How a fugitive from Edenton wrote the slave narrative that named the unspeakable.

This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.

Harriet Jacobs needs to be remembered.

“She hid in a crawlspace for seven years. Then she published a book about what she was hiding from.”

Part I — The Hidden Attic

Harriet Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, on February 11, 1813. The town sat on Albemarle Sound, where the rivers ran flat to the sea. Her father was an enslaved carpenter who could read. Her mother died when the girl was six. After that she was raised by her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, a freed Black woman who ran a small bakehouse on King Street. The household had decency in it. The country around it did not.

Her first mistress, Margaret Horniblow, taught her letters. Few enslaved children learned to read. She did. It would matter later. When she was eleven, Margaret Horniblow died. A codicil to the will, unsigned by the dying woman, transferred her to a three-year-old child named Mary Matilda Norcom. That made the child’s father, Dr. James Norcom, her master in fact. By twelve she was inside his household. By fifteen the harassment was open and constant. He told her what he meant to do. He told her she had no right to refuse.

The law agreed with Norcom. An enslaved woman could not testify against a white man in a North Carolina court. Any child she bore took her own condition — partus sequitur ventrem, the womb decides — and became the property of whoever owned her. Years later, of the position she had been placed in, Jacobs wrote: “There is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death.”

She was not exaggerating. She was describing the legal floor.

She refused him by the only route open to a girl in her position. She entered a relationship with a white attorney named Samuel Tredwell Sawyer. She bore Joseph in 1829. She bore Louisa Matilda about 1833. The children belonged in law to Norcom, because their mother did. Norcom understood the leverage. He told her the boy would be sold. He told her the girl would be raised to sell well. Her body had been the target. Now her children were the weapons.

In April 1835, Norcom moved her to his son’s plantation six miles outside Edenton. He let it be known the children would follow. She ran in June. She hid first in the house of a white woman who took the risk. She hid for a time in a swamp outside town. Then she climbed into a crawlspace above the storeroom attached to her grandmother’s house, where the roof pitched down to three feet at its highest point. The space was nine feet by seven. She could not stand. She could sit. She could lie down. She could not stand.

She stayed seven years.

She bored small holes in the wall with a gimlet. The holes let in a little air and a little light. The holes let her see her children play in the yard below. They did not know she was there. No one told them. She wrote letters in her own hand, dated from New York and Philadelphia, and friends carried them out and posted them from the North. Norcom spent his money chasing a ghost. The ghost was upstairs, watching her children grow.

Her body broke in that hole. Limbs cramped that never fully uncramped. Summer heat on the roof like a kiln. Winter cold that went into the bone. She read what she could reach — the Bible, what newspapers came in — and she sewed. She lived this way through 1835, 1836, 1837, 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, and into the summer of 1842. Then friends put her on a boat to Philadelphia. From there she went on to New York. She called the crawlspace her loophole of retreat. She meant it two ways. It was the chink that let in the light. It was also the legal gap that let her escape — the strange truth that to be missing was sometimes safer than to be present.

Part II — The Public Book

She was free in fact but not in law. The man who claimed her could still claim her in New York. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, he could claim her anywhere in the country, with federal commissioners paid more to return her than to release her, and anyone sheltering her facing a thousand-dollar fine and prison. She worked as a nursemaid in the household of Nathaniel Parker Willis, a popular New York editor. She kept moving. She kept her name quiet. In 1852, Cornelia Grinnell Willis paid Norcom’s heirs three hundred dollars for her body and put the manumission papers in her hand. She was thirty-nine years old, and a free woman in writing for the first time in her life.

She had thought of writing the book for years. In 1853 she reached out to Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin had appeared the year before. Stowe wrote back that the story was too remarkable to be believed unless verified, and suggested she might use bits of it in her own work. Jacobs decided then that no one else would tell her story. She would tell it herself.

She wrote at night. She wrote when the Willis children were asleep. By 1858 she had a manuscript. She could not find a publisher. The Boston houses wanted prefatory endorsements she could not yet secure. In 1860 the firm of Thayer & Eldridge agreed to print it on condition that Lydia Maria Child, the well-known abolitionist editor, write a preface and edit the text. Child did the work and made plain in writing — to Jacobs, and later to the world — that the book was Jacobs’s own. Then Thayer & Eldridge went bankrupt. Jacobs bought the plates. She paid to have it printed herself. The title page said, Published for the Author.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself appeared in January 1861, three months before the firing on Fort Sumter. She used the name Linda Brent. The pseudonym was not to protect her. It was to protect the living people in her story — her children most of all, who could still be reached. She told readers in her preface that her narrative was no fiction, that she had concealed names and places, and that she wrote to arouse the women of the North to what their countrywomen in the South were suffering. Of Norcom she wrote: “My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will.”

That was the second decision.

Part III — A System Indicted

The book is an indictment, not a complaint. The distinction matters. A complaint says, I was hurt. An indictment says, the system is built to hurt. Jacobs wrote the second one. She showed that sexual coercion was not the deviation of one wicked doctor but the predictable yield of property law applied to women. She showed that the children of enslaved mothers were not collateral damage but the fixed asset of the institution. She showed that the federal government — by 1850 — had made her a fugitive in Boston and Rochester and New York, that the North was not innocent, and that the Cult of True Womanhood had drawn its line where the auction block began.

The book sold modestly. The war absorbed it. By 1862 it was out of print. Jacobs herself moved through the conflict as a relief worker. From 1863 to 1865 she lived in Alexandria, Virginia, on the Union side of the line, tending the sick and the displaced. With her daughter Louisa Matilda, trained as a teacher, she fought white missionary societies for control of a school for Black children — and won. The Jacobs Free School opened in January 1864, Black-led, paid for by funds Jacobs herself raised in the North. After the war she tried the same thing in Savannah. The collapse of Reconstruction made it impossible. She returned to private life.

She died in Washington, D.C., on March 7, 1897. Her book was forgotten by everyone except a few historians of the slave narrative. It was reprinted in 1973. In 1987, Jean Fagan Yellin published the archival evidence — letters, papers, Edenton court records, the Norcom family files — that proved beyond dispute that Jacobs had written it herself, and that every major claim in it was true. The book is now standard. It is read alongside Frederick Douglass. It is sometimes read instead of him.

It belongs.

The courage was double.

• The first was the long physical concealment that bought her freedom — seven years in a hole that crippled her body to save her children.
• The second was the decision, years later and on free soil, to put her testimony into public print at a moment when retaliation was still legally possible and morally permitted.

She named the unspeakable while still vulnerable to it.

That is the rare thing.

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Sources: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Harvard University Press, 1987); Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Basic Books, 2004); Yellin et al., The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (University of North Carolina Press, 2008); University of North Carolina, Documenting the American South; Office of Historic Alexandria; Journal of the Civil War Era. In the narrative, “Linda Brent” is Jacobs herself; “Dr. Flint” is Dr. James Norcom; “Mr. Sands” is Samuel Tredwell Sawyer.

Next in this series: Mary Ann Shadd Cary — the first Black woman to edit a newspaper in North America, who recruited Union soldiers without asking permission.

Charles C. Jett is the author of six boks and the writer of Critical Skills Blog (criticalskillsblog.com) and Civic Sage (civicsage.com). A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Harvard Business School, he served as a Cold War nuclear submarine officer before a career in executive search, executive coaching, and civic education.