The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (review)

One of the most striking documents in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers is also one of the briefest. From the daybook of James Bozman, an Edenton, North Carolina, merchant, the entry, which is also included as a facsimile reproduction, reads:

Mrs Horniblow by Delily

1 1/2 yd Checks— 6/6

1 1/2 " Ditto— 6/

(12)

This seemingly innocuous document marks the only reference to Delilah, the mother of Harriet Jacobs, outside of legal documents in which she is named as the property of various members of the Horniblow family. Despite the fact that Delilah's daughter left behind dozens of documents testifying to her own existence, she, too, was almost erased from history. That she was not can be attributed to her unyielding will to literacy, her determined effort to render knowable her own experiences as well as those of others who had been enslaved, and the scholarly foresight and generosity of Jean Fagan Yellin. Yellin's work, which began with the recovery and publication of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1987, has introduced scholars and students to Harriet Jacobs, the only known African American woman to write a narrative prior to the Civil War attesting to her experiences as a slave. Yellin's 2004 biography, Harriet Jacobs: A Life, carefully traces Jacobs's career as a reformer and a writer following the war. The publication of the Papers, many of which were collected during Yellin's work on the edition and the biography, alters drastically the ways in which readers will encounter Incidents and think about Jacobs as an author. It will also force us to rethink our approach to documentary editing in a field that needs responsibly transcribed, edited, and published primary documents by and about American women writers if our recovery efforts are to have any long-lasting scholarly impact.

The core of the collection represented here is 103 documents by Jacobs, her brother John S., or her daughter Louisa. In addition to personal letters to correspondents such as Amy Kirby Post, Lydia Maria Child, and Ednah Dow Cheney (some of which were published previously in Yellin's edition of Incidents), the edition also includes Jacobs's periodical publications, two of which appeared in the New York Tribune prior to the publication of her narrative. During her extensive relief work in southern cities like Alexandria, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia, during and after the Civil War, Jacobs went on to publish letters from the field in the Liberator, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and the Freedman's Record. As Yellin notes in her introduction, "Jacobs, both a major and a representative figure of black history in nineteenth-century America, is the only woman known who can enjoy this scholarly treatment" (xxix). The relative silence of Delilah, Jacobs's own mother, highlights just how remarkable—and yet how tragic—that fact is.

The Papers are not limited, however, to Jacobs's writing alone, or even that of her family. Given the relative absence of African Americans from the public record as well as the archive, Yellin and her colleagues Joseph M. Thomas, Kate Culkin, and Scott Korb selected other documents for inclusion as well: wills and other legal documents, newspaper articles and advertisements for lecture tours and publications, and letters and diary entries by people whose lives intersected with those of Jacobs and her family. Allowing her subject matter to shape her methodology, Yellin ingeniously adapts the standard procedures of documentary editing to reveal the life and letters of a community and a movement, as well as a single woman. This allows for the inclusion of some now-well-known voices, such as those of Frederick Douglass and William Cooper Nell, as well as others, such as the fiercely passionate John S. Jacobs and the formidable Julia A. Wilbur, Jacobs's fellow relief worker in Alexandria.

Overall, more than three hundred documents (roughly a third of those collected) comprise the two volumes. Divided into twelve...