Harriet Ann Jacobs, daughter of Delilah, a slave, and Daniel Jacobs, a slave who was born in Edenton, North Carolina, on February 11, 1813. Until she was six years old Harriet was unaware that she was the property of Margaret Horniblow. Before her death in 1825, Harriet's relatively kind mistress taught her slave to read and sew. In her will, Margaret Horniblow bequeathed eleven-year-old Harriet to a niece, Mary Matilda Norcom. Since Mary Norcom was only three years old when Harriet Jacobs became her slave, Mary's father, Dr. James Norcom, an Edenton physician, became Jacobs's de facto master. Under the regime of James and Maria Norcom, Jacobs was introduced to the harsh realities of slavery. Though barely a teenager, Jacobs soon realized that her master was a sexual threat.
Around the time Harriet turned 15, Norcom began his relentless efforts to bend the slave girl's will. To get Harriet away from his wife, who was suspicious of her husband's intentions, he built a cottage for the girl slave four miles from town. Harriet had previously asked Norcom for permission to marry a free black man. Norcom violently refused. Now Harriet had a plan to disrupt his fight for sexual conquest: She had become friends with a caring white man -- an unmarried lawyer. She formulated a plan where she would become sexually involved with this man, become pregnant, and an infuriated Norcom would sell her and her child. A child was conceived. Nevertheless, Norcom had no intention to sell her.
Still, Norcom pursued Harriet. The harassment continued even after she bore the lawyer another child. Finally, after she learned that Norcom was preparing to put her children to work as a plantation slave, she had had enough. In June of 1835, after seven years of mistreatment, Harriet escaped. For a short time, she stayed with various neighbors, both black and white. Then she moved into a tiny crawlspace above a porch built by her grandmother and uncle. 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. Rats and mice crawled over her; there was no light and no ventilation. But her children had been bought by the lawyer and were now living in the same house. Harriet could even see them while they played outside through a peephole she had drilled. She lived in the crawlspace for seven years, coming out only for brief periods at night for exercise.
In 1842, Harriet made her escape to freedom. She sailed to Philadelphia, and after a short stay traveled to New York City by train. There she was reunited with her daughter, who had in the meantime been sent by her father. Harriet would later move to Rochester, New York, to be close to her brother, also a fugitive slave. There she became involved with the abolitionists associated with Frederick Douglass and his newspaper,. In the following years, she would move back to New York, flee to Massachusetts to avoid Dr. Norcom, and finally become legally free after a friend arranged her purchase. Friends later convinced her to write an account of her life as a slave. Jacobs began compiling her narrative in 1853, completing it in 1858. What began as a serialized version of her life as a slave girl in Frederick Douglas' newspaper, The North Star. Jacobs was determined to tell her own story, she would later publish an account of her anguished life in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The book was one of the first open discussions about the sexual harassment and abuse endured by slave women. Following its publication, (which received little public acclaim until it was rediscovered more than 100 years later as part of the new renaissance of black women writers) Jacobs spent the remaining years of her life as an activist, supporting herself by working as a seamstress and later running a boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After her brother's death in 1875, Jacobs and her daughter moved to Washington, D.C., following her mother's example, helped organize meetings of the National Association of Colored Women. 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. After the war, she worked to improve the conditions of the recently-freed slaves.
Harriet Ann Jacobs died in Washington, D.C. on March 7, 1897.
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