Less Like You're Reading Her, More Like You're Listening to Her (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, we welcome editor Evie Shockley to discuss the author's family background, lively language as a storyteller, and influence on Shockley's own creative process as a poet. 

Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry.   For her poetry collections—including suddenly we, semiautomatic, the new black, and a half-red sea—she has been awarded the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize, has twice won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, has received an NAACP Image Award, and has been named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize.   She has served as an editor of jubilat and Feminist Studies, and is Editor for Poetry at Contemporary Literature.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written By Herself, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393870787.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

[Music]  

[Mark]: You are listening to the Norton Library podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library. A new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael von Cannon producing. Today we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs as we interview its editor, Evie Shockley. In part one, we discuss Jacobs's extraordinary life and her escape, her tense life in the north, her battles with her nemesis, Dr. Flint, and the powerful, magnificent chronicle of her life. Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hursten Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovations in African American Poetry. Her poetry collections such as a half-red sea, the new black, semiautomatic, and suddenly we have been widely decorated, including nominations for the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. It is wonderful to have her with us today. Evie Shockley, welcome to the Norton Library Podcast.  

[Evie Shockley]: Thanks. It's great to be with you.  

[Mark]: It's wonderful to have you. And we are going to be discussing Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Your new edition just published. So, Evie, maybe the best place to start is with Harriet Jacobs herself. What do we need to know about her? Who was she? Where and when did she live?  

[Evie]: Harriet Jacobs, um, was born in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina. She was born into slavery and ultimately though became an anti-slavery activist and, um, the author of one of the only narratives about the experience of slavery uh by a black woman, certainly a U.S. black woman. She is one of the most inspiring people you could, you could imagine. A woman who despite all the things that the system of slavery could throw at her had a real sense of self and a sort of self-definition and self-determination that saw her through some really harrowing experiences to use one of her favorite words and led her to her own journey of uh self-liberation.  

[Mark]: Your response begs the question of how did Harriet Jacobs come to write her own narrative. You mentioned it was rare that we would get a slave narrative particularly by a woman. How did she come to write it?  

[Evie]: Yeah, it's true. I read that only maybe 12% of the narratives of slavery that we have were written, uh, by women or more to the point were of the experiences of women. There were others like Sojourner Truth, uh, Mary Prince whose stories exist in book form but they were as told to narratives, uh, where the person whose experiences they were was narrating aloud her thoughts to someone who might be a kind of an amanuensis-editor-like figure. And in those cases, what we have is a kind of, um, a really highly mediated story. We don't have a very good sense in those cases of what were the words, the ideas of the speaker unfiltered and what were the words, ideas, frameworks, decisions of the, of the editor. With Jacobs, because she had an experience that was at once highly representative and fairly unusual––and so one of the ways in which she was unusual is that she lived the first six years of her life in a home with her father and mother, um, and her brother. They were all enslaved and yet living somewhat independently to slaveholders who were, I guess you would say, uh, on the kindly end of the spectrum. Um, her father was a skilled carpenter who, um, made his living and was able to keep what he made over a certain amount that obviously, uh, went back to uh the person who claimed to own him. But with that excess, he was able to maintain a house for, um, his wife. And uh, Harriet's mother was enslaved to a woman who was unmarried and who just didn't, uh, engage in some of the worst abuses, uh, of the system. Until Harriet was six, that was kind of the environment she grew up in, not really even knowing that she was enslaved. At six, her mother passed and she basically went to live with her mistress who had been her mother's mistress in that weird famil– quasi-familial scenario in which she was both taught to sew and taught to read––this is getting to your question––um, also doing running errands and um learning how to be uh a servant to, to her mistress. But it's clear that her mistress taught her to read, taught her to spell, instructed her in the Bible. Um, her family was very religious and, and so that's the way that she came into language, into the ability to–– into literacy, let's say. Um, and she never quit trying to improve herself as, as she would put it, um, to further that education.  

[Mark]: If you read the book, the prose is not just workmanlike, but it's poetic and extraordinary at times. The extended version of the title, or perhaps it's the subtitle, it's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, like a defiant proclamation that, this, these are her words. And so when you read Jacobs as a storyteller, what strikes you about the way that she crafts her life story?  

[Evie]: She, I think, has a real wit, a sharp eye, and a real precision, uh, in her language. She has metaphors that are really beautiful at times. She's able to really make the people and places in the story that she's telling come alive. Um, one of the contemporary reviewers, um, of the narrative when it was initially published said that it's less like you're reading her and more like you're listening to her. And that really gives you a sense of, uh, of her voice. I think in some ways her writing voice was developed as a correspondent. She, she exchanged letters with people during her years, uh, in slavery in North Carolina and after. And, um, and so I think there's a conversational tone to her writing that is pretty distinctive and that you see of a piece with the letters the her correspondence that that we, uh, still have access to. How do you assess the ratio that Jacobs has between telling the narrative of her enslavement and her emancipation versus explicitly making pleas to end slavery or pointing out directly how horrific this system is? Because she does go to both modes during this narrative and how do you think she strikes that balance? 

[Evie]: I mean I think they're of a piece in many ways for her that is–– the narrative is observing a lot of the conventions of the “slave narrative” genre and that slave narrative is in quotes, um, because most of the people who were writing them were no longer enslaved. But she, she observes those conventions like telling a kind of, um, fairly detailed story of one's own life, um, and one's observations to, um, establish one's–– to in a sense authenticate oneself as an authority on the subject of slavery. But then she, uh, does not hold back from her critique of the institution in any way, shape, or form. One of the things that interestingly leads her narrative to be read not only in relation to the conventions of the slave narrative, but in the in relation to the conventions of women's sentimental novels or or, um, seduction novels is the fact that she is at pains to tell this as a story that is being delivered woman to woman. She is explicit about the fact that she is writing to the women of the north and asking them to exert their political power which is not direct. This is obviously way well before women had the vote or could hold office, but, um, she understood that women had had sway at least to some extent with the men in their lives, the husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. And, um, that if they as a group, um, were interested in the end of slavery at the degree that she wanted them to be, it would make a difference. And, uh, and so she was back and forth between that sort of purely narrative mode and that more explicitly political mode as a part of, of creating a document that would speak to those women. 

[Mark]: And maybe one of the ways that gender manifests itself in the narrative, and you've touched on this already, is how focused Jacobs is on family, on extended family, on her children, her mother. And it seems like every chapter, every episode, what's going through her consciousness is her connection to her family or mourning them not being around.  

[Evie]: Yeah, family is central to her to her life, her sense of self. As you get into, um, kind of this the history around her narrative, you come to understand that basically most of the members of her family, her grandmother, her mother and her aunts and uncles, um, then she herself, her brother, and, um, her children initially were all owned, quote unquote, by members of the same family of white Edenton, uh, residents, the Horniblows, um into which, um, the sort of antagonist of this text, Dr. Norcom, um, marries. And so there are all of these relationships –– it's, she lives in a place that's a small town where everyone knows everyone and where members of her family are respected. Um, her grandmother is a like a fixture, um, both while she's enslaved as a way of buying her freedom and then after her, uh, emancipation, her grandmother is a baker and a maker of preserves and she has a clientele among the wealthier white people in Edenton. And that kind of sets the tone for how she is able to influence her children and then her grandchildren and it also creates this –– she's, she's in some ways a matriarch and inculcates her family with, uh, you know a great sense of their of love for each other and, um, reliance upon one another. Um, so that when Jacobs is in some of her darkest moments, uh, during her adolescence, uh, enslaved to the Norcom family, she nonetheless has her brother in the household, her aunt in the household, and those, those relationships really helped sustain her and her love for her grandmother after the loss of her own mother, it becomes a really important factor in some of the decisions that she has to make, um, about how she's going to meet the challenges that she like so many other enslaved women, uh, confronted as a young girl. 

[Mark]: For me, one of the most memorable episodes, and this might also have something to do with the sentimental novel that you were –– that genre that you were alluding to, is when Jacobs is stuck in like a garret or her attic where she can't come out for years and she sees her child bit by a dog and she can she's close enough to see it and hear but can't come out. Right? Isn't that, isn't that such a striking moment?  

[Evie]: I mean the “so near but yet so far” was never truer than in that moment. Um yes, I mean, um, I think one of the most really fascinating things about this narrative is that her freedom begins before she leaves the South. Um, and that's thanks to that familial relationship. Her grandmother is able to buy a house after she, um, is free. And it's, uh, it's, you know, a long story but, um, Jacob comes to hide out in her grandmother's house only a block and a half from where she is enslaved, uh, where her enslaver lives for seven years. 

[Mark]: That’s amazing. 

[Evie]: And from that position, yes, she can not only see her children in good moments as well as terrifying moments like, uh, the case of the dog bite, she can see her enslaver coming and going. Um, and she basically ha a kind of a bird's eye view on the whole town. Um, and I stress that because I think it's really important to the way that she structures this book that her freedom begins from the moment she runs away as opposed to the moment she leaves the South for the North. Um, she is at great pains to portray the North –– which, by the time she's writing this narrative is, um, subject to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 –– um, she's at great pains to sort of take apart the idea that the North is free soil, um, or that's where freedom is. Her freedom is what she takes for herself, and she doesn't need the law to recognize it, although it makes her life easier when the law and her sense of her own freedom, um, align. Um, but her freedom begins ironically in a moment when she is physically more constrained perhaps than she had been when she was, uh, living and working for her enslaver.  

[Mark]: I'm really glad you mentioned that because that really complicates the narrative. It's asking the question of if freedom is a legal concept, if it's a metaphysical concept, if it's a physical concept, and I think it can be answered different ways at different points of the narrative. How Jacobs can be in the South and be free and be in the North and feel really oppressed.  

[Evie]: Mhm. Absolutely. Um, she spent many of the years of her time in the North before the, um, publication of this narrative in the employ of a literary family. Uh, Nathaniel Willis who was a newspaper journalist and editor, one of the most, you know, well-paid writers of his era and, uh, his first and then second wives, uh, were her employers. And what's interesting is they lived in New York City, and another way that she complicates the idea of the North is to, um, make it much more, um, of a variegated space. Um, Massachusetts was a place where slaveholders, at least up until the Fugitive Slave Law was enacted, didn't feel comfortable going in search of their quote unquote “property.” But New York was a place, uh, that was very deeply bound to the South and to slavery, uh, in ways that, um, Clint Smith's book, How the Word Was Passed, talks about really beautifully. Um, and she actually believed that her employer had kind of pro-slavery sympathies. Not to the extent that he would return the woman who was working for him to her quote unquote “owner,” but, um, to the extent that he might not have been happy for her to be writing a narrative, um, for the abolitionist cause. And so, there were ways in which her life was constrained by slavery even you know during, uh, these years when she was ostensibly outside of its clutches. 

[Mark]: And to exacerbate all of this, as Jacobs describes, is the antagonist of the narrative, Dr. Flint. The way he's depicted is he's relentless in his pursuit of recapturing Jacobs. How is he presented? Like if you can assess him as a literary character, how does he emerge?  

[Evie]: Oh wow. So, Dr. Flint, uh, as he is called in the narrative and I guess this is a moment to mention, um, the entire narrative is written, um, through pseudonyms. Um, Harriet Jacobs goes by the pseudonym Linda Brent. The Norcoms, Dr. Norcom and Mrs. Norcom, uh, are aptly named Dr. and Mrs. Flint. Um, uh, they are stony and fiery and so on and so forth. All of the characters, uh, their names are changed to protect the innocent or the guilty. [Laughter] 

[Mark]: Or the guilty, or the guilty.  

[Evie]: Uh, so, um, Dr. Norcom–– I mean as a literary antagonist, he is portrayed as deceitful and hypocritical, as self-important and, uh, lascivious, lecherous. He is just utterly selfish, cruel. He's the kind of man, um, he's described in one moment by Jacobs as an epicure, which as I note in the annotations to the volume, that basically just means he's a fool. And, uh, and he's so intent upon having his food prepared the way he wants it to be and up to his expectations that, um, you know if the cook delivers anything that he's not satisfied with he's just–– he invents all kinds of really cruel, uh, punishments for her. He really, uh, looms larger than life in many ways. Even though, I think, or maybe, um, not despite of–– not despite that but, um, because of that, we have a lot of pleasure in seeing Jacobs, um, outsmart him.  

[Mark]: Returning to gender, how does Jacobs, writing in the middle of the 19th century, how does she characterize the sexual atrocities that Dr. Flint seems so determined to visit upon Harriet Jacobs? 

[Evie]: Yeah. I mean, this is one of the sort of the central pivots of the narrative is that, um, she is inherited by, uh, Dr. Flint's daughter, uh, three-year-old toddler when Harriet is around 12. And so, she comes into puberty in, uh, the Flint, uh, household and what shreds remain of her happy childhood, um, kind of vanish overnight as he becomes intent upon not just, um, sort of his desire for her body, but his desire to control her completely. We know from things that she says about, um, things that she's observed up to this point that he is a man who has had his way with, has raped many women in his possession or under his control. She estimates at some point that, um, to her knowledge he's the father of at least 11 slave children because the condition of the child follows the condition of the mother. So, his children with enslaved women would be enslaved. Um, and she has seen, um, the way he uses these women, makes promises to them about how he'll take care of them, um, if they just give in to his desires, um, and then if they get quote unquote “too comfortable” with that, make any claims upon him or simply, uh, for the sin of having a child that bears a resemblance to its father, um, mother and child can be sold away, uh, have been sold away. And so, she is brought, as she says, prematurely into an understanding of these kind of sexual, uh, exploitations and violations and is forced to come quickly before she's barely 16 years old to some decisions about how she can best protect herself from him in an environment that he is in many ways like the despot of the household. 

[Mark]: And Evie, as your beautiful introduction demonstrates, one of the ways you approach this work is as a poet and some of the points you were just making–– you have connected to some poetry of your own and I wonder if you can talk about how Jacobs' narrative animates your own, uh, creative engagement. 

[Evie]: Yeah, absolutely. Um, I have been inspired by this narrative since the first time I read it and some years ago, I was reading a newspaper article about, um, contemporary, uh, sex trafficking in the U.S. of young women, um, and started to realize that there were so many echoes of Jacobs’ narrative of her description of the despair she felt, um, the kind of being caught between a rock and a hard place of needing to do what she needed to do to survive, but also wanting to maintain her bodily integrity, um, her sexual integrity, um, and the choices that one might make in those kinds of circumstances. It led me to create a fairly long poem, and too long to to share I think, um, that is–– my work was not to write the poem but to do a mashup, as we call it, to put together directly lines from Jacobs’ narrative with lines from this newspaper article including quotes from young women who had been involved in sex trafficking, uh, and who had been trafficked across state lines and so forth, and just let the language of the past and the present speak to each other directly. Um, and I was really pleased with what the work that poem did. Um, another time, I–– much more recently when the Dobbs decision came down, I found myself, um, thinking about the kind of, the history of reproductive rights and the ways that Jacobs’ narrative speaks to that history, to the ways that black women's reproduction was exploited for the purpose of, uh, maintaining the system of slavery after the slave trade had been, uh, made illegal and, um, for increasing the wealth of, um, their quote unquote owners. When I decided to write a poem about the kind of history of reproduction in relation to abortion rights, I went back to Jacobs’ narrative to see if she said anything about it because I knew that there were, um, enslaved women who might have been referred to as conjure women, um, or midwives who knew how to handle some of this stuff. And to my surprise, she didn't talk about that, but she did allude to, uh, Mr.–– to Dr. Norcom kind of alluding in turn to the possibility of his giving her an abortion to keep, uh–– something he could do to keep her safe from exposure. Um, and so, uh, that became an epigraph for, uh, another poem I wrote.  

[Mark]: It serves as a kind of a devastating reminder that this book is not a relic. It's not a historical account. It kind of lives and breathes and corresponds to whatever moment we're reading in it.  

[Evie]: Absolutely. There's so much about, um, the world today, not just how black women are perceived and treated, but, uh, women generally and really our national relationships with each other, our ways of thinking about, um, who has rights to do what, um, who deserves the sort of the blessings of citizenship in this country. There are just so many ways that this narrative still has a lot to offer us, to think about in regard to our current circumstances.  

[Mark]: Evie Shockley, thank you so much for joining us and discussing your new edition of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Thank you, Evie.  

[Evie]: Thank you. 

[Mark]: The Norton Library edition of Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, edited by Evie Shockley, is available now in paperback and eBook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.