Hi, I’m Jackie Strohm, the Prevention & Resource Coordinator at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. Welcome to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast.
To celebrate and highlight stories of people who advanced the anti-sexual violence movement, particularly Black women, we are sharing a series of shorter episodes so you can learn all about the people and events that contributed to our movement
During today’s episode we’re going to learn about Harriet Ann Jacobs, who published the book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, describing the years of sexual abuse she survived at the hands of the white man who enslaved her until she escaped. Her writings raised awareness within the abolitionist movement about the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. 
As a warning, this episode contains descriptions of racial and sexual violence. Please take care of yourself while listening.


Harriet Ann Jacobs was born in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina to her mother, Delilah, who was enslaved by the Horniblow family, who owned a local tavern. Because her mother was enslaved at the time of her birth, she was also enslaved by the tavern keeper’s family. However, according to the same principle, they should all have been free because Deliah’s mother, Molly, had been freed by her white father, though she was later kidnapped. Two years later, Harriet’s brother, John, was born.
When Harriet was six years old, her mother died. She continued to be enslaved by the tavern-owner’s daughter,, who taught her how to sew, read, and write. At the time, very few enslaved people were literate, and in 1830 North Carolina explicitly outlawed teaching enslaved people to read or write.
In 1825, when Harriet was 12, her enslaver passed away. She willed Harriet to her niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, but because she was only three-years-old, Mary Matilda’s father, Dr. James Norcom became her enslaver. Harriet’s brother John, was instead inherited by the tavern keeper's widow. But Dr. Norcom hired John, so that the siblings could live together in his household. 
In 1828 when the widow died, Harriet’s brother and grandmother, John and Molly, were sold at public auction. Molly had been saving her money over many years of servitude at the tavern, and her friends were able to use that money to purchase her and set her free. John was bought by Dr. Norcom, and he and Harriet stayed together.
That same year, Molly’s youngest son, Joseph, who was also Harriet and John’s uncle, tried to escape. He was caught, put in jail, and sold to New Orleans. The family later learned that he escaped again and reached New York. Harriet and John saw him as a hero, and both would later name their sons for him.
After a short while living with the Norcoms, Dr. Norcom started fetishizing and sexually harassing Harriet. Later, in the book she would go on to publish,  Harriet describes the daily torments she endured. She describes how she was caught between the manipulative Dr. Norcom and his wife, who was jealous of her husband’s attraction to Harriet.
When Harriet fell in love with a free black man who wanted to buy her freedom and marry her,  Norcom forbade her to continue with the relationship. Looking for protection from Dr. Norcom, Harriet started a relationship with Samuel Sawyer, a white lawyer and member of North Carolina's white elite, who would some years later be elected to the House of Representatives. 
When Harriet became pregnant from Sawyer, Norcom’s wife forbade Harriet to return to the Norcom house, which allowed Harriet to live with her grandmother, Molly. Still, Molly’s house was only 600 feet away from the Norcom residence, and Dr. Norcom continued his harassment.
In 1829, Harriet gave birth to her son Joseph, and in 1832 she gave birth to her daughter, Louisa. Harriet used the opportunity of the baptism of her children to register Jacobs as their family name. She chose Jacobs because that was her paternal grandfather’s last name, who was also a free white man. The baptism was conducted without the knowledge of Dr. Norcom. 
In 1835, Norcom finally moved Harriet from her grandmother's to the plantation of his son, which was about 6 miles away. He also threatened to separate and sell her children, and it was then that she decided to escape. “Whatever slavery might do to me,” she wrote, “it could not shackle my children. If I fell a sacrifice, my little ones were saved.”
A white woman, who was a slaveholder herself, hid her at great personal risk in her house. After a short time, Harriet had to hide in a swamp near the town, and at last she found refuge in a "tiny crawlspace" above the porch of her grandmother's house. 
The space was nine feet long and seven feet wide. Its sloping ceiling, only three feet high at one end, didn't allow her to turn while laying down without hitting her shoulder. She was barely able to move, and would only occasionally leave the crawlspace at night to exercise. Rats and mice crawled over her; there was no light and no ventilation. Eventually, she put a few small holes in the roof so she had some fresh air and light. She spent her days reading the Bible and newspapers, and sewing clothing for her ch ildren.  
Norcom was furious that Harriet had escaped, and reacted by selling her children and John to a slave trader demanding that they should be sold in a different state, expecting to separate them forever from Harriet. However, the trader was secretly working with Sawyer, the father of Harriet’s children, to whom he sold all three of them. Sawyer allowed the children to live with their great-grandmother Molly.  While locked in her cell, Harriet could often observe her unsuspecting children. “Season after season, year after year, I peeped at my children’s faces, and heard their sweet voices, with a heart yearning all the while to say, ‘Your mother is here.’ ”
In her autobiography, Harriet accuses Sawyer of not having kept his promise to legally free their children. When Sawyer married another woman in 1838, Harriet asked her grandmother to remind him of his promise to free them. So he got Harriet’s approval to send Louisa to live with his cousin in New York where slavery had already been abolished.
In 1842, after seven years in the crawlspace, Harriet finally got a chance to escape by boat to Philadelphia, where she was aided by anti-slavery activists of the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee. After a short stay, she continued to New York City where she was reunited with her daughter, Louisa. 
In 1843, Harriet heard that Dr. Norcom was on his way to New York to force her back into slavery, which was legal for him to do. She avoided Norcom by visiting her brother John in Boston, who had gained his freedom from Sawyer. From Boston, Harriet wrote to her grandmother asking her to send her son Joseph there, so that he could live there with his uncle John. Eventually she and her daughter Louisa moved to Boston.
Harriet was at the mercy of the Fugitive Slave Law, which meant that wherever she lived in the United States, she could be reclaimed by the Norcoms and returned to slavery at any time. In 1852, her employer, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, purchased her freedom from the Norcoms.
In June 1853, Harriet had the chance to read a defense of slavery entitled "The Women of England vs. the Women of America" in an old newspaper. It was written by Julia Tyler, wife of former president John Tyler, and claimed that the household slaves were "well clothed and happy." Harriet spent the whole night writing a reply, which she sent to the New York Tribune. Her letter, which she signed “A  Fugitive Slave," was published on June 21. Harriet’s biographer, Jean Fagan Yellin, comments, "When the letter was printed ..., an author was born."
In October 1853, she wrote to her friend Amy Post that she had met in Rochester, that she had decided to become  the author of her own story. Post was an abolition activist who worked with Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.  
In letters to Post, Harriet expressed the conflict she felt about revealing her life story. To write a book politicizing the sexual exploitation of female slaves, she would have to expose her own sexual history and reveal herself an unwed mother. Ultimately, she created an alter-ego, Linda Brent, who narrates her history in the first person. 
In 1858, she finished the manuscript, and traveled to London to try and get published. Though unsuccessful, she didn’t give up and sent the manuscript to other publishers -- but they all had conditions that Harriet didn’t agree with. She contacted another publisher who demanded that Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist, women's rights activist and novelist, write a preface or they wouldn’t publish the book. Child agreed, and also became the editor of the book. Child re-arranged the material in a more chronological order, and suggested adding more information on the anti-black violence which occurred in Edenton after Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion.
Harriet’s biographer writes, “Both the preface that Jacobs signed as Linda Brent and the introduction her editor Lydia Maria Child supplied, make clear that Incidents was written for an audience of free white women, and that its purpose was to involve these women in political action against the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of white racism. On one level, Incidents is a literary expression of the struggle of black and white abolitionists against slavery and white racism, and the attempt of nineteenth-century black and white feminists to move women to act collectively in the public sphere. On another, it is one woman’s effort “to give a true and just account of my own life in Slavery.”
In January 1861, nearly four years after she had finished the manuscript, Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl finally appeared before the public. The next month, her brother John published his own, much shorter memoir, entitled A True Tale of Slavery, in London. Both siblings relate in their respective narratives their own experiences, experiences made together, and episodes in the life of the other sibling.
In an excerpt taken from the book, Harriet wrote, quote, “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… 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.”
Harriet was actively involved with the abolition movement before the launch of the Civil War. During the war she used her celebrity to raise money for black refugees. In 1862, Harriet went to Washington D.C and Alexandria, Virginia to help escaped enslaved people. In 1864, she and her daughter, Louisa, who had been trained as a teacher, opened up the Jacobs School for the Black community. After the war she worked to improve the conditions of the recently-freed slaves.
Harriet died in Washington on March 7, 1897, and was buried next to her brother in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge. Little is known of her later years in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in Washington, D.C. 
Jacobs was eulogized as quote "a woman of strong individuality and marked character" by another prominent former enslaved person, the Reverend Francis Grimke.
Harriet’s book was rediscovered during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Jacobs’s autobiography was not authenticated by scholars until 1981 and had therefore often been considered a work of fiction. Her book has been considered to be the most comprehensive slave narrative written by a woman
Thanks for listening to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast. To learn more about Harriet Ann Jacobs, check out the resources shared in the episode description. To learn more about the history of the anti-sexual violence movement, check out PCAR’s free History and Philosphy eLearning course at campus.nsvrc.org.