I am not on the Underground Railroad, or travelling the Underground Railroad, or studying the Underground Railroad. So close to my destination, after 4 months of virtual travel, this compelling American heroism is in my bones. I embody the Underground Railroad. I, a 21st century white woman who has lived in freedom and comfort for all of my 60 years, am swept into a history and legacy that I very humbly and somewhat trepidatiously own. A sisterhood. Hattie Jacobs sealed this for me.
Born into a loving Black family in Edenton, North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs as young girl did not know she was a slave. “I was so fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise, trusted to them (slave owners) for safe keeping, and liable to be demanded of them at any moment.” This is the kind of nurturing that Michele Norris (June 17 post) and Condoleezza Rice (Sept 28 post) and so many other youth experienced as insulated Black families and Black communities from the hate-filled Jim Crow South. But the world is exposed ultimately and Harriet witnessed Africans leaving the ship in shackles, heard the screams of fellow slaves being whipped, and grieved over loved ones sold to unknown fates.
Slavery terrified Harriet’s early life, motivated and transformed her middle years, and haunted her until her death in 1897 at age 84. We know her struggles and triumphs through her remarkable autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. I am indebted to Harriet Jacobs, A Life by Jean Fagan Yellin for its vast context and historic scholarship as well as the Harriet Jacobs website hosted by the Edenton-Chowan County Tourism Development and developed through a National Park Service grant offered by its National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program (our tax dollars!).
Image: book cover of Harriet Jacobs, A Life
Nothing of course compares to the power of Harriet’s own words, written under her own power (rather than as a told-to work as most other slave narratives) and published through her own contacts and resources — a story so moving and harrowing that its autobiographical authorship was questioned.
Image: title page of book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
Yellin’s research helps us venture with Harriet Jacobs into the dark territory of female slavery, where sex was currency. And indeed, sexual bondage is the tragic commodity of human trafficking today. For Harriet, her status as a house slave, her intelligence and persona, and her physical beauty drew the attention of her lascivious owner. “It was clear that at fifteen she did not have the option of choosing virginity nor… of choosing marriage with the young man she loved” (Yellin, p 27) Marriage between slaves was not legal, but slaveowners could give permission for cohabitation in a family relationship. Harriet Jacob’s master gave her no such permission. Slaves always “lived under the auspices of masters who controlled the terms of their most intimate relationships.”
Harriet sought to discourage her owner’s advances by entering into a long-term relationship with a White aristocrat, who became the father of her two beloved children. Her grandmother scorned this liaison and Harriet harbored shame for it through much of her life. She reflected, “still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standards as others.” In her owner’s lifelong obsession with securing Harriet as his sexual property, he pursued her over many years and up and down the East Coast after her escape. I indeed do not judge Harriet or other slave women by the same standards as others.
Harriet’s devotion to family and love of freedom were the driving forces of her entire life, and indeed are characterized consistently as abiding themes in slave narratives. “Whatever slavery might do to me,” she wrote, “it could not shackle my children. If I fell a sacrifice, my little ones were saved.” A mother’s protectionism is the essence of many desperate escapes. Despite this fierce love and devotion, families were decimated by slavery. Professor Tera W. Hunter in a great NYT op-ed defies recent attempts to cast slave family life as nostalgia — “Putting an Antebellum Myth About Slave Families to Rest.”
From the skirts of her grandmother; during seven years of hiding and eventual escape; as part of her service to “contraband” slaves in war relief; through decades of establishing schools and teaching Black children; throughout historic civil rights advocacy; during and after the development of her book; and in later years of financial and health decline — she wanted most to have a family home with loved ones at hand. At times she achieved this. She did achieve her own freedom and the freedom of her children, though not in all the circumstances she had hoped.
Harriet’s autobiography is groundbreaking in its authentic portal into the life and heart of a slave woman and freedom seeker, and just weeks ago a similar work came into news. A history scholar verified the identity of a novel and purported semi-autobiography of female slave, Hannah Bond – a contemporary of Harriet Jacobs who escaped from a plantation in Murfreesboro, just 50 or so miles up the Chowan River from Edenton.
My new hero evolved in my mind from Hattie to a revered but warm Mrs. Jacobs, a leader in the country’s transformation and a witness to so many horrific and turbulent times. The debate leading up to passage of the14th amendment, for example, which gave voting rights to former slaves and for the first time inserted the word “male” into the U.S. Constitution (Yeller, p208), helped to ignite a zero-sum mentality of women’s civil rights vs. Black civil rights. Mrs. Jacobs stood firmly for justice in both camps.
Harriet Jacobs in her book published in 1861: “Slavery is terrible for men, but it is more terrible for women.”
Frederick Douglass in 1869: “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.” (Yeller, p208)
Image: Harriet Jacobs in later years
Women in the quest for freedom and living the great national upheaval of the mid 19th century played out powerful stories. A few that call me….
- Acclaimed free Black women and escaped slaves who went on to support the freedom of others – some of whom I have encountered on my journey (Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Mary Ann Shadd) — but also the many unsung heroes who held families together every day
- Bread riots by women in Richmond in 1863 http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/breadriot.htm
- Richmond aristocrat turned abolitionist and Union spy – Elizabeth Van Lew http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Elizabeth-Van-Lew-An-Unlikely-Union-Spy.html
Harriet Jacobs was social change agent extraordinaire. She accomplished more in her life that I could dare aspire, and endured more than I could ever imagine. Which struggles for justice would she champion today?
Invoking the courage of Harriet Jacobs and riding on.
Underground Railroad Virtual Bicycle Journey 2013 