Jacobs’ desire to see her children dead instead of having them controlled by her enslaver seems similar to what motivated Margaret Garner, the woman who inspired the plot of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, to murder her own daughter instead of seeing her return to slavery. This sentiment is repeated a couple paragraphs later when Dr. Flint throws Jacobs’ son across the room. For a moment, she thinks her son is dead, but when he does open his eyes, she writes, “I don’t know whether I was very happy.”
Jacobs feeling that it would be better for her child to die than to continue living in slavery offers a parallel between Jacobs, Margaret Garner and Morrison’s Beloved. Furthermore, Jacobs’ reference to being “broken in,” or the idea of a mother being forced to observe the abuse of her children so regularly that she eventually accepts it, offers insight into something Frederick Douglass wrote. As he describes the first place where he lived, Douglass indicates that there was little to hold him there because his familial connections were disrupted by the business of slavery. Of his siblings, he writes, “the early separation of us from our mother had well nigh blotted the fact of our relationship from our memories.” Much like the daily experience of slavery results in Jacobs observation of mothers who’ve been traumatized to the point that they express little, as they watch their children being beaten, disruption of families during slavery severed the basic ties between relatives, resulting in situations like the one Douglass described.