Harriet Jacobs, writing under the name Linda Brent, was an escaped slave who went on to write what may be the most affecting slave narrative in existence.
The most famous slave narrative is Frederick Douglass's autobiography, notable for exemplifying the first instance of signifying in American literature as he tricks white boys into teaching him the alphabet and how to spell by telling them they are too dumb to spell, causing them to prove that they can in order to save face. By watching them write, he studied what they did, even if it meant them beating him up afterwards for daring to call them stupid.
Jacobs' narrative is different, because being a woman she has a completely different set of concerns. Furthermore, she is a mulatto woman; likely an octaroon, a term for a woman who was 7/8s white and 1/8 black. She had gotten that way through a series of slave women being raped by white masters, and when her white master saw her he no longer thought of how she came to be in his posession. Jacobs herself, from her tweens onward, was constantly fighting off the affections of powerful white men. Constantly harassed, the book is a narrative of her attempts to evade sexual abuse at the hands of white men and physical abuse at the hands of their jealous wives. It may not be the most famous slave narrative, but perhaps it should be. It is the most powerful, shocking, and will shake you to your core.
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