26 Author Introduction: Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897)

Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery
in Edenton, North Carolina, around
1813. Her father was probably a skilled
carpenter allowed by his master to hire
himself out. Though he and Jacobs’
mother were owned by different masters,
they were allowed to live as a couple
with their children. Jacobs’ maternal
grandmother, Molly Horniblow, was
a freed slave who owned a house in
Edenton. After her mother died, Jacobs
lived as slave in the household of
Margaret Horniblow, who taught Jacobs
to read. Upon Margaret Horniblow’s
death, Jacobs was willed to the daughter
of Dr. James Norcom and brought into
his household. He subjected her to
relentless sexual harassment. His wife,
out of jealousy, subjected Jacobs to
physical abuse.
Jacobs defied Norcom by taking
Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a white lawyer,
as her lover. She had two children, a boy and a girl. As punishment for Jacobs’s
prolonged defiance, Norcom sent her out to work on his plantation, where he also
threatened to send her children. She ran away and hid from Norcom for almost
seven years in her maternal grandmother’s attic. Sawyer bought their children but
did not free them (as Jacobs wrote that he had promised to do).
In 1842, Jacobs escaped to the North, later followed there by her children. She
gave domestic service to writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis (Fanny Fern’s
brother). Willis’s second wife would buy and emancipate Jacobs in 1852. Before
that freedom, Jacobs was vulnerable to being captured and returned to Norcom.
To avoid this danger, she went to Rochester, New York, where her brother John S.
Jacobs (1815–1875) was also a fugitive slave who worked for abolition.
Starting in 1849, she worked for the American Anti-Slavery Society office
located in the same building as The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper founded
by Frederick Douglass. Jacobs took full advantage of the literature available
where she worked. She also became friends with Amy Post, a Quaker reformer,
who encouraged Jacobs to contribute to anti-slavery literature by writing her own
story. After five years, Jacobs completed Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in
1858. Aware of the cult of domesticity and sentimental literature—as exemplified by Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—Jacobs’ story emphasized how slavery betrayed the highest ideals of womanhood and woman’s purity, not only the womanhood of
female slaves but also of slave mistresses. She described the peculiar horrors of her
situation, in being forced to give herself sexually to one man to avoid being sexually
abused by another, and in having her children bought by their white father to help
them escape their legal master. Lydia Marie Child wrote the book’s preface and
helped Jacobs have it published in Boston under the pseudonym of Linda Brent.
It sold well until its message seemed to be obviated by the Civil War, but it gained
renewed attention in the 1980s.

Source: Becoming America. Wendy Kurant, ed. CC-BY-SA