Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: The Givens Collection

By Harriet Jacobs and Louise Meriwether

Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the most compelling accounts of slavery and one of the most unique of the one hundred or so slave narratives -- mostly written by men -- published before the Civil War.

The child and grandchild of slaves -- and therefore forbidden by law to read and write -- Harriet Jacobs was defiant in her efforts to gain freedom and to document her experience in bondage. She suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her master at the age of eleven. In 1842, she fled North and joined a circle of abolitionists that worked for Frederick Douglass's newspaper. In 1863, she and her daughter moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where they organized medical care for Civil War victims and established the Jacobs Free School.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Washington Square Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781451604238

Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) was an African-American abolitionist, author, and relief worker. As a runaway slave, Jacobs had spent seven years hiding in a crawlspace in North Carolina; after escaping to New York she wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl(1861). The book was initially published by the white abolitionist Lydia Marie Child, and until the 1980’s it had been accepted as a work of fiction. Following the publication of the book Jacobs worked as an abolitionist, a relief worker among Black Civil War refugees, and as an educator in the Post Civil-War south.

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INCIDENTS

THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL

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INTRODUCTION

She was born a slave. Her mother and father were slaves. So were her grandmother, aunts, and uncles. It was against the law to teach a slave to read and write. Doing so was punishable by heavy fines to the white teacher and bloody floggings—that could be fatal—to the black lawbreaker. And yet, several years after escaping to the North, Harriet Jacobs penned an autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself.

The prohibition against slaves learning to read is obvious. In order to convince a people that they were inferior and deny them a sense of self worth, it was deemed necessary to keep them away from knowledge, away from the written word. Harriet Jacobs in her narrative reveals how she refused to be victimized within her own mind, but rather chose to act instead from a steadfast conviction of her own worth despite allegations to the contrary. Hers is an example worth emulating even in these modern times.

The sexual exploitation of female slaves is also revealed in minute detail, which makes Incidents unique. Of the more than one hundred slave narratives published before the Civil War, most were by men, and those written by black women did not touch upon that verboten subject. Harriet deliberately flushed it out of hiding for the benefit of the thousands of women still in bondage, suffering from such abuse.

She wrote under a pseudonym, Linda Brent, and chose fictitious names for her true life characters, deeming it kind and considerate to others to pursue this course. Historians have since then connected the dots, determining everyone’s identity, but for the most part the names in the narrative are the ones that appear in this introduction.

Harriet was born in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina. Her father, Daniel, a respected carpenter, was allowed to manage his own affairs and live with his wife and two children in their own home. Although more privileged than many, it grated on Daniel’s independent spirit that he was owned by another mere mortal and had no legal rights as a man, a husband, a father. He attempted to buy his children, whom he loved dearly, but was unsuccessful. Another relative attempting to buy her children’s freedom was Harriet’s grandmother, a caterer, greatly respected by the white gentry. As a child she had been freed by her slaveholding father but was recaptured, and spent the rest of her life saving money to buy her progeny’s freedom. A religious woman, she imparted her sense of virtue and morality to Harriet.

When her mother died, six-year-old Harriet and her brother, William, four, were taken away from their father to live with their mother’s mistress, further embittering him. The child follows the condition of its mother. That was the tenet of the times and it would bedevil Harriet for most of her life. In Incidents she excoriates that tenet for interfering with the natural affinity between parent and child.

In her new home, Harriet’s kind and benevolent mistress taught her to read and sew. This benevolence, however, did not extend beyond the grave. In her will, Mistress bequeathed eleven-year-old Harriet to her young niece instead of freeing her as had been expected. The girl’s father, Dr. Flint, became Harriet’s master and hated tyrant. By the time she was fourteen, he was forty years older. His lewd lust for Harriet became a lifelong obsession to bend her to his will, to force her to submit voluntarily to his sexual demands.

Resisting his persecution, Harriet fell in love with a free black carpenter who wanted to marry her. Enraged, Dr. Flint threatened to shoot the nigger, and made plans to build a cottage on the outskirts of town to install Harriet as his concubine. She panicked. She despaired of having a child by him, estimating that he already had eleven slave babies. These mothers never revealed who the father was except among themselves, fearful of the consequences. Routinely they were sent far away when their master’s lechery turned elsewhere. Harriet had seen several women sold with his babies at their breast.

I wanted to keep myself pure, she wrote. 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 to strong for me. I felt as if I was forsaken by God and man; as if my efforts must be frustrated; and I became reckless in my despair.

In her recklessness, Harriet responded to the advances of Mr. Sands, a white lawyer, hoping that in revenge Dr. Flint would sell her to him. Although outraged, he did not. She wrote, It seemed less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion. There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment. She had a son, Ben, and a daughter, Ellen, by the attorney.

It is important to note that in choosing the lawyer, Harriet exercised control over her own body, her own life. With Mr. Sands she experienced love and compassion, a natural human desire, while at the same time thwarting her master’s sexual persecution. In this she was the victor rather than the victim, reinforcing the assertion that success in forming a positive self-image depends upon taking the initiative to participate effectively in one’s own development.

Harriet also chose her own areas of confinement, her own prisons so to speak, rather than allow herself to be imprisoned by her owner. Dr. Flint threatened to kill her for resisting him, then declared he wanted her happiness and would be lenient. His leniency included knocking her about physically on occasion and once even sending her crashing down a flight of stairs. He hurled her infant son across the room into a wall, knocking him unconscious. When Dr. Flint threatened to have her children sent to his son’s plantation to be broken in, Harriet fled. For months she ran from one hideout to another, one step ahead of capture, aided by slaves who risked their lives to hide her, and even a white woman who risked ruin.

The most revolting and perilous hideout was the Snaky Swamp, a wild, tangled mass of briers and tall bamboos, a refuge for fugitive slaves, mosquitos, and reptiles. Harriet was glad to escape from there alive and sneak into the hiding place her Uncle Philip, a carpenter, had constructed for her. To Harriet’s amazement this was in her grandmother’s house, which was under constant surveillance. And it was ingenious, a dark garret under the shingled roof, nine feet long and seven wide, home to only rats and mice, completely undetectable from the outside.

The sagacity of Harriet Jacobs should not be underestimated. While surviving in this crawl space for almost seven years, with her supportive family as accomplices, she read and wrote letters, instigated the sale of her children to their father, and ingeniously sent Dr. Flint scurrying to New York in search of her. She is representative of a community of slaves in her immediate vicinity who attempted to escape from the battlefields of war, as Harriet described slavery. The list begins with her own family, her brother, aunts, and uncles. As for the neighbors, an old woman hid her fugitive daughter. A young man escaped from a trader. Another fled from a sexually abusive cripple. A female slave shipped out on a northbound vessel. The relevancy of these incidents indicate that the strong family ties that influenced Harriet and the rebellious activities of neighbors made her contemptuous of the happy darky theory that she would later contest in a published article. Finally, at age twenty-nine, Harriet left her garret and was secreted aboard a vessel bound for Philadelphia.

And so she joined the flight. It was endemic. Black slaves had always been a troublesome presence, a plague, a danger, rebelling in a variety of ways. They engaged in sabotage, damaging machinery. They set fires, burning down entire neighborhoods. In 1761, the Charleston Gazette reported that the Negroes had begun the hellish act of poisoning. It was female slaves who poisoned their master’s soup and were hung in the bargain. Male slaves, like Frederick Douglass, physically fought their masters or banded together in slave revolts such as the one led by Nat Turner. And many a thousand ran to the north, to Canada, or to Florida, where they fought with the Indians against Andrew Jackson in the Seminole Wars. The crying need was to breathe in the precious air as a free soul, as Harriet did upon landing in Philadelphia. For the first time in her life, she rhapsodized, I am standing on free soil. But too soon Harriet learned, as she was eventually reunited with her children and sought domestic work in New York and Massachusetts, that she could be captured and returned to slavery. Dr. Flint was still traveling north to find her.

The entire country joined in the manhunt for runaways with the passage by Congress of the Fugitive Slave Law. It became lucrative in the North for slave catchers to snatch black people, declare they were a fugitive slave even if they were free, and ship them south into bondage. Any citizen assisting a fugitive could be fined and imprisoned. Harriet was working in New York at the time and during this reign of terror lived in a state of perpetual anxiety. Hardworking black people who had resided there for twenty years or more grabbed their children and fled to Canada.

Eluding capture, Harriet had many hairbreadth escapes. Her goal was to educate her son and daughter and live in a home with them, but instead they were forced to scurry about from pillar to post seeking safety. One of those pillars was her fugitive brother, William, whom she joined in Rochester, New York, where he had opened an antislavery reading room. There Harriet became firmly entrenched in the abolitionist society, residing for nine months with Isaac Post, a white abolitionist, and his wife, Amy, who became a lifelong friend.

Another pillar was the home of Mrs. Bruce in New York, where she worked as a child’s nurse. When pursuers again threatened Harriet’s safety, Mrs. Bruce, in opposition to her husband, who was pro-slavery, sent Harriet into hiding. To end the nightmare of constant pursuit, Mrs. Bruce bought Harriet’s freedom for $300, without her knowledge.

It had to be without her knowledge, for Harriet Jacobs was a woman with a strong moral code, which included not enriching slaveowners by buying the freedom of a slave. She did not regard herself as property and therefore should not be bought with a bill of sale. And yet when the deed was done, she confessed that it lifted a heavy load from her weary shoulders.

The full-length narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ends with Harriet’s freedom but her remarkable life continued. It was her Rochester friend, Amy Post, who suggested she write her life story, which she believed would aid the abolitionist cause. Harriet vacillated. It was one thing to discuss her intimate life with a woman friend, and quite another to go public with it, especially since she felt guilty about her sexual relationship with Attorney Sands. In her letters to Amy Post and in Incidents, she acknowledged, I know I did wrong. The painful and humiliating memory will haunt me to my dying day. Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.

With the heroism that marks her life, Harriet refused to allow guilt and shame to deter her from making public the sexual oppression she had endured and the deliberate action she chose to thwart it. She was still working for Mrs. Bruce, who suggested that Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famous author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, might be interested in having Harriet dictate the narrative to her. Many slave narratives were so dictated. Stowe’s response was that she was working on A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story is Founded, and some of Harriet’s facts could be included therein. Harriet wanted her life story to be a separate history and decided to write it herself, hopeful the book would arouse Northern women to realize how deep and dark and foul is that pit of abominations, chattel slavery.

It took Harriet five years to accomplish her goal, writing after work and in secret, because her employer, Mr. Bruce, would have objected. Her premonition was correct. He was a defender of slavery and later wrote an article stating that blacks were happy with their lot. She honed her craft, so to speak, by also writing long antislavery articles. Letter from a Fugitive Slave was published in the New York Tribune in June 1853, and Cruelty to Slaves in July 1853. Later, Life Among the Contrabands was published in William Lloyd Garrison’s journal, the Liberator.

When Incidents was finally completed, Harriet traveled to England in vain, hoping to find a publisher. Back in America, a Boston company, Phillips and Samuels, agreed to publish it but went bankrupt before printing. Harriet bought the printing plates and another Boston firm, Thayer and Eldridge, agreed to publish the narrative if the renowned author, Lydia Maria Child, would write a preface. William C. Nell, a black abolitionist, introduced Harriet to the author, who also agreed to edit the manuscript.

What Harriet Jacobs accomplished in Incidents is astounding. She attacked cherished institutions, refusing to accept the status quo, refusing to accept the station in life reserved for her, refusing to accept the denial of her humanity by the powers that be. Those powers itself she called into question. The law declared that although she had fled to the free states, she was still a slave. Harriet regarded such laws as the regulations of robbers who had no rights that I was bound to respect.

Aspects of the patriarchal system also came under attack. Harriet linked the sexual exploitation of female slaves with the degradation of Southern white women. Although they were often vindictive and cruel toward the objects of their husbands’ lust, nonetheless, the mistress of the house and the female slave alike were subject to the vices imposed upon them by their lord and master. Slavery, Harriet wrote, made those lords cruel and sensual, their sons violent and licentious, their daughters contaminated, and their wives wretched. Slavery corrupted the morals of white families and impoverished black families by denying them control of their own lives and destiny, which was degrading, and by the forced separation of husband and wife, parent and child.

Another institution that earned Harriet’s scorn was Southern white churches. Denouncing them as unchristian, she insisted that missionaries routinely sent overseas should peer into the dark corners at home and talk to American slaveholders. Tell them it is wrong to traffic in men. Tell them it is sinful to sell their own children, and atrocious to violate their own daughters. Tell them that all men are brethren, and that man has no right to shut out the light of knowledge from his brother.

She challenged the ideology so beloved by racists that black men were inferior, contending that such inferiority was the ignorance they were forced to endure, the physical violence that lashed the manhood out of them, and the bloodhounds of the South that pursued a black man to his grave. And while alive, he was accused of being a natural-born thief, an accusation that Harriet contested. When a man’s wages were systematically stolen from him, and the laws sanctioned and enforced the theft, he should not be expected to have more regard for honesty than the men who robbed him. In the same vein, she commented that abusive poor whites should realize that the same power that trampled on colored people also kept them, the whites, in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation.

Incidents was published in January 1861, a tumultuous year that focused more on the Civil War than the publication of a slave narrative. It languished until rediscovered in the early 1970s as a result of the agitation of the Civil Rights Movement. In the interim, Harriet joined the abolitionist cause. Sponsored by the Quakers, the Society of Friends in New York, she and her daughter, now educated, traveled all over the South, including their hometown Edenton, doing relief work for the impoverished former slaves. The English edition of Harriet’s book, The Deeper Wrong, was published in London, and she traveled there again to raise funds for an orphanage and a home for the aged. She operated a school for emancipated slaves in Alexandria, the Jacobs School, where the freedmen themselves voted that its teachers should be black. We were gratified by this, Harriet wrote in a letter to Lydia Maria Child. These people bred and born in slavery, had always been so accustomed to look upon the white race as their natural superiors and masters that … the fact of their giving preference to colored teachers … indicate that even their brief possession of freedom has begun to inspire them with respect for their race. At the age of eighty-three, Harriet Jacobs died in Washington, D.C.

When Incidents was reissued in 1973, critics and scholars debated whether a former slave had the ability to write it, and if this was fiction or a true account of the antebellum South. Jean Fagin Yellin, literary historian, resolved this debate with her six-year-long meticulous research at the State Archives in North Carolina, Smith College, and the University of Rochester. She contacted state and local historical societies, tracking down the real names of the characters in Incidents, and the historical accuracy of events. She uncovered a voluminous correspondence between Harriet and her abolitionist friends, Amy Post, Lydia Maria Child, and others, as well as Harriet’s published articles. All of it demonstrated conclusively to scholars and critics alike that Incidents was an authentic autobiography written by Harriet Jacobs.

Her narrative is now a staple in women’s studies departments and in feminist literature, its heritage obvious as a legion of writers confront the problems Harriet so astutely identified, which are still problematic today. Incidents and the narratives of Frederick Douglass are both recognized as classics, eyewitness accounts of a history we all should know.

The wounds inflicted upon the American psyche by chattel slavery have not yet fully healed, and cannot until responsibility is accepted for the social and economic inequities that it spawned. Only then can racial strife be supplanted by peace and harmony, not only in America but in all the nations that were involved in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

It’s incredible that Harriet Jacobs, a disadvantaged descendant of that trade, was able to detect in the South and the North practices at odds with its democratic ideals. We have all been wounded, but the truth of history itself can be a balm. To know the life story of this remarkable woman, as revealed in Incidents, is to be empowered by her.

—Louise Meriwether

PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR.

READER, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery; on the contrary, my descriptions fall far short of the facts. I have concealed the names of places, and given persons fictitious names. I had no motive for secrecy on my own account, but I deemed it kind and considerate towards others to pursue this course.

I wish I were more competent to the task I have undertaken. But I trust my readers will excuse deficiencies in consideration of circumstances. I was born and reared in Slavery; and I remained in a Slave State twenty-seven years. Since I have been at the North, it has been necessary for me to work diligently for my own support, and the education of my children. This has not left me much leisure to make up for the loss of early opportunities to improve myself; and it has compelled me to write these pages at irregular intervals, whenever I could snatch an hour from household duties.

When I first arrived in Philadelphia, Bishop Paine advised me to publish a sketch of my life, but I told him I was altogether incompetent to such an undertaking. Though I have improved my mind somewhat since that time, I still remain of the same opinion; but I trust my motives will excuse what might otherwise seem presumptuous. I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history. Neither do I care to excite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations. May the blessing of God rest on this imperfect effort in behalf of my persecuted people!

Linda Brent

INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR.

THE author of the following autobiography is personally known to me, and her conversation and manners inspire me with confidence. During the last seventeen years, she has lived the greater part of the time with a distinguished family in New York, and has so deported herself as to be highly esteemed by them. This fact is sufficient, without further credentials of her character. I believe those who know her will not be disposed to doubt her veracity, though some incidents in her story are more romantic than fiction.

At her request, I have revised her manuscript; but such changes as I have made have been mainly for purposes of condensation and orderly arrangement. I have not added any thing to the incidents, or changed the import of her very pertinent remarks. With trifling exceptions, both the ideas and the language are her own. I pruned excrescences a little, but otherwise I had no reason for changing her lively and dramatic way of telling her own story. The names of both persons and places are known to me; but for good reasons I suppress them.

It will naturally excite surprise that a woman reared in Slavery should be able to write so well. But circumstances will explain this. In the first place, nature endowed her with quick perceptions. Secondly, the mistress, with whom she lived till she was twelve years old, was a kind, considerate friend, who taught her to read and spell. Thirdly, she was placed in favorable circumstances after she came to the North; having frequent intercourse with intelligent persons, who felt a friendly interest in her welfare, and were disposed to give her opportunities for self-improvement.

I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn. I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them. I do it with the hope of arousing conscientious and reflecting women at the North to a sense of their duty in the exertion of moral influence on the question of Slavery, on all possible occasions. I do it with the hope that every man who reads this narrative will swear solemnly before God that, so far as he has power to prevent it, no fugitive from Slavery shall ever be sent back to suffer in that loathsome den of corruption and cruelty.

L. Maria Child

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I: Childhood.

CHAPTER II: The New Master and Mistress.

CHAPTER III: The Slaves’ New Year’s Day.

CHAPTER IV: The Slave Who Dared to Feel Like a Man.

CHAPTER V: The Trials of Girlhood.

CHAPTER VI: The Jealous Mistress.

CHAPTER VII: The Lover.

CHAPTER VIII: What Slaves are Taught to Think of the North.

CHAPTER IX: Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders.

CHAPTER X: A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life.

CHAPTER XI: The New Tie to Life.

CHAPTER XII: Fear of Insurrection.

CHAPTER XIII: The Church and Slavery.

CHAPTER XIV: Another Link to Life.

CHAPTER XV: Continued Persecutions.

CHAPTER XVI: Scenes at the Plantation.

CHAPTER XVII: The Flight.

CHAPTER XVIII: Months of Peril.

CHAPTER XIX: The Children Sold.

CHAPTER XX: New Perils.

CHAPTER XXI: The Loophole of Retreat.

CHAPTER XXII: Christmas Festivities.

CHAPTER XXIII: Still in Prison.

Reviews for Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

[ilex011 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Deeply moving and raw. Highly recommended.

[billsearth · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a good story and reads like an autobiography. The author conveys well the over-reaching ethical decadence and depravity caused by slavery as it interfered with her life, family, and friends for many decades. Unfortunately this version has illustrations on the cover and embedded within it that are completely unrelated to the story. One illustration, page 232 cannot be read even with a jeweler's headband, very poor illustrations. The author's name is in fine print in the introduction and on page 251 instead of somewhere on the cover, dust kacket, binding, or with the publishing information or title page. There is a lot about a person named Bob Carruthers both inside the book, and on the dust cover, complete with an Academy Award picture, apparently belonging to Bob Carrutheres. I find all this Bob Carruthers promotion a distraction from the real author, so I give this version ony 4 stars, not more.

[kayprime · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It is my understanding that slave narratives were written to aid the abolitionist in persuading white northerners to join the movement by illustrating the horrors of slavery. Considering the era and her audience, I realize it was necessary for Jacobs' language to bring attention to such vulgarities without actually being vulgar. Personally, I felt her portrayal was too tame when it came to describing the 'brutality and injustice inflicted on female slaves that trampled on their humanity and their gender all at once.' Still, her pain and anguish are not wasted on me:"I admit that the black man is inferior. But what is it that makes him so? It is the ignorance in which white men compel him to live; it is the torturing whip that lashes manhood out of him; it is the fierce bloodhounds of the South..." or here,"Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing his voice,' just to highlight a few.Coming out on the other end of this narrative, I have a greater appreciation for my own basic HUMAN liberties that I take for granted every day. Jacobs' story moves me as a woman, angers me as an African, and shames me as an American to know that this is part of my history.

[lizamichelle1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A must read! A first hand account of what kidnapped/enslaved Africans went through during slavery, this woman in particular. Even when she went to the free states she encountered bigotry. To know that you were born into a land, forced to labor for this land, and be treated worse than the immigrants who came to America on purpose, would have made anyone angry at everyone.The courage this woman had to pursue what she wanted and needed for herself and her children is inspiring.

[bjmitch_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a free book available for Kindle and as there are so few memoirs of slaves written by themselves, I couldn't resist. You most likely know it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write and those who did learn usually kept that fact secret. This slave, however, as a house slave had access to reading materials and read especially newspapers and the Bible all her life to give pertinent news to other slaves.Her name was Linda. She was owned by the very young daughter of a doctor, but the doctor treated her as his own. She resisted his attempts to seduce her and managed to evade his direct orders to make her body available to him at will. She was quite valuable since she had light skin (the daughter of mullatoes) so he didn't dare lessen her value in any way.Eventually she was seduced by a white man who she trusted; he had convinced her he would buy her and set her free. She had two children by him which of course infuriated Dr. Flint, her owner's father. When the children are still quite young, she finds herself in such danger that she must leave her children with her aged grandmother in order to escape. She spends many years hidden in an attic of a shed where she is unable to stand up before she is able to escape to the North.Linda's story is one of courage and heartbreak, a story of almost unendurable physical and mental abuse and hardship, but throughout a story of a woman's pride despite being a slave and her devotion to her family, particularly her children. It is also the story of the courage of people willing to help her and her children. I found it as page-turning as a mystery novel and even more frightening since it was a true story.I recommend this free book to Kindle owners.

[livelylady · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was published in 1861, just before or at the start of the CIVIL WAR. The memoirs of a black woman and her growing up and adulthood in slavery. At the end she was in the north, having her freedom bought by the woman for whom she worked. And she was reunited with her children at that time. Very good, interesting. Amazing that even in the north, there was class discrimination. The only reason I did not give it a "5" was that as it was written in the way of the day, I found it difficult to read. But that was also part of the uniqueness.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was an interesting and education read, I found myself cringing many times over the treatment these people endured. I found myself having to put the book down after each chapter and then practically having to force myself to pick it up again. What this one woman went through to attain freedom for herself and her children is a testament to her spirit and endurance.I have heard that this book is not the actual life of one person, but rather a collection of stories put together and released as an abolitionist document. I say either way these atrocities did occur and it’s important to bring these slave stories to light.While the book at times is over-written in the language of the day, it still manages to convey the corruption and dehumanization of slavery. Putting this book into our hands makes it impossible to turn away from the history of persecution and ill-treatment that slavery brought to so many. So, not a book to enjoy, but certainly a book to educate and inform.

[citizenjoyce · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One could say that the writing style of [Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl] were too genteel for the topic of escape from the evils of slavery, but women in the 19th century valued gentility, [[Harriet Jacobs]] perhaps more than most because she felt her readers might find some of her life choices indicative of low morals rather than survival tactics. I was surprised that the attempted "wooing" of "Linda" seemed so much like the wooing referred to in [Wench], though I imagine [[Perkins-Valdez]] is very familiar with this work. I hadn't thought that wooing had any part in master-slave relations, but rather that such relationships stemmed from more straight forward rape. However, I'm sure it eased the conscience of some slave owners to think that their paramours had willingly succumbed to their charms. Spiritual leaders like Dinesh D'Souza and historians like Thaddeus Russell have have parroted the Confederate belief that idealizing the rebellion against slavery is a source of disability among some African Americans. In his book The End of Racism (D'Souza) asserted that the "American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well." Perhaps D'Souza has a very limited imagination if he cannot think of the ways property can be misused and the implications of this misuse when the property is a human being. Russell says that slave families were of course split up, but so were non slave families because children had to be sent from home to work. Jacobs, having heard that argument even in the 19th century describes just such English families that have to separate to find work but who are able to communicate with each other, thus maintain the family. Slave families, once broken up, often didn't even know where the various members had been sent. The most impressive part of the book to me was the account of the slave's life once she had escaped to the North. Just as all romances used to end with marriage, "and they lived happily ever after", accounts of escape from slavery usually end with the joy of escape. However, in the US the slave couldn't relax in her new found freedom because she was at all times subject to capture and return even from the "enlightened" cities of Boston and New York. The description Jacobs gives of the way she raised her children, sending one to boarding school and the other off with a brother reminded me of the Filipino people I have known and the fluid child rearing methods immigrants have always used to try to guarantee the futures of their children. I recommend this book to anyone wanting to get an accurate picture of slavery, and of the treatment of women.

[cbl_tn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoy reading 19th century memoirs, so I expected to like Harriet Jacobs' memoir of her life in slavery and her eventual escape. I did like it, but not as much as I expected. Jacobs wrote under a pseudonym and changed names of places and people. This decision is understandable since the book was published before slavery was abolished, but it made it feel a bit like fiction to me. While the heavy appeal to readers' emotions is typical of the book's era, 21st century readers have been conditioned by decades of political spin and Madison Avenue advertising to be skeptical of this sort of approach. I have a recent biography of Harriet Jacobs by Jean Fagan Yellin in my TBR stash. Since my interest has been aroused, I hope to work Yellin's biography into next month's reading list. It should have more details and documentation than Jacobs was comfortable putting in her memoir, and I hope it will give me a greater sense of her life and legacy.

[schmerguls · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an account of the life of a girl born in slavery in 1813 in Edenton, N.C. When she was a teenager she was sexually molested by her master, from whom she hid in a garret for nearly seven years before escaping to the North. She had had two children by Samuel Sawyer, who went on to serve one term in he U.S. House from 1837 to 1839 and did little for the children she bore him. The author suffered from racism even in the North. The book is not well-written and I found myself glad to get to the end of the book, even though one cannot help but empathize with the author and her dire, almost ubelievable travail.

[shesinplainview · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Honest, painful, sad, and ultimately triumphing. This memoir of a former slave defines determination and love. How Harriet Jacobs sacrificed in order to ensure her children's freedom is beautiful.

[krazy4katz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A book of such pain, but such dignity, and very accessible. Her story feels unique, but I have to remind myself that it represents the life of so many people enslaved at that time. And she was actually luckier than many others! Hearing the story of slavery from a woman also gave me a unique perspective. This book should be read over and over to remind ourselves what must never happen again anywhere in the world. Of course I knew "in my mind" what happened during slavery, but it is quite different to read a first-hand account. For me, it ranks with Nelson Mandela's autobiography in its ability to sensitize me to the dehumanizing conditions of slavery and racism. Absolutely a worthwhile read.

[rachelweaver_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the most important documents of American literature. There would be no Uncle Tom's Cabin without it. There would be no Beloved without it. It's a terrifying life story of indignities and survival, an American Anne Frank.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A good edition of the text with a careful and contextualizing introduction. If you're interested in reading the narrative, this is a worthy edition, complete and unabridged. The edition of "A True Tale of Slavery" by John S. Jacobs isn't necessarily a reason to pick up this edition though--if you've read any other slave narratives from the male perspective, his won't provide anything new, either materially or historically. It's not a bad read, but it's nothing new if you're familiar with the more cannonized works within the genre of slave narratives either.

[angela9vaughn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book moved me. The true life story of this womans fight for freedom, for not only herself and her children was more than she expected even in the Free North. I love that at although she tells her story, she is very polite about the whole thing and she never reveals too much, as a lady would never do that. It just goes to show how the times have changes.

[kendrarenee · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

enjoyed it, found it rather eye-opening as much as slavery stories can be for someone who's taken a bunch of decent american history classes, but I do wish it could be re-written for a different audience, because I found her constantly pleading tone a bit much, after awhile.

[sgerbic · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reviewed March 2007 Originally purchased for History 100W a writing class, I read this book as it was about slavery pre-civil war. Not sure what to say about this book, it is a quick read and it really does seem unbelievable. Regardless of the appendix by two persons who claim the story is true it is very hard to believe that this woman shut herself in a small attic, unable to stand for 7 years. Her children, family and friends were just too perfect, risking death to help her. Yet all around her other slaves were dying for little cause. I also didn’t understand how she was able to “run into” so many acquaintances and friends from the South when she was in Boston, New York and Philadelphia? Through the book is truly unbelievable it was still written during the 1850’s and seems to tell the story of slavery. I’m glad I added this book to my library. P.S. I looked up Jacobs on-line and it appears she is a source of historical resource. There is a website with pictures of the doctor and his home. Also a drawing of her grandmother’s home with the crawlspace. Yale University is sponsoring a paper project and other universities offer her later writings for research. so I guess there must be more to her than I thought. 7-2007

[gmillar_8 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I gave this book five stars for a couple of reasons: it is five star hellish, it is five star storytelling. There are parts of her life story that I won't soon forget.

[duranfan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm sorry that I had never heard of this book before now. And I'm more surprised that this book isn't required reading in high schools and colleges. It should. An amazing personal look into the life black women had to endure during the era of slavery. Very touching story.

[autumnesf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Should be required reading for our jr. high students to get a look at slavery and how it destroyed people.