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Harriet Jacobs, a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, was fortunate in the sense that she was never whipped. But her life was nonetheless a living hell. An attractive mulatto, she was sexually harassed by her owner, the town's respectable doctor, for years, and despised by the owner's wife because of it. She surrendered her morals (this was the way she and her grandmother saw it) to another white man who was kind to her in order to at least have some control over her situation. She bore two children by him in the hopes that being "another man's woman" would put a stop to the doctor's sexual predation. Let's have a look at the good doctor, who caused Jacobs so much mental and emotional torture: Dr. James Norcom, Sr. Here's his biography: http://ncpedia.org/biography/norcom-j... When her owner threatened to send her two young children to a plantation known for its brutality, Jacobs went into hiding in a tiny attic space in her grandmother's house in order to divert the doctor's attention. She lived in this coffin-like space for nearly seven years, occasionally venturing out when the coast was clear for a few moments at a time. (The parallels to Anne Frank seem obvious, but the scholarly introduction didn't go there.) Her white lover had secured a domestic position for her young daughter in New York, so once she thought her two children were relatively safe, she escaped from the crawl space, practically a cripple, and sailed north. She served as a domestic and nanny for several kind and/or abolitionist employers. The Fugitive Slave Act became law in 1850 and her owner's offspring kept up the hunt for her, causing some tense times. Finally her employer bought her freedom for $300, which was both a relief and a degradation: she always felt a complete human being, she denied ever being property or chattel, so it was painful to be the object of a commercial transaction. An interesting side note is that Jacobs approached Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Jacobs' story for her, but Stowe was only interested in her as material for her own writing. Moreover, Jacobs had detailed her sexual history in a letter to Stowe and Stowe revealed those details to Jacobs' employer without her knowledge.

2022-10-04 09:46