I Write Only That Whereof I Know (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, editor Evie Shockley returns to discuss her first encounter with this text in graduate school, the book's place in the literary canon and the classroom, and her favorite passage. 

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 second 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 discussed Jacobs’ life, her motherhood, her escape, the way she conveys the emotions of her experience in her unforgettable narrative, and even how Evie Shockley's poetry was inspired by this work. In this second episode, we learn more about Evie's relationship with this text, how she discovered it, the music it inspires, her favorite line, and so much more. Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston 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 half-red sea, the new black, semi-automatic, and suddenly we have been widely decorated, including nominations for the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. It is so wonderful to have her back with us today. Evie Shockley, welcome back to the Norton Library podcast. 

[Evie]: Hey, how are you?  

[Mark]: Good to see you again, and I look forward to more discussion about Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. First of all, Evie, I'm holding your new edition, which is striking, and I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the design.  

[Evie]: It's designed to sort of fit seamlessly in the beautiful Norton library, uh, so the cover is primarily green with these like peach accents. And I have no idea why this book got these colors, but it forms part of the rainbow of the library as a whole. I actually really like this combination, though.  

[Mark]: No, it's beautiful, but there's nothing in the book that would suggest green and peach, no? Am I right?  

[Evie]: Nothing that I know of. I remember them telling me that they had a logic for, um, choosing these colors. I can't remember if it was something to do with–– there was there was some connection, but my brain has, uh, inconveniently misfiled that information.  

[Mark]: It's a beautiful design as all the Norton Library books are. Do you remember first reading this book? 

[Evie]: Oh, absolutely. And it's shocking to me now to think about how I was taking it for granted, but I was just a few years away from not having this book. So, uh, I first read it in graduate school, um, where I was at Duke in the late 90s and, uh, I don't remember exactly when. It might have been for my orals or what some people call their comps. Um, but I definitely remember it was within that period. I was in North Carolina, which was striking to me since this was taking place in a different part of Carolina. But the narrative had only just been sort of, uh, recovered, you might say, for, uh, literary–– for literary history, uh, in I think 1987. Um, so just like a decade earlier, there would have been people going through grad school who would not have had access to this book. It was out of print. It was believed to be a novel by Lydia Maria Child, uh, who's listed as the editor, um, rather than people taking seriously that Harriet Jacobs was a real person. 

[Mark]: So, this book has not been in the canon all throughout American literary history.  

[Evie]: Not at all. It was very well received when it was published. People, even though it was published under the pseudonym Linda Brent, people in the abolitionist community close to her knew it was Jacobs and the word began to get out and circulate. And even though she hated giving up her privacy about some of these aspects of her life, she knew it was for a good cause, and it enabled her not only to contribute to the anti-slavery effort in, uh, at the very beginning of the civil war but because it circulated widely, um, it gave her a platform from which to speak during the civil war. She published a short piece called Life Among the Contrabands, which were, which was the term used for the formerly enslaved who self-liberated during the civil for to go and join the Union troops. She, um, was able afterwards to start a free school for newly freed African-Americans. Um, so all of that was the case during her lifetime, but in the most of the 20th century, um, that knowledge of the the historical woman in connection with the pseudonym Linda Brent, um, that connection got severed and, um, it was only in the 80s when a wonderful scholar named Jean Fagan Yellin, uh, was working on her dissertation and just began to really suspect that Lydia Maria Child would not have–– she just wouldn't have written a novel about an enslaved woman that, that passed itself off as a slave narrative. Um, that the anti-slavery cause had seen the damage that those kind of fake narratives, um, which did exist, the damage that those kinds of narratives could do to the credibility of anti-slavery causes. Yellin felt that Child would not have taken that chance. And she just started to do research. She, um, most importantly I think came upon a trove of letters from Jacobs that, that she was able to use to authenticate the narrative.  

[Mark]: That's great. And so, when you do approach this book in graduate school, are you immediately captivated by it? Has it become a central part of your scholarship and your reading? 

[Evie]: Absolutely. Um, by time I got to it, people were using it in so many different ways. It had become then and is even more so now a really central text for black feminist thought. Um, Deborah Gray White, uh, former colleague of mine, wrote, a study called “Aren't I a Woman: The Female Slave in the Plantation South,” that draws some information, but also it's the questions that it asks from the things that Jacobs focuses us on in the narrative. Portance Spillers and Sadia Hartman had, um, already started publishing, um, work that was really central to, um, to black feminist thought about what agency really means, um, about what family can possibly mean in under a system of slavery for anyone, white or black. Those texts were already working with Jacobs’ narrative. And then you had, um, books like Tony Morrison's Beloved, um, or a little bit later, Thylias Moss' book Slave Moth that, um, were also about these young teenage girls becoming mothers and sort of, um, confronting slavery or, um, becoming mothers or becoming sexualized, um, at that same age that Jacobs was when that happened to her. You can just see its influence everywhere. Speaking of Beloved, even in Jacobs' narrative, we find her wondering whether she thinks her children are better off alive or dead if they're enslaved. Imagine a mother having to ask that question. And so Morrison novelizes it, but it's also in Jacobs' narrative. 

[Evie]: It's in Jacobs's narrative. I mean, Morrison is drawing her character based on another actual woman who lived, Margaret Garner. But, um, what Jacobs’ narrative gives us is not just the newspaper, um, descriptions and discussions of the Margaret Garner case, but what was going on inside a mother's head whose children were born into slavery. 

[Mark]: As you present this book to new readers, what do you think are the challenges that they face or are going to face when encountering this book? 

[Evie]: I'm thinking about this because you asked if I teach it, and I do teach this book and it teaches really well, and I could say more about how I do that, but I would say that there's a style of language and a sensibility about, you know, what is proper or what is polite or shocking, um, that is different for 21st century readers than for Jacobs and her contemporary audience. But really, it's not like the gap between our English and Shakespeare's English. It's a much nearer kind of style and and sensibility. And once you kind of adjust to Jacob's voice, uh, –– and I highly recommend reading her out loud, she's amazing, um, just really conversational,as I was saying last time –– there's really not a lot to to get between, uh, this book and new readers. I shared it when I took on this project, uh, I shared the book immediately with my mother who's like 92 now, so she might have been 90 at the time. Um, and I was like, “I'm going to be writing an introduction to this book. Read it and tell me what you think. What what should I talk about?” And she had no problem diving in and really forming an attachment to Jacobs, and I think the same is true for the students who have studied this book with me. They like her. They like seeing the world through her eyes. And so to that point,  I tend to think about this book in terms of the ways that it can help students form contrasts. So, I teach it often with Douglas's, um, first narrative and ask students to think about the differences that gender makes in terms of the ways that resistance, um, agency, um, self-definition take form for a man ,which is often through physical contest, versus, um, for Jacobs as a woman, um, it's more of a contest of wills, of wits. I have also, um, put it in contrast with something like, uh, Beloved where, um, we get to see what a woman will do to spare her children from slavery take two very different forms. And it's not a matter of this is wrong and this is right, um, but about a point that Jacobs makes more than once in the narrative about the impossibility of moral behavior within an immoral system.  

[Mark]: Here's an unfair question, Evie. In this entire narrative, do you have a favorite line?  

[Evie]: I do. I do. And it's–– I'm not the only one, I think, because I see it quoted often. Um, it, there's this whole amazing passage. It's really short. If you don't mind, I'll just read it. Is that okay? 

[Mark]: Please.  

[Evie]: She says, "You may believe what I say, for I write only that whereof I know. I was 21 years in that cage of obscene birds. I can testify from my own experience and observation that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual, the sons violent and licentious. It contaminates the daughters and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.” But that line, “I was 21 years in that cage of obscene birds” 

[Mark:] Amazing, yeah.  

[Evie]: I mean, it's unparaphrasable, which is the best kind of poetry, right? She said what needed to be said in the only way it could be said.  

[Mark]: That's such a profound statement. I remember in our last episode we were talking a little bit about the balance between polemic and personal narrative and how they sort of entwine, and it seems like that passage that you're quoting is such a perfect example of an emotional statement about her experience, but also the political effect and what it means as policy. 

[Evie]: Yeah. I mean, “the personal this political, um–– 

[Mark]: Yes. 

[Evie]: ––had its, uh, its moments well before the quote unquote “second wave feminist movement.” 

[Mark]: Right. Yes. Well, that's just tremendous. Uh, okay. So, we also ask our Norton Library editors to offer a hot take, which is to say something counterintuitive or something about this book that maybe is going against the prevailing wisdom. Do you read this in kind of a counterintuitive way? 

[Evie]: You know, I won't say that this is, um, that this is an original thought of my own, but as I was doing the research and getting myself back into this text for the purpose of editing and writing the introduction, I found myself persuaded by what I think is a kind of a minority view on the importance of the question [of] whether Dr. Flint, Dr. Norcom ever succeeded in forcing himself on Jacobs. 

[Mark]: Because it's not explicitly stated one way or the other.  

[Evie]: So the scholar who I really found myself listening to with new ears is Gabrielle, uh, Gabrielle Foreman and she talks about what she calls a simultextual reading. So it's like simulcast but simultext, um, which is to say that Jacobs does say that she eludes Dr. Noram when she's talking about herself in the first person, but she also–– there's a passage where she relates what is clearly her story down to, you know, uh, just a number of particulars in the third person. And in that passage, she says, um, escape is impossible. And so the text kind of lets you have it both ways. And the point, the point is not ultimately–– I'm kind of persuaded that whether or not she was able to ellude him completely, but whether she prevented him from possessing her and controlling her completely. And that is clearly something she achieved. He, he did not get to ensconce her in some out of the way, um, like cottage where he could sort of separate her from her family and friends and place her entirely under his will, the threat of being sold and her children being sold. Like, all of that she was able to forstall ,um, by using her wits, um, and making some choices, uh, that that you know it's really important for me as a a black woman living in her legacy to know that she thought about and and made and felt capable of making that larger outcome more than whether she was able to escape sexual violation entirely is the real important question.  

[Mark]: Yeah, that's a great, great thought. And isn't there more than one episode in the narrative where she's defiant and she can tell him to his face, you know, I don't want to paraphrase, but “You're repulsive. You're not welcome. Go away. I'll never s––” and it's kind of extraordinary to read it just as imagining how that scenario would have played out at the time. But so she was absolutely what you're saying, industrious and witty and cagey about certain things but also when the time came she would just stand right in his face and tell him it's not happening.  

[Evie]: Right. Right. I mean, she was defiant and could get away with perhaps more than some other people, partly because of who her grandmother was, partly because he was a doctor in a small town and needed to have at least some reputation that would allow him, um, to see the women in the town, you know, like he had a little bit more of a a social constraint, uh, in that way than say if he had been out on a plantation away from town where the only people who knew what was happening, uh, were the people also under his control, right? So, so there were things that allowed her to, um, a little bit more wiggle room than we would might expect. And there may be ways in which even those exceptional circumstances didn't always do the trick. We just we can't know. We can't know.  

[Mark]: Is there a way to absorb or appreciate this work in a form other than the book itself? Has it been repurposed or reappropriated, adapted in other forms over the years?  

[Evie]: I am aware of some although I haven't actually experienced it that way. There's a play by, uh, the wonderful playwright Lydia Diamond called Harriet Jacobs: A Play, and I know there is a young adult book, uh, by Mary Lions called Letters From a Slave Girl. It's written as if, um, Jacobs–– it's based on the narrative but, uh ,written as if Jacobs were writing letters, um, to her deceased mother. Besides that, you know, the other thing, and I meant to look this up before our conversation, but there's a wonderful map and sort of an online apparatus that you can, if you just Google Harriet Jacobs Edenton, you are likely to discover this map that lets you see how small of a town this was, why there really was a kind of “everyone knows what's going on,” and why there might be a greater sense of shame even among, uh, even for someone like Dr. Norcom, uh, than we're used to thinking about, right? Um, the distance between his house and Jacobs’ grandmother's house, they're just shockingly close. 

[Mark]: It would help you visualize the sheer impossibility of hiding for years at just a stones throw from where you were escaping from. And I–– yeah, the ability to visualize that would be great. And Evoe, you also neglected to mention the poetry of Evie Shockley, which also appropriates Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. So, but, that does show how it this work is reinvented.  

[Evie]: Yes. Yes. I mean, it lives. Um, I think it's hard to read it and not be permanently touched by Jacobs.  

[Mark]: How about music? Is there any musical adaptations or is there music that it inspires? Do you have a Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl playlist, things that help you make sense of the book? 

[Evie]: [Laughter] You know, um, I am usually really bad at this kind of a question. Um, there, I cannot say with confidence whether there are musicians, singers who have explicitly taken up Jacobs. So, uh, you know, apologies, I'm just not that that person with the encyclopedia, uh, encyclopedic knowledge of, um, the musical landscape. But, um, thinking about, uh, like what kind of a playlist this book might, um, call for, I pulled together some titles. Um, um, so, if you'll bear with me. 

[Mark]: Yeah, please. 

[Evie]: Thinking about her losing her mother at such a young age, I would start such a playlist with Odetta's rendition of Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child. So, all of these are just beautiful, beautiful pieces of music. Thinking about the, the importance of family and the way her grandmother stood for her, um, and just risked so much for her sake, um, I thought about Aretha Franklin's rendition of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Um, then I knew I had to have at least one, I ended up with two songs by Nina Simone because Nina Simone is also from North Carolina, of course. So, there's that connection. Um, I thought about Four Women, which is, uh, a song that, um, that gets at the kind of, um, four of the primary ways that black women, um, are figured by slavery and in the wake of slavery: um, asexual, hypersexual, um, for use, and ultimately for themselves. Um, so Four Women and I also thought about Nina Simone's version of Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood. I think that it is a great pair with the ways that Jacobs tries to, um ,to really make sure her readers understand her intentions for telling these stories, um, sharing her life. Um, so Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood. Um, and then, um, the last three I thought about maybe on a kind of a happier note, um, Mahalia Jackson, How I Got Over, because in the end she does, she does get over. Um, there's a version of uh, or there's a song that's a duet between the Eurythmics, Annie Lennox, and Aretha Franklin again, um, Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves, which I thought about to kind of, um, honor the sisterhood. Um, Amy Post, um, another anti-slavery activist who really encouraged Jacobs to write and publish this narrative, Lydia Maria Child, who, um, wrote the preface and edited this narrative, um, and even, um, to a degree, uh, the second Mrs. Willis who, um, uh, purchased Jacobs’ and her children's freedom, um, finally just to end the harassment for once and for all even though that was the last thing Jacobs wanted was to ever have someone pay for what she believed was hers. Um, that kind of sisterhood, um, intellectual and activist, um, I thought about and then finally, um, Donny Hathaway, Someday We'll All Be Free.  

[Mark]: What a great playlist. Those are fantastic. You mentioned Evie, uh, Lydia Maria Child in not just these episodes but also your introduction and in the notes that you have to this edition ... Can you tell us just a little bit about her and what her connection was with this particular work?  

[Evie]: Sure, um, she was a novelist, a journalist, anti-slavery activist, um, an activist generally, and she was another person I think, uh, like Harriet Beecher Stowe whose credentials as a, as a literary woman were, um, first rate, well-respected, um, and when Jacobs was trying to get this book published, she initially kept running up against, you know, as an unknown person to most of the publishers, she kept running up against the need for someone to more or less vouch for her. This was often the case with, um, slave narratives anyway, but I think it was especially the case in in her, in her situation. And people kept suggesting that Harriet Beecher Stowe or her employer Nathaniel Willis, um, might write a preface to sort of launch the book. And she wanted nothing to do with either of those ideas for reasons that, um, that I talk about more in the introduction. But finally, uh, one publisher suggested Lydia Maria Child. If she would write a preface for the book, then they would publish it, and, um, she had to get an introduction made because she didn't know Child at that point. But, um, William Nell, who was another person in the anti-slavery world, um, connected the two women, and they found themselves, uh, very quickly to be kindred spirits. And so, um, Child not only wrote the preface but, um, with what she herself describes as a very light hand, um, sort of organized and, um, and edited the narrative just to make it cohere. She says she didn't change hardly 50 words in the whole, in the whole book. Um, she really made the publication of the narrative possible.  

[Mark]: Evie Shockley, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your new edition of Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Thanks so much, Evie.  

[Evie]: It was a pleasure. 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.