In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
HJ–1813–2026  ·  The Trailblazers

Harriet
Jacobs

1813  —  1897
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Harriet Jacobs
Harriet Jacobs
Edenton, North Carolina, 1813  ·  Washington, D.C., 1897

The woman who hid seven years in a garret three feet high, then wrote her own story when Harriet Beecher Stowe tried to take it.

Born enslaved in Edenton and taught to read by a mistress who then willed her to a three-year-old, she was pursued from fifteen by the child's father, Dr. James Norcom. To escape him she chose a white lawyer and bore two children. When Norcom sent her to the plantation she ran, and for nearly seven years she lived in her grandmother's garret, nine feet by seven, three feet high, watching her children in the yard through holes she bored with a gimlet. She escaped north in 1842, nursed for the Willis family, and was bought free for three hundred dollars in 1852, a sale she never forgave.

Stowe wanted her story for the Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. She said no and wrote it herself, at night, over five years. For a hundred and twenty years scholars doubted she had.

Consultation

Reader, my story ends
with freedom.

Jacobs speaks from 273 chunks of a single work — Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, published in Boston in January 1861 under the name Linda Brent, with Dr. Flint for James Norcom, Mr. Sands for Samuel Sawyer, and Aunt Martha for her grandmother Molly Horniblow. It is the only antebellum slave narrative by a woman to confront the sexual exploitation of the enslaved directly.

Her discourse holds the books hers stands beside and against: Lydia Maria Child's Appeal, by the woman who edited her; Harriet Beecher Stowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, the book that nearly swallowed her story; and Frederick Douglass's Narrative, the male account her own answers. Douglass is in this hall; Stowe is in the Press Room.

Ask her why she will not apologize for Mr. Sands. Ask her what kept her in the garret. Ask her what she told Stowe. Ask her what it means that for a century no one believed she wrote her own book.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave GirlThe GarretDr. FlintWritten by HerselfThe Fugitive Slave LawMotherhoodAlexandria
Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free! We are as free from the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north; and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl  ·  Chapter XLI, Free at Last  ·  1861

Drawn From the Corpus