Her tale was brutal, sexual. No one believed a slave woman could be so literate.

But now Harriet Jacobs has reclaimed her name. Annie Nakao, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Harriet Jacobs Ran on: 06-20-2004 / SF Clarification: A Datebook article June 23 on Harriet Jacobs stated that Thomas Jefferson fathered a child by his slave, Sally Hemings. The matter has been controversial for 200 years. In 1998, a DNA study revealed that a Jefferson male likely fathered Hemings's youngest son, Eston Hemings, but that the father was not necessarily the former president. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which oversees Monticello, has declared that the "weight of all known evidence" indicated "a high probability" that Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings and perhaps all six of Hemings' children. The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society issued a report in 2001 rebutting the paternity allegation.

"Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is like to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing of his voice." When North Carolina slave Harriet Jacobs penned those words in "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," a book she self-published in 1861, she became the first black woman to write a slave narrative. As recently as two decades ago, the book was considered an obscure literary oddity written by white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Today, with Jacobs' authorship authenticated, her dramatic narrative provides new generations with a revealing look at a often-hidden side of slavery: the sexual exploitation of women. The brutalization of black girls and women by white slave-masters, who justified their dehumanizing treatment by viewing them as "sexual savages," was a daily fact of life under slavery. Stripped, beaten, raped and forced to "breed" more slaves, black women suffered a double burden of slavery because of their sexual vulnerability. "Jacobs wrote what nobody dared to write," said literary scholar Jean Fagan Yellin, 73, who toiled for six years to uncover the identity of Jacobs as the true author of the book in the late 1980s. Yellin has recently published a biography of Jacobs, titled "Harriet Jacobs, A Life," and is working on publishing Jacobs' papers. A PBS series, "Slavery and the Making of America," now in production, will also feature Jacobs' story. The growing recognition now given to Jacobs is long overdue, said Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University professor of literature and noted biographer of such African American figures as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. "It's a very important slave narrative because it takes into account directly the experience of being a woman in slavery," said Rampersad. "It raises the question of whether slavery was worse for women than it was for men, which was not really talked about much." Slave narratives have been a critical part of the telling of African American history. But unlike other narratives dictated to others by illiterate slaves, Jacobs' own eloquent recounting of her remarkable life --

she hid for seven years in an attic to escape her white slave master before escaping north and becoming an anti-slavery activist who wrote dispatches for famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's the Liberator -- makes her, in Yellin's view, as heroic a figure as 19th century African American giants Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. "We know of the heroic Harriet Tubman and her work during the war as a Union spy," Yellin wrote in Jacobs' biography. "We know of the heroic Sojourner Truth and of her relief efforts. But because of slavery's antiliteracy laws, neither Tubman nor Truth could write her own story. ... Astonishingly, Jacobs managed both to author her own book and to get it Beneath the soaring atrium of the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero -- she'd recently addressed the American Literature Association in San Francisco on the Jacobs papers -- Yellin, a small woman with short gray hair and deepset brown eyes, looked even tinier. But she had an air of a woman used to plowing ahead, which probably served her well in the years she, a lone white academic, spent poring over an obscure slave narrative that few other scholars seemed to care about. "Listen, my hair was a different color when I started on this years ago," quipped Yellin, a professor emerita at New York's Pace University, where she taught English for 30 years. It was her Irish Catholic father's and Jewish immigrant mother's Old Left influences and the changing times that sparked an interest in what she called "the nontraditional" and "oppositional." "In the 1960s, the civil rights movement influenced everybody. So I started looking at things I could study that made sense in terms of the changes going on in the country." While researching her dissertation on black figures in American literature, she came across Jacobs' narrative, which at the time was published under the pseudonym Linda Brent. She was fascinated. But it wasn't until the feminist movement of the 1970s that Yellin went back to "Incidents" as she tried to draw connections between race and gender. "At the time, nobody was interested because the book makes people uncomfortable," she said. "It tells the terrible story of sexual exploitation." Yet from abolitionist times, many of the details of that history remain veiled. White anti-slavery advocates avoided the topic so they wouldn't shock their Victorian audiences. And despite the handing down of stories of sexual oppression over generations of black families and the now substantial body of eloquent writings by black female authors about the struggles of women during slavery, the magnitude of the sexual exploitation of millions of black women slaves remains muted.

Reminders are unavoidable as revelations surface that the late senator and segregationist Strom Thurmond at age 22 fathered a child with a 16-yearold black maid who worked for his parents, or that one of the fathers of our country, Thomas Jefferson, also sired a child with his slave, Sally Hemings. Poles apart when it comes to their places in history, Jefferson and Thurmond were nevertheless participants in a system of sexual oppression that for Jefferson was codified in the law of the land, and for Thurmond was a vestige of social custom. Central to that system of oppression was the centuries-old perceived sexual availability of black women that even today fosters stereotypes and assumptions about their sexuality. "The whole myth of black women's sexuality, availability and compliance is ingrained into the culture," Yellin said. The issue surfaces in complicated ways -- provoking, for example, uneasiness among some African Americans about Halle Berry's Oscar win two years ago for "Monster's Ball." There was happiness that a black woman finally won as best actress but pain that her highly sexualized role was viewed as stereotypical. It's there, too, in the anger of some blacks about the criticism heaped on Janet Jackson earlier this year after Justin Timberlake ripped her bodice during a Super Bowl performance and exposed her right breast. Granted, this is a woman who, like many other female entertainers, black and white, is marketed for her sexually suggestive persona. Yet, would an equally suggestive Madonna have received more sympathy? "I'm not a student of popular culture, but that does seem reasonable," Yellin said. "The fact is, there's a public role out there and someone walks into it." That public role, she said, stems directly from chattel slavery, which used rape as a form of terror against every black woman, including Jacobs. Born in 1813, Jacobs lived a peaceful childhood until she turned 13 and her mistress, who had taught her to read and write, died. She was willed to the baby daughter of an Edenton, N.C., doctor named James Norcom. Norcom, a tyrant who had already had 11 children by other slaves, quickly began stalking Jacobs as a sexual prize. He did not rape her but constantly harassed and threatened her about having sex and even had a cottage built for that purpose far from the house. "He told me I was his property; that I must be subjected to his will in all things," she wrote.

That she was not raped was unusual, given that slave masters either bribed their slaves with extra rations or better treatment for their children, or beat or starved them into submission. "That always comes up -- why didn't he rape her?" Yellin said. "I am told that there are men who want acquiescence. But that's not the issue. It's that she resisted him, defied him." To escape Norcom, Jacobs -- ironically -- used her sexuality to find a protector in a white lawyer with a higher social standing, with whom she had two children. "At 15, she was no fool," Yellin said. "She chose the lesser of two evils. " Yet she was later haunted by her choice. Years later, it pained her to reveal her story to her activist friends. Determined, in her words, to "try and be useful in some way," however, Jacobs wrote the book, using the pseudonym. Still pursued by the doctor, who remained her owner, Jacobs hid in a tiny crawl space in her grandmother's attic for nearly seven years before escaping north. Her two children eventually joined her. Even in New York, the doctor and later his heirs continued their search for years, until an abolitionist friend finally bought her freedom. Jacobs became an anti-slavery activist and Civil War relief worker and correspondent for Garrison. She also opened a school for free blacks in Alexandria, Va. After she died in 1897, Jacobs was largely forgotten and her book given short shrift by critics who discounted the work as inauthentic. "Some of us say those critics were unable to accept the idea of a literate black woman held in slavery," Yellin said. Nearly 107 years after Jacobs died, Yellin had the satisfaction of having the listed author of "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" changed to Jacobs at the Library of Congress. "I wanted her to be there, in American cultural history," she said. Jacobs was a large presence in Yellin's life as well.

"I have lived with Harriet Jacobs for a very long time and am eager to get her presence out of my head, her papers out of my house and her story into the hands of readers," she wrote on the preface of her biography. "But I truly cannot imagine life without her."