Harriet Jacobs
Harriet Jacobs was an African-American abolitionist and writer whose autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is now considered an "American classic".
Born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, she was sexually harassed by her enslaver. When he threatened to sell her children if she did not submit to his desire, she hid in a tiny crawl space under the roof of her grandmother's house, so low she could not stand up in it. After staying there for seven years, she finally managed to escape to the free North, where she was reunited with her children Joseph and Louisa Matilda and her brother John S. Jacobs. She found work as a nanny and got into contact with abolitionist and feminist reformers. Even in New York City, her freedom was in danger until her employer was able to pay off her legal owner.
During and immediately after the American Civil War, she travelled to Union-occupied parts of the Confederate South together with her daughter, organizing help and founding two schools for fugitive and freed slaves.
Biography
Family and name
Harriet Jacobs was born in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, to Delilah Horniblow, enslaved by the Horniblow family who owned a local tavern. Under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, both Harriet and her brother John were enslaved at birth by the tavern keeper's family, as a mother's status was passed to her children. Still, according to the same principle, mother and children should have been free, because Molly Horniblow, Delilah's mother, had been freed by her white father, who also was her owner. But she had been kidnapped, and had no chance for legal protection because of her dark skin. Harriet and John's father was Elijah Knox, also enslaved, but enjoying some privileges due to his skill as an expert carpenter. He died in 1826.While Harriet's mother and grandmother were known by their owner's family name of Horniblow, Harriet used the opportunity of the baptism of her children to register Jacobs as their family name. She and her brother John also used that name after having escaped from slavery. The baptism was conducted without the knowledge of Harriet's master, Norcom. Harriet was convinced that her father should have been called Jacobs because his father was Henry Jacobs, a free white man. After Harriet's mother died, her father married a free African American. The only child from that marriage, Harriet's half brother, was called Elijah after his father and always used Knox as his family name, which was the name of his father's enslaver.
Early life in slavery
When Jacobs was six years old, her mother died. She then lived with her owner, a daughter of the deceased tavern keeper, who taught her not only to sew, but also to read and write. Very few slaves were literate, although it was only in 1830 that North Carolina explicitly outlawed teaching slaves to read or write. Although Harriet's brother John succeeded in teaching himself to read, he still was not able to write when he escaped from slavery as a young adult.In 1825, the owner of Harriet and John Jacobs died. She willed Harriet to her three-year-old niece Mary Matilda Norcom. Mary Matilda's father, the physician Dr. James Norcom, became her de facto master. Most of the property, including her brother John, was inherited by the tavern keeper's widow. Dr. Norcom hired John, and the Jacobs siblings lived together in his household.
Following the death of the widow, her slaves were sold at the New Year's Day auction, 1828. Among them were Harriet's brother John, her grandmother Molly Horniblow and Molly's son Mark. Being sold at public auction was a traumatic experience for twelve-year old John. Friends of hers bought Molly Horniblow and Mark with money Molly had been working hard to save over the many years of her servitude at the tavern. Afterwards Molly Horniblow was set free, and her own son Mark became her slave. Because of legal restrictions on manumission, Mark had to remain his mother's slave until in 1847 or 1848 she finally succeeded in freeing him. John Jacobs was bought by Dr. Norcom, thus he and his sister stayed together.
The same year, 1828, Molly Horniblow's youngest son, Joseph, tried to escape. He was caught, paraded in chains through Edenton, put into jail, and finally sold to New Orleans. The family later learned that he escaped again and reached New York. After that he was lost to the family. The Jacobs siblings, who, even as children, were talking about escaping to freedom, saw him as a hero. Both of them would later name their sons for him.
Coping with sexual harassment
Norcom soon started harassing Jacobs sexually, causing the jealousy of his wife. When Jacobs fell in love with a free black man who wanted to buy her freedom and marry her, Norcom intervened and forbade her to continue with the relationship. Hoping for protection from Norcom's harassment, Jacobs started a relationship with Samuel Sawyer, a white lawyer and member of North Carolina's white elite, who would some years later be elected to the House of Representatives. Sawyer became the father of Jacobs's only children, Joseph and Louisa Matilda. When she learned of Jacobs's pregnancy, Mrs. Norcom forbade her to return to her house, which enabled Jacobs to live with her grandmother. Still, Norcom continued his harassment during his numerous visits there; the distance as the crow flies between the two houses was only.Seven years concealed
In April 1835, Norcom finally moved Jacobs from her grandmother's to the plantation of his son, some away. He also threatened to expose her children to the hard life of the plantation slaves and to sell them, separately and without the mother, after some time. In June 1835, Harriet Jacobs decided to escape. A white woman, who was a slaveholder herself, hid her at great personal risk in her house. After a short time, Jacobs had to hide in a swamp near the town, and at last she found refuge in a "tiny crawlspace" under the roof of her grandmother's house. The "garret" was only by and at its highest point. The impossibility of bodily exercise caused health problems which she still felt while writing her autobiography many years later. She bored a series of small holes into the wall, thus creating an opening approximately an inch square that allowed fresh air and some light to enter and that allowed her to see out. The light was barely sufficient to sew and to read the Bible and newspapers.Norcom reacted by selling Jacobs's children and her brother John to a slave trader demanding that they should be sold in a different state, thus expecting to separate them forever from their mother and sister. However, the trader was secretly in league with Sawyer, to whom he sold all three of them, thus frustrating Norcom's plan for revenge. In her autobiography, Jacobs accuses Sawyer of not having kept his promise to legally manumit their children. Still, Sawyer allowed his enslaved children to live with their great-grandmother Molly Horniblow. After Sawyer married in 1838, Jacobs asked her grandmother to remind him of his promise. He asked and obtained Jacobs's approval to send their daughter to live with his cousin in Brooklyn, New York, where slavery had already been abolished. He also suggested sending their son to the Free States. While locked in her cell, Jacobs could often observe her unsuspecting children.
Escape and freedom
In 1842, Jacobs finally got a chance to escape by boat to Philadelphia, where she was aided by anti-slavery activists of the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee. After a short stay, she continued to New York City. Although she had no references, Mary Stace Willis, the wife of the then extremely popular author Nathaniel Parker Willis, hired Jacobs as a nanny for her baby daughter Imogen. The two women agreed on a trial period of one week, not suspecting that the relationship between the two families would last into the next generation, until the death of Louisa Matilda Jacobs at the home of Edith Willis Grinnell, the daughter of Nathaniel Willis and his second wife, in 1917.In 1843 Jacobs heard that Norcom was on his way to New York to force her back into slavery, which was legal for him to do everywhere inside the United States. She asked Mary Willis for a leave of two weeks and went to her brother John in Boston. John Jacobs, in his capacity as personal servant, had accompanied his owner Sawyer on his marriage trip through the North in 1838. He had gained his freedom by leaving his master in New York. After that he had gone whaling and had been absent for more than three years. From Boston, Harriet Jacobs wrote to her grandmother asking her to send Joseph there, so that he could live there with his uncle John. After Joseph's arrival, she returned to her work as Imogen Willis's nanny.
Her work with the Willis family came to an abrupt end in October 1843, when Jacobs learned that her whereabouts had been betrayed to Norcom. Again, she had to flee to Boston, where the strength of the abolitionist movement guaranteed a certain level of security. Moving to Boston also gave her the opportunity to take her daughter Louisa Matilda from the house of Sawyer's cousin in Brooklyn, where she had been treated not much better than a slave.
In Boston Jacobs took on odd jobs. Her stay there was interrupted by the death of Mary Stace Willis in March 1845. Nathaniel Willis took his daughter Imogen on a ten-month visit to the family of his deceased wife in England. For the journey, Jacobs resumed her job as nanny. For several months, she stayed together with Imogen in the vicarage at Steventon, the home of Mary Stace Willis's sister and her husband Reverend William Vincent, while Willis went to London and to the Continent. In her autobiography, she reflects on her experiences during the journey: She did not notice any sign of racism, which often embittered her life in the US. As a consequence of this, she gained a new access to her Christian faith. At home, Christian ministers treating blacks with contempt or even buying and selling slaves had been an obstacle to her spiritual life.