Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861)

A "slave narrative" by a young woman who hid in an attic for seven years to escape bondage.

Nonfiction Review: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl demonstrates the added burden of slavery on women. Not only did they face repeated rape by their owners and others, but their children would be sold away, often at an early age. Just the threat of selling children would be enough to keep women in line. Despite being in a better position than other slaves on the plantation (she learned to read and write as a child), Jacobs vividly describes the experience of being a prisoner without having committed a crime except being born black. In the grotesque system of slavery even free blacks could be pulled into slavery, a daunting thought in these times of slavery deniers and increased racism. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl does have a sense of the dramatic, but nothing here was unbelievable except the well-documented monstrosity of slavery. Scholars have confirmed the validity of the narrative. What is amazing is how the slaves continued to live as people, live ordinary lives of affection, culture, and tradition despite the ugly oppression and terrorism designed to turn them into automatons. To her credit Jacobs also rails against the discrimination that confronted her in the "free" north. I came to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl only after reading Kindred (1979) by Octavia E. Butler, as I felt it necessary to read non-fiction accounts of the times depicted in that novel.  We read these chronicles not for their style or technique, but as a sort of time machine to learn our history and so not repeat it.  [5★]