AUTHOR: HARRIET JACOBS
DATE: 1861
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a pseudonymous autobiography of a fugitive slave, caused a minor sensation when it was published in 1861. Jacobs renamed herself as Linda Brent in the book, which tells the story of her time in slavery and her fight for freedom for herself and her children. Jacobs intended the work to convey the particular horrors of slavery from a female perspective in the hope that it would draw more white women towards the abolitionist movement. For a long time, the work was all but forgotten, but it has come to be regarded as a classic not only of the abolitionist movement but of feminist literature too.
Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina. In her early years she was taught to read and write by her female owner, an education very few of her fellow slaves ever enjoyed. But her life took a turn for the worse when she was twelve years old and her mistress’s death saw ownership transferred to a man who sexually abused her – a crime compounded by the fact that his interest in her inspired the ire of his wife.
As a teen, Jacobs fell in love with a free black man but her owner prevented the relationship developing. She then became involved with a white lawyer, whose two children she would bear while still in her teens. Her son and daughter inherited her slave status and their master continued his cruel treatment, sending them to a relative’s plantation and vowing to see that they (along with Jacobs’ brother, John) were sold to another slave-owner out of state to ensure their permanent separation from her.
In 1835, Jacobs made the decision to escape her servitude, an enterprise that involved hiding in a swamp and then spending some seven years in what was described as a ‘garret’ – a tiny crawl space above her grandmother’s home. Here she spent much time reading, not least the Bible but newspapers as well. In the meantime, her brother managed to escape from his master (ultimately finding his way to Boston), while her children’s lawyer-father intervened to ensure that they were not sold out of state, although he failed to win them their freedom.
After seven years in the crawl space, Jacobs embarked on the next stage of her life, fleeing to New York via Philadelphia. In New York, she was taken on as a nanny by Mary Stace Willis, wife of the author Nathaniel Parker Willis (who was the best-renumerated magazine writer of his day). But still her former owner pursued her. In order to escape him, she had stints with her brother in Boston, then a hotbed of the abolitionist movement, and also in England when she once more worked for the Willis family.
In 1852, again under threat of being reclaimed by her former slave-owners, Jacobs became a free woman when the second wife of the widowed Nathaniel Parker Willis bought her liberty. By this time, her brother John was working for the abolitionist movement headed by William Lloyd Garrison in New York and staying with two of its most prominent figures, Amy and Isaac Post. It was John and Amy who began to persuade Jacobs to write her life story.
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
Several years before Jacobs struggled to find a publisher, Harriet Beecher Stowe had enormous commercial success with her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is thought to have been the bestselling novel of the nineteenth century. A white abolitionist, Stowe based the book on a number of first-hand accounts, and it has been credited with fundamentally changing white American attitudes to slavery as the US careered towards civil war. But it has also come to be seen as one that damagingly reinforced assorted white prejudices about people of colour through its reliance upon racial stereotypes. Today, ‘Uncle Tom’ operates as an insult addressed to those who might be considered to betray their own cultural heritage by their servility to others.
Having immersed herself in the ideas of anti-slavery, Jacobs reflected: ‘The more my mind had become enlightened, the more difficult it was for me to consider myself an article of property.’ She composed Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl between 1853 and 1858, while working once more as a nanny for the Willis family. It took her a further two years to find a publisher and the book finally reached market in 1861.
Hers was by no means the first book written by a slave. The autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass had been an enormous success back in the 1840s. But Jacobs’ experiences as a woman in slavery added another dimension to her work. Nor did she shy away from depicting the brutality of her treatment, including her sexual abuse, or from how her refusal to conform to the expectations of entitled white patriarchy contributed to many of the worst experiences of her life. She also took on such potentially divisive subjects as religion and the Church. In particular, she highlighted the deep Christian faith of many slaves (her own grandmother suggested they should accept their slavery as an expression of God’s will) and contrasted it with the hypocritical conduct of so-called God-fearing slave-owners.
The book received positive notices from the outset and secured a significant readership through its promotion via the abolitionist networks operating across the United States. On its publication in Britain, a reviewer for the London Daily News described Jacobs’ character in the book as a ‘heroine’ who exemplified ‘endurance and persistency in the struggle for liberty’. Few who read the book could reasonably conclude that slavery was anything but a terrible thing. Along with Frederick Douglass’s work, the abolitionists had a pair of extremely powerful first-hand accounts to support their cause.
Yet Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl soon became a forgotten work. Moreover, Jacobs’ literacy and her ability to write a narrative full of melodramatic verve (reflecting the commercial tastes of the day) brought her critics. Some simply refused to believe this was autobiographical. Often, it was suggested that Jacobs was not even the true author. Only in relatively recent years have academic researchers uncovered the various source materials that substantiate her story. It is perhaps telling as to the strength of her communication skills and the horror of what she endured that she became the subject of such interrogations. Surely this cannot be true, her critics secretly hoped. But, to our collective shame, it was.
The work enjoyed a renaissance in the 1960s after many years in the literary wilderness, driven by the combined emergence of the feminist and civil rights movements. And while legalized slavery may have been consigned to the past, her voice continues to ring out, advocating for justice for the oppressed. As she said of her motivation for writing the book: ‘Reader, it is not to awaken sympathy for myself that I am telling you truthfully what I suffered. I do it to kindle a flame of compassion in your hearts for my sisters who are still in bondage.’