In 1861, one of the most powerful slave narratives in American history was published under the title, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Jacobs and edited by the famous abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child. The memoir unflinchingly recounts the unique experience that enslaved women faced in the American system of Black chattel slavery – to put it bluntly, Jacobs describes the years of grooming, manipulation, sexual harassment, and threats of rape that she faced at the hands of her master, Dr. Flint, and the abuse she took from her mistress, Mrs. Flint. Jacobs’ memoir painted a picture of slavery that had all the brutality that we’re familiar with learning about – backbreaking work, horrific physical punishments, tearing families apart, inhuman treatment. But it also added a new layer – that enslavement was a different experience for women, for whom sexual terror was a constant, pregnancy was profitable, rape was often unavoidable, and childbirth and wet nursing were part of their labor. For this episode in our latest series on women’s history, we’re talking about women and American slavery.
Women and Slavery: How Harriet Jacobs Revealed Women’s Experience of American Enslavement
Written by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD
Produced and Recorded by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD and Marissa Rhodes, PhD
Sarah: In 1861, one of the most powerful slave narratives in American history was published under the title, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by a woman who called herself pseudonymously Linda Brent and edited by the famous abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child. The memoir unflichingly recounts the unique experience that enslaved women faced in the American system of Black chattel slavery – to put it bluntly, Jacobs describes the years of grooming, manipulation, sexual harassment, and threats of rape that she faced at the hands of her master, Dr. Flint, and the abuse she took from her mistress, Mrs. Flint. Eventually, Harriet Jacobs hid in her own grandmother’s attic in order to avoid the obsessed Dr. Flint – that tiny crawlspace became her home for the next seven years.
Marissa: Jacobs’ memoir painted a picture of slavery that had all the brutality that we’re familiar with learning about – backbreaking work, horrific physical punishments, tearing families apart, inhumane treatment. But it also added a new layer – that enslavement was a different experience for women, for whom sexual terror was a constant, pregancy was profitable, rape was often unavoidable, and childbirth and wetnursing were part of their labor. For this episode in our latest series on women’s history, we’re talking about women and American slavery.
I’m Sarah
And I’m Marissa
And we are your historians for this episode of Dig
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Sarah: As always, we start by acknowledging the work of the historians that we relied on to write this episode. If you’re a longtime listener, you know why we do this, but I like to mention it now and then. History isn’t just things that happened in the past. It’s a discipline. We know what we know about history because historians did enormous amounts of reading books and articles by other historians to become deeply literate in their area of study, then went out and did primary source research, and then wrote their own interpretation about what happened, or how, or why, in the past. So when we put together an episode of this podcast, we can only do that because other historians read, and researched, and wrote, often for years, to help us understand a topic. For this episode, I read a variety of really excellent books on women and slavery: Closer to Freedom by Stephanie M.H. Camp, They Were Her Property by Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Birthing a Slave by Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow by Jacqueline Jones, Arn’t I A Woman by Deborah Gray White, and An Intimate Economy by Alexandra Finley. The majority of the episode comes directly from Harriet Jacobs’ narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, as well as Jean Fagan Yellin’s edition of the narrative, which includes a lengthy introduction that helps contextualize the narrative in Jacob’s real life story.There are many different edited versions, but you can find both versions easily on the Internet Archive for free, which I’ve linked throughout the transcript. We are grateful to all those historians who have enriched our knowledge of the lives of enslaved women.
I also want to give a quick disclaimer about language. While Harriet Jacobs is the real name of the woman who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the rest of the names that she uses in the narrative are pseudonymns. In fact, she refers to herself as Linda Brent in the text – but most people just use her real name when referring to her. However, most people also use the pseudonyms in the text for everyone else rather than their real names. So while we’ll refer to Harriet Jacobs as Harriet, we will use the name Dr. Flint for her owner, whose real name was Dr. James Norcom; the name Mrs. Flint for her mistress, who was really Mary Matilda Horniblow Norcom; the name Mr and Mrs. Bruce for Harriet’s employers, the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis and his wives, Mary Stace Willis and Cornelia Grinnell Willis; and Mr. and Mrs. Dodge for her real owner, Mary Matilda Messmore and her husband.
Marissa: For most of the twentieth century, historians used the word ‘slave’ in the same way that people had used the word ‘man’ for ages: to represent all people with that label, ignoring that gender might play a role in differentiating the experiences of enslaved men and enslaved women. (As in, “since the dawn of man” or “for all mankind!”) But in the 1970s and 1980s, just as the women’s liberation movement inspired women to take their new-found consciousness into law and medicine, so too did it inspire woman-historians to begin thinking about the past through the lens of feminist analysis. Instead of seeing the experience of enslavement as a monolithic one, these historians began to argue that enslavement was an entirely different experience for women than it was for men – that one’s gender affected the way that a person experienced the institution of chattel slavery. As Jacqueline Jones wrote in 1985’s Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, in the slaveholding south, “without pretense or apology, were racial and patriarchal ideologies wedded to the pursuit of profit. As blacks, slave women were exploited for their skills and physical strength in the production of staple crops; as women, they performed a reproductive function vital to individual slaveholders’ financial interests and to the inherently expansive system of slavery in general.”[1] In other words, historians began to argue that enslaved women experienced the forced labor of slavery, but were also used for their ability to bear children – children which enriched slavers and maintained and expanded the population of enslaved laborers into the future.
Sarah: The same year, pioneering historian of Black women in the United States Deborah Gray White published Arn’t I A Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, which took its name from the famous speech that the abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth gave in 1851. In the speech, Truth wove together the twin issues of race and gender for enslaved women for her largely white audience, saying: “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?” White wrote, that “She (Sojourner Truth) like most black women of the time, plowed, planted, and hoed, did as much work as a man, endured the brutal punishment meted out by slaveholders and their overseers, and also fulfilled her ordained role of motherhood.”[2] In this book, Gray drew attention to what Truth was trying to convey in 1851: that the interconnection between race and gender placed Black women in a different situation than either Black men or white women. The combination of Blackness and womanhood, in other words, informed enslaved women’s experience. In 1991, scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw gave a name to what Truth was describing: intersectionality.
Marissa: Let’s return to the story of Harriet Jacobs to illustrate what it is scholars like Jacqueline Jones and Deborah Gray White and Kimberlé Crenshaw and others were talking about here. Harriet Jacobs was born sometime around 1815. She says that in her early childhood, she didn’t have a concept of enslavement. Her father was a carpenter, and while he remained legally enslaved, he was able to work fairly independently as long as he paid his mistress a sizeable sum each year out of his earnings. Because of this arrangement, and because her family was fairly light-skinned, they lived comfortably and Harriet was shielded from most of the horrors of slavery. Harriet also had a grandmother who was well-respected in the community by Black and white folk alike. But when Harriet was about twelve, their mistress died, and she was transferred to her mistress’s niece, who was only five years old. So in actuality, Harriet became the property of that girls’ parents: Dr. and Mrs. Flint. The Flints didn’t want to keep Harriet’s grandmother, who many called Aunt Marthy, so put her up for sale. But the community response was negative – Aunt Marthy had nursed, fed, and cared for so many people in the area, and so when she was called up for sale, many in the crowd chanted, “Shame!” Eventually, the elderly sister of their former mistress, who knew Martha well, purchased her and immediately set her free. (This may seem tangential, but it will be relevant!)
Sarah: While Harriet had loved her former mistress, who was kind, provided the family was a measure of freedom, and taught the children how to read and write, these new owners were far more cruel. Harriet writes this of her mistress, Mrs. Flint: “Mrs. Flint was, like many southern women, was totally deficient in energy. She had not strength to superintend her household affairs; but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped, til the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash. She was a member of the chuch, but partaking of the Lord’s supper did not seem to put her in a Christian frame of mind.” For the first few years, Harriet was treated not unlike the white children of the household, but when she turned fifteen, Dr. Flint turned his sights onto her. She called the teenage years “a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl.” Flint began to aggressively pursue herfor sex. “He was a crafty man,” Harriet wrote, “and resorted to many means to accomplish his purposes. Sometimes he had stormy, terrific ways, that made his victims tremble; sometimes he assumed a gentleness that he though must surely subdue….He told me I was his property, that I must be subject to his will in all things.”
Marissa: Harriet had nowhere to turn – while Flint’s words were disgusting, they were also true: she was her property, and she was to be subject to his will. She tried for some time to treat him with disdain, thinking that might turn him off, but it didn’t work. She did have some things on her side: while her grandmother lived nearby, Dr. Flint was cautious – as a respected member of the community and a spirited woman, he didn’t want to draw her ire. She was also somewhat lucky that they lived in town, rather than at a rural plantation. “It was lucky for me that I did not live on a distant plantation, but in a town not so large that the inhabitants were ignorant of each other’s affairs. Bad as are the laws and customs in a slaveholding community, the doctor, as a professional man, deemed it prudent to keep up some outward show of decency.” In other words, Flint was at least socially conscious of not creating a scandal – that didn’t mean he wouldn’t or couldn’t rape or harass her, but that he wanted to maintain his reputation while doing so. This wasn’t uncommon. According to historian Shannon Eaves, the slaveholding South constituted a “rape culture,” in that “the systematic rape of Black women especially and the sexual exploitation of Black people more broadly were [critical] to the founding of the nation,” and that Black women’s bodies were the “ideological and physical landscape upon which the slaveholding South was built.”[3] After all, as Eaves and others have argued, rape was incentivized for white men: if they raped an enslaved woman whom they owned and impregnated her, they stood to profit from the baby, which would increase the number of bound laborers they owned and which could be, to put it bluntly, converted to cash. Moreover, the rape culture of the slaveholding South meant that everyone knew it happened and everyone allowed it to happen, and further believed that it should and ought to happen, especially if the slaver-rapist was discrete and otherwise respectable. So unfortunately, while what Harriet describes in her narrative is disgusting and inexcusable, it was not unusual or uncommon in the slaveholding South. Critically, this rape culture had a major profit motive: after the importation of slaves through the trans-Atlantic slave trade was banned in 1808, slavers relied on the natural growth of the enslaved population. Breeding their bondspeople, encouraging many births, and, of course, raping with impunity, meant the perpetuation of the Southern way of life.
Sarah: When I teach Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, one of the things I concentrate most on is Harriet’s mistress, Mrs. Flint. In the age of #MeToo, we might think about the rallying cries of “Believe Women,” which calls others, but especially other women, to believe and protect other women when they relay their narratives about having been sexually abused. So it’s actually really common for students to assume, before reading, that Mrs. Flint might be upset with her husband for his behavior, call him out, and support Harriet. But of course this is not what she, or other white women slavers, typically did. In a patriarchal society, while white woman enjoyed a position of very real privilege, they also lived under the control of white men. They had little to no power to control their husbands actions. Further, they had a great deal to lose if they tried to hold their husbands accountable – they enjoyed wealth, prestige, and status if they just played along. Take this really famous quote from Mary Boykin Chestnut, the famed diarist of the Civil War era, who observed, “God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatoo children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.” Chesnut is saying there that slave mistresses know, but when it comes to their own families, they simply pretend they “can’t see” the mixed-race children of their rapist husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. When of course in reality, not only could they see them, but they also knew everyone else could see them, too. Again, as Eaves argues, this was the rape culture of the South: everyone knows it happens, agree that it will and should happen, and does nothing to speak against or stop it.
Marissa: Harriet describes this dynamic in a chapter called “The Jealous Mistress.” Mrs. Flint, according to Harriet, “possessed the key to her husband’s character before I was born.” In other words, Mrs. Flint knew that he had a pattern of harassing and manipulating young enslaved girls in their household, and she saw that pattern starting up again with Harriet. She wrote of Mrs. Flint, “She might have used this knowledge to counsel and to screen the young and the innocent among her slaves; but for them she had no sympathy. They were the objects of her constant suspicion and malevolence.” Mrs. Flint hated Harriet and made her life miserable, and while she was careful not to physically punish her against Dr. Flint’s wishes, she berated her and treated her with disdain. Dr. Flint contrived all sorts of plans to try to get alone with Harriet away from his wife’s watchful eye – in one scenario, he decided that the couples’ four year old daughter would sleep in his rooms at night – and of course, she would need an enslaved maid to attend to her. That servant, of course, would be Harriet. Flint lectured and cajoled her, reminding her that he never “treated her like a slave” and that he would intervene for her with his wife. Harriet was running out of time to escape Dr. Flint’s advances.
Sarah: A similar – if more grievous – dynamic unfolds in another narrative written by a former slave: Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup. Northrup was a free Black man and musician who lived in Northern New York State who was kidnapped by two white men and sold into slavery in 1841. Northrup is sold several times, and at one point is owned by a man named Edwin Epps, on his cotton plantation in Louisiana. Epps enslaved eight people, including a young woman named Patsey, who was the quickest and most productive field hand on the plantation. Patsey is described as nimble, athletic, and incredibly smart. Northrup wrote that though Patsey was young, beautiful, and lively, she also was the most miserable: “Patsey wept oftener, and suffered more, than any of her companions. She had been literally excoriated. Her back bore the scars of a thousand stripes; not because she was backward in her work, nor because she was of an unmindful and rebellious spirit, but because it had fallen to her lot to be the slave of a licentious master and a jealous mistress. She shrank before the lustful eye of the one, and was in danger even of her life at the hands of the other, and between the two, she was indeed accursed.” Like Jacobs, Patsey experienced a painful change between childhood and adulthood as an enslaved woman. She was a special favorite (a pet, compared to a kitten) of the household when she was child, and the unnamed mistres (Mrs. Epps) used to enjoy spoiling her – but as she grew into a beautiful young woman, the mistress came to hate her. And while Harriet Jacobs was able to find ways to avoid being raped by Flint, Patsey was not so successful. This is a good place to note that in the nineteenth century, it was not possible, socially, to write openly about sexuality in anyway that wasn’t extremely vague and euphemistic. So Northrup writes about Patsey’s experience in a way that makes it clear to the reader what is happening to her without ever explicitly stating that she was raped. When Northrup writes, that Epps was a “licentious master” and that Patsey “shrank before the lustful eye” of Epps, he doesn’t mean that Epps just looked at her sinfully or had lustful thoughts – he means that he was raping her, a reality that any nineteenth century reader would have understood easily.
Marissa: Epps’ wife would rage at him over the attention he paid to Patsey, and he would appease her by punishing Patsey with a whipping to prove that he didn’t have a soft spot for her. In between these whippings, the mistress still made Patsey’s life miserable by harassing and hurting her. Between the physical punishment and constant rape, Patsey lived in pain and misery. Northrup writes: “If she uttered a word in opposition to her master’s will, the lash was resorted to at once, to bring her to subjection; if she was not watchful when about her cabin, or when walking in the yard, a billet of wood, or a broken bottle perhaps, hurled from her mistress’ hand, would smite her unexpectedly in the face. The enslaved victim of lust and hate, Patsey had no comfort of her life.” In one of the most painful parts of the narrative to read, Northrup describes an instance where Epps became enraged when Patsey was caught leaving the plantation to get some soap at a neighboring property. Epps had Patsey stripped naked and tied down by wrists and ankles to four stakes and demanded that Northrup whip her. After around thirty lashes, Northrup refuses to whip her anymore, afraid that she might actually die – so Epps took the whip and continued the beating until, Northrup writes, “She was terribly lacerated—I may say, without exaggeration, literally flayed.” It’s absolutely fucking horrible. From that point, Patsey is never the same. To quote Northrup again: “from that time forward she was not what she had been. The burden of a deep melancholy weighed heavily on her spirits. She no longer moved with that buoyant and elastic step—there was not that mirthful sparkle in her eyes that formerly distinguished her. The bounding vigor—the sprightly, laughter-loving spirit of her youth, were gone.” (If you have seen the film version of the book, you may remember the incredibly painful scene, in which Michael Fassbender plays Epps.)
Sarah: This scene stands out as one of the most infamous and painful in all American slave narratives. But in general, what Patsey experienced – sexual predation and unspeakable violence – were not unusual within the system of American enslavement. So while what Harriet experienced wasn’t necessarily rare or unique, she is able to describe the plight of an enslaved woman with clarity and honesty. And her narrative also gives us a glimpse into a woman’s first hand account of what she experienced – after all, Northrup is a man describing his interpretation of Patsey’s experience – and how she tried to navigate and survive it. For instance, as a teenager, Harriet fell in love with a free man of color, and the two decided they wanted to marry – but they couldn’t until they got permission from Dr. Flint. Flint, unsurprisingly, refused. He railed against her, and eventually threatened her with selling her away to Louisiana. This wasn’t just the threat of sale away from her family and all she knew (that would be bad enough) but the threat of sale to Louisiana was likely intended to carry the threat of intense and deadly work on a large sugar or cotton plantation. This was a common threat, especially for enslaved people in the upper south like Harriet. In the upper southern states, like Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, where cash crops like cotton weren’t quite as booming a business as in the deep south, plantation owners often supplemented their income by selling slaves into the ‘internal slave trade,’ which circulated slaves bred in the upper South to the massive cash crop plantations of the deep South. Harriet essentially dared Flint to carry through with it, knowing that he wanted her too badly to follow through – and she was right. But in the process, she also decided that she couldn’t doom a free man to life as the husband and father to loved ones in bondage, and she encouraged him to seek a life in a free state. She wrote, “My lover was an intelligent and religious man. Even if he could have obtained permission to marry me while I was a slve, the marriage would give him no power to protect me from my master. It would have made him miserable to witness the insults I should have been subjected to.” (To be clear, she’s referring here to sexual harassment and rape, not any common ‘insults.’) “And then, if we had children, I knew they must ‘follow the condition of the mother.’” So when her lover told her he had to travel out of state, Harriet told him not to return and instead to move to a Northern state. As much as it broke her heart to send him away, she didn’t want him to be trapped by the institution even as a free man.
Marissa: Even though she avoided sale to the deep South, Harriet knew that time was limited for Dr. Flint’s patience. After her lover moved away, Dr. Flint announced his plans to build a secluded cabin, outside of the prying eyes of the community, where she would live. The passage in which Harriet describes this is a good example of the difficult position Harriet was in as she wrote this narrative. It was simply not acceptable for a woman to write openly about anything sexual in the mid-nineteenth century, even if it was describing sexual terror rather than sexual pleasure. So as Harriet describes plans for this new cabin in the narrative, she has to talk around the reality of the cabin to make the reader understands without actually saying it. For example, she writes that “Hitherto, I had escaped my dreaded fate, by being in the midst of the people….I vowed before my Master that I would never enter it. I had rather toil on the plantation from dawn til dark; I had rather live and die in jail, than drag on, from day to day, through such a living death.” Further, she knew that Dr. Flint sold away women he had raped in the past, along with their babies. Harriet wrote, “I shuddered to think of being the mother of children that should be owned by my old tyrant. I knew that as soon as a new fancy took him, his victims were sold far off to get rid of them, especially if they had children… He never allowed his offspring by slaves to remain long in sight of himself and his wife.” She was tortured over what she could do to avoid this fate herself. There was little that she could do until she met a white man in the community who took a great interest in her. He was kind, and acquainted with her grandmother, and Harriet felt able to confide in him some of what Dr. Flint was subjecting her to. This white man offered a solution of sorts. Harriet described her decision to enter a sexual relationship with this white man: “I knew that impassable gulf between us; but to be an object of interest to a man who is not married, and who is not her master, is agreeable to the pride and feelings of a slave, if her miserable situation has left her any pride or sentiment. It seems less degrading to give one’s self, that to submit to compulsion.” She also saw it as the better option in the almost certain case that she became pregnant. “Of a man who was not my master I could ask my children well supported; and in this case, I felt confident I should obtain the boon. I also felt quite sure that they would be made free.” And so Harriet – only 15 years old – entered a into relationship with the unnamed white man and eventually bore him two children.
Sarah: When Harriet became pregnant with her first child, Dr. Flint became enraged and tried to demand Harriet into ending her relationship with her partner, but she refused. She had actually been hoping that Dr. Flint would be angry with her for getting pregnant by another man, but she hoped that he would react to that anger by selling her – allowing her partner the opportunity to purchase her. But instead, Dr. Flint told her, “Never look to me for help. You are my slave, and shall always be my slave. I will never sell you, that you may depend on.” All she could do was continue her relationship with her partner in the hopes that her master wouldn’t want to tangle with another white man over access to her body. When she gave birth to her second child and learned that it was a girl, she was devastated: “When they told me my newborn babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.” As her children grew, Flint taunted Harriet by making comments about how much money they would bring when he eventually decided to sell them. But though Harriet and her partner tried, Flint refused to sell her or her children to anyone he suspected was working with or for her white partner. Eventually, Dr. Flint sent Harriet to live on his son’s cotton plantation, where again, she would be away from the protection of her grandmother and white partner. She considered running away, hoping that it would convince Flint to sell her and her children, but her grandmother warned her not to for the sake of her children. At first, her time laboring for Dr. Flint’s son and daughter-in-law was tolerable, but eventually Dr. Flint returned to continue harassing and manipulating her, and Harriet overheard him plotting with his son to “break” Harriet’s children by sending them to the cotton field to work as field hands. The idea here was to force the two children to learn the reality of slavery, and break their will, by making them perform hard manual labor. Harriet couldn’t let this happen to them.
Marissa: Harriet then decided to run away. Her reasoning was that the plan to ‘break’ her children was only a tool to manipulate Harriet. If she disappeared, the children would only become a nuisance, and it might induce Flint to finally sell them – and then their father, Harriet’s white partner, could arrange for their purchase. So Harriet disappeared – and we say “disappeared,” because she didn’t really run away, but instead went into hiding. First, she was sheltered by a friend. For fear of her friend being punished for hiding her, Harriet then ran out into a wooded area, where she was bitten by a snake, causing a terrible infection in her leg. Then, she was taken in by a white woman – a slaveholder herself – who hid her in a room in her home to protect her from Flint. Harriet couldn’t stay in the house forever, especially as Flint was leading searches that were geting closer and closer to locating her. With the help of many others, Harriet was then moved to an area that people called “the Snaky Swamp” while they found a more permanent place for her to hide. Finally, they landed on a crawlspace in a shed at her grandmother’s house – a space that was nine feet long, seven feet wide, and only three feet high. It was oppressively hot and often plagued with insects and mice. Family members brought food which they delivered through a trapdoor. Occasionally at night when it was safer, family members would stand in the trapdoor to keep her company. With only holes for light and ventilation, Harriet hid in that space, which she referred to as “the garret,” for seven years. Through her peepholes, she could often see her children outside, but she could not interact with them for fear they would accidentally reveal her location. Once, her son was bitten by a dog in the yard, and she could hear him screaming while the bite wounds were treated. She wrote: “Oh, what torture to a mother’s heart, to listen to this and be unable to go to him!”
Sarah: The fate of the children hung in the balance. While Harriet hoped their father would find a way to get them their freedom, he did not. Instead, he married – and told his wife about the children. Suddenly, Harriet had to worry that this white woman would claim her children as slaves. She wrote: “If pecuniary troubles should come, or if the new wife required more money than could conveniently be spared, my children might be thought of as a convenient means of raising funds. I had no trust in thee, O Slavery! Never should I know peace til my children were emancipated with all due formalities of law.” Eventually, the childrens’ white father arranged for them to each go North, their daughter to live with his family members and their son to travel with Harriet’s brother, who served as a body servant to her white partner. While they wasn’t exactly free, they were at least safe from Flint and from the South. In the meantime, Harriet hid – continuing to wait and watch. Her aunt passed away and she had to listen to stories of the funeral instead of being there herself. Her brother managed to escape from bondage. And finally, after seven years, Harriet herself escaped – first to Philadelphia, then Boston.
Marissa: She needed to make some money to stay afloat, but could only work for someone sensitive to her situation. She found the perfect situation as a nanny for a time for Nathaniel Parker Willis, a famous writer in his day. (In the book, she refers to Willis and his wife as Mr. and Mrs. Bruce.) She worked for Willis’s first wife, and when she passed away, helped Mr. Willis with their child on a trip to England, and then, worked for Willis’s second wife, Cornelia Grinnel Willis. When she returned, living with the Bruces in New York, things became especially tense with the recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which ramped up the federal effort to seize and return escaping bondspeople. In 1850, Dr. Flint died – but this still did not solve Harriet’s dilemma, because she still officially belonged to his daughter, now a married woman. Then one day, a notice was published in the newspaper announcing that Mr. and Mrs. Dodge (Flint’s daughter and her husband) were in New York City. Harriet Jacobs’ biographer, Jean Fagan Yellin, who we’ll talk a bit more about in a moment, suspects that the Dodges (in reality, Daniel and Mary Messmore) were hoping to capitalize on the new Fugitive Slave Act, and use Harriet’s care and protectiveness of her children against her. They planned to tell Harriet that when Flint had sold Harriet’s children, he had violated the law, since his daughter (now an adult) owned the children, and not him. This would invalidate that sale, and mean that the Dodges could seize he children and take them back into slavery. Yellin suspects that the Dodges planned to use that tidbit to convince Harriet to hand herself ove to, once again, protect her children. To protect Harriet, Mrs. Bruce sent her out of the state. According to Harriet’s account, Mrs. Bruce then wrote to Harriet to say that she was going to find Mr. Dodge and purchase Harriet’s freedom. Harriet did not consider this a kindness. Paying someone for her freedom, she thought, was just another slave transaction, one that propped up slavery as if it was a legitimate enterprise. She didn’t want young Mrs. Bruce to become just like another slave trader. Instead, she wrote to Mrs. Bruce to say that rather than have her freedom purchased, she would move to California and go into hiding.
Sarah: But Mrs. Bruce forged on anyway. A short time after, Mrs. Bruce wrote to Harriet to say that with the help of a trusted agent, she had purchased Harriet’s freedom for $300. Historical research done by Jean Fagan Yellin revealed that Mrs. Bruce (actually Mrs. Willis) worked with the American Colonization Society to raise the funds to purchase Harriet’s freedom. (This was a common tactic for abolitionists seeking to aid fugitives. In 1846, British abolitionists raised about 150 pounds sterling to purchase Frederick Douglass’s freedom from those who claimed ownership over him; in 1855, abolitionists raised $1300 dollars to purchase the freedom of the fugitive Anthony Burns after they had been unsuccessful in stopping slave catchers from seizing him in Boston in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act.) Harriet wrote: “So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquaries, who are seeking to measure the progress of civilization in the United States. I well know the value of that bit of paper; but much as I love freedom, I do not like to look upon it. I am deeply grateful to the generous friend who procured it, but I despise the miscreant who demanded payment for what never rightfully belonged to him or his.”
Marissa: Let’s take a step back here and talk a little bit about this narrative and its role in the history of the American system of enslavement. Though it was always a well-known narrative, until the 1990s, most historians believed that Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was not a narrative at all, but a work of sentimental fiction, likely written by a white woman. Even though the full the title of the book includes the phrase “Written by Herself,” most historians suspected that Lydia Maria Child, the white abolitionist that worked with Jacobs to edit the narrative for publication, had likely actually written the book and invented the character of the main character. This wouldn’t have been completely unthinkable. Other prominent ‘autobiographies’ about enslaved women were actually written by white women. In 1857, a white woman named Mattie Griffith – a former slaver who had become an abolitionist – wrote a novel called Autobiography of a Female Slave which was presented as a slave narrative and sometimes mistaken as one. Many well-known historians agreed that Incidents was another such case: in 1972, the historian John Blassingame wrote that the narrative was “not credible” as a narrative. He wrote: “In the first place, the book is too orderly; too many of the major characters meet providentially after years of separation. Then, too, the story is too melodramatic: miscegenation and cruelty, outraged virtue, unrequited love and planter liscentiousness appear on practically every page. The virtuous Harriet sympathizes with her wretched mistress who has to look on all the mulattoes fathered by her husband, she refuses to bow to the lascivious demands of her master, bears two children for another white man and then runs away and hides in a garret in her grandmother’s cabin for seven years until she is able to escape to New York. In the meantime, her white lover has acknowledged his paternity of her children, purchased their freedom, and has been elected to Congress. In the end, all live happily ever after.” But as we mentioned earlier, with the wave of women entering the profession and asking new questions about women and slavery came new interpretations and assertions. No small part of Blassingame’s dismissal of the narrative was because it was written by and for women – his reference to “melodrama” is a rejection of a story that prioritizes the experiences that made up the center of an enslaved woman’s life. In 1981, Jean Fagan Yellin published a short essay in the journal American Literature to contradict Blassingame and others’ assumption that the narrative was fiction.
Sarah: In short, Yellin found a collections of letters between Jacobs and her abolitionist friend Amy Post. Sharp listeners who have read our book might recognize that name – Amy Post, along with her husband Isaac, were prominent abolitionists who lived in Rochester, NY. They were close friends with Frederick Douglass and his wife Ann, and were close friends with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1848, Amy Post was a signer of the Declaration of Sentiments, the famed document penned by Eizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott and signed at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. And of course, Amy and Isaac Post were directly responsible for the Fox sisters – the young girls who heard the knockings that they believed were communications from spirits who lived in their cabin – becoming famous and for helping to accelerate the creation of the Spiritualist religion. Nineteenth century America was a small world, indeed. In the late 1840s, after the first Mrs. Bruce passed away, Harriet Jacobs moved to Rochester to live with her brother, John, who was giving lectures as a fugitive slave with the help of the abolitionist community. The city was a hub for the movement, and a safe place for Harriet and her brother to live. John introduced Harriet to his circle of abolitionist friends, and Harriet became enmeshed in the movement, even working in an office that local abolitionists had in the city that served as a bookstore and reading room. This is where Harriet began to read deeply in the literature of antislavery. While she was of course always antislavery, this is where she likely began to develop a more formal political awakening and to theorize her own experiences – and it’s also likely why her narrative used familiar tropes, sometimes zooms out to make larger claims or arguments, and references other well-known narratives. As Yellin writes, “The breadth of the references to literature and current events in Incidents suggests that during her eighteen months in Rochester she read her way through the abolitionist’ library of books and papers.” When her brother went out to go on a lecture tour, Harriet moved in with Isaac and Amy Post, and became close friends with Amy. Even after Jacobs moved out, she and Amy wrote to each other often. It’s these letters, which were acquired in the 1970s by the University of Rochester Rush Rhees Library, that helped Yellin definitively prove that Jacobs was the author of Incidents. For one, Yellin notes that the letters “demonstrate the sophistication of Jacob’s vocabulary and syntax and trace the growth of her writing skills.”
Marissa: In the letters, Jacobs and Post worked through Harriet’s feelings about whether she should write a narrative based on her life. Slave narratives were like currency in the abolitionist movement – they were key to the “hearts and minds,” moral suasion tactic that most abolitionists embraced. Narratives could embed readers into the real experience of enslavement, cutting through the fictions woven by white slavers who tried to present the system as natural, correct, and familial. But Harriet Jacobs was not sure that she should write about her own life. Their first idea was that they could enlist Harriet Beecher Stowe to write about her experiences. But when they wrote to her, Stowe was not only not interested, she didn’t really believe Harriet’s story – and to confirm the details (which included references to both sexual terror that Harriet experienced and her decision to have children with a white man she was not married to) with her employer, the second Mrs. Bruce. Harriet was horrified. She wrote to Amy Post, “I had never opened my life to Mrs. [Bruce] concerning my children …. It embarrassed me at first, but I told her the truth; but we both thought it wrong in Mrs. Stowe to have sent your letter. She might have written to inquire if she liked.”[4] Harriet was disillusioned with Stowe, who was supposedly an antislavery celebrity. (This is a good place to remind you, listener, that antislavery does not mean antiracist.) So Harriet decided she would have to write the narrative herself. She first wrote it in small snippets that appeared in abolitionist newspapers as editorials or letters to the editor. Then, she wrote a full manuscript. The biggest challenge in writing it, she wrote to Amy Post, were the parts that dealt with the sexual terror she experienced. While most of the narrative is clear and forcefully written, the parts about how Flint relentlessly pursued her and her decision to have a relationship with her white partner are more vague. These parts are also framed as letters to a female friend. For instance, she writes things like, “Pity me and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave!” These were conscious decisions. It was simply not acceptable in nineteenth century society to write plainly about sex in anyway – in fact, during her time in Rochester, Harriet was at first reticent to become close to others because she was so ashamed of her experiences, and was very worried about how the public would react to a narrative by a woman that referred to sexuality. She wrote to Post about her decision to write it in this way: “There are somethings I might have made plainer, I know,” but felt that it might be more acceptable to frame them as “whispers to a dear friend” rather than a straightforward narrative. Further refuting Blassingame’s critique, Yellin noted that Harriet Jacobs framed the narrative in the tradition of a ‘seduction novel,’ a common format of novel in the nineteenth century that told the story of a virtuous young woman seduced and pursued by a licentious man. Typically, in the end of a seduction novel, the young woman dies – Harriet was still alive, so instead she offered profuse apologies and pleas for forgiveness and understanding from the reader.
Sarah: But Harriet needed someone to help prove the respectability of the book to get it successfully published. Finally, she arranged a meeting with Lydia Maria Child, a prominent and fairly radical white abolitionist. Child agreed to edit the book and write an introduction. Child did literally edit the text: she helped to line edit, though it was only needed minimally, and nixed a chapter about John Brown that she felt was superfluous. Finally, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in 1861. During the war years, Harriet Jacobs became a minor celebrity as the book’s author. The book was well received and reviewed, and Jacobs was able to parlay her success into another project providing aid to formerly enslaved refugees in Washington, DC, Alexandria, VA, and Savannah, GA in the 1860s. But then, after the war, slave narratives – including her own – lost their relevance. While some, like Frederick Douglass’s, remained in the American canon, others were essentially forgotten – as was Harriet Jacobs herself. It wasn’t ‘rediscovered’ until the 1960s, when the twin uprisings of the Civil Rights movement and the women’s liberation movement inspired historians to revisit the narrative. In presenting Incidents as a true narrative of enslavement rather than a melodramatic story written by a white woman, Yellin was able to show how the narrative called for a gendered analysis of the experience of slavery. After all, Yellin points out, Jacobs announces herself as a woman in the very title. Then, she opens the narrative with the assertion, “Slavery is terrible for men, but it is far more terrible for women.” Yellin writes that this assertion “names the special subject of this narrative: a woman’s struggle against her oppression in slavery as a sexual object and as a mother.” While other narratives, like Frederick Douglass’s, are framed around masculine bravery in escaping bondage, Jacobs’s frames much of the decision making around family, particularly motherhood. She also articulates the unique decisions and paradoxes that enslaved women had to live with. Yellin writes, “Like other slave narratives by women, Incidents consistently portrays a society in which female slaves are not only prevented from adhereing to this [purity] standard but forced to conform to its opposite.” Jacobs argued that enslaved women need to be given special consideration, writing about her decision to take a white lover: “Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel, that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.” Yellin sees in this statement a kind of feminist argument. She speculates: “Does Harriet Jacobs, the black fugitive slave author, here propose a new definition of female morality grounded in her own sexual experience in brutal and corrupt patriarchal racist society?” Taken with Lydia Maria Child’s endorsement and support of the book, and Amy Post’s friendship and generosity, we see a book that not only includes feminist lessons, but was the product of intersectional feminist collaboration. I want to close with Yellin’s final words in her introduction to her edition of Incidents: “In Jacobs’ hand, the passive woman of the captivity narrative acts to save herself; in her hand, the slave narrative is changed from a story of a hero who singlehandedly seeks freedom and literacy to the story of a hero tightly bound to family and community who seeks freedom and a home for her childre. In her hand, the pathetic seduced “tragic mulatto” of white fiction is metamorphosed from a victim of white male decpetion and fickleness into an inexperienced girl making desperate choices in her struggle for autonomy; the “mammy” of white fiction becomes not the white babies’ nurse but hte nurturer and literator of her own children. In her hand, the madwoman in the attic sanely plots for her freedom; instead of studying self-control within a domestic setting, the young woman learns to engage in political action. Harriet Jacobs tells a story new in Black literature, in wmen’s writings, and in American letters: “a woman’s true and just account of my own life in slavery.”
Bibliography and Further Reading
Blassingame, John. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Oxford University Press, 1972.
Camp, Stephanie M.H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Eaves, Shannon. Sexual Violence and American Slavery: The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South. University of North Carolina Press, 2024.
Finley, Alexandra. An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade. University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, Written By Herself. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. Basic Books, 2010.
Jones-Rogers, Stephanie. They Were Here Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. Yale University Press, 2019.
Schwartz, Marie Jenkins. Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South. Harvard University Press, 2006.
White, Deborah Gray. Arn’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. W. W. Norton & Co, 1985.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Written By Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative,” American Literature 3 (November 1981): 479-486.
Notes
[1] Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (Basic Books, 2010), 12.
[2] Deborah Gray White, Arn’t I a Woman: Female Slave in the Plantation South (Norton, 1985),14.
[3] Shannon Eaves, Sexual Violence and American Slavery: The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 2024), 20.
[4] Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written By Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative,” American Literature 3 (November 1981), 482.
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