Harriet Jacobs
Of racially mixed ancestry, Harriet
Ann Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina.
After her mother died when Harriet was six years
old, she was nurtured by her grandmother, Molly
Horniblow, an industrious and pious freed woman
who ran a bakery in her home. At age 6, Jacobs was
taken into her mistress's home and trained as a
house servant. At age 11, she was willed to her
mistress's little niece and sent to the home of
Dr. James Norcom to live. The following year her
father died. When Jacobs became a teenager, her
master, Dr. Norcom, subjected her to unrelenting
sexual pressure. In a desperate attempt to prevent
him from sexually subjugating her, Jacobs, at age
16, became sexually involved with a white neighbor,
Samuel Treadwell Sawyer. They had a son, Joseph,
when Jacobs was about 17, much to the outrage of
Dr. Norcom. Their daughter, Louisa Matilda, was
born a few years later. Sawyer promised Jacobs that,
when circumstances permitted, he would purchase
both of their children and set them free.
When Jacobs was 21, she once again
adamantly rejected Dr. Norcom's offer to become
his concubine. He punished her by sending her out
to do fieldwork on a local plantation, leaving her
children in the care of her grandmother. When she
learned that Dr. Norcom planned to send them to
work at the plantation as well, she decided to run
away. Skilled in the implacable logic of slavery,
Jacobs assumed correctly, as it turned out, that
Dr. Norcom would sell her children if she fled.
Therefore, she made arrangements with Sawyer to
purchase them. Working through a surrogate, a speculator
in the slave market, Sawyer did so and returned
the children to the care of Jacobs's grandmother.
In the meantime, Jacobs hid in town, concealed by
sympathetic friends and neighbors. Dr. Norcom became
consumed by his zealous, increasingly frenetic,
and obsessive efforts to find her. For the next
seven years, Jacobs adopted various ruses to throw
him off her trail. During this entire period, she
remained hidden in a cramped crawl space under the
roof of her grandmother's house, an experience that
would leave her physically impaired for the rest
of her life.
In 1842, Jacobs finally managed to
escape north, making her way to New York City, where
she found work in the home of Nathaniel Parker Willis.
In New York she was reunited with her daughter,
Louisa (who had previously been sent to Brooklyn
by Sawyer), and arranged for her son, Joseph, to
live with her brother, John, who had escaped from
slavery and now lectured on the abolitionist circuit.
Jacobs joined her brother in 1849, moving to Rochester,
New York, where she ran the Anti-Slavery Reading
Room. She also became actively involved with a group
of antislavery feminists, including a woman who
became a close friend, Amy Post, who had attended
the historic 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca
Falls, New York. It was Post who urged Jacobs to
write her life story, as so many former slaves had
as a weapon in the escalating struggle against chattel
slavery. After the passage of the 1850 Fugitive
Slave Act, Jacobs returned to New York to work for
the Willis family. Although Dr. Norcom had died,
his descendants continued their efforts to find
and capture her. In 1852, Mrs. Willis purchased
Jacobs's freedom, freeing her as well of the burden
of secrecy she had carried for many years. As Jacobs
confided to Post, she had long been weighed down
by feelings of guilt and shame. To write a narrative
that graphically exposed and politicized the sexual
exploitation of women slaves would mean revisiting
her own personal history. Jacobs solved this problem
by creating fictitious names and locations and,
most important, by creating an alter ego, Linda
Brent. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
was privately printed early in 1861 on the eve of
the Civil War, one of the few full-length slave
narratives written by a woman. After the Civil War
broke out, Jacobs left New York to do relief work
among the slaves who escaped to the Union Army,
raising funds for them and working in Washington,
D.C.; Arlington, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia.
After 1868 she returned north, spending her last
years with her daughter in Boston and Washington,
D.C. She died in 1897. -James A. Miller
