Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (5 page)

11
John S. Jacobs, “A True Tale of Slavery,” 235.

12
Robanna Sumrell Knott, “Harriet Jacobs,” 56, 78. All the enslaved would have been considered to be Negroes, but their number would also include people of European and American Indian descent.

13
John S. Jacobs, “A True Tale of Slavery,” 256.

14
Robanna Sumrell Knott, “Harriet Jacobs,” 128.

15
According to Jean Fagan Yellin
(Incidents,
268), Samuel Tredwell Sawyer died in 1865; in this instance, I have followed Robanna Sumrell Knott (“Harriet Jacobs,” 114), who adds that Sawyer is buried on Long Island.

16
Robanna Sumrell Knott, “Harriet Jacobs,” 130-134.

17
Harriet Jacobs,
Incidents,
9.

18
P. Gabrielle Foreman speculates enticingly on the possible familial entanglements motivating Horniblow’s sale and emancipation, her possession of her son, and her purchase of a grand house in the center of town for $1. See Foreman’s “Manifest in Signs: The Politics of Sex and Representation in
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,”
in
Harriet Jacobs,
ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 92.

19
John S. Jacobs, “A True Tale of Slavery,”243.

20
The quotes are on pages 58 and 39 of Harriet Jacobs,
Incidents.
See also pages 4 and 57.

21
Hannah Decker points to the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of the sweet young thing (
das süsse
Mädel) in Freud’s Vienna. See Nell Irvin Painter, “Three Southern Women and Freud: A Non-Exceptionalist Approach to Race, Class, and Gender in the Slave South,” in
Feminists Revision History,
ed. Ann-Louise Shapiro (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 205-206.

22
Harriet Jacobs,
Incidents,
61-62. The Norcoms named their daughter Mary Matilda after her mother, Mary Matilda Horniblow Norcom.

23
Harriet Jacobs,
Incidents,
59.

24
Harriet Jacobs,
Incidents,
61-62.

25
Harriet Jacobs,
Incidents,
18, 60-61.

26
Deborah M. Garfield, “Earwitness: Female Abolitionist, Sexuality, and
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,”
in
Harriet Jacobs,
ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 121-122; and Harriet Jacobs,
Incidents,
86.

27
Robanna Sumrell Knott, “Harriet Jacobs,” 83, 115.

28
Robanna Sumrell Knott, “Harriet Jacobs,” 227.

29
Nell Irvin Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Full Loaded Cost Accounting,” in U.S.
History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays,
ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 137-138.

30
Frederick Douglass (1818-1885), the leading African-American antebellum feminist abolitionist and postwar statesman, wrote three autobiographies and edited several newspapers over the course of an illustrious public career.

31
Willis’s father-in-law supplied half their annual income. See P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Manifest in Signs,” 91.

32
The exact quote is Carolyn Karcher‘s, rather than Child’s. See Carolyn L. Karcher, ed.,
A Lydia Maria Child Reader
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 330.

33
Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative,”
American Literature
53, no. 3 (November 1981): 481.

34
Nathaniel Parker Willis’s’sister, the popular novelist Fannie Fern, suspected he married Cornelia Grinnell for her money. Cornelia Willis’s inheritance paid for their Hudson River mansion, Idlewild, where Harriet Jacobs was the senior housekeeper and surreptitiously wrote
Incidents.
See P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Manifest in Signs,” 97.

35
Jean Fagan Yellin, “Through Her Brother’s Eyes: Incidents and ‘A True Tale,’ ” in
Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 46, 45.

36
Jean Fagan Yellin, “Through Her Brother’s Eyes,” 47.

37
This material comes from Jean Fagan Yellin’s “Chronology,” in Yellin, ed.,
Incidents,
224-225.

38
P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Manifest in Signs,” 80. Sojourner Truth’s Narrative was meant to raise money to support her in her old age. She was in her mid-fifties when it appeared.

39
See “Introduction,” in
Narrative of Sojourner Truth,
ed. Nell Irvin Painter (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

40
See Jean Fagan Yellin, “Harriet Ann Jacobs, c. 1813-1897,”
Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers
5, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 56, 60-61. This article includes the text of Jacobs’s first letter to the editor, written in 1853.

41
New York
National Anti-Slavery Standard,
23 February 1861.

42
Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, eds.,
Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters,
1817-1880 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 357-359, 378-379. See also Carolyn L. Karcher,
The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 435-437.

43
Frances Smith Foster, “Resisting
Incidents,”
69.

44
Jean Fagan Yellin, “Through Her Brother’s Eyes,” 56.

45
William C. Nell, Letter to the Editor,
Liberator,
25 January 1861.

46
New York
National Anti-Slavery Standard,
23 February 1861. By this time, Lydia Maria Child had been out of the editorship nearly twenty years.

47
New York
National Anti-Slavery Standard,
17 August 1861, quoted in Jacqueline Goldsby, “I Disguised My Hand,” in
Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 23.

48
New York
Anglo-African,
13 April 1861.

49
Child to Henrietta Sargent, 9 February 1861, in Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, eds.,
Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters,
374-375.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Andrews, William L. “The Changing Moral Discourse of Nineteenth-Century African American Women’s Autobiography: Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley.” In
DelColonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography.
Edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Berlandt, Lauren.
The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.

Braxton, Joanne M., and Sharon Zuber. “Silences in Harriet ‘Linda Brent’ Jacobs’s
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.”
In
Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism.
Edited by Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Carby, Hazel.
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-
American Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Doriani, Beth Maclay. “Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century America: Subversion and Self-Construction in Two Women’s Autobiographies.”
American Quarterly
43, no. 2 (June 1991).

Fleischner, Jennifer.
Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives.
New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “The Spoken and the Silenced in
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig,” Callaloo
13, no. 2 (Spring 1990).

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. “To Write My Self: The Autobiographies of Afro-American Women.”
In Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship.
Edited by Shari Benstock. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Garfield, Deborah M., and Rafia Zafar, eds.
Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kaplan, Carla. “Recuperating Agents: Narrative Contracts, Emancipatory Readers, and
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.”
In
Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice.
Edited by Judith Kegan Gardiner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Knott, Robanna Sumrell. “Harriet Jacobs: The Edenton Biography.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994.

Lovell, Thomas B. “By Dint of Labor and Economy: Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and the Salutary View of Wage Labor,”
Arizona Quarterly
52, no. 3 (Autumn 1996).

McKay, Nellie Y. “The Girls Who Became the Women: Childhood Memories in the Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Church Terrell, and Anne Moody.” In
Tradition and the Talents of Women.
Edited by Florence Howe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Mullen, Harryette. “Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
and Beloved.” In The
Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America.
Edited by Shirley Samuels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Painter, Nell Irvin. “Three Southern Women and Freud: A Non-Exceptionalist Approach to Race, Class, and Gender in the Slave South.” In
Feminists Revision History.
Edited by Ann-Louise Shapiro. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Smith, Valerie.
Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Sorisio, Carolyn. “ ‘There Is Might in Each’: Conceptions of Self in Harriet Jacobs’s
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself,” Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers
13, no. 1 (1996).

Sterling, Dorothy, ed.
We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1984.

Walter, Krista. “Surviving in the Garret: Harriet Jacobs and the Critique of Sentiment,” ATQ:
19th
C.
American Literature and Culture
New Series 8, no. 3 (September 1994).

Yellin,
Jean
Fagan, “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative,”
American Literature
53, no. 3 (November 1981).

————. “Harriet Ann Jacobs, c. 1813-1897,” Legacy:
A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers
5, no. 2. (Fall 1988).

————. “Harriet Ann Jacobs, 1813-1897.” In
Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia,
Vol. I. Edited by Darlene Clark Hine. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1993.

————. “Harriet Jacobs’s Family History,”
American Literature
66, no. 4 (December 1994).

————. “
Incidents
in the Life of Harriet Jacobs.” In
The Seductions of Biography.
Edited by Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Yellin, Jean Fagan, ed.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, by Harriet A. Jacobs. Edited by L. Maria Child. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The text reproduced here of
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
is based on the 1861 first Boston edition. That of “A True Tale of Slavery” comes from a bound copy of the
Leisure Hour,
a London periodical, in which it was published serially in February 1861.

None of the three original manuscripts of
Incidents
—Harriet Jacobs’s version, Louisa Jacobs’s copy, or Lydia Maria Child’s edited version—survives. After the initial publications in Boston in 1861 and London in 1862, the book did not begin to circulate until it was reprinted in 1960 and 1961 in facsimile editions by Ayer Publishers and the Scholarly Press. In 1972 the travel writer Walter Magnes Teller published excerpts in an anthology entitled
Twelve Works of Naive Genius
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) and the first annotated edition in 1973.
¹
Also in 1973, the AMS Press published a facsimile edition.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Jean Fagan Yellin, following in the footsteps of Dorothy Sterling, used the Jacobs letters in the recently deposited Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers in the University of Rochester Library to corroborate Jacobs’s claim, in her title, to have written her book “herself.” Although Jacobs was known as her book’s author in the nineteenth century, twentieth-century readers preferred to see it as the work of Child. Before Yellin’s research, historians and critics did not consider the book the authentic work of a former slave.