Chowan County, NC - Harriet Jacobs, 1861 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ News and Observer Tuesday, February 24, 2004 The amazing true tale of a slave girl A biographer writes about Harriet Jacobs, a North Carolina woman who penned a memoir in 1861 By BRIDGETTE A. LACY, Staff Writer Literary scholar Jean Fagan Yellin spent more than 20 years researching the life of slave and activist Harriet Jacobs. For readers interested in the lives of slaves, Duke University has a collection of letters, some of which can be read on the university's Web site. Go to http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/Guides/slave-letters.htm. ---------------------------------------- Yellin, now a retired distinguished English professor from Pace University in New York City, found Jacobs' 1861 narrative, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," too compelling to put down. Jacobs, she thought, seemed gutsy, even as a child, and strong-willed. Yet it was a daunting task to write a biography of Jacobs, a slave born in 1813 in Edenton, who died in 1897 in Washington, D.C. As a middle-class white woman, Yellin says, "I had race and class and a generation working against me." Yellin has finally written a biography of her heroine, "Harriet Jacobs, A Life" (Basic Civitas Books, $27.50). It's a work she calls "the story of sexual exploitation that came out of American slavery." She will discuss Jacobs and sign copies of her book Thursday at the N.C. Museum of History in downtown Raleigh. The author says even after she finally decided to take on the project, she was nervous during the writing. "I was ready not to do this a lot of times," she says. "At each point, black feminist colleagues encouraged me very strongly. They said I knew more about her life than anyone else did. I have spent a lot of my life, thinking about her life, and learning about her life." In contrast to escaped slaves Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, Jacobs was the only slave woman of her time to write her own autobiography rather than telling her story for someone else to record. And while famous slave narratives, like that of Frederick Douglass, tell about an individual's struggle against slavery, Jacobs' work draws on the strength of her family. UNC-Chapel Hill English professor Trudier Harris-Lopez teaches the Jacobs narrative. She says Jacobs and others were able to document their lives despite the laws against teaching slaves how to read and write. "What makes Jacobs' story so special is that it's the most complete account of the enslavement of a black woman during that period," she says. Jacobs learned to read, spell and sew from her mistress. Yellin believes Jacobs taught herself to write from a copy book. Outwitting Dr. Flint For many years, some scholars believed that Lydia Maria Child, a white abolitionist writer, was the author of "Incidents"; they considered the work a fictional account about slavery. Critics couldn't fathom that a slave was educated and sophisticated enough to write her own story, Yellin says. When Jacobs first published her work she used the pseudonym Linda Brent. She used fictional names for the characters. Yet she titled the work "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself," and proclaimed that what she had written was as true as she lived it. Yellin was able to document that Jacobs was the author of "Incidents" by writing to libraries and archives to find letters from Harriet Jacobs or Linda Brent. A Smith College librarian found a Jacobs-penned letter from Edenton. Yellin compared the contents and style of Jacobs' letters. She found the letters consistent with the narrative. Then Yellin compared the events in Jacobs' narrative and the descriptions of places and the people who owned her with real people, history and places in Edenton at the time. With the help of George Stevenson, a North Carolina archivist, Yellin spent six years -- from 1981 to 1987 -- documenting incident after incident in Edenton. Eventually, Yellin wrote a foreword and included notes authenticating Jacobs' authorship and established that "Incidents" was autobiographical in a 1987 re-issue of Jacobs' book by Harvard University Press. Yellin's biography reveals new details about Jacobs' life. Harriet -- called Hatty as a child -- didn't know she was a slave until she was 6. She was shielded by her family, in part because both her mother and grandmother were owned by mistresses instead of masters. Later, Jacobs became sexually involved with her owner's neighbor, hoping the neighbor would free her and her children because in Edenton that scenario had worked before. The narrative told how "Dr. Flint" -- Jacobs' owner -- already had 11 children by other slaves, and was quick to sell off these slaves, even as they suckled his newborn children at their breasts. She was determined to prevent this from happening to her. It's the lens through which Jacobs told much of her story, her attempts to outwit the tireless, malevolent pursuit of her by her owner, says Melissa Solomon, a graduate student at Duke University, who uses Jacobs' narrative in a seminar she teaches for first-year Duke students. Solomon says Jacobs' slave narrative documents something Douglass only hinted at: what author Toni Morrison calls the "uncontested sexual availability" of the African-American female slave to her master. Telling the rest Like all slave narratives, Yellin says, Jacobs' story ends with freedom. But Yellin's book continues Jacobs' story until the end of her life. "She lives until 1897 and she becomes free in 1852. The point is what she does with that freedom," Yellin says. "I carry her story past her freedom, the relief work she does in Alexandria, Va., and Savannah, Ga., and then her retreat North." Jacobs became an advocate for free people, even establishing a school in Alexandria, Va. But when she died a Boston newspaper obituary summed up her life in stark terms, describing her, Yellin says, "solely as the recipient of white patronage." The slight shows why it was important for Jacobs to write her narrative. "She tells her own story with such passion and eloquence," Yellin says. "She's so smart. She understands the significance of her story. She tells it in a purposeful fashion. She really wanted control of her life and her life story." ___________________________________________________________________ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by Kay Early ___________________________________________________________________