Jacobs, Harriet Ann

By: Lisa Clayton Robinson

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Jacobs, Harriet Ann

Sex:  Female

Born:  Edenton, North Carolina, United States
c.1813

Died:  Washington, District of Columbia, United States
7 March 1897

Activity/Profession:  Slave Narrative Author, Slave, Social Reformer

1813?–1897
African American writer, known especially for her autobiography, which is one of the most significant slave narratives by an African American woman.

Harriet Ann Jacobs published her 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself under the pseudonym Linda Brent. She states in the preface that she wants her story to “arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered.” In this statement she stresses her appeal to a female audience. She also touches on one of her autobiography's most important features: Jacobs may be the only African American woman slave to leave a long and detailed record of the particular ways in which slavery affected women, from sexual abuse to constraints on motherhood. For most of the twentieth century, however, scholars thought her narrative was a novel by a white author and ignored the book. It was not until the 1980s, when literary historian Jean Fagan Yellin used letters and manuscripts to prove that Jacobs had indeed written the autobiography “by herself,” that readers rediscovered Jacobs as a key early African American writer.

Born in Edenton, North Carolina, Jacobs lived with her parents and younger brother until her mother's death, when Jacobs was six. She was sent to live with her mother's owner, Margaret Horniblow, who treated her well and taught her to read and write. At Horniblow's death, however, she willed Jacobs to her three-year-old niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, and at age twelve Jacobs was sent to live with the Norcom family. Her time with the Norcoms is a large part of her autobiography—especially the sexual harassment she received from Dr. Norcom, the evil Dr. Flint in her narrative. Jacobs's narrative is very frank about Norcom's frequent sexual advances and threats, and she makes explicit the particular hazards slave women faced that are often only alluded to in men's Slave Narratives.

In 1829 and 1833 Jacobs gave birth to two children—Joseph and Louisa Matilda—whose father was a white neighbor. This relationship only angered Norcom, and when he began to use her children, who were legally his property, as another means of controlling her, Jacobs decided to take a chance on running away. She hoped that if she was gone, Norcom might sell her children to their father, and so in 1835 she ran away from the Norcom household.

Jacobs was first hidden in several Edenton homes by sympathetic black and white neighbors. But when it became apparent that it was going to be difficult for her to leave Edenton undetected, family members constructed a secret crawlspace in the house that belonged to her grandmother, who was free. The crawlspace was nine feet long, seven feet wide, and, at its tallest, three feet high—but Jacobs hid in the tiny enclosure for the next seven years, a fact so harrowing it may have been what led historians to suspect her autobiography was fictional.

In 1842 Jacobs was finally able to escape to New York. There she was reunited with her children, who had indeed been purchased by their father and sent north. In New York, Jacobs worked as a nursemaid for a white family and became active in the antislavery movement. In 1850 her freedom was threatened when the Fugitive Slave Law stated that runaway slaves must be returned to their owners if apprehended in any part of the United States. The Norcom family sent agents to New York; these agents attempted to kidnap her from her employers' home. Her employer finally secured her legal freedom by purchasing her from the Norcoms and emancipating her in 1853. That same year, Jacobs began writing her autobiography, which she worked on at night after her childcare duties were done. The book was edited by white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and received good reviews in the antislavery press when it was published in March 1861. But the outbreak of the Civil War one month later quickly stole away readers' attention.

During the war, Jacobs and her daughter, Louisa, worked in relief efforts for African American soldiers and newly freed slaves, first in Alexandria, Virginia, and then in Savannah, Georgia. Increased violence and racial tension in the postwar South led them to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Jacobs served as clerk of the New England Women's Club and ran a boardinghouse for Harvard University students and faculty. But by 1877, Harriet Jacobs and her daughter had returned to Washington, D.C., where Harriet continued to work among the freed slaves while Louisa taught at several schools, including Howard University. Harriet Jacobs lived with her daughter in Washington, D.C., until her death on March 7, 1897.

Since its rediscovery, Jacobs's autobiography has become required reading in English, history, African American studies, and women's studies courses around the country. In her narrative, Jacobs states that she hopes to “add [her] testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is.” The book she wrote is now recognized as one of the most valuable testimonies on what slavery really was, especially for the black women who endured it.

See also Abolitionism in the United States; Fugitive Slave Laws; Slavery in the United States; Women Writers, Black, in the United States.

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