Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs, writing under the pseudonym Linda Brent and changing every other name in the book including her own, was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, around 1813, and taught to read by an early mistress before passing, at twelve, into the household of Dr James Norcom, fictionalised in the book as Dr Flint, who began sexually harassing her as soon as she was old enough for him to notice. Rather than submit to Norcom or marry the free Black man who loved her and risk the children of that marriage becoming his property too, Jacobs began a relationship with a white neighbour, Samuel Sawyer, and had two children by him, a decision she narrates with unusual directness about the impossible choices slavery forced on enslaved women. In June 1835, to escape Norcom without abandoning her children, Jacobs went into hiding in a crawlspace above her grandmother's house, a space just nine feet by seven and barely three feet at its highest point, where she could not stand upright and could see her children in the yard below without being able to speak to them. She stayed hidden there for seven years before finally escaping by boat to Philadelphia in 1842, and it was not until February 1852, ten years after she reached the North, that her employer Cornelia Willis purchased her outright for three hundred dollars and set her legally free.

Jacobs wrote the book herself over five years, publishing it in 1861 with a preface from the abolitionist editor Lydia Maria Child confirming her authorship at a time when many white readers doubted a formerly enslaved woman could have written so clearly for herself. The prose is plain and controlled even at its most painful, and Jacobs never lets a reader mistake her account for melodrama; it is a hard, exact book about what slavery specifically did to women and mothers, and it earns every page of that specificity.