Seven Years in a Crawlspace: Harriet Jacobs’s Escape from Edenton

The room was about nine feet long and seven feet wide. At its highest point it was three feet tall, and the roof sloped down from there. Harriet Jacobs could not stand up in it. She could only lie down, sit, or crawl.

The space was a garret above a storeroom attached to her grandmother's house in Edenton, North Carolina. By her own account, she bored a small hole through the boards so she could get air and light. Through it she could see her children playing in the yard, and she could hear the voice of the man she was hiding from. She entered it in 1835 and did not leave for nearly seven years.

A girl owned by a doctor

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born in Edenton in 1813 to enslaved parents, the carpenter Daniel Jacobs and Delilah Horniblow. After her mother died, she lived with her mistress, Margaret Horniblow, who taught her to read and sew. When Margaret Horniblow died in 1825, her will left Harriet to a young niece, Mary Matilda Norcom.

The girl's legal owner was a child, so Harriet came under the control of the niece's father, Dr. James Norcom, an Edenton physician. In her memoir Jacobs says Norcom began sexually harassing her when she was about fifteen. She says he whispered threats and obscene remarks and made clear that he could punish her if she refused him.

Her anchor was her grandmother, Molly Horniblow. Molly had been freed by her former enslaver's will and owned a house in Edenton. The family's position there was precarious, but it gave Harriet a place to go.

The decision to hide

Jacobs began a relationship with Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a white lawyer in Edenton who later served in the U.S. House of Representatives. They had two children, Joseph and Louisa Matilda. Under North Carolina law, children took the legal status of their mother, so both were enslaved and Norcom claimed them as his property.

In 1835 Norcom threatened to send Jacobs to work on a plantation he controlled, where she would be far from her family. In June she ran away. She first stayed with friends and in a swamp, then moved into the garret above her grandmother's storeroom.

She chose to stay close rather than flee north at once. If she was believed to be in the North, she reasoned, Norcom might sell her children rather than hold them hostage. According to her memoir, Sawyer, working through a slave trader, bought the children from Norcom, and they went to live with their great-grandmother. Jacobs could then watch them grow up from her hiding place.

What the crawlspace was like

Jacobs's memoir describes the garret as stifling in summer and bitterly cold in winter. She wrote of insects and mice, and of the physical damage from lying cramped for so long. She also wrote that Norcom searched for her and tried to trick her family into revealing where she was.

She and her allies tried to mislead him. She had letters carried north and posted from there, so Norcom would think she had escaped to a free state. Her family kept the secret for years, and Molly Horniblow's house was apparently never searched thoroughly enough to find her.

Most details of the hiding place come from Jacobs herself, because few other sources describe it. Historians have found documents that support the main outline of her story, including the identities of the people involved and the timing of her disappearance. The exact conditions inside the garret rest largely on her testimony.

Escape and a book

In 1842 Jacobs left Edenton by boat, with help from friends, and reached Philadelphia. She went on to New York, where she found work as a nursemaid in the household of the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis. Her daughter Louisa later joined her in the North.

Her freedom was still uncertain. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made her vulnerable to recapture, and in 1852 Willis's second wife, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, bought her freedom for $300. Jacobs accepted the arrangement, though she disliked that she had been bought.

Encouraged by the Quaker abolitionist Amy Post, Jacobs wrote her story. Lydia Maria Child edited it, and a Boston firm published it in 1861 as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Jacobs used the name Linda Brent for herself and gave Norcom the name Dr. Flint.

The book was among the first slave narratives to describe sexual exploitation from a woman's point of view. For many years some readers thought it was a novel or that Child had written it. The historian Jean Fagan Yellin's research, published in the 1980s, documented Jacobs's authorship and the real people behind the pseudonyms. Jacobs died in Washington, D.C., in 1897.