Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (4 page)

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.”

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
(Bloomington: 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.