free designs

Harriet Jacobs

DESIGNING MINDS  This provocative post by my friend and colleague Jim Farrell extends our discussion of place and houses to more sorts of stuff (e.g. chairs) and lives.  Reading it as I have been reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, I also notice other connotations of the verb, "to design."

• Dr. Flint has designs on Linda.
• Aunt Martha (Grandmother)'s house is designed in such as way as to provide a hiding place for Linda.
• The whole system of slavery draws everyone near it into its design.

You get the picture.  We might also say that the book itself is designed to reveal a design that makes persons into property.  The two primary meanings seem to point in different directions.  The one suggests the designer's intentionality, vile and virtuous; the other allows that the design itself, intentional or not, has power to subordinate its elements.  And yet, the book does show us examples of persons who resist the design of slavery in small and large ways.

I doubt that we humans can live in total free-form design (i.e. chaos or constant improvisation), but Jacob's book, read in 2010 can serve as a reminder that slavery is not the only design that can diminish human life and steal freedom as well as stimulate readers to consider how to better design their lives for freedom: their own and that of others around them.