HARRIET JACOBS
Born into slavery in North Carolina, Harriet Ann Jacobs was raised both by her free black
grandmother and by a White mistress who taught her to read. Upon her mistress’ death, Jacobs
was willed to Mary Matilda Norcom and sent to live in her household. Mary’s father, the
prominent physician Dr. James Norcom, son began making unwelcome sexual advances toward
Jacobs, preying on her vulnerability as a slave. Rather tan submit to her master, Jacobs choose
to become involved with Samuel Sawyer, a White, slave-holding neighbor, with whom she had
two children. In 1835, Dr. Norcom, angry at what he viewed as Jacob’s offenses against him,
separated her from her children and sent her to work on a plantation in nearby Auburn. Jacobs
son escaped from the plantation but was unable to flee North Carolina. Instead, she was forced
to hide in a cramped artic crawlspace in her grandmother’s house for nearly seven years,
keeping secret watch over her children. In 1842, Jacobs finally managed to escape to the North.
Once there, she arranged for her children’s escape as well.
In NY, Jacobs worked as a nursemaid in the home of the popular writer and editor Nathaniel
Parker Wills. In 1849, she moved to Rochester to work in the Anti-Slavery Reading Room,
where she got to know many prominent abolitionists (including Frederick Douglass) and
familiarized herself with anti-slavery literatura and feminism in the process. Jaconbs eventually
determined that she should publicize her own story of explotation and escape in order to raise
public awareness about the condition of women held in slavery. She initially approached Harriet
Beecher Stowe, the celebrated autor of Uncle Tom’s cabin, about writing her narrative, but
ultimately Jacobs decided to compose her history herself. Adopting the psudonym “Linda
Brent” and disguising the names of the other characters in her story, she used her
autoiographical narrative to reflecto n the sexual harassment and psychological abuse that were
so often the lot of female slave. Because the book departed from the conventions of male-
centered slave narratives and also challenged genteel notions of propriety br focusing on issues
of sexuality, Jacobs found it difficult to find a Publisher. Finally, a Boston firm agreed to publish
the manuscript provided Jacobs could get Lydia Maria Child to write an introduction and act as
editor. Child agreed to the project and, with the help of her intrduction and minor editorial
contributions, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in 1861.
Jacobs’ history is unique among slave narratives for its focus on the experiences of women, its
tratment of sexual explotation, its emphasis on family life and maternal values, and its self-
conscious appeal to an audience of White female readers. Incidents draws on the conventions of
both seduction novels and domestic fiction –two popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
master’s attempted seduction and celebrates family relationships and domestic ideals of
femininity. Jacobs’ deployment of sentimental discourse also Works to problematize nineteenth-
century notions of proper womanhood and exposes the extent to which such ideals were
dependent upon economic and racial distinctions. As her story makes clear, the pressures and
abuses enslaved black women faced could make it imposible for them to uphold bourgeois
standards of virginity and motherhood. Relegated to the status of property. Jacobs’ faced an
enormous struggle in her attempts to control her own sexuality, home life and family
relationships.
Jacobs was finally freed from slavery in 1853, when her NY employer’s wife, Cornelia Willis,
bought her from the Norcom family fot three hundred dollars and the emancipated her. In her
narrative, Jacobs notes both her gratitude to her employer and her discomfort with being
purchased. Making use of her freedom, she remained activ in the anti-slavery cause and ols
relief work among black refugees from the Suth during and after the Civil War. Jacobs died
while living with her daughter in Washington D.C.