Yellin not only authenticated Jacobs's authorship of her own memoir of slavery and freedom but uncovered most of the rest of her remarkable life as well. The first she did in publishing a new edition of Jacobs's 1861 "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," in 1987. The second she has completed in this moving biography.
Born in 1813 in Edenton, N.C., Jacobs had loving parents and was sheltered from the knowledge that she was a slave until she was 6. Her father was a skilled carpenter, and her mother a lady's maid. Her own mistress taught her to read and write. However, when her mistress died in 1824, Jacobs came into the ownership of the lecherous doctor James Norcom.
Desperate to escape Norcom's demands, she made an alliance with another white man of higher social status. She had two children with him, which protected her for a while from Norcom. But when Norcom's pressure increased, she faked an escape, hiding in her grandmother's attic for seven years. Finally, she escaped to Philadelphia in 1842.
Until the Civil War ended her fugitive insecurity (a few years earlier, a loving Northern employer had paid off the Norcoms to yield any further claim), she lived in fear of reenslavement, and resided in various places in the North, including Boston, Cambridge, New Bedford, New York City, and Rochester, N.Y., usually working as a nanny. While trying to make a living, she lent her intelligence and writing to the abolitionist cause.
In the late 1850s, Jacobs wrote the autobiographical "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" under the pseudonym Linda Brent, hoping her revelations of the oppression of slavery, especially for women, would further the abolitionist cause. She disguised all places and names. Abolitionist author Lydia Maria Child helped her publish it in 1861, with only light editing.
