Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself

The summary

Harriet Jacobs wrote for one reader, and names her in the first pages: the free woman of the North. Her preface asks that reader to grasp the condition of two million enslaved women in the South; a sentence at the book’s center says why sympathy for men in bondage will not stretch to cover it. Slavery is terrible for men, she writes, but “far more terrible for women” — on top of the burden everyone carries, women have wrongs and mortifications peculiarly their own. What she means is sexual, and the argument she builds from it goes straight at her reader’s idea of virtue.

A slave woman cannot be judged by your standard

In her fifteenth year, her master began whispering obscenities to her. He is Dr. Flint in the book; scholars identify him as Dr. James Norcom of Edenton, North Carolina. Years of coaxing, threats and surveillance followed, and Jacobs dates the start of her long war with him to that stretch of her girlhood.

Her counter-move was to take a lover, an unmarried white man she calls Mr. Sands, presented as calculation rather than passion: “It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion.” A lover has no legal power over her, she reasons — something like freedom. Two children followed, Benny and Ellen.

Then she turns to the reader, asks to be pitied and pardoned — and in the next breath declines the verdict. Looking back calmly, she writes, “the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.” That is the book’s central claim, not a plea for leniency. On Jacobs’s premise, the virtue her reader prizes assumes a woman who can refuse and be obeyed.

Escape meant hiding in town, not running north

In 1835 Jacobs ran, but not away. A shed on her free grandmother’s house had a garret between its ceiling boards and the shingles: nine feet long, seven wide, three feet high at the peak, no way in for light or air. Her uncle, a carpenter, cut a concealed trap door. She lived up there for nearly seven years — a claim she expects readers to reject, and says so before they can.

In the dark she found the gimlet her uncle had left in the trap door and turned it on the wall facing the street: three rows of holes, the gaps bored out, an opening about an inch square. Through it she watched Benny and Ellen in the street. The first person she saw was Flint. Her escape, in her telling, is not a road north but a decision to stay in town, immobile, within earshot of the man hunting her, until her children were out. She left Edenton by boat in 1842.

The decent white man is the harder indictment

Flint costs the reader nothing to condemn. Sands is the difficult one. He bought the children through a speculator after Flint jailed them, then never freed them: if he died, they passed to his heirs. He runs for Congress, Flint spends his liquor trying to beat him, and fails. Scholars identify Sands as Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, who by the House’s own record served as a Whig in the Twenty-fifth Congress, 1837 to 1839.

The night before he left for Washington, Jacobs hauled herself out of the garret — so stiff her ankles gave way — crawled to the storeroom window and waited behind a barrel. When he passed she said, “Stop one moment, and let me speak for my children.” He started, hesitated, and walked out the gate.

Disbelieved for a century

The book appeared in Boston in 1861, published for the author under the pseudonym Linda Brent, with L. Maria Child named as editor on the title page. Child’s introduction sets out her role: she revised for condensation and orderly arrangement, added nothing to the incidents, and says she “pruned excrescences a little” but otherwise left the telling alone. Jacobs’s own preface opens flatly — “READER, be assured this narrative is no fiction.”

Readers took the other view for a century, widely assuming the book was Child’s fiction. In 1972 the historian John Blassingame called it “not credible” in The Slave Community — too orderly, too melodramatic to believe. The verdict stuck; the book came off syllabi.

Jean Fagan Yellin overturned that with archives. At the University of Rochester she found Jacobs’s letters about trying to publish; one, written from Edenton, put her twelve feet from the spot where she had suffered all the crushing weight of slavery. That gave Yellin a town to search. With George Stevenson at the North Carolina state archives, a skeptic who set himself a test and identified Jacobs’s father, she corroborated the narrative event by event. Even the seven years held: a runaway advertisement in Norfolk’s American Beacon on 4 July 1835 fixed one end, a letter placing Jacobs in Philadelphia seven years later fixed the other. Yellin published her findings in 1981, her Harvard University Press edition in 1987. Blassingame’s response, quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “What Jean Yellin has done has erased any doubts I had.”

The bottom line

Jacobs argues that a woman held as property cannot be measured by the moral standard her reader brings, and the book’s reception made the point twice over: a first-hand account of sexual coercion was dismissed as too shapely to be true until the archives forced the issue. She refuses the ending her reader expects, too: “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.” Her freedom was bought in 1852 for three hundred dollars, arranged without her knowledge and paid to a man she despised for demanding payment at all.

Read it for the half of American slavery the men’s narratives leave out, then read it beside Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and notice what changes when the narrator is a woman.