Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

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1. Seven years hidden in a grandmother's garret

   To escape her master Dr. Flint (James Norcom) and force him to sell her children, Harriet Jacobs hid for nearly seven years (1835–1842) in a crawlspace above her free grandmother's shed in Edenton, North Carolina, about nine feet long, seven feet wide and three feet high at its tallest point. She bored a small hole to watch her children in the street, wrote letters that were posted from New York to make Flint think she had fled north, and came out physically crippled before escaping by boat to Philadelphia. The episode shows a person accepting near-total physical confinement as a better choice than the kind of 'freedom of movement' slavery allowed.

2. Enslaved women cannot be judged by free morality

   Jacobs confesses that she deliberately took a white lover, Samuel Sawyer, and had two children by him to shield herself from her master. She argues that chastity presumes the power to refuse, so a woman owned by her abuser should not be held to the sexual standards of free white women. Virtue, on this view, depends on circumstances: a moral code written for people with legal protection turns into a tool of condemnation when it is applied to people who have none.

3. Slavery corrupts the enslavers' households too

   Jacobs tells the story through the slaveholding home as well as the plantation field. There, the master's sexual predation turns his wife into a jealous persecutor of the victim rather than an ally, and the white children grow up surrounded by open cruelty and adultery. Read this way, slavery is a system that morally degrades everyone in its domestic orbit, and this undercuts the defense of the 'benevolent' Southern household.

4. Purchased freedom still concedes the market's premise

   When her employer Cornelia Willis buys Jacobs from Flint's heirs to end the threat of recapture under the Fugitive Slave Act, Jacobs is grateful but also bitter. Being 'sold at last' felt like confirming that a human being could be property, even though the sale freed her. Her point is that a rescue carried out inside an unjust system's own terms can protect a person while still ratifying the injustice.

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