Harriet Jacobs Research Paper

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina in 1813. Harriet Jacobs mother and father both passed away when she was a small child, then she and her younger brother, John, were both raised by their grandmother, Molly Horniblow. By then Jacobs had already learned to read, write and sew by Margaret Horniblow, the mistress. Jacobs would have high hopes in that being her ticket to freedom but when Margaret passed away be given in the will to Dr. James Norcom, and this would be a tough life of hardship due to the sexual and physical abuse Jacobs would have to endure. Jacobs was able to devise a plan to ward off his sexual advances and assaults by having an affair with a white lawyer named Samuel Treadwell Sawyer and bearing with him two children name Joseph (b.
1829) and Louisa Matilda (c.
1833-1913), but they would legally belong to Norcom. Because Jacobs was afraid of Norcom's constant sexual threats and hoping he might release the hold on her children, Jacobs hid in the storeroom crawlspace of her grandmother's house from 1835 until 1842. For seven years Jacobs would do more than sit up in the cramped up tight space, she would also read, sew, and carefully watch over her children from the roof, awaiting the perfect opportunity to get away to the North. When Jacobs was able to finally leave and work her way to New York City by boat in 1842 and was would be reunited with her kid. Although Jacobs was in New York, she would still be at the mercy of the Fugitive Slave Law, which meant no matter where she was in the United States she could be captured and returned to the Norcoms. It wasn’t until around 1852, that her employer, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, would purchase her
freedom.
In 1861 Jacobs would write an autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and it would be the most widely ready slave narrative. Jacobs autobiography would stand out from the male-dominated slave narrative with a unique point of view and highlighting its focus on the sexual abuse of the female slaves. Jacobs would share her most detailed personal life experiences before she was freed from slavery. Prior to Jacobs autobiography, there were many male authors of slave narratives, that had referred to the discrimination of enslaved African American women by white adult males, but none of them had attempted at all to address the subject as direct or boldly as Jacobs chose to. She would not only speak about herself and her sufferings of sexual abuse but also how she devised a plan to avoid the sexual abuse and exploitation by her slave master or superior. Publishing this autobiography meant that Jacobs would be putting her life and her reputation at a high risk to disclose such intimate and personal details. But Harriet Jacobs would appeal to a northern female that might empathize with the difficulty of a southern mother in slavery. Jacobs would keep a focus on the importance of family and motherhood throughout the narrative. Jacobs also talked about the strain of being taken from her grandmother and her two children during her seven years in hiding, her escape to the north, and then in New York and Boston, how she lacked the means to free her own daughter. As her biographer, Jean Fagan Yellin noted, Jacobs slave narrative being quite similar that of other tales with the level of conflict, endurance, and freedom. However, with Jacobs confronting directly the cruel reality that plagued black women in the nineteenth century, Jacobs work occupied a important position in the American literary tradition.