Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Summary

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is Harriet Jacobs's account of her life in slavery and escape, told under the name Linda Brent with the names of people and places changed. Linda grows up in a North Carolina town believing herself free until, at six, her mother dies and she learns she is a slave. Her first mistress teaches her to read and spell, but at her death in 1825 bequeaths Linda, then about twelve, to a young niece, so that Linda comes under the control of the girl's father, the town physician Dr. Flint. Her grandmother, Aunt Martha, a freed woman respected in the town for her bakery and her faith, is the moral center of the book. As Linda enters her teens Dr. Flint pursues her with unwanted advances, and his jealous wife turns her anger on the girl. Forbidden to marry a free man she loves, and seeking some protection, Linda enters a relationship with Mr. Sands, an unmarried white lawyer, and bears two children, Benny and Ellen; she writes of this with deep shame and asks the reader not to judge her by the standards of the free. Dr. Flint sends her to his son's plantation to break her and threatens to bring the children there too, and in June 1835 she runs away. Friends, including a sympathetic white woman, hide her; then she is taken to a crawlspace above a shed at her grandmother's house, nine feet long and seven wide, three feet high at its peak. There she stays for nearly seven years, reading, sewing, and watching her children through a small hole she bores in the wall, while Dr. Flint searches for her in the North. Mr. Sands buys the children through a trader, and her brother William escapes to the North. Linda suffers cramps, cold and illness in the garret. In 1842 she escapes by boat to Philadelphia and New York, recovers her daughter, and finds work as a nurse with the kind Mrs. Bruce. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 puts her in danger again, and she spends periods in hiding and a year in England, where she finds a welcome she has not known at home. In 1852 the second Mrs. Bruce buys her freedom from Dr. Flint's son-in-law over her objections, and Linda declares that her story ends with freedom, not with marriage, though she still longs for a home of her own. The book was published in Boston in 1861, printed for the author, with an introduction by Lydia Maria Child, who edited it, and an appendix of testimonials from Amy Post and George W. Lowther.

Top Lessons

• A mother's endurance

  Linda's flight and her seven years in the garret are undertaken for Benny and Ellen. She chooses darkness, cold and cramped limbs over a life in which her children would be raised in slavery, and she watches them through a hole bored in the wall. The book honors the self-sacrifice of mothers and the strength of family bonds that slavery could not break.

• Faith tested and kept

  Aunt Martha's trust in God steadies the family through every loss. Linda distinguishes true Christianity from the religion of slaveholding churches, and she records her own struggles to pray and to forgive. Faith in the book is not easy comfort; it is held through sorrow and doubt.

• Telling the truth with restraint

  Jacobs changed names to protect others and wrote of her most painful choices with shame and honesty, asking her readers, especially Northern women, to understand rather than condemn. Her reticence is itself a form of dignity, and her frankness was a moral act meant to move readers to oppose slavery and the return of fugitives.

• Freedom and home

  Linda's freedom is bought by a friend, and she is grateful yet grieved that a human being should be sold in New York. She ends by saying her story ends with freedom, not marriage, and that she still longs for a hearth of her own. Freedom is the beginning, not the end, of a life rebuilt.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The narrative's persecutor is a physician, a fact Jacobs uses pointedly: Dr. Flint's medical authority and household access are part of his power over her, and he attends Mrs. Flint and the household while his enslaved servants have no recourse against him. It is therefore a source for the history of medical ethics and of physicians' place in a slaveholding society. The seven years in the garret are described physically: cramp, numbness and swelling of the limbs from inaction, frostbite, a winter episode in which her face and tongue stiffened and she lost consciousness and the power of speech, and lasting trouble with her limbs after escape, for which an employer later engaged a physician. Aunt Nancy's sleep deprivation as a night nurse and her repeated pregnancy losses are recorded with restraint. Linda's chronic fear of discovery, sleeplessness and dread at every newspaper list of arrivals are often read in light of later understandings of traumatic stress, but these are interpretations; Jacobs describes them in the language of her time.

• Chapter XXI, The Loophole of Retreat

  Dimensions of the garret, the absence of light and air, and the frostbite of her shoulders and feet in the first winter.

• Chapter XXIII, Still in Prison

  The second winter: cramps, cold in the head, stiffening of face and tongue, loss of speech and consciousness, and revival by her brother.

• Chapter XXVIII, Aunt Nancy

  Her aunt's broken health from night nursing on the floor of the entry, and the deaths of her infants.

• Chapter XXXIII, A Home Found

  Swelling of her limbs after escape and the physician Mrs. Bruce engages for her.

• Chapter XLI, Free at Last

  Her constant watch of the newspaper lists of arrivals and the fear of recapture.