Both Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Sylvia Path’s poem “I am Vertical” share the commonality of lack of verticalness. With this lack of verticalness, both narrators are looking from the ground up in search of some sort of escape. However, both pieces differ in the type of escape the characters are looking for. In Jacob’s excerpt, the narrator is looking for an escape from captivity. But in Path’s poem, the narrator is looking for an escape from the world, ultimately desiring death.