Title: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Author: Harriet Jacobs (writing as Linda Brent) Creation Date: 1861 Location: Boston, Massachusetts Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl appeared in Boston in January 1861, under the pseudonym Linda Brent, with an authenticating preface by the abolitionist editor Lydia Maria Child. It is the only extended slave narrative written by an American woman before emancipation, and the first book in English to deal directly with the sexual machinery of chattel slavery as it bore on enslaved women. Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, around 1813, the granddaughter of Molly Horniblow, a free woman whose local standing shaped much of what the book describes.
The central antagonist is Dr James Norcom — called "Dr Flint" in the text — the Edenton physician who applied sustained sexual pressure to Jacobs from her mid-teens onward. She resisted for years. At about nineteen she entered a deliberate relationship with the white lawyer Samuel Tredwell Sawyer ("Mr Sands"), partly as a calculated strategy to make herself unavailable to Norcom and to place her children under a man who might free them. When Norcom's pressure became unbearable, Jacobs disappeared into a crawlspace above her grandmother's storeroom — nine feet long, seven feet wide, three feet high — where she hid from 1835 until 1842, watching her children through a hole bored in the shingles.
She escaped by boat to Philadelphia and then New York, where she worked as a nursemaid for the editor Nathaniel Parker Willis. In 1852 Willis's wife purchased Jacobs from the Norcoms and manumitted her — a transaction that freed her legally while confirming the commercial logic she had spent her life resisting. She wrote the book in stolen hours through the 1850s and printed it privately after her publisher went bankrupt. She died in Washington, D.C., in March 1897. For more than a century her authorship was doubted; only after Jean Fagan Yellin's archival work in the 1980s was the book restored to Jacobs under her own name, alongside Douglass and Northup in the American slave-narrative canon.
The Prohibition
The prohibition was layered, and each layer carried the force of American law. Under the laws of North Carolina in the 1830s, Jacobs was not legally a person but property, with no right to her own body, no right to marry, no right to retain custody of her children, no right to testify against a white person, and no right to literacy. That she had been taught to read by her first owner was an anomaly Norcom could have reversed at any time.
The second prohibition was specifically sexual. The law gave Norcom enormous latitude over her body; there was no effective crime of rape against an enslaved woman in North Carolina. She could not refuse him, accuse him, or be protected by any legal authority. Norcom's strategy was not to exercise the full legal permission he held but to extract something more — her compliance, her presence in a parody of a relationship. He whispered obscenities in kitchens, ordered her to follow him from room to room, threatened to sell her children if she had any by another man.
The third prohibition was the silence imposed on enslaved women about what was done to them. The sexual economy of slavery was the most carefully unspoken fact of American public life. White Northern readers expected stories of whippings and the auction block — and Douglass and others provided these with great power. What those narratives did not contain was what the institution actually did to Black women's bodies and inner lives. For a Black woman to speak of that material in print was to violate not only the laws of the South but the decorums of the North. Lydia Maria Child had to defend the book's explicitness against the expectation that respectable women's reading should not include such details. The prohibition on Jacobs's speech was at once legal, social, racial, and gendered — she was forbidden from telling the story by every framework available to her culture.
The Strategy
Jacobs's strategy operated on two horizons: the survival strategy that produced the seven years in the garret, and the literary strategy that produced the book. She calculated that Norcom's obsession could be defeated only by disappearance — that if he believed she had fled north he would eventually lose interest and might be persuaded to part with her children. She chose the crawlspace because it was the one place in Edenton where Norcom would never look. She endured the inability to stand, the darkness, the temperature extremes, the permanent cramp in her legs, because the alternative was to continue living inside his household.
The literary strategy was equally patient. Jacobs did not write like Douglass, whose 1845 Narrative was heroic, oratorical, and built around a single authorising moment of male self-assertion. She wrote instead in a mode borrowed from the sentimental novel and the confessional memoir, addressing her reader directly as a listener whose sympathy she was trying to recruit. She understood that white Northern women were her primary audience and that their willingness to accept her story would determine whether the book succeeded. She told her own sexual history plainly — the relationship with Sawyer, the two children, the calculating element in her choices — because any account that pretended to preserve her reputation would be a lie, and she needed the book to be true in order for it to work.
Jacobs also chose to place the book within a framework of abolitionist authentication while retaining authorial control. She sought out Child as editor rather than a more prominent male abolitionist, because Child was a woman of letters who would respect the manuscript's literary integrity. The pseudonym "Linda Brent" protected Jacobs and her children from Norcom family retaliation, and the changed names throughout were a condition of being able to tell the story at all.
The Price and the Legacy
The price was almost incalculable. The seven years in the garret damaged Jacobs's body permanently: her legs and back never fully recovered, and she was subject to recurrent illness through her long working life in the North. The psychological price of watching her children grow through an air hole, without being able to hold or speak to them, is one she barely gestures at in the book and which is everywhere in its weight. The price of publication was the pseudonym, the editorial preface, and the doubts about her authorship that would follow the book for more than a century. The price of manumission was the knowledge that the money paid by Cornelia Willis confirmed, in the very transaction that freed her, that she had always been treated as something to be bought.
The legacy took the longest of any nineteenth-century American book to arrive. For more than a hundred years Incidents was either ignored or classified as a novel — white scholars assumed a fugitive slave woman could not have written such a sophisticated narrative, and attributed the authorship to Child or dismissed the book as fiction dressed as testimony. In 1981 Jean Fagan Yellin demonstrated, through abolitionist correspondence and Norcom family records, that the book was authentic autobiography. Since then Incidents has become foundational to American women's literature, African American literature, and the history of slavery written from inside. It is taught alongside Douglass's Narrative and has become the most-cited source for the sexual history of American slavery. The slow vindication of the book is the exact shape of the legacy: a woman who wrote into a silence so total that the literary establishment could not believe she had spoken, and whose voice survived long enough for the establishment to be corrected.
The Reading
A Childhood Inside the Law
I was born a slave, but I did not know it until six years of happy childhood had passed away. My father was a carpenter, and considered so intelligent and skilful in his trade that when buildings out of the common line were to be erected he was sent for from long distances. He hired his own time, earned his own wages, and I lived with him and my mother and my younger brother William in a home that felt, to a child, like freedom. My grandmother — my mother's mother, whom the town knew by her industry and her baking — was a free woman, and her standing shielded us. I did not know until my mother died that I belonged to someone. My brother and I were the property of a young mistress, the daughter of my mother's friend, and this mistress had been kind — she taught me to read, which was a gift no law required of her. But when she died, her will passed me not to my grandmother, as I had hoped, but to a child — her young niece — whose father was Dr Flint. I was sent to live in his household, and it was there that my life turned.
The Flint Years
Reader, I want you to understand what I am about to describe, because I know that you may doubt it. An enslaved girl, not yet sixteen, was pursued for years in the household of a respectable Southern physician. The law gave her no practical protection. Her grandmother's reputation could not prevent it. The form of the harassment was not open assault — it was the patient, daily, methodical pressure of a clever man who knew that the law made her body his property and who was waiting for her to acknowledge it. He whispered to me in the kitchen. He cornered me in the passage. He dismissed the other servants so he could be alone with me. He threatened me when I refused him. He forced me to follow him from room to room.
The household itself was the instrument. The texture of the kitchen, the timing of meals, the arrangement of the sleeping quarters, the schedules of domestic work — all of it placed an enslaved girl in exactly the rooms where the master could find her alone. The coercion operated not through exceptional violence but through the ordinary architecture of the house, the way power was distributed across every room and every hour. There was so little space inside such a house for a mind that had decided to resist.
The Jealous Mistress
Mrs Flint knew what her husband was doing, and she responded not by protecting me but by turning her fury on me. She stole into my room at night to watch me sleep. She whispered into my ear in a voice meant to imitate her husband's, trying to catch me answering in his name. She accused me of seduction. She made my daily life unbearable through a cruelty that the slave system generated as routinely as it generated its male forms of cruelty. I pitied her. She was herself trapped in a machinery of sexual humiliation, but she took her revenge not on the husband who humiliated her but on the enslaved woman whose body had become the site of the humiliation. O, you happy free women of the North, you do not know what it is to be the slave of a jealous mistress.
I resisted Flint's pressure for years — silence when silence would work, carefully measured insolence when insolence would work, invocation of my grandmother's reputation when that would work. And then I made a decision I will not ask you to forgive. I chose a white lover of my own — Mr Sands, an unmarried lawyer from a prominent local family — because I calculated that he would be less destructive than Flint and that he might eventually be persuaded to free any children I bore him. I tell you this plainly, reader, because any account that pretended to preserve my reputation would be a lie. The standards of sexual morality that apply to free white women cannot apply to an enslaved woman, because the legal conditions of her life are not the conditions those standards assume. If you would condemn an enslaved woman for having a child outside marriage without asking what the alternatives were, you have not thought about what slavery actually is. I am arguing what I know to be true: that what I did must be understood within the coercive structures that made it necessary, not by the moral vocabulary a free society uses for free people.
Disappearance
I had two children by Sands — a son, Benny, and a daughter, Ellen. Flint was enraged. He refused to allow an easy sale of the children to their father; he used them as new leverage against me; he threatened to break the whole family apart by sending us to his son's plantation. I calculated that disappearance was the only move left. In the summer of 1835 I slipped out of Flint's house and hid first in the houses of sympathetic neighbours, then briefly in a swamp where the snakes and mosquitoes were thick around me, and finally in the small garret space my uncle had prepared above a shed attached to my grandmother's house. The space was nine feet long, seven feet wide, and three feet high at its highest point. I could not stand. I could barely move. The roof was thin enough that rain and heat passed through it with almost no attenuation.
I lived in that garret for seven years. The air was bad. My legs swelled. I could not sit up straight. The vermin came and went. In winter I shivered; in summer I suffocated. But I could hear my children playing in the yard below. I could hear Dr Flint's footsteps on the street as he passed the house looking for me. I could hear my grandmother and my uncle bringing food and news at night. I learned to distinguish the movements of rats and mice from human footsteps. I bored a small hole in the shingle to let in air and light and to allow me to see a narrow strip of the world. I watched my children grow through that hole. I wrote letters from the garret, which my uncle smuggled out and arranged to have posted from distant Northern cities, to deceive Flint into believing I had already escaped. The letters worked. Flint spent time and money on fruitless journeys north looking for me while I was in fact a few yards from his own street. He walked past my hiding place and I watched him through the hole in the shingles, and there is a bitter satisfaction in that which I have never quite been able to relinquish.
Aunt Martha and the Network
My grandmother was the pillar on which everything rested. She was a free woman of colour who had built her reputation in the town through decades of careful conduct — her baking business supplied white households, her standing in the community was the one fragile shield her grandchildren had. Her house was the base from which my hiding was organised. The garret was above her storeroom. The food I ate for seven years was carried up by her hands. The entire operation depended on her courage and on the network of Black and sympathetic white neighbours who knew I was there and chose silence. The precariousness of that network, the discipline it required, the risks each participant took — I set it all down, because the world should know that enslaved people did not suffer passively. They organised, they conspired, they kept silence against interrogation, and they did it at the daily risk of their own destruction.
The seven years ended when a place was finally secured for me on a ship bound north. I said goodbye to my grandmother, whose bravery and resourcefulness and quiet daily endurance had sustained me and my children through the whole ordeal, and I escaped in 1842. What followed was flight through Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, work as a nursemaid in a good family's household, desperate strategies to keep my whereabouts concealed from Flint's agents, the reunion with my children in the North, and then the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which made the free states dangerous again. I could not walk certain routes. I could not be seen at certain gatherings. I had to have a plan for disappearance at all times. The freedom I had struggled for turned out to be a different form of vigilance rather than the absence of it.
And then Mrs Bruce — my employer's wife, a woman who had shown me only kindness — purchased my freedom from the Norcoms. I received the news with a mixture of relief and grief. I was free. I was also, for the first time, confirmed in my knowledge that I had always been merchandise in the eyes of the law, and that my freedom was obtainable only by a cash transaction between white women on my behalf. The bill of sale exists. It was paid. I am grateful, and I am ashamed that gratitude is the feeling the transaction requires.
Freedom, Not Marriage
Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble. I wish it for my children's sake far more than for my own. But God so orders circumstances as to keep me with my friend Mrs Bruce. Love, duty, gratitude also bind me to her side. It is a privilege to serve her who pities my oppressed people, and who has bestowed the inestimable boon of freedom on me and my children.
I thank my grandmother, whose death I learned of between the writing of this account and its appearance in print, and whose house in the town of my birth I shall never see again. Slavery is not only what is done to men in the fields. It is what is done to women in the kitchens and the nurseries and the consulting rooms. The freedom of an enslaved woman is not the same as the freedom of an enslaved man, and the full human cost of the institution cannot be reckoned without the testimony of the women it silenced. I have given mine. I ask you, reader — you who have daughters, you who have been spared the knowledge I carry — to consider whether the moral standards you have been applying to women in my position are the standards you would want applied to yourself, or to your own daughter, under the same conditions. If they are not, then it is not I who need forgiveness. It is the system that made my choices necessary.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
The Harvard University Press edition edited by Jean Fagan Yellin (2009) is the scholarly standard, restoring Jacobs's authorship after a century of dispute, with full annotations and an introduction by the scholar who proved the manuscript authentic. The Penguin Classics edition edited by Nellie Y. McKay and Frances Smith Foster (2000) is the readable classroom text, with a strong introduction and notes oriented to first-time readers.
Yellin's authoritative edition. The text the modern reception of Jacobs is built on.
Penguin Classics paperback. The most widely assigned classroom edition.
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