This authentic account was originally published in 1861 by Linda Brent, just before the Civil war began. In truth, the actual events took place many years before, and the story's author was Harriet Jacobs who felt compelled to writer under a pseudonym and decades after the fact to protect those who loved and shielded her. The account is harrowing in its portrayal of Jacob's life as a female slave - the degradation and sexual oppression, her master's determination to make her his concubine, his jealous wife, the white man who fathered her children - but there is also grace and salvation in the form of Jacob's grandmother, who hid her in a tiny garret for seven years, and the blacks and whites who secured Jacob's eventual passage north and made it possible to tell her story.
A difficult, gripping personal account of U.S. history and
the
major antebellum autobiography of an African-American woman, readers everywhere should be grateful that stories such as Jacobs's survive.