Harriet A. Jacobs

Harriet A. Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, to Delilah Horniblow and Daniel Jacobs. Orphaned at an early age with her brother John, she was passed down to the Norcom family. To avoid the attentions of her new owner, she took a white lover and bore him two children, but he, a future congressman, broke his promise to free them. In 1835, Jacobs escaped and spent the next seven years hiding in a crawl space above her grandmother's storeroom, where she watched over her children after their father purchased them and sent them to live in the house. During that time, reading and writing gave her the literary experience that later enabled her to write her book. In 1842, she fled to New York, worked as a nursemaid, arranged for her children's freedom, and met Quaker reformer Amy Post, who became her confidante and urged her to make her story public. Freed in 1852, Jacobs spent the next five years writing her autobiography, with Lydia Maria Child as her editor. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, became a major contribution to the genre of slave narratives alongside works by Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown. Although many thought her story was too fantastic to be true, Jacobs became famous and used her prominence to do relief work for black soldiers and help create schools for blacks after the Civil War. She later lived for brief periods in Massachusetts while fleeing from her master, ran a boardinghouse on Trowbridge Street near Massachusetts Avenue from 1870 to 1872 for the student sons of her white benefactors, then moved in 1873 to the corner of Story and Mount Auburn streets, where she lived for three years. She lived out her life in Washington, D.C., and was buried with her brother in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States