A History of American Literature

Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 133

have promised to tell you the truth.” That emphasis on truth, the assurance that, as

Jacobs puts it elsewhere, she is drawing “no imaginary pictures of southern homes,” is

vital. Her aim, she plainly states in the preface to Incidents, is “to arouse the women of

the North to a realising sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South.”

And, to do that, she is telling a tale that, as she points out persistently, is extraordinary

and typical: melodramatic and startling but also plain, unvarnished fact. The story is

no less extraordinary when Jacobs recalls how she was determined to see her two

children free. They lived at first with her grandmother, in relative comfort. But Jacobs

learned, she tells us, that Dr. Flint was planning to take them out of the grandmother’s

care. So, to save them from becoming plantation slaves, she decided to run away. Her

hope was that Flint would sell the children if she went away. And the hope proved well

founded. Escaping, she hid with various black and white neighbors. Dr. Flint then

sold the children to their father, who permitted them to stay where they were.

Here, again, in the episode of escape, Incidents differs radically from the Narrative

of Douglass. Jacobs did not flee northwards. Instead, as she discloses to the reader,

she hid in a tiny attic in her grandmother’s house for seven years. This was what she

called her “loophole of retreat.” “The air was stifling there,” she remembers, “the

darkness total” to begin with, “but I was not comfortless. I heard the voices of my

children.” “There was joy and there was sadness in that sound,” she confesses. “It

made my tears flow. How I longed to speak to them!” And horrible though it was “to

lie in a cramped position day after day,” Jacobs emphasizes, “I would have chosen

this rather than my lot as a slave.” There were, eventually, even more comforts. She

succeeded in making a hole “about an inch long and an inch broad” through which

she could see the daylight. Even more important, she could now see the “two sweet

little faces” of her children, and more clearly hear their talk. Occasionally, she could

talk to relatives and overhear conversations; regularly, from day to day, she could

watch her son and daughter growing up. For Jacobs, liberation comes not in heroic

battle, the recovery of manhood, and solitary flight, but in being still with her family,

even if apart from them: enjoying a strange kind of solitude, free from the impositions

of her white masters, that nevertheless allows her to see, and sometimes talk with,

those whom she loves. It would be wrong to exaggerate the difference between Jacobs

and Douglass here; it is certainly not absolute. Douglass, after all, spoke of being

“linked and interlinked” with his fellow slaves. After seven years in hiding, Jacobs

eventually fled north – where, in due course, she was reunited with her children and

all had their freedom bought. But a difference there is, between these two great slave

narratives. Each has its own way of dramatizing the trials of the self and the travails

of slavery; each has its own manner of turning autobiography into challenging art.

The Making of Many Americas

“Reader, my story ends with freedom; not, in the usual way, with marriage.” That

conclusion to Incidents, playing on a conventional ending to sentimental fiction,

modestly summarizes the drama of the self that inspired and intrigued so many

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