Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

  Between 1853 and 1858, Jacobs wrote in secret, certain her employer would oppose her mission. She also honed her skills by writing letters to the editors of New York newspapers.40 Once the book manuscript was complete, her daughter Louisa, who had the advantage of formal education, recopied the manuscript, standardizing the spelling and punctuation. Jacobs took the recopied manuscript to England to engage a publisher; she did not succeed. In Boston in 1859 she found Phillips and Sam-son, but the firm went bankrupt before the book could be printed. Meanwhile, like many other abolitionists, Harriet Jacobs was deeply inspired by John Brown’s 1859 raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. She added a final chapter to her book on Brown’s visionary attack.

  A new publishing firm in Boston, Thayer and Eldridge, agreed in 1860 to publish Incidents, provided the experienced abolitionist author and editor Lydia Maria Child would add a preface. William C. Nell, whom Jacobs knew as a fellow abolitionist and Post family friend, introduced Jacobs to Child. Child agreed, further, to edit the manuscript in the late summer of 1860.

  The two women’s correspondence shows that Jacobs had completed her book before meeting Child and that Child made only two substantive changes, minor cuts, and one act of reorganization. Child suggested that Jacobs delete the chapter on John Brown and end with her purchase by Cornelia Grinnell Willis and subsequent emancipation. Jacobs complied. Child also gathered together the stories of physical torture, placing them in one chapter, “Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders.” In addition to Child’s authenticating preface, Jacobs’s friends Amy Post (a white woman) and John Lowther (“a highly respectable colored citizen of Boston,” according to the National Anti-Slavery Standard 41), appended endorsements.

  Thayer and Eldridge went bankrupt in December 1860, having stereotyped the plates but not printed the book. Jacobs bought the plates and published the book herself using a Boston printer, a recourse Sojourner Truth had also used in 1850 with her Narrative. Lydia Maria Child continued to help with publishing and promotion. She had arranged for a subvention so that Thayer and Eldridge could print 2000 copies (it is unclear whether 1000 or 2000 were finally printed), and she wrote friends such as John Greenleaf Whittier, urging them to have their local booksellers stock copies of Incidents.42

  LINDA: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, seven years concealed in Slavery, Written by Herself appeared in Boston in January 1861. Although the name “Linda” appeared on the book’s spine, its title page omitted it. As a result, the book is better known today without “Linda.”43 (W. Tweedie published the English edition, entitled The Deeper Wrong: or, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, in September 1862.44 Child used parts of Incidents [citing Jacobs as author] in The Freedmen’s Book, an anthology she compiled for the freedpeople in 1865.)

  The earliest notices of the publication of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl amounted to far less than sustained book reviews. Jacobs’s old friend, William C. Nell, puffed the book in a letter to the editor in the Boston Liberator. Nell acknowledged that the Liberator overflowed with news of secession and impending civil war, but he wanted to alert readers to the existence of a newly published book, “LINDA: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, seven years concealed in Slavery,” which he thought certain to “render a signal and most acceptable service” in a time of crisis. Nell praised the book as more useful than most ex-slave narratives because it was straight fact, with no fiction: “This record of complicated experience in the life of a young woman, a doomed victim to America’s peculiar institution-her seven years’ concealment in slavery—continued persecutions—hopes, often deferred, but which at length culminated in her freedom—surely need not the charms that any pen of fiction, however gifted and graceful, could lend. They shine by the lustre of their own truthfulness ...” Nell expressed the hope that all mothers and daughters would read it and “learn yet more of the barbarism of American slavery and the character of its victims.”45

  The New York National Anti-Slavery Standard published the book’s “Preface by the Author,” signed “Linda Brent,” as well as Lydia Maria Child’s introduction and the accompanying notes from Amy Post and George W. Lowther in its “New Publications” column on 23 February 1861. The editor, claiming to have read the book, added a paragraph assuring readers that it “will not disappoint the expectation which these testimonials are so well adapted to excite. It casts a strong light upon the system of slavery, revealing features too often obscured by a mistaken delicacy. If this narrative of the terrible experiences of a noble woman in slavery could be read at every fireside in the free States, it would kindle such a feeling of moral indignation against the system and its guilty abettors” that Northerners would no longer coddle Confederate secessionists.46 Several months later, National Anti-Slavery Standard columnist Richard D. Webb briefly noted the publication of both Jacobses’ narratives, calling hers “one of the most interesting and affecting in the whole compass of anti-slavery literature.”47 The New York Anglo-African ran an unsigned review praising Incidents for portraying “the true romance of American life and history” and showing a “more revolting phrase ... because it is of the spirit and not the flesh.” The reviewer condemned the sexual dynamics of American slavery and said the book would strike a telling blow against this “cursed system.” As though anticipating twentieth-century interpretations of the provenance of the text, the Anglo-African review stressed the circumscribed nature of Child’s role as editor.48

  Lydia Maria Child deplored the antislavery press’s lack of interest in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as early as February 1861, and unfortunately, that interest hardly picked up.49 Jacobs’s publication date, coinciding with the furor preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, practically consigned the book to obscurity; the demise of the institution Jacobs attacked diminished its interest for American readers for more than a century. Only in the aftermath of the civil rights, black power, and black studies movements did Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl begin to find a larger readership. The growth of the fields of women’s history and women’s studies has further elevated it to the status of a classic American text. The narrative of a slave woman is being recognized as a story of a representative American woman.

  Thanks for research assistance to Malinda Alaine Lindquist and especially, as ever, to Elaine Wise.

  NELL IRVIN PAINTER

  East Charleston, Vermont, August 1999

  Notes

  1 Frances Smith Foster notes that the title page of the first edition of Jacobs’s book bears only the subtitle, leading later reprinters and critics to call the book simply Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The spine of the first edition bore the name “Linda,” and thus, in the nineteenth century the author was known by her pseudonym, “Linda Brent.” See Francis Smith Foster, “Resisting Incidents,” in Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 69.

  2 For example, Louisa Picquet’s autobiography, Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon; or, Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life, as told to the Reverend Hiram Mattison, also appeared in 1861. It reflected above all Mattison’s prurient interest in Picquet’s sexuality. See William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 243-246.

  3 This last point is Hazel Carby’s in Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 39, 45-61.

  4 The “happy darky” genre outlived Harriet Jacobs, notably in continual restagings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a proslavery play and movie well into the twentieth century.

  5 Jacobs calls the crawl space in which she hid for nearly seven years a “loophole of retreat.”

  6 Wilma King and Nellie McKay both compare to wartime the conditions under which slave children developed. See Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Blo
omington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and Nellie Y. McKay, “The Girls Who Became the Women: Childhood Memories in the Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Church Terrell, and Anne Moody,” in Tradition and the Talents of Women, ed. Florence Howe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

  7 According to Jean Fagan Yellin, the definitive authority, Jacobs was born in “around 1813.” See Jean Fagan Yellin, introduction to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, by Harriet A. Jacobs (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), xv. However, Robanna Sumrell Knott, in “Harriet Jacobs: The Edenton Biography” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994), uses Jacobs’s Mt. Auburn Cemetery gravestone to calculate her dates. Edith Grinnell Willis, daughter of Cornelia Grinnell and Nathaniel Parker Willis, erected the stone in 1917, after the death of Harriet’s daughter Louisa Jacobs, presumably using Louisa’s dates. By this reckoning, Harriet Jacobs would have been born in 1815, her brother John S. Jacobs born in 1819, and her daughter Louisa in 1837. Harriet’s son Joseph, who died in Australia, presumably in 1863, is not buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Yellin gives Joseph’s birthdate as 1829. (Knott, p. 33, fn. 1; p. 75, fn. 15). This essay uses Yellin’s dates unless otherwise indicated.

  8 In her introduction to the 1987 edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jean Fagan Yellin calls Harriet Jacobs’s father Daniel. She corrected the name in “Harriet Jacobs’s Family History,” American Literature 66, no. 4 (December 1994): 765-767. Yellin also explains that after the death of Harriet’s mother, Elijah married a free woman, with whom he had a second family, including a son born in about 1824, also named Elijah. The younger Elijah, surnamed Knox, eventually settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the widowed father of two children. He subsequently remarried and had a son, whom he also named Elijah. Louisa Jacobs, Harriet’s daughter, recognized Elijah Knox and his family in her will.

  9 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: Published for the Author [self-published], 1861), 9. All page numbers refer to this edition.

  10 John S. Jacobs, “A True Tale of Slavery,” 233. All page numbers refer to this edition.

  11 John S. Jacobs, “A True Tale of Slavery,” 235.

  12 Robanna Sumrell Knott, “Harriet Jacobs,” 56, 78. All the enslaved would have been considered to be Negroes, but their number would also include people of European and American Indian descent.

  13 John S. Jacobs, “A True Tale of Slavery,” 256.

  14 Robanna Sumrell Knott, “Harriet Jacobs,” 128.

  15 According to Jean Fagan Yellin (Incidents, 268), Samuel Tredwell Sawyer died in 1865; in this instance, I have followed Robanna Sumrell Knott (“Harriet Jacobs,” 114), who adds that Sawyer is buried on Long Island.

  16 Robanna Sumrell Knott, “Harriet Jacobs,” 130-134.

  17 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents, 9.

  18 P. Gabrielle Foreman speculates enticingly on the possible familial entanglements motivating Horniblow’s sale and emancipation, her possession of her son, and her purchase of a grand house in the center of town for $1. See Foreman’s “Manifest in Signs: The Politics of Sex and Representation in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Harriet Jacobs, ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 92.

  19 John S. Jacobs, “A True Tale of Slavery,”243.

  20 The quotes are on pages 58 and 39 of Harriet Jacobs, Incidents. See also pages 4 and 57.

  21 Hannah Decker points to the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of the sweet young thing (das süsse Mädel) in Freud’s Vienna. See Nell Irvin Painter, “Three Southern Women and Freud: A Non-Exceptionalist Approach to Race, Class, and Gender in the Slave South,” in Feminists Revision History, ed. Ann-Louise Shapiro (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 205-206.

  22 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents, 61-62. The Norcoms named their daughter Mary Matilda after her mother, Mary Matilda Horniblow Norcom.

  23 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents, 59.

  24 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents, 61-62.

  25 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents, 18, 60-61.

  26 Deborah M. Garfield, “Earwitness: Female Abolitionist, Sexuality, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Harriet Jacobs, ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 121-122; and Harriet Jacobs, Incidents, 86.

  27 Robanna Sumrell Knott, “Harriet Jacobs,” 83, 115.

  28 Robanna Sumrell Knott, “Harriet Jacobs,” 227.

  29 Nell Irvin Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Full Loaded Cost Accounting,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 137-138.

  30 Frederick Douglass (1818-1885), the leading African-American antebellum feminist abolitionist and postwar statesman, wrote three autobiographies and edited several newspapers over the course of an illustrious public career.

  31 Willis’s father-in-law supplied half their annual income. See P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Manifest in Signs,” 91.

  32 The exact quote is Carolyn Karcher‘s, rather than Child’s. See Carolyn L. Karcher, ed., A Lydia Maria Child Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 330.

  33 Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative,” American Literature 53, no. 3 (November 1981): 481.

  34 Nathaniel Parker Willis’s’sister, the popular novelist Fannie Fern, suspected he married Cornelia Grinnell for her money. Cornelia Willis’s inheritance paid for their Hudson River mansion, Idlewild, where Harriet Jacobs was the senior housekeeper and surreptitiously wrote Incidents. See P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Manifest in Signs,” 97.

  35 Jean Fagan Yellin, “Through Her Brother’s Eyes: Incidents and ‘A True Tale,’ ” in Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 46, 45.

  36 Jean Fagan Yellin, “Through Her Brother’s Eyes,” 47.

  37 This material comes from Jean Fagan Yellin’s “Chronology,” in Yellin, ed., Incidents, 224-225.

  38 P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Manifest in Signs,” 80. Sojourner Truth’s Narrative was meant to raise money to support her in her old age. She was in her mid-fifties when it appeared.

  39 See “Introduction,” in Narrative of Sojourner Truth, ed. Nell Irvin Painter (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

  40 See Jean Fagan Yellin, “Harriet Ann Jacobs, c. 1813-1897,” Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers 5, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 56, 60-61. This article includes the text of Jacobs’s first letter to the editor, written in 1853.

  41 New York National Anti-Slavery Standard, 23 February 1861.

  42 Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, eds., Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 357-359, 378-379. See also Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 435-437.

  43 Frances Smith Foster, “Resisting Incidents,” 69.

  44 Jean Fagan Yellin, “Through Her Brother’s Eyes,” 56.

  45 William C. Nell, Letter to the Editor, Liberator, 25 January 1861.

  46 New York National Anti-Slavery Standard, 23 February 1861. By this time, Lydia Maria Child had been out of the editorship nearly twenty years.

  47 New York National Anti-Slavery Standard, 17 August 1861, quoted in Jacqueline Goldsby, “I Disguised My Hand,” in Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 23.

  48 New York Anglo-African, 13 April 1861.

  49 Child to Henrietta Sargent, 9 February 1861, in Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, eds., Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 374-375.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  Andrews, William L. “The Changing Moral Discourse of Nineteenth-Century African American Women’s Autobiography: Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley.” In DelColonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s
Autobiography. Edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

  Berlandt, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.

  Braxton, Joanne M., and Sharon Zuber. “Silences in Harriet ‘Linda Brent’ Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” In Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism. Edited by Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

  Doriani, Beth Maclay. “Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century America: Subversion and Self-Construction in Two Women’s Autobiographies.” American Quarterly 43, no. 2 (June 1991).

  Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

  Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “The Spoken and the Silenced in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig,” Callaloo 13, no. 2 (Spring 1990).

  Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. “To Write My Self: The Autobiographies of Afro-American Women.” In Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship. Edited by Shari Benstock. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.