Harriet Ann Jacobs was a contemporary of Frederick Douglass's, and like Douglass's narrative, her Incidents challenged the institution of slavery. Born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813, she enjoyed a -40- reasonably carefree early childhood, unlike Douglass, living with both of her parents and her brother, and having a loving grandmother nearby. This tranquillity was irreparably ruptured at age six when her mother died. But even then the conditions of her life changed only minimally. When she was twelve, however, the mistress who had treated her with kindness also died, and left her as a human legacy to her five-year-old niece. At that point Jacobs learned, to her great distress, that the bane of all slave women was their vulnerability to the sexual abuse of their masters. Soon after she moved into his household, her young mistress's father, a local doctor, began his sexual pursuit of her. The struggle between the two, what Jacobs describes as the "war of her life" — his determination to win her submission and her resolve never to become his victim — went on for many years, even after she escaped from the South in 1842.
In addition to depicting events in her childhood and the unwanted sexual attentions of her master, Jacobs's narrative details events of slave life in Edenton and surrounding communities; strategies she adopted to thwart the master's desire to conquer her; her deliberate decision to become the mother of two children by another white plantation owner and her escape from her master by hiding for seven years in a crawl space under the roof of her grandmother's house; her struggle to free her children; the existence of an antipatriarchal interracial community of women; her flight to freedom; and the events of her life in the North. While the whole narrative is an interesting and moving document, its most memorable passages focus on the sexual victimization of the slave woman and Jacobs's culminating analysis of the meaning of freedom.
Unlike Douglass, in her time Jacobs gained no fame for her story, perhaps because of the combination of its publication during the Civil War and the lesser attention women's narratives enjoyed than men's. Incidents rose to prominence in the late 1970s, in the wake of the rise of white and black feminism, and is now universally recognized as a text that is as important as Douglass's Narrative.
Straddling the slave narrative and nineteenth-century sentimental novel traditions, and mindful of the power of the "cult of True Womanhood," especially since the implied readers of her story were Northern white middle-class women, Jacobs scores a major achievement in her textual handling of the incidents surrounding her vul-41- nerability to the sexual tyranny of her former master and her willing participation in a miscegenational relationship. A black woman slave and a fallen woman, she presumes to speak to the white women of the North, the upholders of "piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity," through a rhetoric that invites them to join her in the struggle against the patriarchal domination of all women. Incidents was the first book by an African American woman in which the victim made her own plea against the sexual tyranny of her slave master, and as woman and slave Jacobs ably addresses the parallels between race and sex. Finally, in the culmination of her story, when, against her will, a white female friend purchases her freedom, Jacobs does an elegant feminist analysis of the meaning of freedom for women of color. She had insisted that, as a human being, she could not be bought or sold. Although she recognized the impulse of her friend to free her from further harassment by her then dead master's kin, she was offended and disappointed by the act of money changing hands for her.
Unlike Douglass's Narrative, the authenticity of Incidents was a subject of critical debate for a number of years. At least one historian initially claimed that while the central character may have been a fugitive from slavery, the narrative was probably false because the work was not credible. Much of the debate centered on the extent of the editorial role of white feminist Lydia Maria Child in its production (was this a fiction by Child?), the narrative's use of novelistic conventions like dialogue, and its literary sophistication. Years of research have now gone into locating the "facts" that prove that Harriet Jacobs was indeed a former slave from Edenton, that she was owned by a well-known physician of that town, and that she authored her own narrative.
However, two aspects of the narrative persist to make this a problematic text. One is Jacobs's use of the conventions of sentimental fiction, and the other, her pseudonym. While it is arguable that she used the first to create bridges with her white female readers-bridges that, for cultural reasons, it would have been impossible to build with traditional slave narrative conventions, the pseudonym, a purely literary device, is more difficult to explain. Even more confusing, I suggest, are the contradictions in the narrative's opening statement: -42- "Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction…my adventures… are…strictly true…. [But] my descriptions fall short of the truth." Yet, like the pseudonym that protects the identity of the author by raising doubts regarding her authenticity, the statement is a camouflage that permits her more control over her narrative. With its novelistic techniques, its pseudonym, and the ambiguity in its declaration of contingent truth, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, as effective a text as Douglass's Narrative, sits squarely on the frontier of fact and fiction.
The first Native American to publish anything in America was Samson Occom, a Methodist missionary to the Indians, whose Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772) was also the first Indian best-seller. Before that, Occom went to England to raise money for the Indian Charity School in Hanover, New Hampshire, which later became Dartmouth College. Native American authors in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote sermons, protest literature, and tribal histories based on oral traditions for similar reasons that former African slaves wrote their autobiographies.
Egocentric individualism was not an aspect of Native American cultures before Europeans arrived on these shores, and autobiography took a long time to develop among the native peoples. Although Native Americans valued personal freedom, self-worth, and personal responsibility, personal autonomy was secondary to the welfare of the group. Even in autobiography, Indian first-person narratives do not probe the nature of the self in the text. Also, since no Indian culture, prior to the European coming, developed a phonetic alphabet, writing did not exist for them as we know it in Western culture. Experts like Arnold Krupat note that tribal writings took the form of "patterns worked in wampum belts, tatoos, [and] pictographs painted on animal skins." Within their cultures, Native Americans constructed their identities not as individuals but as persons in relationship to collective social units of which each person was only a part.
The early Indian forms with the closest resemblances to Western autobiographical narratives were stories and accounts of dreams or mystic experiences. Communicated orally, these included the exploits of war and stories of family events told to assembled audiences of the -43- tribes, among whom were some individuals other than the tellers likely to have been present during the events actually being told. Honors were won, not for the individual, but for the tribe.
In the Western tradition, written Native American autobiography was a nineteenth-century phenomenon and exists in two separate forms: Indian autobiographies that are collaborative efforts produced like the as-told-to slave narratives, with the Indian as the subject; and autobiographies by Indians, texts composed without the mediation of an editor or transcriber. The latter, of course, depended on the Indian's mastery of literacy. However, critics see both groups as bicultural texts that developed as a result of contact with a culture outside of the native one. Krupat tells us that each represents the subject's having sufficiently distanced her/himself from the native culture to be influenced by the "other," and in the case of autobiography written by Indians, to have gained the "other's" expertise to compose one's own story in a normative form.