3 - Social death and the reconstruction of slavery

Summary

In 1861, the year the Civil War began, Harriet Jacobs published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs was born a slave in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina; her father was a skilled carpenter, and her mother the slave of a tavern keeper. Jacobs lived with both parents until the age of six, and was taught to read, but in 1824, the family of Dr. James Norcom inherited her, and she was increasingly subjected to Norcom's sexual predation. Seeking protection, Jacobs took her own lover, a white lawyer, and had two children with him. In 1835, Jacobs ran away and was sheltered by white as well as black neighbors before she entered the tiny attic crawlspace in the home of her grandmother, who was free. Jacobs remained in hiding for seven years. Sewing, reading, and writing to pass the time, she was bothered most by immobility and exposure to the elements through the thin roof. Her health permanently compromised, Jacobs escaped to the North in 1842, and after a brief reunion with her children found work as a nursemaid for a New York magazine editor. As a fugitive (under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated the return of all escaped slaves), Jacobs was haunted by the prospect of recapture by Norcom, who pursued her. Forced to flee New York and then Boston, Jacobs followed her brother John S. Jacobs, an abolitionist, to Rochester, New York, where she had access to an abolitionist library, and worked daily in the antislavery reading room just above the newspaper offices of Frederick Douglass.