Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

Harriet Jacobs: the life of a slave girl

In 1861, just prior to the American Civil War, Harriet Jacobs published a famous slave narrative – of her life in slavery and her arduous escape. Two years earlier, in 1859, Harriet Wilson published an autobiographical novel, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, tracing her life as “free black” farm servant in New England.

Both books tell moving stories about African American women suffering at the hands of white racists (Jacobs was particularly concerned to show how slavery enabled appalling sexual abuse). Both underline how such racism did not just exist amongst slave-owning southerners and pro-slavery advocates, but also amongst slavery’s opponents. Wilson shows how her Northern farming family, though broadly anti-slavery, allowed her to be tortured by the family matriarch, whilst Jacobs’ book explores how racist incidents blighted her life in the so-called Free North. Jacobs even exposes how Harriet Beecher Stowe, who she turned to for assistance, wanted to use Jacobs’ story merely to underline Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s accuracy. Jacobs objected, because she would lose all authorial control. Frederick Douglass also experienced this problem: white editors and sponsors generally wanted escaped slaves simply to tell their story—leaving all analysis and ethical reflection to whites. This patronizing attitude was, at its core, racist.

One justification for such patronage was a belief that proving the authenticity of African American narratives was vital. Our Nig and Incidents were written at a time when southerners, recognizing how anti-slavery sentiments threatened slavery’s continuation, were keen to depict African American as northern propaganda, misrepresenting the benevolent institution of slavery. To combat such mendacity, abolitionists urged African Americans to limit themselves to straight autobiography, arguing that such simplicity enhanced credibility.

Even today critics still often focus upon pre-Civil War African American writings’ autobiographicality. Important research has resulted, proving that Wilson was a species of indentured servant, kept in near-slavery until eighteen years old, and that Jacobs’ incredible story of her concealment in a tiny attic for seven long years was true.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin‘by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Yet such an emphasis preserves a species of unconscious racism, by underplaying how African Americans dealt culturally with existence before the Civil War. Their lives were so restricted, oppressed and even violently repressed that they developed and drew upon a common reservoir of images, symbols, and metaphors, in order to generate as much oppositional power as possible. Consequently, their valuation of originality and individuality were different to those of whites: more complex and nuanced.

Instead they revisited existing narratives strategically, to add heft to their stories. One famous example is William Wells Brown, who constantly laced-in other writers’ resources. Close to plagiarism though it was at times, his work re-deployed established attacks on racism. Both Wilson and Jacobs incorporate a similar, if more subtly adaptive process, in artful narratives that even have central “characters”: Frado and Lucy, respectively.

Wilson’s narrative is highly structured. Her title page foreshadows key themes: Our Nig; or Sketches from the life of a Free Black in a Two-Story White House, North Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There; By “Our Nig”. Frado cannot escape the circle of slavery (Our Nig <> “Our Nig”). Her white farm house’s racism is legitimated by the White House. She is not “Free,” despite the Declaration of Independence. Like New Englanders generally, her farm family tells two stories: publically, one of benevolence; privately, one of racism. Her story is also carefully shaped. To enhance our sympathy, Frado is constructed as a lively child, but the ways she displays her bright personality – outsmarting an aggressive male sheep, dancing on a farmhouse roof, making her teacher believe his desk is on fire – draw upon common symbolic motifs in children’s stories. Relatedly, her beatings echo those depicted in slave narratives.

Jacobs’ narrative similarly introduces incidents drawing on stock representations of slavery. For example, in both John Brown’s 1855 slave narrative, Slave Life in Georgia, and Jacobs’ Incidents painful cleansing agents are applied to a slave’s back just after a whipping; and slaves are tied up in a back-straining “buck” in order to enhance their pain. Jacobs also draws upon Theodore Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké’s 1839 anthology of slave mistreatments, American Slavery As It Is. Take this passage:

I turn to another [scene] … a stage [was] built, on which a mother with eight children were placed, and sold at auction. … seven of the children were torn from their mother, while her discernment told her they were to be separated probably forever, causing … the most agonizing sobs and cries ….  The scene beggars description

… In the “Macon (Ga.) Telegraph,” Jan. 15, 1839, MESSRS. T. AND L. NAPIER, advertise for sale Nancy, a woman 65 years of age, and Peggy, a woman 65 years of age.

In Incidents this becomes:

I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction-block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all. The children were sold to a slave-trader, and their mother was brought by a man in her own town. … I met that mother in the street, and her wild, haggard face lives to-day in my mind. She wrung her hands in anguish, and exclaimed, “Gone! All gone! Why don’t God kill me?” I had no words wherewith to comfort her.

… I knew an old woman, who for seventy years faithfully served her master. She had become almost helpless, from hard labor and disease. Her owners moved to Alabama, and the old black woman was left to be sold

Both stories draw upon stock narrative elements—the auction block and the old, discarded slave, but Jacobs ramps up the power by selling off “all” the slave mother’s children. Jacobs constantly works into her life story an African American tradition of refashioning common tropes drawn from many sources to create powerful patchworks, stitching together slavery’s patterns of personal and institutional excess and cruelty.

Certainly, both Wilson and Jacobs are writing autobiographically, but this is artfully laced with communal tropes, in order to enhance the levels of resistance their narratives can provide in denouncing racism and varieties of enslavement. This is quite different from white writers’ valorization of individual creativity. But it proves to be far more compellingly forceful when seeking to confront head-on nationwide racist cruelty. These narratives need to be read in this light. And we can learn from their observation that almost no whites are free from traces of racism.

Featured image: Old Wagon by Brigitte Werner, Public Domain via Pixabay

Recent Comments

There are currently no comments.