Harriet Ann Jacobs' 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl'

Harriet Ann Jacobs was the first African American woman to write her own account of her experiences living under slavery, titled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, in the fall of 1813. She was the daughter of Delilah, a slave woman belonging to Margaret Horn blow, and Daniel Jacobs, the slave of Andrew Knox. Unaware that she was the property of Margaret Horn blow, Harriet was treated kindly by her mistress, who taught her how to read and sew.

Upon Horn blow's death in 1824, Harriet became the property of her mistress's niece, Mary Matilda Norco. However, because Mary was just a child, her father, Dr. James Norco, acted as Harriet's master. Under the Noncoms, Harriet experienced the harsh realities of slavery, including threats of sexual victimization by Dr. Norco.

From the time Harriet entered the Norco household until she escaped from slavery in 1842, she struggled against her fate. At one point, she formed a secret liaison with a white attorney, Samuel Treadwell Sawyer, with whom she had two children, Joseph and Louisa. Hoping that she could induce Norco to sell her children to Sawyer by pretending to run away, Harriet hid for several years in an attic storeroom at the house of Molly Horn blow, a free black woman who was her grandmother [3].

Sawyer did purchase the children, but in 1837, he was elected to Congress and moved to Washington, D.C., without emancipating the two youth, and took them with him. In 1842, Harriet Jacobs escaped to the North, determined to reclaim her daughter, whom Sawyer had sent to Brooklyn, New York, to work as a house servant.

For ten years after her escape from the South, Harriet Jacobs lived the uncertain life of a fugitive slave. She eventually was reunited with her children in 1842. Still fearing capture by Norco, who continued to search for her, she kept moving around, finally taking up residence in Rochester, New York [5].

While in Rochester, she met and began to confide in Amy Post, an abolitionist and feminist who urged Harriet to make the story of her life public. At first, she tried to enlist the help of white author Harriet Beecher Stowe in writing her story. However, after gaining her freedom in 1952 from Cornelia Grinnell Willis, the second wife of ...