Harriet Ann Jacobs
From Wikiversity
The Life of Harriet Jacobs
Harriet Jacobs was a remarkable woman who was born into slavery in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, and died free in Washington, DC, at the age of eighty-four. She put an individual face on major social and political events of her era, but mainly she put a face on one of the most inhumane aspects of enslaved womanhood, sexual abuse and molestation by white men.
Jacobs is best known for her abolitionist work and for her narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. She was born into a benevolent household and described her childhood as comfortable. After the death of her beloved mother, she was taught by her mistress to read and to sew, skills that would serve her well throughout her life. When her mistress died, Jacobs was willed to the family of Dr. James Norcum. Most of Jacobs’ autobiography des cribes how she spent decades battling Norcum’s sexual pursuits. After Norcum built a cabin outside of town for intimate meetings with Jacobs when she was a teenager, she countered this plan by becoming pregnant by a single white lawyer. Jacobs wrote, “it was something to triumph over my tyrant in that small way.” But her child by another man did not defeat Norcum who had no intention of selling her. Even after the birth of a second child by the same lawyer, Norcum’s harassment continued. Desperate to get away from her predator, Jacobs planned to escape.
Norcum’s threat to put Jacobs’ children to work as field hands was the ultimate motivation for her escape. At first, Jacobs hid in the houses of both black and white Edenton neighbors, but finally she settled into a small 9 x 7 crawlspace above the porch of her grandmother, a free black. There was neither light nor ventilation in the space, and vermin crawled over her at night, but it was a secure hiding place. The lawyer purchased the children he fathered with Jacobs and they went on to live with Jacobs’ grandmother. Jacobs was hiding in the same home in which her children lived, and the children did not even know their mother was there. Through a peephole, Jacobs watched them grow up. She hid in the space for seven long years, coming out only occasionally late at night to exercise. In 1842, she finally escaped to the North by sailing from Edenton on a ship where she found safe passage to Philadelphia.
Jacobs eventually ended up in Rochester, New York, where she became actively involved with abolitionists associated with Frederick Douglass’ newspaper, the North Star. In the years that followed, a friend arranged for her purchase from Dr. Norcum. She was encouraged to write her autobiography, which when published gave her quite a bit of celebrity and today exemplifies “ a heart nerved with determination to suffer even unto death in pursuit of that liberty which without makes life an intolerable burden” (Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, October 9, 1853).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON HARRIET JACOBS
PRIMARY SOURCES
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Accomando, Christina. "The Laws were Laid Down to Me Anew: Harriet Jacobs and the Reframing of Legal Fictions.” African American Review, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer, 1998, pp. 229-245.
Beardslee, Karen E. “Through Slave Culture's Lens Comes the Abundant Source: Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” MELUS, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring 1999, p. 37.
Berlant, Lauren. “The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill.” American Literature, Vol. 65, No. 3, September 1993, pp. 549-574.
Cutter, Martha J. Dismantling "The Master's House": Critical Literacy in Harriet Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Callaloo, Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 1996, pp. 209-225.
Drake, Kimberly. “Rewriting the American Self: Race, Gender, and Identity in the Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs.” MELUS, Vol. 22, No. 4, Winter 1997, pp. 91-108.
Garfield, Deborah M. and Rafia Zafar. Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, 1996.
Hanrahan, Heidi M. “Harriet Jacobs's ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’: a retelling of Lydia Maria Child's ‘The Quadroons’”. New England Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 4, December 2005, pp. 599-616.
Johnson, Yvonne. The Voices of African American Women: The Use of Narrative and Authorial Voice in the Works of Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker. American Studies XXIV: American Literature, 1999.
King, Lovalerie. “Counter-Discourses on the Racialization of Theft and Ethics in Douglass's Narrative and Jacobs's Incidents.” MELUS, Vol. 28, No. 4, Winter 2003, pp. 55 (29).
Larson, Jennifer. “Converting Passive Womanhood to Active Sisterhood: Agency, Power and Subversion in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Women’s Studies, Vol. 35, No. 8, December 2006, pp. 739 (18).
Levy, Andrew. “Dialect and Convention: Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Nineteenth-Century Literature Vol. 45, No. 2, Sep., 1990, pp. 206-219.
Li, Stephanie. “Motherhood as Resistance in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Vol. 23, No. 1, January 2006, pp. 14 (16).
Lyons, Mary E. Letters from a Slave Girl: The Story of Harriet Jacobs. 2007.
Mason Bolick, Cheryl and Meghan M. McGlinn. “Harriet Jacobs: Using Online Slave Narratives in the Classroom.” Social Education, July 2005.
Mills, Bruce. “Lydia Maria Child and the Endings to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” American Literature, Vol. 64, No. 2, June 1992, pp. 255-272.
Moore, Geneva Cobb. “A Freudian reading of Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1, Fall 2005, p. 3 (18).
Morgan, Winifred. “Gender-Related Difference in the Slave Narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglas.” American Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2, Fall 1994, pp. 73 (22).
Nudelman, Franny. “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering.” ELH, Vol. 59, No. 4, Winter 1992, pp. 939-964.
Randle, Gloria T. “Between the Rock and the Hard Place: Mediating Spaces in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” African American Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, Spring 1999, pp. 43-56.
Smyth, William D. “O Death, where is Thy Sting?: Reverend Francis J. Grimke's Eulogy for Harriet A. Jacobs.” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 70, No. ½, Winter 1985, pp. 35-39.
Stover, Johnnie M. “Nineteenth-Century African American Women's Autobiography as Social Discourse: The Example of Harriet Ann Jacobs.” College English Vol. 66, No. 2, Nov., 2003, pp. 133-154.
Tricomi, Albert. “Dialect and Identity in Harriet Jacobs's Autobiography and Other Slave Narratives.” Callaloo, Vol. 29, No. 2 Spring 2006, pp. 619-633.
Washington, Margaret. “From Motives of Delicacy: Sexuality and Morality in the Narratives of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs.” The Journal of African American History, June 2007.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Harriet Jacobs's Family History.” American Literature. Vol. 66, No. 4, December 1994, pp. 765-767.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative.” American Literature, Vol. 53, No. 3, November 1981, pp. 479-486.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. 2005.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative. 1981.
