Harriet Jacobs: A Life (review)

In 1987, Harvard University Press published Jean Fagan Yellin's breakthrough edition of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, a powerful slave narrative, first published in 1861, that exposed the sexual exploitation of slave girls and women at the heart of the institution of slavery. Before Yellin's edition, most scholars agreed that the narrative's pseudonymous author, "Linda Brent," was its white, abolitionist editor, Lydia Maria Child. Sixteen years later, Yellin has carried her project of recovering Harriet Jacobs to wonderful fruition with the publication of the first full-length biography of the woman who wrote, "by herself," what Yellin calls "a work of American genius" (xxi).

Yellin follows the incidents of Jacobs's life as told in her autobiography, but goes beyond that text with details and context, enriching the well-known story. Jacobs was born in 1813, in Edenton, North Carolina, into an extended African American family that straddled slavery and freedom. The family matriarch, Harriet's maternal grandmother, Molly Horniblow, was a freedwoman and homeowner who ran her own baking business to save money to buy her children; her father was a proud, skilled carpenter who worked for hire; and her mother, who died when Jacobs was six, was remembered as "noble and womanly" (Incidents 5). It was Jacobs's first mistress who taught her how to read, write, and sew. But she died when Jacobs was eleven, and an unsigned codicil to her will left Jacobs the property of the three-year-old daughter of her brother-in-law, Dr. James Norcom, the notorious Dr. Flint of Jacobs's narrative. Yellin's depiction of Dr. Norcom, who sexually harassed the adolescent Jacobs and terrorized her younger brother John, who worked in his office, adds much to Jacobs's own outraged portrait of this lecherous villain. Yellin quotes from an undated fragment from Norcom's papers in which the doctor, who in his "prime," he claims, could have any woman he wanted, calls women who now reject him "our most terrible tormentors & ... devils incarnate" (17). Similarly, Yellin adds detail to Jacobs's gamble to seek protection from Dr. Norcom by becoming the mistress of a white Edenton lawyer, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer. Yellin argues that Jacobs would have taken as her model Rose Carbarrus, an Edenton slave whose aristocratic, white lover had freed her, their young children, and Rose's mother (26). Yellin's account of Jacobs's physical and psychological sufferings—from her seven years of hiding in the crawl space in her grandmother's house to her pained reaction when she learned that her Northern employer, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, had bought her in order to free her—is powerfully drawn, with illuminating, provocative discoveries. Above all, Yellin presents a strong-willed, smart, and courageous woman whose struggle for agency for herself, her family, and her people motivates and guides her. Yellin makes good use of Jacobs's letters to show the budding author's growing determination to write her own narrative. Incidents marked an important stage in Jacobs becoming a social and political activist and joining the articulate, committed community of African American activists that included her brother John, who was by 1861 a fiery anti-slavery lecturer. John's own narrative was serialized in a London journal the same year that Incidents appeared.

Yellin's most important new contributions to the historical record, however, come in the second half of the biography. Here she traces Jacobs's and her daughter Louisa's public advocacy for freed men, women, and children during the Civil War and for years afterward, until Jacobs's death in 1897. She became known as "Mrs. Jacobs," and was admired for helping to empower blacks who had suffered, as she had, under American slavery, racism, and sexism. A prominent member of relief associations and education and reform movements that were energizing African Americans, Jacobs regularly published her views in eloquent letters and articles in activist papers. Yellin shows Jacobs acting with characteristic will and...