Jacobs cultivates a mood that is both hopeful and angry. She wants the reader to get upset about the injustices the institution of slavery props up, but she doesn't want to discourage the reader from acting. On the contrary, she wants the reader to be galvanized to action for a better world.
The best example of how Jacobs cultivates this angry but hopeful mood occurs at the close of the book, in Chapter 41:
Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free! We are as free from the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north; and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition. The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. […] I wish it for my children’s sake far more than for my own.
This passage is a reflection on how far Linda has come in her life and narrative. Jacobs plays on the trope of the happy ending found at the end of many sentimental novels. Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, for instance, starts its final chapter with the infamous line, "Reader, I married him." This passage copies that structure and delineates the difference between the happy ending possible for a white woman and the happy ending possible for a formerly enslaved Black woman. Jane Eyre gets a house with her husband and child. Jacobs, on the other hand, does not "sit with my children in a home of my own." Still, she remains convinced that the "dream of her life" is not dashed, only "not yet realized." Even if it takes multiple generations to make that dream real, it is still worth fighting for "for my children's sake." By placing her ending in the register of the happy ending, Jacobs suggests that more is still possible for her and people like her if the world changes. By clarifying that "[t]he dream of my life is not yet realized," she asks readers to feel indignant on her behalf and to take up the task of making a true happy ending for the book they have just read.
