Harriet Jacobs and Women’s History

I. Timeline of Jacob’s life

  • Born 1813, Edenton, NC
  • Parents both “mulatto” slaves; father a skilled carpenter; family lives together
  • Mother dies in 1819 (Harriet age 6)
  • Moves in with her mother’s mistress, Margaret Horniblow, who teaches her to read, write and sew
  • Horniblow dies in 1825 (Harriet age 12)
    • She wills Harriet and her brother to her young niece; they fall under the control of the niece’s father, Dr. James Norcom and his wife (Mr. and Mrs. Flint)
  • Lives with the Norcums from 1825-35 (age 12 to 22)
    • Endures constant sexual harassment
  • Age at 15, forms a “consensual” relationship with Samuel Sawyer, an elite white man
  • By age 20, she has two children, Joseph and Louisa
  • 1835 Flees
    • Lives for seven years in her grandmother’s attic
  • Sawyer purchases their children but does not free them; eventually, he marries and sends Louisa to his cousins in NY
  • 1842 escapes to North
    • Retrieves daughter in Brooklyn; settles with her children in Boston, works as a nanny for the family of Nathaniel Parker Willis
  • 1849-50 spends 18 months in Rochester, NY
    • Connects with important abolitionists
  • 1852 employer’s wife buys her freedom
    • (Fugitive Slave Law had passed in 1850)
  • 1853 begins to write; first sends anonymous letters to the New York Tribune
  • 1857 finishes narrative;1860 publishes Incidents
  • 1862-66 returns South to work with freed people
    • Establishes a school with her daughter
  • 1870 racist violence forces her and Louisa to leave the South; they open a boarding house in Cambridge, MA
  • In the mid-1880s, they return to DC
  • Dies in 1897

II. Lydia Maria Child

  • Editor
  • Vouched for the text’s authenticity
  • Defended the need to put “indelicate” matters before the public

“I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn.”

 

III. Historian John Blassingame on Incidents

  • Blassingame a prominent historian of the African American experience
  • Edited Frederick Douglass’s papers
  • Among other works, he published a groundbreaking text, “Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies,” in 1977
  • So why was he so skeptical of Jacobs’ narrative?

“…the work is not credible. In the first place, [the book] is too orderly; to many of the major characters meet providentially after years of separation. Then, too, the story is too melodramatic: miscegenation and cruelty, outraged virtue, unrequited love and planter licentiousness appear on practically every page. The virtuous Harriet sympathizes with her wretched mistress who has to look on all the mulattoes fathered by her by her husband, she refuses to bow to the lascivious demands of her master, bears two children for another white man and then runs away and hides in a garret in her grandmothers cabin for seven years until she is able to escape to New York. In the meantime, her white lover has acknowledged his paternity of her children, purchased their freedom and been elected to Congress. In the end, all live happily ever after.”

 

IV. How Incidents differs from Douglass’s Narrative

  • Addressed to women
    • “But oh, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely!”
  • “Freedom” is not equated with “manhood,” but with the freedom to mother
    • “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free! ….The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own.”
  • Sexual abuse at the center of the narrative
  • Draws on two genres, slave narrative and the seduction novel
  • In Douglass’s Narrative, freedom equated with manhood

“I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheery spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

“This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free.… He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.”