THE FREE WOMAN Harriet Jacobs

When Harriet Jacobs’ enslaver threatened to sell her children away to the plantation unless she accepted his sexual abuse, she decided the only way to keep them safe was to run. But with no resources and no way to get north, where could she go instead? The answer is an astonishing one. Jacobs’ story is one of the most dramatic and remarkable ‘slave narratives’ in United States history, yet for over 100 years, everyone believed it was fiction.

With our guest Dr. Maria Windell, discover the incredible life and astonishing history of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and a powerful activist, abolitionist and educator in the ninteenth century United States.

A full transcript of this episode is available here.

A volume of the Harriet Jacobs family papers are available from the National Archives and are a treasure trove of additional information. Find the book at a library near you.

You can find images of the parlor and front passage of the Norcom home, where Harriet Jacobs was enslaved from age thirteen to twenty-six, where they have been preserved at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

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Maria A. Windell is assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she teaches classes on ethnic and early US literatures. Her research focuses on intersections between the US and the Americas, and her book Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She co-edited, with Jesse Alemán, a special issue of English Language Notes on “Latinx Lives in Hemispheric Context.” She is currently working on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary flirts and the classification of coquette hummingbirds in Central America.

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Music featured in this episode included

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