Linda Brent's stunningly frank admission comes at a crucial moment in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. She has settled into a job in New York, having finally escaped from Southern slavery after being sequestered for nearly seven years in her grandmother's garret. Linda has located her daughter Ellen, who is also working in the metropolis, as a servant for the Hobbs family. Anxious to see her child but fearful of being exposed as a fugitive slave, Linda writes her daughter's employer a letter of introduction that masks her Southern history by creating a local, Northern one. In order to obtain leave to visit Ellen, Linda intimates that she is free, having recently relocated from Canada. Although Linda's stated preference for a “straightforward course” implies that this is the first time she has “enact [ed] a falsehood,” she has deployed “crooked” ways throughout the narrative up to and including this point. In fact, Linda does not “resort to subterfuges” in this instance alone; she actively engages in them throughout Incidents as a political strategy to effect her liberation from bondage and, as she suggests in this passage, as a discursive mode with which to transcribe her experience.