Read Part One HERE
In this post I will focus on a woman named Harriet Jacobs. She lived from 1813 - 1897. Harriet was born in Edenton, North Carolina, USA. She was the daughter of Delilah, the slave of Margaret Horniblow and Daniel Jacobs, the slave of Andrew Knox. Until she was six years old, Harriet was unaware that she was the property of Margaret Horniblow. Before her death in 1822, Harriet's kind mistress taught her to read and sew. In her will, Margaret bequeathed eleven-year old Hariet to a niece, Mary Matilda Norcom. Since Mary was only three years old when Harriet became her slave, Mary's father, Dr James Norcom became in fact her master. Harriet soon realised that her master was a sexual threat.
From 1825, when she entered the Norcom household, until 1842, the year she escaped from slavery, Harriet struggled to avoid the sexual victimization that Dr Norcom intended to be her fate. In desperation she formed a clandestine liason with Samuel Redwell Sawyer, a white attorney with whom she had two children.
Hoping that by seeming to run away she could induce Norcom to sell her children to their father, Harriet hid herself in a crawl space above a storeroom in her grandmother's house in the summer of 1835. In that little hole she remained for the next seven years, sewing, reading the Bible, keeping watch over her children as best she could, and writing occasional letters to Norcom designed to confuse him as to her actual whereabouts.
Although Sawyer had purchased their children in accordance with Harriet's wishes, he moved to Washington D.C. without freeing them.In 1842 Harriet escaped to the North by boat, determined to reclaim her daughter from Sawyer, who had sent her to Brooklyn, New York, to work as a house servant.
Read Part One Hundred And Twenty-Five HERE
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