(warning: sexual content and topics of sexual assault are included in this post)
There are so many disturbing things related to the enslavement of Black women in the South, that it is a hard topic to discuss. The topic of sexual assault and abuse, which was routine in plantation life, was hidden and shunned as a subject for conversation or documentation. That is why it was so controversial in 1861 when Harriet Jacobs, a runaway slave, published her autobiography detailing her account of sexual abuse and exploitation. Her book is Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl, and I have just finished reading it in time to include her story in this Black History Month series.
In reading her autobiography, I have been moved toward empathy and outrage at the same time. I felt her anguish, shame, fear, and anger reaching up from the page to grab my soul as if to say. “Hear me!” I can say that it is a life-changing and perspective-changing book. I encourage my readers to put it on their reading list.
Harriet Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in the fall of 1813. Both of her parents were enslaved, but it was not until she was six years old that she reached the realization that she was the property of a white family. Before she died in 1825, Harriet's relatively kind mistress taught Harriet to read and sew. These were skills that served her well her whole life.
Margaret Horniblow, Harriet’s mistress, bequeathed the eleven-year-old Harriet to a niece, Mary Matilda Norcom. Since Mary Norcom was only three years old when Harriet Jacobs became her slave, Mary's father, Dr. James Norcom, an Edenton physician, became Jacobs's master. This turn of events would introduce Harriet to the worst aspects of enslavement, especially for a young girl approaching the age of 15. Jacobs soon realized that her master was a sexual threat.
Jacobs writes about her ordeal this way:
“But I now entered on my fifteenth year—a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. I tried to treat them with indifference or contempt… He was a crafty man and resorted to many means to accomplish his purposes… He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him—where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things.”
Despised by the doctor's suspicious wife and increasingly isolated by her situation, Jacobs in desperation formed a secret liaison with Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a white attorney with whom Jacobs had two children, Joseph and Louisa, by the time she was twenty years old. Her affair was consensual but was also a tactic to keep Dr. Norcom at bay.
As her children grew up in the shadow of enslavement, Harriet devised a plan to gain her freedom. This plan will not go entirely as concocted, but it will eventually lead to freedom for her and her children.
Hoping that pretending to run away she could induce Dr. Norcom to sell her children to their father, attorney Sawyer, Jacobs hid herself in a crawl space above a storeroom in her grandmother's house in the summer of 1835. In that "little dismal hole," she remained for the next seven years, sewing, reading the Bible, keeping watch over her children as best she could, and writing occasional letters to Norcom designed to confuse him as to her actual whereabouts. Norcom was enraged and desperate to find Harriet offering a $500 reward for her return and even went to New York in a vain attempt to track her down, all the while she was within a mile of his home in North Carolina.
Jacobs writes about her seven years of solitude this way:
“I hardly expect that the reader will credit me, when I affirm that I lived in that little dismal hole, almost deprived of light and air, and with no space to move my limbs, for nearly seven years. But it is a fact; and to me a sad one, even now; for my body still suffers from the effects of that long imprisonment, to say nothing of my soul. Members of my family, now living in New York and Boston, can testify to the truth of what I say.”
Although the father of the children, Sawyer, had purchased their children following their mother's wishes, Sawyer moved to Washington, D.C. in 1837 as a US Representative for the state of North Carolina without emancipating either Joseph or Louisa. Sawyer had leased out the daughter Mary, to a family in Brooklyn as a house servant and Harriet determined she would flee her cell and find her daughter. In 1842 Jacobs escaped to the North by boat.
But before getting to her escape, Harriet Jacobs gives 21st-century readers an insider view of what enslavement was really like. A few passages from her memoir will describe to us in excruciating detail, life as a slave on a plantation in the 19th century.
On Religion and the Hypocrisy of Enslavement:
“I well remember one occasion when I attended a Methodist class meeting. I went with a burdened spirit, and happened to sit next to a poor, bereaved mother, whose heart was still heavier than mine. The class leader was the town constable—a man who bought and sold slaves, who whipped his brethren and sisters of the church at the public whipping post, in jail or out of jail. He was ready to perform that Christian office anywhere for fifty cents… She rose to her feet, and said, in piteous tones, "My Lord and Master, help me! My load is more than I can bear. God has hid himself from me, and I am left in darkness and misery." Then, striking her breast, she continued, "I can't tell you what is in here! They've got all my children. Last week they took the last one. God only knows where they've sold her. They let me have her sixteen years, and then—O! O! Pray for her brothers and sisters! I've got nothing to live for now. God make my time short!" She sat down, quivering in every limb. I saw that constable class leader become crimson in the face with suppressed laughter, while he held up his handkerchief, that those who were weeping for the poor woman's calamity might not see his merriment.”
Reactions to the Nat Turner Uprising (1831):
“It was a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority and show their subserviency to the slaveholders; not reflecting that the power which trampled on the colored people also kept themselves in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation. Those who never witnessed such scenes can hardly believe what I know was inflicted at this time on innocent men, women, and children, against whom there was not the slightest ground for suspicion. Colored people and slaves who lived in remote parts of the town suffered in an especial manner.
“In some cases the searchers scattered powder and shot among their clothes, and then sent other parties to find them, and bring them forward as proof that they were plotting insurrection. Everywhere men, women, and children were whipped till the blood stood in puddles at their feet. Some received five hundred lashes; others were tied hands and feet, and tortured with a bucking paddle, which blisters the skin terribly.”
On how enslaved people are conditioned through violence and intimidation:
“Some poor creatures have been so brutalized by the lash that they will sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to their wives and daughters. Do you think this proves the black man to belong to an inferior order of beings? What would you be, if you had been born and brought up a slave, with generations of slaves for ancestors? I admit that the black man is inferior. But what is it that makes him so? It is the ignorance in which white men compel him to live; it is the torturing whip that lashes manhood out of him; it is the fierce bloodhounds of the South, and the scarcely less cruel human bloodhounds of the north, who enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. They do the work.”
Jacobs writes with the poignancy and pain of a first-hand survivor of these atrocities. Her book is difficult to read but a necessary realization for anyone who thinks that there has been no legacy of enslavement to today.
For ten years after her escape from North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs lived the tense and uncertain life of a fugitive slave. She was forced to move often. She found Louisa in Brooklyn and secured a place for both children to live with her in Boston. In 1849 she took up an eighteen-month residence in Rochester, New York, where she worked with her brother, John S. Jacobs, in a Rochester antislavery reading room and bookstore above the offices of Frederick Douglass's newspaper, The North Star. Here she became active in the abolitionist movement.
In 1853, Jacobs took her first steps toward authorship, sending several anonymous letters to the New York Tribune. In the first, "Letter from a Fugitive Slave.” Jacobs presented the sexually sensitive subject matter that would become the burden of her autobiography -- the sexual abuse of slave women and their mother's attempts to protect them. Jacobs wrote, "I have left nothing out but what I thought the world might believe that a Slave Woman was too willing to pour out—that she might gain their sympathies." Jacobs hoped her book "might do something for the Antislavery Cause" both in England and the United States in which she was now actively participating.
Her book was ignored by some publishers because of its sexual content, but in 1860, just before the Civil War started, her book was published under the title, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written By Herself. She included reference to herself to establish that it was a true account and that enslaved people were educated and intelligent enough to write such a book.
With the onset of the Civil War, her book did not receive very much attention. From 1862 to 1866 Jacobs devoted herself to relief efforts in and around Washington, D.C., among former slaves who had become refugees of the war. With her daughter Jacobs founded a school in Alexandria, Virginia, which lasted from 1863 to 1865, when both mother and daughter returned south to Savannah, Georgia, to engage in further relief work among the freedmen and freedwomen. Harriet’s son Joseph, eventually went to Australia and was never heard from again. His whereabouts have never been established.
By the mid-1880s Jacobs had settled with Louisa in Washington, D.C., having been driven out of the South by the rising tide of violence and hostility after Reconstruction. Little is known about the last decade of her life. Harriet Jacobs died in Washington, D.C. on March 7, 1897.
Today, Jacobs is seen as an "icon of female resistance". David S. Reynolds' review of Jean Yellin's 2004 biography of Jacobs in The New York Times, states that “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, are commonly viewed as the two most important slave narratives.”
It wasn’t until 2004, that Yellin published her exhaustive biography (394 pages) entitled Harriet Jacobs: A Life, that Jacob’s story came into the mainstream of research and study. Her work revived interest in the story of Harriet Jacobs, and her book was republished. Yellin also conceived of the idea of the Harriet Jacobs Papers Project which included hundreds of Jacobs’ documents that were published in 2008.
Jacobs’ efforts to tell her story, work for the betterment and education of freed enslaved people, and her unending courage in the face of soul-crushing treatment and torment should put her at the forefront of the history of Black Americans.