Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Education and Abolition (Critical Essay‪)‬

Some thirty years before Harriet Ann Jacobs opened the Jacobs Free School in Alexandria, Virginia in January 1864, one of her first students was her fifty-three-year-old uncle, Fred. The seventeen-year-old Harriet appreciated her uncle's "most earnest desire to learn to read" and promised to teach him. (1) As slaves, both teacher and student risked the punishment of "thirty-nine lashes on [the] bare back" as well as imprisonment for violating North Carolina's anti-literacy laws targeting African Americans. (2) Nevertheless they agreed to meet three times a week in a "quiet nook" where she instructed him in secret. (3) While the primary goal for him was to read the Bible, this moment in Jacobs' slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl revealed her early commitment to African American literacy and education as well as her rejection of the laws of American slavery. In that moment, the vocations of education and abolition took root for Harriet Jacobs. Throughout her life, Harriet Jacobs embraced the twin vocations of educator and abolitionist. To expose slavery as a "pit of abominations" not only helped to undermine it, but by educating African Americans she frustrated the very idea of African American inferiority upon which slavery had been built. (4) Incidents is thus not only an account of the experiences she endured as an enslaved African American woman, but also, in light of her public activities as an educator and abolitionist, a text intended to enlighten white Northern women on why and how American slavery should be abolished. Considering these aims, it is no wonder that, in a letter to her friend Amy Post, Jacobs expressed feeling somewhat conflicted about writing her life story. (5) Exposing in shrewd detail the institution of American slavery ostensibly meant, for Jacobs, exposing, among others things, her sexual abuse "for the world to read."6 With the same daring approach that she used to teach her uncle Fred to read and write, she intended to educate the hearts and minds of women in the North on the issue of African American enslavement and the notion of racial equality.