At the same 1828 auction at which James Norcom sold Molly Horniblow, he bought Harriet’s brother John, then about thirteen years old. John worked in Norcom’s medical office, where he learned the then common practices of cupping, leeching, and bleeding, and the manufacture and use of various salves and dressings. As a youth, John doctored the enslaved and later attracted the attention of a medical student, who attempted to buy him. His then owner, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, refused to sell him even for the handsome price of $1500.19
By 1829 Harriet had fallen in love with a free black carpenter, who wanted to marry her. James Norcom forbade the marriage and intensified his pursuit of her by threatening to place her in a small house outside of town—the isolation of concubinage. As a very young, enslaved, orphaned African-American woman, Harriet was virtually powerless to resist the obscene advances of her leading-citizen, middle-aged, white male medical doctor owner.
The close relationship between the elder Norcom and Sawyer and their sons grew thornily incestuous around the person of young Harriet. James Norcom, at fifty-two, was trying to seduce thirteen-year-old Harriet, who lived in his house as a dependent. He dared not exercise one right against her—exiling her to the plantation where his son John lived—for fear John would possess her sexually.
Harriet found herself in a common quandary, for during the nineteenth century, young girls of all races and sexes were regarded as little more than prey: men saw even the most privileged mainly as rich potential wives. In Incidents, Jacobs attacks this dynamic, calling slavery “that cage of obscene birds.” She chastises Northerners who married their daughters to Southern slaveholders, for the “poor girls” would soon find themselves victims of adultery, their homes scenes of “jealousy and hatred.” 20 Conservatives like the South Carolina novelist Sue Petigru King and Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut—both of whom accepted the justice of Negro slavery—deplored Southern husbands’ habit of committing adultery with women who belonged to them; it mattered less to Chestnut and Petigru King that the women under the husbands’ control were mere girls. But girls they often were, vulnerable in both their status and their youth.21 James Norcom had been following a Southern tradition of taking advantage of girls when he married a teenager situated to improve his financial situation. He had been a thirty-two-year-old divorce in 1810, when he married Mary Matilda Horniblow, the barely sixteen-year-old daughter of the woman whose business affairs he managed. This marriage had brought him control of Harriet Jacobs’s family.
Norcom’s threats and Harriet’s distress alerted Norcom’s partner’s son, the unmarried young lawyer Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, to her sexual availability and made her quarry. He began courting her through letters and other expressions of sympathy. Finding herself trapped, Harriet “made a headlong plunge” into a sexual relationship with Sawyer. Jacobs admits she knew what she was doing when she slept with Sawyer instead of Norcom: Norcom was building a cottage in which to hide her from the town whose gaze had lent her some meager protection. Harriet had “exhausted [her] ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of the hated tyrant.” In Incidents, she says, “I tried hard to preserve my self-respect; but I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery; and the monster proved too strong for me.... I saw whither all this was tending.” 22 Caught between two older stalkers, Harriet gave in to the younger evil. As the peer of Norcom’s son John, Samuel Sawyer belonged to a filial generation. In relation to fourteen-year-old Harriet, he belonged to a parental generation. When he impregnated her, he was nearly thirty years old.
Harriet’s difficulties increased when her pregnancy began to show. Already jealous of her husband’s pursuit of Harriet, Mary Matilda Horniblow Norcom assumed the child Harriet was carrying was her husband’s and threw her out of her house. Harriet went to her grandmother, touching off a scene that scarred the younger woman for life.
At first reading, Molly Horniblow’s reputation appears to have both protected Harriet against Norcom and aggravated her vulnerability. On the one hand, Horniblow’s standing among the Edenton elite made outright rape of her granddaughter too costly for Norcom and his reputation as a gentleman. The dozen or so slave women he had raped, impregnated, and sold had all lived outside of town on the plantation and lacked highly visible family connections. On the other hand, Harriet held back from confessing Norcom’s harassment to her grandmother, who, in a contradictory but time-honored pattern, would have blamed Harriet for prompting the advances both women deplored. Harriet’s reticence forestalled her grandmother’s confronting Norcom head-on and, perhaps, forcing him to desist.
A second look at Incidents, however, shows Molly Horniblow aware of her granddaughter’s peril and taking all the steps open to her to warn Norcom off. Her approach—indirect, moral, and highly contingent—reflected the fundamental disparity of power between owner and grandmother. Although Horniblow could not afford a direct or angry confrontation with one of the town’s first citizens, she had “high words” with him over Harriet.23 In the last analysis, she lacked means of retaliating against him materially; her puny weapons and the need to keep up appearances failed her on Edenton’s sexual hunting ground.
Horniblow’s staunch belief in the ideal of female chastity put her nearly as much at odds with her granddaughter as with her harasser. Jacobs addresses her reader directly in Incidents: “You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another.”24 But when she says that the prospects of the unfree are so “blighted by slavery” that chastity becomes an impossible goal, she speaks to her grandmother as well as the Northern reader she addresses as “you.”25
Molly Horniblow accused Harriet of disgracing her dead mother’s memory after Harriet had been turned out of the Norcoms’ house. “I had rather see you dead than to see you as you now are,” Horniblow exclaimed as she wrenched Harriet’s mother’s wedding ring from her finger and sent her away. Molly Horniblow waited several days before answering Harriet’s plea to take her back home. Even on relenting, Horniblow pitied Harriet but never forgave her. One critic wonders whether Harriet sinned chiefly by losing caste: Becoming pregnant without marrying, she was acting just like all the other ordinary slave girls. Horniblow, after all, took pride in her and Harriet’s superiority over the common run of “degraded” Negro slaves.“26
In 1831, two years after Harriet gave birth to her son Joseph, Nat Turner led an insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, some forty miles from Edenton. As in insurrection scares in 1807, 1819, and 1822, the Nat Turner insurrection fomented a pogrom in and around Edenton.27 On the pretext of searching for insurrectionists, white men looted, beat, raped, murdered, and generally terrorized African Americans. For a moment, Southern legislators, particularly in Virginia, considered the possibility of saving their skins by abolishing slavery. They decided instead to tighten its controls, making manumission more difficult and the lives of free blacks yet more precarious.
During the early and mid-1830s, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer launched his political career with service in the North Carolina state house and senate. He spent increasing amounts of time in Raleigh but fathered a second child with Jacobs, Louisa Matilda, born in 1833. Meanwhile, James Norcom flourished in Edenton as chairman of the town commissioners.28 To punish Harriet for rejecting his renewed advances, he sent her to one of his plantations. Upon learning in 1835 that he intended to send her children to the plantation to be “broken in,” Jacobs panicked. She knew the breaking-in process entailed much physical and psychological abuse, which Harriet had already witnessed to her sorrow. Several times in Incidents she mentions slaves who had been so “brutalized” as to lose all human feeling. We still recognize the behavior she described, now labeling it trauma and the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome: depression, self-loathing, anger, violence against the self and/or others.29 The plantation to which Norcom proposed sending her children was a place of bloo
dletting torture.
To divert Norcom from his plan and persuade him to let her children’s father purchase them, Harriet ran away, commencing the long process of self-emancipation that would entail spending several days and nights in a swamp full of snakes and nearly seven years hidden in a crawl space in her grandmother’s house. Norcom imprisoned Jacobs’s Aunt Betty, her brother John, and her children, but in the end he would allow Sawyer to purchase their two children and Harriet’s brother John.
Sawyer was elected to one term in the United States House of Representatives in 1837. He took his slave John S. Jacobs to Washington and then with him on a wedding trip to Chicago, Canada, and New York. To travel in the North, Sawyer bade Jacobs pose as a free man working for wages, which Jacobs, who said he hated lies and hypocrisy, found repugnant. Toward the end of the journey he left Sawyer in New York City and emancipated himself.
Now free, John S. Jacobs quickly made his way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, a haven for fugitive slaves where young Frederick and Anna Douglass had recently settled and where doubtless all three became acquainted as fellow workers and budding abolitionists.30
The early 1840s also brought the emancipation of Harriet Jacobs and her children, one by one. Sawyer had brought little Louisa from Edenton to Washington, D.C., to tend her half-sister, his and his wife’s new baby. Once Sawyer’s term ended, he sent Louisa to work for his Tredwell cousins in Brooklyn. Harriet finally escaped from Edenton to New York in 1842. Her grandmother sent Harriet’s son Joseph to her, and Harriet sent Joseph to her brother in New Bedford. She lived and worked in the Astor House, the favorite New York stopping place of wealthy white Southerners and the same hotel where John S. Jacobs had left Sawyer in 1839.
Harriet served as the live-in baby nurse of Nathaniel Parker Willis, the popular poet, litterateur, and editor of the weekly Home Journal, and his English wife Mary Stace Willis. They lived well, thanks to her father’s £300/year subvention.31 Willis was well known among New York’s smart set and among its abolitionists; he had courted Lydia Maria Child, editor of the New York National Anti-Slavery Standard, who later became Harriet Jacobs’s editor. Child described Willis in terms of his “aristocratic tastes, social snobbery, dandyism, and political conservatism.” 32 Jacobs did not weigh in on the first three of these characteristics, but she knew Willis to be proslavery. In 1850 he wrote “Negro Happiness in Virginia,”33 dismissing whatever doubts Jacobs might have harbored about his politics and, undoubtedly, inspiring a scene she includes in chapter 13 of Incidents. Here, a slaveholder seduces a Northern visitor, producing slaves who—because, as Jacobs explains, they would suffer violent reprisals if they spoke the truth—attest to their perfect contentment. While Willis was hobnobbing with apologists for slavery, Jacobs attended abolitionist meetings on a regular basis.
During her years in antebellum New York, Jacobs always felt hunted. As the North’s busiest seaport and one of fugitive slaves’ preferred destinations, New York harbored numerous slave catchers, whose numbers increased after the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act made the recapture of fugitives—or black people alleged to be fugitives—even more lucrative. Jacobs always felt somewhat safer in Massachusetts. In 1843 she fled to Boston. She returned to New York City, but another scare in 1844 sent her back to Boston with her daughter Louisa.
After the death of Mary Stace Willis in 1845, Nathaniel Parker Willis took his daughter Imogen and Jacobs to England to visit Imogen’s grandparents. In London, Jacobs felt truly free—of slavery, of American white supremacy and racial oppression—for the first time in her entire life. She was thirty-two years old. But needing to make a living for herself and her children, Jacobs returned to employment in New York City and several subsequent recapture scares. Finally, Cornelia Grinnell (the second Mrs. Willis) bought Jacobs for $300 in 1852 and freed her.34
During Harriet Jacobs’s years with the Willises, John S. Jacobs extended his activism in the abolitionist movement, serving as the corresponding secretary of Boston’s black New England Freedom Association. In 1848 and 1849 he toured as a paid lecturer of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, appearing with star speakers such as Frederick Douglass, who praised Jacobs’s “calm but feeling manner.”35 In 1849 John S. Jacobs purchased the Rochester Antislavery Office and Reading Room, a bookstore located above Douglass’s North Star newspaper offices. Harriet sent Louisa to school in Clinton, New York, and joined her brother’s antislavery enterprise. The reading room failed, as did John’s succeeding endeavor, an oyster restaurant.
During her nine months in Rochester, Harriet roomed with Amy and Isaac Post, a white feminist abolitionist couple unusual in their ability to deal with African Americans on a footing of equality. Through the Posts, Jacobs met another of their black house guests, the chatty young Bostonian, William C. Nell, who worked in the offices of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. Jacobs had already left Rochester when the Posts hosted the itinerant antislavery preacher Sojourner Truth. During their time together, Harriet Jacobs shared her life story with Amy Post, who encouraged her to write and publish it. Jacobs eventually acted on the suggestion, but not in the 1840s.
The Compromise of 1850 included a tough new Fugitive Slave Act. On the lecture circuit, John S. Jacobs exhorted his black brethren and sisters to arm themselves for self-defense, then left the East for safer and potentially more lucrative fields. Always enterprising, he went to California to pan for gold.36 Harriet returned to New York City; her son Joseph, now twenty-one years old, joined her brother in California. Unbeknownst to her, her Edenton tormentor, Dr. James Norcom, died late in 1850.
During the 1850s, when she was in her late thirties, Harriet Jacobs worked for the Willises, who were now settled in their Hudson River estate, and wrote her book in secret. LINDA: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, seven years concealed in Slavery, Written by Herself was issued in January 1861 under the pseudonym “Linda Brent.” In it Jacobs indicted the institution of chattel slavery for its physical torture, its debasement of family attachments among white as well as black, ifs corruption of Southern white religion, and the prostitution of young women. Such a firsthand account had never before appeared. Despite its uniqueness, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl failed to capture the attention of a public preoccupied with the breakup of the Union and the impending war. John S. Jacobs, now living in London, published serially “A True Tale of Slavery” in the London magazine Leisure Hour in February 1861.
Harriet Jacobs, like several other women abolitionists (including, later, Sojourner Truth and Maria Stewart), put her antislavery principles to work in 1862, moving to Washington, D.C., to volunteer in the freedmen’s relief movement under the auspices of New York and Philadelphia Quakers. Her daughter Louisa, now about thirty, joined Harriet in 1863. They distributed food and clothing to “contraband”—black people who had escaped slavery in Maryland and warfare in northern Virginia. Freed-men’s relief took Harriet back to Edenton in 1865 and 1867, as a free woman able to succor the poor who had in the past shared her oppression. This relief mission also took her to Savannah, Georgia; she then traveled to England and raised £100 to build an orphanage and old-age home. (Harriet Tubman, in Auburn, New York, acted on a similar vision.) But Ku Klux Klan terrorism made the Savannah undertaking dangerous, and Jacobs finally recommended the home not be built. With the end of Reconstruction in Georgia and North Carolina, the Jacobses returned North. By 1870 they were running a rooming house for Harvard faculty and students in Cambridge, Massachusetts; by 1885 they were living in Washington, D.C., where Louisa taught at Howard University. Harriet accompanied Louisa to meetings in 1895 at which the National Association of Colored Women was organized. Harriet Jacobs died in 1897; Louisa died in 1917.
Although Harriet and Louisa stayed together until the end of Harriet’s life, Joseph, the son and brother, disappeared in Australia in 1863; his mother had been able to send him money but not to save his life. Harriet’s brother John S. Jacobs died in 1875 and is buried beside his sister an
d niece in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.37
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is first and foremost a piece of engaged writing, a means of advancing the struggle against the institution of slavery by politicizing respectable Northern white women—as women. Jacobs agreed with her friend and sister abolitionist Amy Post that her story should be told in order to reveal gendered evils of slavery that—due to their sexual nature—were usually passed over in silence. Whereas many other ex-slave narratives presented testimonials against a vicious institution and also served as a means for their authors’ financial support, Jacobs wrote purely out of her antislavery ideology. Well and gainfully employed, her children grown up, she was not in great need of money.38
Lacking formal education, Jacobs initially doubted her ability as a writer to strike the right balance between candor and prurient detail. She thought first to dictate her experiences to someone more comfortable with writing for publication, as Sojourner Truth had to Olive Gilbert in the 1840s.39 The best-selling author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin struck Jacobs as a potential amanuensis, but Harriet Beecher Stowe saw in Jacobs only grist for her own mill. She asked to print the whole of Jacobs’s experiences in her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but Jacobs allowed her only a brief sketch. Stowe not only sought to appropriate Jacobs’s material, she also sent Jacobs’s letter, containing details about her sexual history, to Jacobs’s employer, without Jacobs’s permission. Jacobs, perhaps naively, had also proposed to Stowe that Louisa accompany Stowe on a trip to England. Stowe’s patronizing refusal offended Jacobs. Deeply chagrined, Jacobs decided to become an author in her own right. The death of her grandmother in 1853 removed the last obstacle to her writing her own story, “by herself.”