even in the intercourse of her day-to-day life, with free african-americans, other white people in edentonjacobs has a kind of world that becomes critical to understanding how she resists the doctor and ultimately how she escapes. it is that proximity to other people. celia, by contrast, you are absolutely right. what her life was like in audrain county, we can't say. we do not know. we certainly know when she makes that brief migration to fulton and to the farm, she is clearly without family, without acquaintances, and the isolation of that farm, many miles from downtown fulton means she does not have the access to allies, to information, to resources that jacobs herself had. that is most vividly underscored by the question of family. we know the role that family plays, the powerful role that family plays for harriet jacobs, her grandmother and her uncle, who not only provide psychological support, but they are buttresses for jacobs's critique of her own condition. she has these kind of family interlocutors who are critical to her developing critique and her resistance to dr. flint over t