Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) was born into slavery and repeatedly evaded the sexual advances of her owner, Dr. James Norcom. For seven years she hid from him in her grandmother’s shack in a crawl space so small she could not stand. Finally, in 1842, she escaped to the North and wrote, under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, work that endures in the great canon of slave narratives. Jacobs is buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts, beneath a headstone that reads “Patient in tribulation, fervent in spirit serving the Lord.”
WORKS THAT HAVE APPEARED IN NARRATIVE:
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a novel excerpt, in Stories of the Week: 2016–2017