Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  Preface by the Author

  INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL, SEVEN YEARS CONCEALED.

  I - Childhood

  II - The New Master and Mistress

  III - The Slaves’ New Year’s Day

  IV - The Slave Who Dared to Feel Like a Man

  V - The Trials of Girlhood

  VI - The Jealous Mistress

  VII - The Lover

  VIII - What Slaves Are Taught to Think of the North

  IX - Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders

  X - A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life

  XI - The New Tie to Life

  XII - Fear of Insurrection

  XIII - The Church and Slavery

  XIV - Another Link to Life

  XV - Continued Persecutions

  XVI - Scenes at the Plantation

  XVII - The Flight

  XVIII - Months of Peril

  XIX - The Children Sold

  XX - New Perils

  XXI - The Loophole of Retreat

  XXII - Christmas Festivities

  XXIII - Still in Prison

  XXIV - The Candidate for Congress

  XXV - Competition in Cunning

  XXVI - Important Era in My Brother’s Life

  XXVII - New Destination for the Children

  XXVIII - Aunt Nancy

  XXIX - Preparations for Escape

  XXX - Northward Bound

  XXXI - Incidents in Philadelphia

  XXXII - The Meeting of Mother and Daughter

  XXXIII - A Home Found

  XXXIV - The Old Enemy Again

  XXXV - Prejudice Against Color

  XXXVI - The Hairbreadth Escape

  XXXVII - A Visit to England

  XXXVIII - Renewed Invitations to Go South

  XXXIX - The Confession

  XL - The Fugitive Slave Law

  XLI - Free at Last

  A TRUE TALE OF SLAVERY

  CHAPTER I - Some Account of My Early Life

  CHAPTER II - A Further Account of My Family, and of My New Master

  CHAPTER III - My Uncle’s Troubles—My Further Experience of the Doctor, and Our Parting

  CHAPTER IV - My New Master’s Plantation—My Medical Practice Among the Slaves—My ...

  CHAPTER V - My Master Goes to Washington as Member of Congress—He Is Engaged to ...

  CHAPTER VI - Sensations of Freedom—Self-Education—A Whaling voyage—I Meet My ...

  CHAPTER VII - Cruel Treatment of Slaves—The Fugitive Slave Law—Slavery Opposed ...

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

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  INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL

  Harriet Ann Brent Jacobs was born in about 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina. Her brother, John S. Jacobs, was born two years later. Their parents, Delilah and Elijah Jacobs, were enslaved, but they lived together as a family with Delilah’s mother until Delilah’s death. Harriet, then six, went to live with her owner, Margaret Horniblow, who taught her to read and sew. When Margaret Horniblow died in 1825, Harriet became the slave to Horniblow’s three-year-old niece, the daughter of Dr. James Norcom, a prominent citizen, who tried to force the teenaged Harriet into a sexual relationship with him. In an effort to fend off his advances, she began a relationship with another white man, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, and bore him two children, whom Norcom planned to send to a plantation with a reputation for treating its slaves especially brutally. To divert him, Harriet ran away, eventually hiding in a crawl space in her grandmother’s house where she remained for almost seven years before escaping to the North in 1842. She lived and worked in New York City and Boston until her freedom was purchased in 1852. In the meantime, Sawyer managed to purchase his and Harriet’s two children as well as her brother John, who went on to work for the abolitionist cause. Harriet Jacobs wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl between 1853 and 1858, finally publishing it in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent. John S. Jacobs died in 1875. Harriet Jacobs died in 1897.

  Nell Irvin Painter is Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University, where she currently heads the Program in African-American Studies. She is the author of several books, including Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, and editor of the Penguin Classics edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth.

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  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl first published in the United States of America 1861

  This edition with an introduction and notes by Nell Irvin Painter published in Penguin Books 2000

  Introduction and notes copyright © Nell Irvin Painter, 2000 All rights reserved

  “A True Tale of Slavery” was published serially in The Leisure Hour, London, 1861.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Jacobs, Harriet A. (Harriet Ann), 1813-1897.

  Incidents in the life of a slave girl / written by herself, Harriet Jacobs.

  With A true tale of slavery / by John S. Jacobs ; edited with an introduction and notes by Nell Irvin Painter.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  Includes bibliographical references

  eISBN : 978-1-101-12807-7

  1. Jacobs, Harriet A. (Harriet Ann), 1813-1897. 2. Jacobs, John S.,

  1815-1875. 3. Staves—United States—Biography. 4. Women slaves—

  United States—Biography. I. Painter, Nell Irvin. II. Jacobs, John S., 1815-1875. True tale of slavery. III. Title: True tale of slavery.

  IV. Title. V. Series.

  E444.J17 A3 2000b 305.5’67’092—dc21 [B] 99-055803

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  INTRODUCTION

  HARRIET JACOBS’S LINDA: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, seven years concealed in Slavery, Written by Herself (1861), the best-known nineteenth-century African-American woman’s autobiography, makes a marked contribution to American history and letters by having been written, as Jacobs stressed, “by herself.”1 Many other narratives by women who had been enslaved (for example, Sojourner Truth) had been dictated to amanuenses whose roles diluted the authenticity of the texts.2 Jacobs not only wrote her own book, but as an abolitionist and ardent reader, she knew the literary genres of her time. Describing an African-Americ
an family whose members cleave to one another against great odds, she skillfully plays on her story’s adherence to and departure from the sentimental conventions of domestic fiction. In so doing, she used its difference to a woman’s advantage. Her self-consciously gendered and thoroughly feminist narrative criticizes slavery for corrupting the morals and the families of all it touched, whether rich or poor, white or black. She lays the groundwork for the analysis of black womanhood.3

  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl makes three important points convincingly: It shows, first, the myriad traumas owners and their agents inflicted upon slaves. Bloody whippings and rapes constituted ground zero of the enslaved condition, but in addition, slaves were subject to a whole series of soul-murdering psychological violations: destruction of families, abandonment of children, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, humiliation, contempt. Jacobs details the physical violence so common in her Southern world, but she especially stresses the assault on slaves’ psyches. Second, she denounces the figure of the “happy darky.” As a slave and later as an abolitionist, she was frequently confronted with this favorite American myth, which she knew to be false. In answer to this proslavery argument, she enumerates the miseries of the enslaved; in chapter 13 she shows precisely how Northerners were gulled into believing black people liked being enslaved 4 Third, and most courageously, Jacobs insists that enslaved people—here, black women—cannot be judged by the same standards as the free. Jacobs expounds the conditions of enslavement that deprived people of autonomy, denying them influence over their own and their children’s destinies. While her enslaved friends and family took advantage of every possible loophole5 within the fabric of an evil system, working the system allowed them only a modicum of self-determination. Because they literally belonged to other people, slaves lacked the power to protect their morals, their bodily integrity, or their children.

  In sum, Jacobs delineates a system in which the enslaved and their enslavers (aided and abetted by Northern sympathizers) were totally at odds or, as she says, at war.6 As she sees it, there could be no identity of interest between the two parties to the peculiar institution, even though lives and bloodlines frequently intersected. The frequent occurrence of similar names—for example, Margaret Horniblow (Harriet’s first owner) and Molly Horniblow (Harriet’s grandmother)—may confuse the reader but attest to these very intersections.

  Harriet Ann Brent Jacobs was born in about 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina.7 Her younger brother and best friend, John S. Jacobs, was born two years later. Their parents, Delilah and Elijah 8 Jacobs, were enslaved, but they lived together as a family with Delilah’s mother, Molly Horniblow. Horniblow, the daughter of a South Carolina planter who emancipated her during the Revolutionary War and sent her to freedom outside the United States, had been captured, returned to American territory, and fraudulently reenslaved after her father’s death. The head chef at the Horniblow Inn in Edenton, Molly Horniblow managed to earn and save money as a caterer even while enslaved. Her industry and clientele made her well known, well respected, and well connected in Edenton, and even before being freed again at the age of fifty, she had accrued as much standing as possible by one who was neither white nor free.

  As a slave, Horniblow could not marry, yet her daughter Delilah and her husband Elijah lived with Molly as a married couple: Delilah even wore a wedding ring, which she left to her daughter Harriet. Horniblow’s effective marital status, on the other hand, remains a mystery, as does the never mentioned existence or identity of her own children’s father. These silences—in the historical record, in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and in John S. Jacobs’s “A True Tale of Slavery”—speak volumes, given Horniblow’s seemingly hypocritical attachment to the feminine ideal of chastity. Her insistence on premarital sexual purity, a condition which often eluded even free poor and working-class white women, would wreak havoc in her enslaved granddaughter’s emotional life.

  Neither Harriet nor John recalled much about their mother, who died when Harriet was about six and John about four years old, although Harriet later praised Delilah as “noble and womanly” in nature.9 Their father, Elijah, the best house carpenter in the region, hired himself out from his base at home. Both Harriet and John recalled their father as a man of independent mind, whose slave status embittered and depressed him. John was convinced that his father died young—in 1826—precisely because he was enslaved: “My father, who had an intensely acute feeling of the wrongs of slavery, sank into a state of mental dejection, which, combined with bodily illness, occasioned his death when I was eleven years of age.”10

  By dint of their skills, values, connections, and ancestry, the entire Jacobs family had much in common with Edenton’s elite. However, their African descent, legal status as slaves, and extreme vulnerability placed them firmly on the wrong side of a towering color bar. Molly Horniblow and her grandchildren experienced the ambiguities of their allegiances differently. The grandchildren admired, but could not share, her heartfelt Christian piety. The grandmother counted on the existence of conscience in the slaveowning class, another faith beyond her grandchildren’s reach. She sought decent treatment through personal entreaty; they both followed the route of permanent escape. Horniblow’s son Joseph shared her grandchildren’s hatred of slavery; he ran away twice, the second time intending to leave the United States for good. Punning on the common term for whipping, he told his brother that he meant to “get beyond the reach of the stars and stripes of America.”11

  The Jacobses lived on the left bank of the Chowan River where it empties into Albemarle Sound. Connected through internal waterways with Hampton Roads, Virginia, and the Chesapeake Bay during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Edenton served as an administrative center for its own Chowan and surrounding counties and as northeastern North Carolina’s main port. In 1820, the population numbered 1261, of whom 634 were white, 499 enslaved, and 67 free black.12 During Harriet’s and John’s youth, Edenton was still vibrant enough as a trading center that the town’s leading families would station members in the New York area. The Tredwells and Blounts in Brooklyn, New York, who made the Jacobses’ later residence there unsafe, belonged to Edenton’s merchant families. During the mid-nineteenth century, Edenton lost importance as the Albemarle Sound silted up and North Carolina’s economy shifted away from the heavily slaveholding and agricultural East Coast toward the diversified farming and industry located in the Piedmont farther inland.

  In 1819 and 1820 Edenton rated two visits from President James Monroe; in 1820 the town offered him a banquet, prepared by none other than Molly Horniblow, the region’s finest chef, at the Horniblow Inn, the local elite’s gathering place.

  The inn sat on the main street, across an alley from the courthouse. Between the inn, the jail, and the courthouse stood the whipping post, where slaves were disciplined and blood flowed. John S. Jacobs recalled seeing “men and women stripped, and struck from fifteen to one hundred times and more. Some whose backs were cut to pieces were washed down with strong brine or brandy ...” He described one instrument of torture, the oak backing paddle, the blade of which was full of small holes that pulverized the body and left “the flesh like a steak.” He himself had dressed the back of a woman whose back he “solemnly declare[d] ... had not a piece of skin left on it as wide as my finger.”13

  The Edenton elite, small and inbred, was closely connected through ties of ownership and sentiment to the Jacobses and included the heads of the Sawyer, Tredwell, and Norcom families. Drs. Matthias Sawyer (d. 1835) and James Norcom (1778-1850) were longtime business and professional partners. An 1808 inventory of the value of their joint practice revealed a net worth of $8000, half of which consisted of outstanding debts.14 The financial precariousness of medicine, combined with doctors’ ostentatious standard of living, kept them constantly on the lookout for financial advantage. Both Sawyer and Norcom operated plantations that (usually) contributed to their income and where Harriet and John had occasion to
work. During this same period, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer (1800-1863)15 and John Norcom (1802-?), attended the Edenton academy together; the younger Norcom followed in his father’s footsteps by graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a medical degree. Samuel Tredwell Sawyer attended but dropped out of William and Mary College. With his family connections, neither his limitations as a scholar nor his feckless dandyism impeded his flourishing as a lawyer.16

  After her mother’s death in 1819, Harriet went to the home of her owner, Miss Margaret Horniblow. Harriet Jacobs recalled Margaret Horniblow as a kind mistress “almost like a mother to me.”17 During her six years with Margaret Horniblow, Harriet learned to read, sew, and generally to carry herself as a lady, a bearing others remarked upon for the rest of her life.

  Reflecting the extreme vulnerability of enslaved people to the fates of those who owned them, Margaret Horniblow’s death in 1825 made Harriet the slave of Horniblow’s sister’s three-year-old daughter, also the daughter of James Norcom, who became her de facto owner. The following year, Harriet’s father died, leaving the child with only her grandmother as protector. Molly Horniblow’s stature and residence in the center of town did pose a counterweight to Norcom’s power over his young female slave. Harriet realized that both the town’s gossip mill and her grandmother’s standing offered her limited but tangible protection.

  When her own mistress died in 1828, fifty-year-old Molly Horniblow, too, fell to James Norcom and was put up for sale at auction. On account of her age and stature, the sight of Molly Horniblow on the auction block scandalized the good citizens of Edenton, but her sale, entirely legal, went through. According to Incidents, an older white woman bought Molly Horniblow, emancipated her, and made Molly the owner of her own older son, Mark Ramsey. John S. Jacobs’s “A True Tale of Slavery” tells a different story. It says the grandmother entrusted her savings to a kindly white man, who carried out her wishes.18 In any case, Horniblow’s younger son Joseph ran away, was recaptured, jailed in Edenton, and sold to New Orleans. Joseph escaped again and met his brother Mark Ramsey in New York City, prior to disappearing forever. Mark Ramsey hired his time as a steward on a passenger boat, a position that made it possible for him to aid many a fugitive slave running toward freedom. Molly Horniblow bought her own seven-room house in the very center of the town with excellent access to her catering market of Edenton’s elite.