By Josanna Berkow
Harriet and John Jacobs, sixth generation siblings from one enslaved Edenton family, each wrote definitive narratives. Come learn about their multigenerational legacy of resistance and the tumultuous events in the region where they were enslaved between the Revolution
and the Civil War presented by Michelle Lanier, Director, N. C. Div. State Historic Sites and the Harriet Jacobs Project, in conversation with Jonathan D. S. Schroder on the first of the 2026 Armchair Traveler Series, Monday, September 14, 2026, 5:30 p.m. at the Chowan County Courthouse, 117 E. King St. Edenton.
The story of Harriet Jacobs is unique in the literature of American slavery because it is based on motherhood rather than solitary self-liberation. She detailed her life, using pseudonyms for the people mentioned, in the book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
For Harriet, freedom was inseparable from family:
“My mind is made up – I would foil my master and save my children, or I would perish in the attempt.” Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) Cosimo Classics ed. 2009 p.61)
At age 12, Harriet, mere property under the law, was bequeathed to a 3-year old child upon the death of the “kindly mistress” who taught her to read but failed to free her, and came under the control of the child’s guardian, the town doctor, James Norcom. Forty years her senior, Norcom became increasingly obsessed with Harriet as she matured and began a persistent campaign of sexual predation. At age 15, Harriet began a relationship with
Samuel Sawyer, an unmarried lawyer in town who knew her situation and shown her kindness with whom she had her first child Joseph.
“It seemed less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion” Incidents, supra at p. 48
Humiliated, Norcom threw Harriet and the baby out of his house. Molly Horniblow was Harriet’s grandmother, a slave who had been able to buy her own freedom and a home in
town provided them shelter. Harriet gave birth to a second child by Sawyer, Louisa. Further enraged, Norcom, swore he would never sell her and refused to sell the children to
their father. He told Harriet if she agreed to move to an isolated cottage miles out of town and never see Sawyer again, he would eventually free her and the children but if not, he would send them all to his son’s plantation with no special treatment, subject to sale and separation at any time. Norcom’s promises were worthless.
What options did Harriet have? If she left the safety of the town where Sawyer and her even her grandmother had some influence, she would be entirely vulnerable and so refused the offer.
Harriet devised a plan to run and hide before the children could be “broke” into slavery. She knew Norcom would not sell her children if she were a fugitive:
“They will never sell [my children] to anybody as long as they have me in their power.” Incidents, supra at p. 81
And so, she ran. But she didn’t run north. She ran a mere hundred yards into the attic above her grandmother’s storeroom in the middle of town, yards away from Norcom’s home – concealed, like our own Anne Frank, by a small circle of family and friends who risked everything to keep her secret.
Harriet’s hiding place was a small, airless attic above her grandmother’s storeroom: nine by seven feet, only three feet at its highest point, suffocating in the summer, and unheated in the winter. She could see her children, who had no idea she was there, playing outside, through a peephole she drilled herself.
Enraged by her flight, Norcom threw Harriet’s children, then aged five and two, into the county jail, along with her brother and aunt, certain that would result in her return or
information about her whereabouts. It did not; Harriet had made sure they knew nothing.
Harriet’s real strategy was patience and misdirection. She wrote letters to her family that she arranged to be carried north by a trusted seaman friend and mailed back postmarked from New York, written so Norcom would intercept and read them, confirming the fiction that she had made it to a free state.
Finally convinced that Harriet was not returning, Norcom sold her children to a passing slave trader, never learning the trader was covertly acting for their father. The moment the sale closed, Norcom’s power over Harriet’s children was gone.
Sawyer allowed the children to stay with their grandmother until he married then sent Louisa to serve as a domestic in the home of his New York relatives. Joseph followed. New
York was a free state, and the children were then technically free. It would be years more before Harriet could secure her own passage north. Working in the in the homes of sympathetic Northern families and in the reading room of Frederick Douglass’s antislavery paper, The North Star, Harriet remained at risk to Norcom’s repeated attempts to reclaim her as his property under the Fugitive Slave Act. Only when a friend was able to buy Harriet then free her was she able to reunite her family.
Harriet Jacobs made the decision to hide literally under the nose of her master, unique in the literature of American slavery, to improve the chances her children could be free.
Harriet’s plans were strategic, based on the few tools available to her: patience and misdirection wielded against a man who held all the legal and economic power of a
system designed to suppress her. We rightly celebrate escape as the great act of resistance to slavery. Jacobs shows us something rarer: that delaying flight and choosing the terms of one’s own imprisonment can be the braver act. Hers is a story of motherhood as strategy and patience as defiance.
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