Biography of Harriet Jacobs
Harriet Jacobs was born in Edenton, NC in 1813. She was the daughter of Delilah, the slave of Margaret Horniblow, and Daniel Jacobs, the slave of Andrew Knox. For the first six years of her life Harriet did not know she was a slave but, when her mother died, Harriet was sent to her mistress’ house. Margaret Horniblow was a relatively kind slave owner. She taught Harriet to read and write and treated her like a child. Upon her death Margaret bequeathed Harriet to her three year old niece, Mary Matilda Norcom. At the age of 11 Harriet fell under the direct control of Mary’s father, Dr. James Norcom, a family physician in Edenton.
Throughout her teen years Harriet endured incessant sexual harassment from Norcom and found few allies to resist him. His wife directed her anger towards Harriet, and Harriet’s grandmother, Molly Horniblow, could do little to shelter her or commiserate. Desperate to avoid becoming Norcom’s mistress, Harriet entered a romantic relationship with a local lawyer, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer. Her relationship with Sawyer was flattering and, perhaps, strategic—he came from a wealthy family that wielded more power in the community than Norcom. Harriet gave birth to two children with Sawyer, Joseph and Louisa. Hoping to induce Norcom to sell her children to Sawyer, Harriet hid in her grandmother’s narrow attic for seven years. Although he was able to buy the children from Norcom, Sawyer did not emancipate the children as Harriet wished. Instead, he sent Louisa to work as a house maid in New York City.
In 1842 Harriet escaped to the North by boat. After her escape Harriet led a tense and uncertain life as a fugitive slave. Eventually she secured employment as a seamstress and was able to reunite with her children in Boston. They lived together only briefly because Norcom continually pursued Harriet, forcing her to remain mobile. Finally in 1852 her friend and employer, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, bought her from Norcom’s heirs and freed Harriet.
Harriet began to write publicly about her experiences as a slave in an article published in the New York Tribune in 1853. Lydia Maria Child, a prominent white abolitionist writer, edited Harriet’s manuscript and helped her publish it in Boston. Praised by critics in the U.S. and Britain, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl addressed the unique issues facing female slaves.
Although Harriet’s narrative ends before the Civil War, her story continued. Throughout the Civil War and after, Harriet and her daughter, Louisa, provided charitable services to freed slaves. It was this work that brought Harriet back to Edenton in 1867. Later she and her daughter established an orphan asylum and school in Savannah, GA. Eventually, having to flee racist violence in the South, they returned to Boston where they opened a boarding house in 1870. Little is known about the last decade of her life; by the late 1880s Harriet resettled in D.C. and died there in 1897.
Incidents was never reprinted in Harriet’s lifetime. In 1973 it was finally reprinted but largely suspected to be a fictionalized account of the slave experience. In 1987 Jean Fagan Yellin’s edition of Incidents established the veracity of her narrative and put to rest concerns that it was largely written by Child.