The Woman Who Refused to be Erased
“She was a slave in the South and a fugitive in the South and the North. She was an abolitionist, the author of a published slave narrative. She was a relief worker during the Civil War, and after Reconstruction, she was an entrepreneur.” (The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, introduction)
These are the words that esteemed historian Jean Fagan Yellin uses to begin her epic two-part work The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, that collects and preserves hundreds of documents including hand-written letters, bills of sale, real estate documents, maps, and other things that are connected with Harriet Jacobs and her family.
This epic volume also tells the story of how this historian, through years of hard work, reclaimed Harriet Jacobs’ rightful place in American History.
For over a century, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was treated as something like a ghost story. Because it was published under the pseudonym Linda Brent, critics and historians dismissed it as a “sentimental novel” likely published by the white writer, L Maria Child, shortly before the Civil War to stir up sentiment against slavery.
As a result, Harriet Jacobs was nearly erased from history.
The Woman Who Rediscovered Harriet Jacobs
Historian Jean Fagan Yellin, who had done extensive historical work on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, knew things didn’t add up.
Recognizing that this was something more than fiction, she kept digging-as good historians are known to do.
In her research, she came across little-known documents that called the whole Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as a fiction theory into question.
Reading the papers of the renowned pre-Civil War abolitionist Amy Post, she came across letters between Harriet Jacobs and L. Maria Child.
In these letters, she discovered evidence of two important facts:
- She saw firsthand evidence of Harriet Jacobs’ own handwriting, which included elevated vocabulary and a polish that few formerly enslaved people would have had at the time.
- And, she saw Child refer to herself as an “editor” of the book, not its author.
It took Jean Fagan Yellin another six years to prove that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was actually the true story Harriet Jacobs herself wrote.
Here is what we now know about Harriet Jacobs.
- One of the millions of women who lived under slavery in the South, she was the only one to write her own story and have it saved for posterity. To be sure, other stories are told, but they are largely “as told by,” written and collected by others.
- Harriet Jacobs is the only woman to escape and tell her full story in her own words.
- This was because Harriet Jacobs spent her early years as an enslaved woman and was taught to read and to sew, skills that would serve her throughout her life.
The long road to publication
Harriet Jacobs escaped to the North in 1842, but Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl didn’t get published until 1861.
During those years, she traveled to England as an employee of the famous writer Nathanial Parker Willis. There, she saw firsthand the power of the emancipation movement.
After she returned to the States, she attempted to get her memoir published through several different publishing houses, but hit roadblock after roadblock.
Eventually, after yet another publisher disbanded before the book could finally be published, she received help from a friend and fellow abolitionist, L. Maria Child.
With her help, Harriet Jacobs finally published her book in January 1861 under the name “Linda Brent,” edited by L. Maria Child.
Not an ending, but a new beginning
Many retellings of Harriet Jacobs’ story end here, with her as a free woman and author of a published memoir.
For Jacobs, 1861 marked a beginning, not an end.
She was an industrious woman, strengthened by years of struggle, who still had much to give.
Soon, I’ll continue her story, covering her travels to England, reunion with family, confrontations in New York, and even her return to the South.
