Why does Linda become involved with Mr. Sands?

Linda chooses involvement with Mr. Sands, a white neighbor, as strategy under coercion — not as romance freed from power imbalance. Dr. Flint threatens a isolated cottage where Linda would have no protection; bearing children to another white man complicates Flint’s claim and later motivates Sands’s partial interventions for Ellen and Benny.

Jacobs narrates moral conflict openly: she judges herself by harsh standards society applies unfairly to enslaved women. Students must read Sands through constraint, not equivalence to Flint alone. Connect to sexual-exploitation-and-agency and motherhood-and-separation — children become both leverage and love objects Linda refuses to abandon.