Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (2 page)

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
makes three important points convincingly: It shows, first, the myriad traumas owners and their agents inflicted upon slaves. Bloody whippings and rapes constituted ground zero of the enslaved condition, but in addition, slaves were subject to a whole series of soul-murdering psychological violations: destruction of families, abandonment of children, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, humiliation, contempt. Jacobs details the physical violence so common in her Southern world, but she especially stresses the assault on slaves’ psyches. Second, she denounces the figure of the “happy darky.” As a slave and later as an abolitionist, she was frequently confronted with this favorite American myth, which she knew to be false. In answer to this proslavery argument, she enumerates the miseries of the enslaved; in chapter 13 she shows precisely how Northerners were gulled into believing black people liked being enslaved
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Third, and most courageously, Jacobs insists that enslaved people—here, black women—cannot be judged by the same standards as the free. Jacobs expounds the conditions of enslavement that deprived people of autonomy, denying them influence over their own and their children’s destinies. While her enslaved friends and family took advantage of every possible loophole
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within the fabric of an evil system, working the system allowed them only a modicum of self-determination. Because they literally belonged to other people, slaves lacked the power to protect their morals, their bodily integrity, or their children.

In sum, Jacobs delineates a system in which the enslaved and their enslavers (aided and abetted by Northern sympathizers) were totally at odds or, as she says, at war.
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As she sees it, there could be no identity of interest between the two parties to the peculiar institution, even though lives and bloodlines frequently intersected. The frequent occurrence of similar names—for example, Margaret Horniblow (Harriet’s first owner) and Molly Horniblow (Harriet’s grandmother)—may confuse the reader but attest to these very intersections.

Harriet Ann Brent Jacobs was born in about 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina.
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Her younger brother and best friend, John S. Jacobs, was born two years later. Their parents, Delilah and Elijah
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Jacobs, were enslaved, but they lived together as a family with Delilah’s mother, Molly Horniblow. Horniblow, the daughter of a South Carolina planter who emancipated her during the Revolutionary War and sent her to freedom outside the United States, had been captured, returned to American territory, and fraudulently reenslaved after her father’s death. The head chef at the Horniblow Inn in Edenton, Molly Horniblow managed to earn and save money as a caterer even while enslaved. Her industry and clientele made her well known, well respected, and well connected in Edenton, and even before being freed again at the age of fifty, she had accrued as much standing as possible by one who was neither white nor free.

As a slave, Horniblow could not marry, yet her daughter Delilah and her husband Elijah lived with Molly as a married couple: Delilah even wore a wedding ring, which she left to her daughter Harriet. Horniblow’s effective marital status, on the other hand, remains a mystery, as does the never mentioned existence or identity of her own children’s father. These silences—in the historical record, in Harriet Jacobs’s
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
and in John S. Jacobs’s “A True Tale of Slavery”—speak volumes, given Horniblow’s seemingly hypocritical attachment to the feminine ideal of chastity. Her insistence on premarital sexual purity, a condition which often eluded even free poor and working-class white women, would wreak havoc in her enslaved granddaughter’s emotional life.

Neither Harriet nor John recalled much about their mother, who died when Harriet was about six and John about four years old, although Harriet later praised Delilah as “noble and womanly” in nature.
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Their father, Elijah, the best house carpenter in the region, hired himself out from his base at home. Both Harriet and John recalled their father as a man of independent mind, whose slave status embittered and depressed him. John was convinced that his father died young—in 1826—precisely because he was enslaved: “My father, who had an intensely acute feeling of the wrongs of slavery, sank into a state of mental dejection, which, combined with bodily illness, occasioned his death when I was eleven years of age.”
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By dint of their skills, values, connections, and ancestry, the entire Jacobs family had much in common with Edenton’s elite. However, their African descent, legal status as slaves, and extreme vulnerability placed them firmly on the wrong side of a towering color bar. Molly Horniblow and her grandchildren experienced the ambiguities of their allegiances differently. The grandchildren admired, but could not share, her heartfelt Christian piety. The grandmother counted on the existence of conscience in the slaveowning class, another faith beyond her grandchildren’s reach. She sought decent treatment through personal entreaty; they both followed the route of permanent escape. Horniblow’s son Joseph shared her grandchildren’s hatred of slavery; he ran away twice, the second time intending to leave the United States for good. Punning on the common term for whipping, he told his brother that he meant to “get beyond the reach of the stars and stripes of America.”
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The Jacobses lived on the left bank of the Chowan River where it empties into Albemarle Sound. Connected through internal waterways with Hampton Roads, Virginia, and the Chesapeake Bay during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Edenton served as an administrative center for its own Chowan and surrounding counties and as northeastern North Carolina’s main port. In 1820, the population numbered 1261, of whom 634 were white, 499 enslaved, and 67 free black.
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During Harriet’s and John’s youth, Edenton was still vibrant enough as a trading center that the town’s leading families would station members in the New York area. The Tredwells and Blounts in Brooklyn, New York, who made the Jacobses’ later residence there unsafe, belonged to Edenton’s merchant families. During the mid-nineteenth century, Edenton lost importance as the Albemarle Sound silted up and North Carolina’s economy shifted away from the heavily slaveholding and agricultural East Coast toward the diversified farming and industry located in the Piedmont farther inland.

In 1819 and 1820 Edenton rated two visits from President James Monroe; in 1820 the town offered him a banquet, prepared by none other than Molly Horniblow, the region’s finest chef, at the Horniblow Inn, the local elite’s gathering place.

The inn sat on the main street, across an alley from the courthouse. Between the inn, the jail, and the courthouse stood the whipping post, where slaves were disciplined and blood flowed. John S. Jacobs recalled seeing “men and women stripped, and struck from fifteen to one hundred times and more. Some whose backs were cut to pieces were washed down with strong brine or brandy ...” He described one instrument of torture, the oak backing paddle, the blade of which was full of small holes that pulverized the body and left “the flesh like a steak.” He himself had dressed the back of a woman whose back he “solemnly declare[d] ... had not a piece of skin left on it as wide as my finger.”
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The Edenton elite, small and inbred, was closely connected through ties of ownership and sentiment to the Jacobses and included the heads of the Sawyer, Tredwell, and Norcom families. Drs. Matthias Sawyer (d. 1835) and James Norcom (1778-1850) were longtime business and professional partners. An 1808 inventory of the value of their joint practice revealed a net worth of $8000, half of which consisted of outstanding debts.
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The financial precariousness of medicine, combined with doctors’ ostentatious standard of living, kept them constantly on the lookout for financial advantage. Both Sawyer and Norcom operated plantations that (usually) contributed to their income and where Harriet and John had occasion to work. During this same period, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer (1800-1863)
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and John Norcom (1802-?), attended the Edenton academy together; the younger Norcom followed in his father’s footsteps by graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a medical degree. Samuel Tredwell Sawyer attended but dropped out of William and Mary College. With his family connections, neither his limitations as a scholar nor his feckless dandyism impeded his flourishing as a lawyer.
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After her mother’s death in 1819, Harriet went to the home of her owner, Miss Margaret Horniblow. Harriet Jacobs recalled Margaret Horniblow as a kind mistress “almost like a mother to me.”
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During her six years with Margaret Horniblow, Harriet learned to read, sew, and generally to carry herself as a lady, a bearing others remarked upon for the rest of her life.

Reflecting the extreme vulnerability of enslaved people to the fates of those who owned them, Margaret Horniblow’s death in 1825 made Harriet the slave of Horniblow’s sister’s three-year-old daughter, also the daughter of James Norcom, who became her de facto owner. The following year, Harriet’s father died, leaving the child with only her grandmother as protector. Molly Horniblow’s stature and residence in the center of town did pose a counterweight to Norcom’s power over his young female slave. Harriet realized that both the town’s gossip mill and her grandmother’s standing offered her limited but tangible protection.

When her own mistress died in 1828, fifty-year-old Molly Horniblow, too, fell to James Norcom and was put up for sale at auction. On account of her age and stature, the sight of Molly Horniblow on the auction block scandalized the good citizens of Edenton, but her sale, entirely legal, went through. According to
Incidents,
an older white woman bought Molly Horniblow, emancipated her, and made Molly the owner of her own older son, Mark Ramsey. John S. Jacobs’s “A True Tale of Slavery” tells a different story. It says the grandmother entrusted her savings to a kindly white man, who carried out her wishes.
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In any case, Horniblow’s younger son Joseph ran away, was recaptured, jailed in Edenton, and sold to New Orleans. Joseph escaped again and met his brother Mark Ramsey in New York City, prior to disappearing forever. Mark Ramsey hired his time as a steward on a passenger boat, a position that made it possible for him to aid many a fugitive slave running toward freedom. Molly Horniblow bought her own seven-room house in the very center of the town with excellent access to her catering market of Edenton’s elite.

At the same 1828 auction at which James Norcom sold Molly Horniblow, he bought Harriet’s brother John, then about thirteen years old. John worked in Norcom’s medical office, where he learned the then common practices of cupping, leeching, and bleeding, and the manufacture and use of various salves and dressings. As a youth, John doctored the enslaved and later attracted the attention of a medical student, who attempted to buy him. His then owner, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, refused to sell him even for the handsome price of $1500.
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By 1829 Harriet had fallen in love with a free black carpenter, who wanted to marry her. James Norcom forbade the marriage and intensified his pursuit of her by threatening to place her in a small house outside of town—the isolation of concubinage. As a very young, enslaved, orphaned African-American woman, Harriet was virtually powerless to resist the obscene advances of her leading-citizen, middle-aged, white male medical doctor owner.

The close relationship between the elder Norcom and Sawyer and their sons grew thornily incestuous around the person of young Harriet. James Norcom, at fifty-two, was trying to seduce thirteen-year-old Harriet, who lived in his house as a dependent. He dared not exercise one right against her—exiling her to the plantation where his son John lived—for fear John would possess her sexually.

Harriet found herself in a common quandary, for during the nineteenth century, young girls of all races and sexes were regarded as little more than prey: men saw even the most privileged mainly as rich potential wives. In
Incidents,
Jacobs attacks this dynamic, calling slavery “that cage of obscene birds.” She chastises Northerners who married their daughters to Southern slaveholders, for the “poor girls” would soon find themselves victims of adultery, their homes scenes of “jealousy and hatred.”
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Conservatives like the South Carolina novelist Sue Petigru King and Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut—both of whom accepted the justice of Negro slavery—deplored Southern husbands’ habit of committing adultery with women who belonged to them; it mattered less to Chestnut and Petigru King that the women under the husbands’ control were mere girls. But girls they often were, vulnerable in both their status and their youth.
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James Norcom had been following a Southern tradition of taking advantage of girls when he married a teenager situated to improve his financial situation. He had been a thirty-two-year-old divorce in 1810, when he married Mary Matilda Horniblow, the barely sixteen-year-old daughter of the woman whose business affairs he managed. This marriage had brought him control of Harriet Jacobs’s family.

Norcom’s threats and Harriet’s distress alerted Norcom’s partner’s son, the unmarried young lawyer Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, to her sexual availability and made her quarry. He began courting her through letters and other expressions of sympathy. Finding herself trapped, Harriet “made a headlong plunge” into a sexual relationship with Sawyer. Jacobs admits she knew what she was doing when she slept with Sawyer instead of Norcom: Norcom was building a cottage in which to hide her from the town whose gaze had lent her some meager protection. Harriet had “exhausted [her] ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of the hated tyrant.” In Incidents, she says, “I tried hard to preserve my self-respect; but I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery; and the monster proved too strong for me.... I saw whither all this was tending.”
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Caught between two older stalkers, Harriet gave in to the younger evil. As the peer of Norcom’s son John, Samuel Sawyer belonged to a filial generation. In relation to fourteen-year-old Harriet, he belonged to a parental generation. When he impregnated her, he was nearly thirty years old.