1. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself , ed. Lydia Maria Child (1861). Reprint, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Jacobs's letters to Post of 1852[?] and June 21, 1857, are included in the "Correspondence" section of Yellin's edition (232, 242). Amy Post clearly saw these statements as significant, quoting the latter in her postscript to Incidents as evidence of how Jacobs's "sensitive spirit shrank from publicity" (203).

In the correspondence Jacobs's own practices of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling have been retained. I follow Yellin, however, in inserting an additional space where a period and the subsequent capital letter have been omitted (see Yellin's "Note on this Edition," xxxiv). All quotations from Incidents refer to the Yellin edition and are given parenthetically within the text.

2. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Introduction," Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (New York: Oxford University Press,1987), xxiv.

3. Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, February 14, 1853, in Yellin, Incidents , 233.

4. Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, April 4, 1853, in Yellin, Incidents , 235.

5. Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains that Frederick Douglass was "the representative colored man of the United States" in part because he was "the most presentable" ("The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black," Representations 24 [Fall 1988]: 128).

6. Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, April 4, 1853, in Yellin, Incidents , 235. In her letter to Post of October 9, 1853, Jacobs writes, "Mrs Stowe never answered any of my letters after I refused to have my history in her key perhaps it is for the best at least I will try and think so," and then discusses her "scribbling" of antislavery pieces for the New York Tribune in preparation for writing her history herself (236). As such letters indicate, Jacobs understood her own writing as a means of responding to Stowe's treatment.

7. The evaluations of Jacobs's deportment are from Lydia Maria Child's editorial introduction to Incidents (3). Amy Post provides a similar, if warmer, assessment in an appended postscript to the volume: "the author of this book is my highly-esteemed friend. . . . [When introduced] I immediately became much interested in Linda; for her appearance was prepossessing, and her deportment indicated remarkable delicacy of feeling and purity of thought" (203). Thus Jacobs's story is framed by the testimony of well-bred abolitionist women to her fine character and manners.

8. See Dorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 84.

9. Before Yellin's superb work in documenting Jacobs's authorship of Incidents , Jacobs's existence was almost completely concealed by her book. Some critics argued that though the basic story might have been that of a fugitive slave, the book itself was merely an imitation of a slave narrative written by its purported editor, Lydia Maria Child. See, for example, John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 367-82, as well as Yellin's discussion of Blassingame and this critical trend in Yellin, "Written By Her-

self: Harriet Jacobs's Slave Narrative," American Literature 53 (November 1981): 479-86.

Even among those critics who upheld the text's authenticity as a slave narrative, Linda Brent was generally noted as its author, with significant results. For example, Annette Niemtzow's perceptive comparison of Incidents and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: Signet, 1968), includes a discussion of these texts' different attitudes toward names: "male slaves needed names and control of naming to achieve adult identity; for women, bound to give up their names, the issues of adulthood were different" ("The Problematic of Self in Autobiography: The Example of the Slave Narrative," in The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory , ed. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner [Macomb, Ill.: Western Illinois University, 1982], 104-5). Niemtzow is clearly unaware that "Linda Brent," the name she ascribes to the author of Incidents , is itself an instance of the control over naming she associates with the narratives of male slaves.

10. Taken together, Annette Niemtzow's and Valerie Smith's discussions of Incidents can be read as a debate over the relation of Jacobs's text to generic norms. In their analyses of Incidents , both critics examine the influence of domestic fiction, and particularly the Richardsonian plot of seduction, on the form of the slave narrative. Niemtzow ultimately presents these conventions as disabling. She argues that, finding no space for her experiences as a female slave in the fundamentally male genre of the slave narrative, Jacobs evokes the female seduction story, only to be imprisoned within its white and middle-class definitions of femininity. Smith, on the other hand, argues that in her juxtaposition and manipulation of these two genres—that of the male slave and that of the free woman—Jacobs radically critiques and transforms them both. Niemtzow, 104-8, and Smith, "Form and Ideology in Three Slave Narratives," Self Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 28-43.

11. See Hortense Spillers's discussion of the paradox by which the "peculiar institution" both denies slaves a "private realm" and makes them "the very stuff of domesticity as planter-aristocrats envisioned it" ("Changing the Letter: The Yokes and Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed," in McDowell and Rampersand, Slavery and the Literary Imagination , 25).

12. My thanks to my Amherst College students Jonathan Flatley, who helped me to think of Jacobs as "poaching" on the private, and Margaret Stohl, whose paper on Incidents taught me a good deal about Jacobs's use of domestic space and specifically that the peephole looked out but not in.

13. Margaret Horniblow's testament is among the many documents Yellin has discovered. In a codicil she wills "that my negro

girl Harriet be given to my niece Mary Matilda Norcom Daughter of Dr. James Norcom, and I further give & bequeathe to my said niece my bureau & work table & their contents." Not recognized as a neighbor, Jacobs is rather in the category of "negro girl," a possession little different from a work table. Yellin prints a facsimile of the codicil ( Incidents , 213).

14. As Hazel Carby notes, "Any feminist history that seeks to establish the sisterhood of white and black women as allies in the struggle against the oppression of all women must also reveal the complexity of the social and economic differences between women." Carby's reading of Incidents examines Jacobs's treatment of this problem specifically in terms of Linda's relations to her various mistresses (" 'Hear My Voice, Ye Careless Daughters': Narratives of Slave and Free Women before Emancipation," Reconstructing Womanhood , 53). See also her discussion of the "sisterhood" of Linda's mother and mistress (51-53).

15. Angela Davis has made similar observations about the power of the slave woman who, in tending to the needs of the slave community, "was performing the only labor of the slave community which could not be directly and immediately claimed by the oppressor" ("Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves," Black Scholar 3 [December 1971]: 7).

16. Jacobs details the privations of plantation domesticity:

If the dinner was not served at the exact time on that particular Sunday, [Mrs. Flint] would station herself in the kitchen, and wait till it was dished, and then spit in all the kettles and pans that had been used for cooking. She did this to prevent the cook and her children from eking out their meager fare with the remains of the gravy and other scrapings. The slaves could get nothing to eat except what she chose to give them. Provisions were weighed out by the pound and ounce, three times a day. I can assure you she gave them no chance to eat wheat bread from her flour barrel. She knew how many biscuits a quart of flour would make, and exactly what size they ought to be.

Dr. Flint was an epicure. The cook never sent a dinner to his table without fear and trembling; for if there happened to be a dish not to his liking, he would either order her to be whipped, or compel her to eat every mouthful of it in his presence. The poor, hungry creature might not have objected to eating it; but she did object to having her master cram it down her throat till she choked. (12)

In Mrs. Flint's domestic economy, the household wisdom so prized by nineteenth-century matrons produces deprivation, not the bounty its proponents promised. Mrs. Flint spitting into the pots or Dr. Flint force-feeding the cook literally invert the normative and life-sustaining processes of consumption: the kettle, instead of containing food for the body, becomes a receptacle for excretions from the body; the cook, instead of preparing the meal, is choked by

it. Food withheld, contaminated, or crammed down the throat becomes punitive, its nutritive value perverted into a sign of dominance and submission. Significantly, many of the women who wrote for the abolitionist cause also wrote treatises on household management, thus casting the well-ordered, thrifty, but bountiful freehome as a mechanism of political reform. See, for example, Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science (New York: J. B. Ford and Co., 1869) and Lydia Maria Child, The Frugal Housewife (Boston: Carter, Hendee, 1830).

17. For a reading of how these three stories interact with each other and with the chapter's explicitly gendered title, "The Slave Who Dared to Feel like a Man," see Smith, Self-Discovery , 34-35.

18. The questions that accompany Child's request for a longer and more explicit account of the Southern outrages that followed Turner's rebellion make dear the titillating violence inherent in antislavery's appeal.

My object in writing at this time is to ask you to write what you can recollect of the outrages committed on the colored people, in Nat Turner's time. You say the reader would not believe what you saw " inflicted on men, women, and children, without the slightest ground of suspicion against them." What were those inflictions? Were any tortured to make them confess? And how? Were any killed? Please write some of the most striking particulars, and let me have them to insert. (Lydia Maria Child to Harriet Jacobs, August 13, 1860, in Yellin, Incidents , 244).

Ambivalent in her assessment of the allure of cruelty, Child also included suggestions such as grouping the more gruesome stories of neighborhood atrocities together in one chapter "in order that those who shrink from 'supping upon horrors' might omit them" (Yellin, Incidents , xxii). To note that two of these digressive chapters were suggested by Child only illustrates the discontinuities entailed in coupling the requirements of a personal narrative to the needs of abolitionist politics.

19. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature , 52. In general, Jacobs does not extend this concern to "any slave boy." She associates sexual vulnerability primarily with the body of the female slave; thus, while admitting that "slavery is terrible for men," she contends that "it is far more terrible for women. Supperadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own" ( Incidents , 77). Though she relates stories of white women whose offspring are fathered by their slaves, she does not present such incidents as evidence of the oppression of these enslaved men, but rather as a sign of the moral laxity inherent to slaveholding (51-52). The one exception is the story of Luke, who

was forced to wear nothing but his shirt so as to be always ready for the whip, and who was made to submit to "the strangest freaks of despotism. . . . Some of these freaks were of a nature too filthy to be repeated." Yet what Jacobs labels most freakish about Luke's ordeal is undoubtedly that he has been fashioned into a slave girl. The feminization that characterizes Luke's enslavement is reversed as the story of his eventual escape includes the symbolic castration of his now dead master: Luke requests and receives his master's old trousers, their pockets secretly loaded with bills (192-93).

20. Douglass's story of writing "protections" is not of course without its ambivalences: on discovery of the escape plan, he and his friends must destroy the evidence by eating the forged passes along with their biscuits ( Narrative , 94-97). Such scenes of bodily incorporation, however, ultimately reiterate Douglass's sense of writing as replacing and filling the slave body: "My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes" (43). William Wells Brown, "The Life and Escape of William Wells Brown," in Clotel, or, The President's Daughter (New York: University Books, 1969), 38. Also see Brown's barter of barley sugar for lessons in spelling (36-37).

21. The recognition that the act of telling about sexual abuse may prove largely indistinguishable from the abuses told is common among the narratives of slave women. Stories of interracial rape and sexual compulsion might well fuel abolitionist zeal, but they also necessarily cater to the voyeurism of Northern audiences. For a particularly explicit example of these dynamics, see the Rev. H. Mattison's interview of Louisa Piquet, published as an antislavery tract in 1861. Piquet speaks about her experiences under slavery in the hope of gaining subscriptions to a fund for the purchase of her mother. While Mattison is supportive of her efforts, his questions pruriently focus on the more pornographic aspects of her story: how thin her dress when she was whipped, what parts of her body were scarred by the cowhide, whether she was stripped at the auction, and of course, what her sexual relations were with her various masters (Rev. H. Mattison, Louisa Piquet, The Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Life , included in Collected Black Women's Narratives , ed. Anthony G. Barthelemy, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988]).

22. My analysis owes much to Hortense Spillers's treatment of this passage in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17 (1988): 65-81. Spillers discusses the analogy between the position of the jealous mistress and that of the master and concludes, as I do, that such an analogy provides neither the white woman nor the slave woman with a position of authority: "Neither could claim her body and its various productions—for quite different reasons, albeit—as her own" (77). My reading differs

from Spillers's, however, in the attempt to relate this scene to the more general dynamics of a discourse of female sexuality.

23. Jacobs's concern with bourgeois standards of feminine virtue was characteristic of early black feminists. Linda Gordon and Ellen Dubois note that since the problems of maintaining respectability common to all nineteenth-century women were especially severe for the black woman, "the black women's movement conducted a particularly militant campaign for respectability, often making black feminists spokespeople for prudery in their communities" ("Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual Thought," Feminist Studies 9 [Spring 1983]: 10). At stake in such campaigns, and in Jacobs's narrative project, is both an acknowledgment of the black woman's position as the one recognized site of sexuality in a purportedly asexual female world, and the desire that it were otherwise.

24. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood , 61.

25. I thank P. Gabrielle Foreman for allowing me to quote from her manuscript "Manuscript in Signs," 7.

26. Jacobs is not alone in suggesting the erotic power of antislavery work. For example, in an article published in the 1854 giftbook Autographs for Freedom the white feminist-abolitionist, Jane Swisshelm, describes William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist fervor in just these terms: "It is necessary to his existence that he should work—work for the slave; and in his work he gratifies all the strongest instincts of his nature, more completely than even the grossest sensualist can satisfy his , by unlimited indulgence!" That Swisshelm should draw such an analogy is no doubt indicative of the relation between politics and sexuality in her own life and mind. Nevertheless, it is important to note that her discussion of the sexual dimension of political work is explicitly framed in terms of male, not female, experience. See Ronald Walters, "The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism," American Quarterly 25 (May 1973): 177-201; Walters quotes Swisshelm on 178.