Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

This book challenged so much of what I thought I knew about American slavery. Harriet Jacobs was born enslaved in North Carolina. She dared to ask why she should not have the same freedom as her enslavers; ultimately, she escaped to the North and fought for her children’s freedom from there. I loved the way she challenged her readers to face their complicity in the system that enslaved her.

I especially admired the powerful rhetoric that allowed her to be accommodating to her readers while also demanding that they confront slavery’s evil and change their lives accordingly. I felt like… show more.

I think everyone should read at least one slave narrative, and Jacobs’s is a gem of both exquisite storytelling and powerful testimony.

Jacobs tells her own story but also the story of a whole town and a whole society, and she paints a devastating portrait of the rot at the heart of the Old South, the sham that slave power made of all human relations that came into contact with it.

In Edenton, North Carolina, about 45 miles from my hometown, Harriet Jacobs lived in a crawl space for almost seven years in the 1830s.

I never learned of her in the NC public schools I attended; she was erased from the history I was taught. Harriet Jacobs was a slave who had shirked the sexual advances of her owner by hiding in her grandmother’s garret, a “little dismal hole, almost deprived of light and air, and with no space.” Jacobs’s dark “loophole of retreat” was only nine feet long by seven feet wide.

Sometimes she heard the voices of her… show more.

Jacobs was the Anne Frank of American slaves.

As a young woman and mother of three children, her owner subjected her to relentless sexual harassment, a situation typical of the lot of female enslaved people. Jacobs resisted his advances. Her owner threatened to sell her children if she refused to submit to his insatiable sexual demands. One day she disappeared.

Enslavers searched for her with guns and dogs but couldn’t find her. She had hidden in the cramped attic of her grandmother’s cabin, a space only three feet high. She hid there for seven years then was able to escape… show more.

Jacobs’ emotionally compelling book is arguably the most well-known slave narrative written by a woman. Published in 1861, under the pseudonym Linda Brent, this intimate memoir played an important role in the antislavery movement. Nineteen-century readers were moved, as are readers today, by the story of a young woman so determined to avoid the sexual advances of her enslaver that, for seven years, she hides in her grandmother’s coffin-like attic from which she secretly watches from afar her two children at play. The narrative ends on a cautiously hopeful note. When Jacobs finally escapes from North Carolina, she is able… show more.