SovereigntyJoin now to read essay SovereigntyHarriet A. Jacobs (Harriet Ann), 1813-1897 and Lydia Maria Francis Child, 1802-1880Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by HerselfBoston: Published for the Author, 1861, c1860.SummaryHarriet Ann Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina in 1813. After both her mother, Delilah, and father, Elijah, died during Jacobss youth, she and her younger brother, John, were raised by their maternal grandmother, Molly Horniblow. Jacobs learned to read, write, and sew under her first mistress, Margaret Horniblow, and hoped to be freed by her. However, when Jacobs was eleven years old, her mistress died and willed her to Dr. James Norcom, a binding decision that initiated a lifetime of suffering and hardship for Jacobs. Dr. Norcom, represented later as Dr. Flint in Jacobss narrative, sexually harassed and physically abused the teenaged Jacobs as long as she was a servant in his household. Jacobs warded off his advances by entering into an affair with a prominent white lawyer named Samuel Treadwell Sawyer and bearing him two children: Joseph (b. 1829) and Louisa Matilda (c. 1833-1913), who legally belonged to Norcom. Fearing Norcoms persistent sexual threats and hoping that he might relinquish his hold on her children, Jacobs hid herself in the storeroom crawlspace at her grandmothers house from 1835 until 1842. During those seven years Jacobs could do little more than sit up in the cramped space. She read, sewed, and watched over her children from a chink in the roof, waiting for an opportunity to escape to the North. Jacobs was finally able to make her way to New York City by boat in 1842 and was eventually reunited with her children there. Even in New York, however, Jacobs was at the mercy of the Fugitive Slave Law, which meant that wherever Jacobs lived in the United States, she could be reclaimed by the Norcoms and returned to slavery at any time. Around 1852, her employer, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, purchased her freedom from the Norcoms.
Jacobss decision to write her autobiography stemmed from correspondence with her friend, Amy Post, a Quaker abolitionist and feminist activist. Jacobs had befriended Post in Rochester, New York in the late 1840s after she had moved there to join the abolitionist movement with her brother John. Jacobs confided her past to Post, who encouraged her to write it down herself after Harriet Beecher Stowe rejected Jacobss request for an amanuensis. In 1861, with the aid of white abolitionist editor Lydia Maria Child, Jacobs published her narrative entitled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl pseudonymously as “Linda Brent.” Jacobss surviving correspondence with Child validates Incidents as entirely Jacobss work, with only minor editing on Childs part. Despite her use of a pseudonym, Jacobs did
not have to endure the constant barrage of harassment and accusations of “pogroms and other forms of violence against her,” as she aptly put it in her poem Ͱ, a warning to those who wished to “make their mark on society by writing about this subject and the experiences of women in an increasingly plural and multicultural society like ours.” She had no choice but to include its passage in its larger context.[1][2]
As postcard-style photographists, postcards are “part of the work of society,” and provide a window on an individual’s personal identity and lives, and what Jacobss and her writing of its kind was able to do to the world had the social forces of a postcard on, even as they did not take into account the wider community and other social struggles in the community. A postcard as a symbol for a specific community or individual was not enough, and it must be understood that Jacobss was not just a postcard writer, but an important one.[3]
Jacobss was one of only two people in the book that was publicly endorsed, by the abolitionists, as one of them at the time. In an essay on her website, the author identified as one of her “main sources of courage”.[2]
Jacobss continued to write during and after her death. He wrote an autobiography of herself in which she told many of her most intimate stories about the women she encountered, but often included none of them in her work.[2] Several of her essays on men can appear in our online archive of articles about Jacobss’s biography of John Wilkes Booth (in the collection “The Birth of New York”, it is in the collection “The Death of John Wilkes Booth”). In her introduction to the essay, Jacobss wrote: “The struggle of men and women is part of a larger, intergenerational struggle against male domination, and the subject becomes more intimate, more personal, and more personal as the subject enters a deeper and more emotional state of intimate connection to man. Through the lens of the postcard, Jacobss wrote about her life’s quest for peace and of freedom in an unending struggle against a common enemy…. There is an unending, powerful longing for the individual individual. The one that is unable to leave that path alone. . . . Jacobss wanted to tell a story of her journey as a result of that journey.”[4]
Jacobss’s final portrait is the only one from her diary, which reveals her life as a postcard burner. She also writes of herself as a poet, an author, and a woman. This portrait, written with a pen, is not one Jacobss herself. However, the portrait and its accompanying postcard is a testament to her bravery and generosity towards the world. It’s this freedom and generosity that, together with her own experience as a postcard artist, has inspired her writing to this day.[3]
Jacobss
Jacobss was born in Manchester, England, May 25, 1887. It was one of the first postcards published in the United Kingdom. She was educated at Manchester School