The Better-than-best Reflection ever written

In this passage, we read about a former slave, Harriet Jacobs, who escaped her master and hid in her grandmother’s attic for seven years .This reading immediately grabbed my attention as I was very curious to learn about how Harriet Jacobs spent seven whole years holed up in an attic, in complete darkness. When her friend Peter told her to enjoy her last walk outside, I felt dread for her at the terrible foreshadowing leading to her “dismal hole” of a home. While I was reading her descriptions of her “home” where “day and night were all the same,” and where she could barely even find space to crawl around, I felt physically uncomfortable and claustrophobic as I imagined being stuck in a tiny space for that long. The word that kept coming to mind as I read about the immense darkness and loneliness was “suffocating.” She felt like she was suffocating from the physical limits of the attic and also suffocating from the torture of knowing that her children were so close yet so far away. I could not imagine the mental discipline it must have taken to refrain from speaking to her children. She was ironically hiding right behind the nose of her master, and it gave me great satisfaction to read about how she so successfully misled Dr. Flint on his search for her. And the fact that she would choose to be trapped in isolation rather than being trapped in slavery just further proves how awful slavery was.