so depressing

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) was a memoirist who was born into slavery in North Carolina. Using the pseudonym Linda Brent, Jacobs published her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1865), an account of her time in slavery and her eventual escape. The purpose behind writing her memoir was to show the North what horrors it was complicit to with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. She wanted to make the reality of slavery clear to Northerners who were willing to return slaves to Southern slaveholders as though the slaves were property, not people. (The Fugitive Slave Act compelled Northerners to turn in escaped slaves so that they could be returned to their plantations in the South.) It was lost to history until 1987, when a new edition found interest in African-American and feminist communities: for both communities, the bold way that Jacobs discussed the sexual exploitation faced by all female slaves was of groundbreaking importance. The basic story of the narrative is that to escape the lechery and sexual threats of her white master, she slept with another white man and bore him two children. He bought the children and guaranteed their freedom, but eventually had his own white children and reneged on his promise of emancipation. In the meantime, her constant fear of her master and mistress (who blamed Harriet for her husband’s sexual desire for her) lead Harriet to go into hiding for 7 years — all the time able to see, but not speak to, her children. Eventually her daughter is gifted into her father’s family and Harriet escapes to the north to see her daughter and find freedom (in 1842). With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, she lives in fear for years and is hunted by her master’s family until she is finally purchased and set free by a friend and employer. The tale ends with us conscious of the irony of a woman being bought and sold in a so-called Free State (Massachusetts).

Jacobs’ intended audience for her story was white, middle-class, Christian women. She used her graphic depictions of sexual harassment and assault to touch on the very issues that would have inflamed a sense of morality in such an audience. Furthermore, I think Jacobs believed that if Northern women knew what slave women went through, they would mobilize to change the law. Unfortunately, this was a risky choice for Jacobs — newspapers serializing her story felt that their readers should not be exposed to such content, and as a result her serializations were cut short.

The book makes overt reference to what Jacobs felt was most injust about slavery. Predominantly, she draws attention to the fact that the condition of slavery is legislated to follow the line of the mother, not the father. This allowed slave owners to essentially create more and more slaves by raping their female subjects and forcing their own unrecognized children into slavery. This ensured that female slaves had no protection or safety from their masters sexual advances, nor did they have any protection from angry mistresses seeking revenge. It also guaranteed that children would not be able to claim freedom regardless of the lot of their parent, and it ensured that half-siblings would be slaves to half-siblings based exclusively on skin colour. Jacobs is sickened by this, as the audience cannot help but be.

As readers, we are not shocked by the violence — this is common in slave narratives, and on a sick level it becomes the expected norm. But reading it from a woman’s point of view and being aware of a even deeper level of powerlessness and fear is startling and unsettling. This is what makes Jacobs’ narrative so compelling and unique amongst the available slave narratives.