Harriet Jacobs (l. c. 1813-1897) was a former slave, abolitionist, and author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), her autobiography, describing her life as a slave in North Carolina, her flight to freedom in the North, and her experiences there. Her book is among the most important primary documents on slavery in 19th-century America.
As Jacobs felt ashamed of some of the experiences she endured as a slave, she chose to publish the work under a pen name, Linda Brent, and the work was edited by the famous writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child (l. 1802-1880). It was well-received upon publication, and, among abolitionist circles anyway, Jacobs was accorded great respect as its author.
Jacobs had arranged the publication of the work herself, and it fell out of print after 1862. It was only rediscovered in the 1960s, with the advent of the Civil Rights Movement and Women's Movement in the USA. Although initially recognized as an autobiography, and Jacobs as its author, in 1861, it was understood in the 1960s as an anti-slavery novel by Child until this view was corrected by the American historian Jean Fagan Yellin (l. 1930-2023).
Today, the work is considered on par with the greatest slave narratives, such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) by former slave and leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass (l. c. 1818-1895) and Ellen and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860).
Unlike many others, including those of Mary Prince (l. c. 1788 to c. 1833), Harriet Tubman (l. c. 1822-1913) and Sojourner Truth (l. c. 1797-1883) – which are as-told-to works – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was written by Jacobs herself and so was not subject to the criticism leveled against the others as exaggerations by abolitionists of a slave's condition.
Early Life
Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, c. 1813, the daughter of Delilah (a slave of one Margaret Horniblow) and Daniel Jacobs (slave to one Andrew Knox). Her parents tried their best to shield her from the reality of slavery, as Jacobs notes:
I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away…I was so fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise, trusted to [my parents] for safe keeping, and liable to be demanded of them at any moment.
(8)
Jacobs had a younger brother, John, and was especially attached to her grandmother, a free Black woman, Molly Horniblow. As a young girl, she was taught to read, write, and sew by her mistress, Margaret. Jacobs' mother died when she was six years old, and Margaret treated her as a daughter. When Margaret died in 1825, she left young Harriet to her niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, who was only three years old, and so Mary's father, Dr. James Norcom, became Harriet's master. It was not until she came to the Norcom residence that she understood she was a slave and had no control over her own life.
Norcom, Sawyer & the Crawlspace
She arrived at the Norcom house when she was around twelve (the same year her father died), and she was left alone by Dr. Norcom until she was 15, when he began to make sexual advances and threatened her with violence if she did not comply. She was able to hold him off, primarily because of the presence of her grandmother in the neighborhood. Molly Horniblow was well-respected by the Whites in the community who had helped her buy her freedom in 1828, and Dr. Norcom was afraid of incurring her wrath, which would have also led to a loss of standing among his social circles.
Jacobs writes about this in Chapter V: The Trials of Girlhood, appearing below, and endured Norcom's persistence from c. 1825 until she ran away in 1835. She formed a friendship with a White neighbor, the lawyer Samuel Tredwell Sawyer (l. 1800-1865) and, believing Norcom would leave her alone if she were pregnant, began a sexual relationship with Sawyer, who fathered her two children, Joseph and Louisa.
Her pregnancies did nothing to deter Norcom's advances but enraged Mrs. Norcom, and Jacobs' life became increasingly difficult. Believing that Norcom would sell her children to Sawyer if she were no longer in the house, Jacobs ran away, first finding sanctuary with a White woman before taking up residence in the crawlspace at the top of her grandmother's house, an area of 9 feet (3 m) x 7 feet (2 m) x 3 feet (1 m), making it impossible for her to stand.
Norcom sold her children to a slave trader with the understanding they would be sold somewhere further south where Jacobs would never find them, but the trader, who knew of Sawyer's parentage, sold them to him, and he sent them to live with their great-grandmother, allowing Jacobs, in her hiding spot, to hear them and, through holes in the walls and floor, to see them, though she could not reveal herself or interact with them in any way. She remained in the crawlspace, reading the Bible and sewing, for the next seven years.
Flight to the North & the Abolitionists
During this time, she periodically sent Norcom letters, claiming she had fled to the North and, in 1842, made this a reality when she escaped north aboard a ship to Philadelphia. Abolitionists there paid for her to continue to New York City, where she was reunited with her daughter, who had been sent there by Sawyer to work as a domestic. She found work as a nurse at the home of the poet and writer Nathaniel Parker Willis (l. 1806-1867) and his wife, Mary Stace Willis, caring for their daughter, Imogen.
In 1843, Norcom arrived in New York to reclaim Jacobs, and she fled to Boston where her brother John now lived. When Mary Stace Willis died in 1845, Jacobs returned to the Willis house to care for Imogen and went with Nathaniel to England to visit his late wife's family. After their return to the United States, Jacobs went to stay with her brother John, who had relocated to Rochester, New York, and was working with abolitionists in a bookstore and reading room above the offices of Frederick Douglass' newspaper, The North Star. Here, she met the Quaker abolitionist Amy Post, who first encouraged her to write her autobiography.
In 1850, she returned to New York City and was again employed in the Willis household as a nurse, this time to the child of Nathaniel's second wife, Cornelia. In 1852, when Norcom's daughter came to New York to try to find Jacobs and bring her back to North Carolina, Cornelia Willis bought Jacobs' freedom for $300 so she would no longer have to fear re-enslavement.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
In 1853, Jacobs began writing her book, changing the names of the people (she became Linda Brent, Dr. Norcom was turned into Dr. Flint, and Samuel Sawyer was Mr. Sands) and purposefully omitting place names and dates. She tried to enlist the help of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin had become a bestseller, but Stowe rejected her proposal. Jacobs then decided to write the book herself and had a finished manuscript by 1858.
The book was accepted by Thayer and Eldridge publishers on the condition that Jacobs get Lydia Maria Child to write a preface. Child agreed and also took on the role of editor and suggested Jacobs include more on the aftermath of Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831, which eventually became Chapter XII: Fear of Insurrection, a rare, first-person account of the lives of Blacks in slave-holding states in the fall of 1831.
Thayer and Eldridge went out of business before the book could be published, and Jacobs bought the stereotyped plates that had been set and published the work herself in January 1861. The book was well-received, and Jacobs became a celebrity author and noted speaker on abolition.
Civil War & Later Life
During the American Civil War, Jacobs was involved in helping refugee slaves in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., and, with her daughter, she founded the Jacobs School in Alexandria, Virginia, staffed by Black teachers and administrators, working with Black students. In 1866, Jacobs and Louisa were in Savannah, Georgia, participating in relief work. The school had closed in 1865 due to White supremacist violence. Anti-Black sentiment in Georgia made it impossible to continue their work.
They returned north, and Jacobs stayed again with the Willis family, helping to care for Nathaniel until his death in 1867. She returned once to Edenton, North Carolina, and, in 1877, moved with Louisa to Washington, D.C., where they ran a boarding house until Jacobs' death of natural causes on 7 March 1897.
In time, Harriet Jacobs' name was forgotten, and so was her work. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl only came to public attention again in the 1960s and was regarded as a novel by Child. Jean Fagan Yellin's pivotal work restored Jacobs' book to the status it had enjoyed in 1861, and today it is regarded as a classic work of American history.
Text
The following is taken from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chapter V: The Trials of Girlhood, pp. 26-28 of the Dover Thrift Edition, 2001.
DURING the first years of my service in Dr. Flint's family, I was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of my mistress. Though this seemed to me no more than right, I was grateful for it, and tried to merit the kindness by the faithful discharge of my duties. But I now entered on my fifteenth year—a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. I tried to treat them with indifference or contempt. The master's age, my extreme youth, and the fear that his conduct would be reported to my grandmother, made him bear this treatment for many months.
He was a crafty man and resorted to many means to accomplish his purposes. Sometimes he had stormy, terrific ways, that made his victims tremble; sometimes he assumed a gentleness that he thought must surely subdue. Of the two, I preferred his stormy moods, although they left me trembling. He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of.
I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him—where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.
The mistress, who ought to protect the helpless victim, has no other feelings towards her but those of jealousy and rage. The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe. Surely, if you credited one half the truths that are told you concerning the helpless millions suffering in this cruel bondage, you at the north would not help to tighten the yoke. You surely would refuse to do for the master, on your own soil, the mean and cruel work which trained bloodhounds and the lowest class of whites do for him at the south.
Everywhere the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows. Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves. Perhaps the child's own mother is among those hated ones. She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion and cannot help understanding what is the cause.
She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master's footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave. I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely and shrink from the memory of it.
I cannot tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, nor how I am still pained by the retrospect. My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother's grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings. The other slaves in my master's house noticed the change. Many of them pitied me; but none dared to ask the cause. They had no need to inquire. They knew too well the guilty practices under that roof; and they were aware that to speak of them was an offence that never went unpunished.
I longed for someone to confide in. I would have given the world to have laid my head on my grandmother's faithful bosom and told her all my troubles. But Dr. Flint swore he would kill me if I was not as silent as the grave. Then, although my grandmother was all in all to me, I feared her as well as loved her. I had been accustomed to look up to her with a respect bordering upon awe. I was very young, and felt shamefaced about telling her such impure things, especially as I knew her to be very strict on such subjects.
Moreover, she was a woman of a high spirit. She was usually very quiet in her demeanor; but if her indignation was once roused, it was not very easily quelled. I had been told that she once chased a white gentleman with a loaded pistol, because he insulted one of her daughters. I dreaded the consequences of a violent outbreak; and both pride and fear kept me silent.
But though I did not confide in my grandmother, and even evaded her vigilant watchfulness and inquiry, her presence in the neighborhood was some protection to me. Though she had been a slave, Dr. Flint was afraid of her. He dreaded her scorching rebukes. Moreover, she was known and patronized by many people; and he did not wish to have his villainy made public. It was lucky for me that I did not live on a distant plantation, but in a town not so large that the inhabitants were ignorant of each other's affairs. Bad as are the laws and customs in a slaveholding community, the doctor, as a professional man, deemed it prudent to keep up some outward show of decency.
O, what days and nights of fear and sorrow that man caused me! Reader, it is not to awaken sympathy for myself that I am telling you truthfully what I suffered in slavery. I do it to kindle a flame of compassion in your hearts for my sisters who are still in bondage, suffering as I once suffered.
I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight. I foresaw the inevitable blight that would fall on the little slave's heart. I knew how soon her laughter would be changed to sighs. The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers and overarched by a sunny sky. Scarcely one day of her life had been clouded when the sun rose on her happy bridal morning.
How had those years dealt with her slave sister, the little playmate of her childhood? She, also, was very beautiful; but the flowers and sunshine of love were not for her. She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink.
In view of these things, why are ye silent, ye free men and women of the north? Why do your tongues falter in maintenance of the right? Would that I had more ability! But my heart is so full, and my pen is so weak! There are noble men and women who plead for us, striving to help those who cannot help themselves. God bless them! God give them strength and courage to go on! God bless those, everywhere, who are laboring to advance the cause of humanity!
