![]() ![]() She had transformed her life and the lives of her children by securing her freedom as well as theirs, and then penned an unprecedented account of her struggle. By 1861, when Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published “for the author” by a Boston press, Harriet Jacobs had become a free mother, a New Yorker, and a scathing critic of the institution of southern slavery. These bold words not only encapsulated the incredible story of Jacobs’s life, but also sounded the call for an entirely new way of conceiving the fraught experience of black womanhood. “I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation,” Harriet Ann Jacobs later wrote of her affair with a wealthy white man when she was an enslaved girl of fifteen. ![]()
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