Black Ecologies (Humanity, Animality, Property)

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs ([1861] 2001) submits a zoology of the Southern US plantation and its environs. As a recent fugitive, Linda Brent (Jacobs's pseudonym) hides from her pursuers behind bushes, where she is injured by “a reptile of some kind,” “something cold and slimy” (83). Days later, she and family friend Peter must wait in “Snake Swamp”; “hundreds of mosquitos . . . [poison their] flesh” as “snake after snake” crawls at their feet (94–95). “But,” she insists, “even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized” (95). For seven years, she shares an attic's crawl space with “rats and mice” as well as “hundreds of little red insects, fine as a needle's point, that [pierce] through [her] skin, and [produce] an intolerable burning” (95, 97). Even after she reaches...