Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1861

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-20

Chapters 21-25

Chapters 26-30

Chapters 31-35

Chapters 36-41

Key Figures

Themes

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 21-25Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 21 Summary: “The Loophole of Retreat”

Harriet hid in the attic of a small shed near Grandmother Martha’s house. The windowless, mouse- and rat-infested space was only three feet high at the highest part. The heat was intense. Food was passed up to Harriet through a trap door Phillip had built that led to the storeroom.

Harriet heard the voices of her children, but there was no hole through which she could see them. Harriet dug three vertical holes for light. She could now see her children, but the attic was now also infested with fire ants. Sometimes, her grandmother, Phillip, and her Aunt Nancy would climb up at night to speak to her. Aunt Nancy brought news of Dr. Flint: He offered a Black woman in New York who was sympathetic to slave owners a reward if she could find out any information about Harriet.

In autumn, Harriet had some relief from the heat. Now accustomed to the light, she was able to read and sew. In winter, she suffered from the cold. Grandmother Martha brought her. Harriet lay in bed in warm clothes. But despite Martha’s hot drinks, she developed frostbite in her shoulders and feet.

Harriet overheard people talking to each other in the street. One conversation was about a plan that slave hunters had for catching a fugitive slave. Strangely, no one suspected that Harriet was hiding at her grandmother’s house. If they had, Grandmother Martha’s house would have been set afire.

Chapter 22 Summary: “Christmas Festivities”

For Christmas, Harriet sewed clothes and toys for her children. Other families worried about being separated, as hiring season approached. Both Black and White children rose early on Christmas morning to see Johnkannaus, an informal parade of Black men who wore fanciful costumes, danced, and sang songs, asking for a penny or a bit of rum at each house.

Both enslaved Black people and Whites feasted on Christmas day. Some slaves captured a turkey or a wild pig, while others would cook possum or a raccoon. Grandmother Martha had bravely invited the town constable to her home for the occasion, as well as a free Black man who curried favor with Whites by betraying the enslaved. Martha warned Harriet to stay very quiet during the visit. Martha took her guests all over the house. Before they departed, she gave each man pudding to take back to their wives.

Chapter 23 Summary: “Still in Person”

In the summer heat, turpentine dripped from the roof onto Harriet’s head. A year passed, as Harriet worried she would die in confinement. The next summer, when torrential rains came through the roof, soaking through Harriet’s clothes.

Harriet contends that Mississippi’s Senator Brown had to have been aware of the hardships of slaves. One woman bore a child by her master. When her mistress saw the resemblance, she banished the woman and the child from her house. When the enslaved woman went to her master for help, the enslaved woman and her child were sold to a slave trader from Georgia. Another time, two men chased an enslaved woman wet nurse—her mistress had ordered the men to strip and whip her. The woman ran to the river, jumped in, and drowned herself.

When winter came again, Harriet suffered more than she had the previous winter. Her hands and limbs cramped from the cold. William went to an herbalist and pretended that he was the one with the aching limbs. The healer prepared a concoction of roots, herbs, and ointment which was to be rubbed on the body while sitting beside a fire. Harriet’s family brought her hot coals in an iron pan and placed them on bricks. The warmth from the few coals was so soothing that Harriet wept. Her pain subsided a bit.

Each day, Harriet had dark thoughts, but she tried to be thankful for her hiding place, however dismal it was. Around this time, a dog bit Harriet’s son Benny, whose wounds were so severe that they hindered his ability to walk. When Grandmother Martha became ill from stress and overwork, White ladies in the town tended to Martha. Mrs. Flint refused to let Aunt Nancy tend to her mother, though Mrs. Flint went to Martha’s bedside herself when she heard that other ladies were doing it. Dr. Flint’s offer to care for Martha was refused.

When Mrs. Flint heard about the incident with Benny and the dog, she said that she wished the dog had killed the boy and that she hoped dogs would also soon get hold of the boy’s mother.

Chapter 24 Summary: “The Candidate for Congress”

At the end of the summer, Dr. Flint made a third trip to New York in pursuit of Harriet. He returned in the fall to vote for two Congressional candidates. Mr. Sands was the Whig candidate, so though Dr. Flint had previously been a Whig, he changed his party affiliation just to hurt Sands’s candidacy. Despite his efforts, Mr. Sands won the seat. The day before he was set to leave for Washington, DC, Harriet arranged to see him. He promised that he would free her children.

Friends feared that Harriet would become disabled due to being sedentary for so long. Had it not been for her hope of freeing her children, she would have been glad to die.

Chapter 25 Summary: “Competition in Cunning”

Dr. Flint continued to obsess over Harriet. Harriet decided to encourage Dr. Flint’s belief that she was in New York by writing him a letter pretending to be in the city. Her friend Peter provided her with New York newspapers so that she could learn the names of the streets. She ended up with the New York Herald, which was notorious for its systematic vitriol against Black people.

Harriet wrote two letters. In a letter to Dr. Flint, Harriet admonished him for his treatment of her over the years. In a letter to her grandmother, Harriet asked that her children be sent to the North. She then directed her grandmother to respond to a certain street in Boston, as though pretending that she did not live in New York. Harriet arranged for Peter to send them. Martha wasn’t happy to hear about this ruse, worried that the letter would bring trouble.

Aunt Nancy reported that she had heard Dr. Flint and his wife talking the letter over. When Dr. Flint visited Martha, Harriet asked Martha to seat him near a particular door so that she could eavesdrop. Dr. Flint arrived told Martha about the letter, but when he read it aloud the letter he read was one he had written himself. In it, he tried to fool Martha into thinking that Harriet was miserable in Boston and wanted to return to the South.

When Dr. Flint ran into Ellen, the doctor assured her that she would see her mother soon. Harriet found the whole matter funny.

Dr. Flint decided to send Phillip after Harriet. He also mentioned that he had written to the mayor of Boston, asking whether Harriet lived where she said she did, but Harriet assured Martha that the mayor would never trouble himself with this matter. However, the fact that Dr. Flint had written to the mayor proved that he believed it was true.

Several weeks passed, and Martha started allowing Harriet to leave her hiding place early in the morning to exercise her limbs.

Chapters 21-25 Analysis

In these chapters, Jacobs describes how enslaved people celebrated Christian holidays. Johnkannaus—also called Junkanoo, Jonkonnu, John Coonah, John Canoe, and other names—was a Carnival celebration that comes out of West African tradition. Johnkannaus usually started on Christmas day and may have extended to Boxing Day. It was a time of joy before the sadness of hiring day—New Year’s Day—descended. A group of Black men would dress in horns, multi-colored rags, and animal skins, with one playing the Johnkannaus character, who signaled the arrival of the holiday season. The group would march down the street, singing and playing instruments. The holiday gave slaves some freedom and also permitted friendlier interactions with Whites. Early 18th-century written accounts of Johnkannaus refer to celebrations in Jamaica and in the Bahamas.

Jacobs provides examples of some Black people—both free and enslaved—who were complicit with slaveholders. She does not explain why they behaved as they did, so their motivations remain unclear. However, the reader can infer that those who were free were eager to collect rewards for helping to return fugitive slaves. The enslaved likely hoped that, by informing, they would curry favor and privileges from their masters.

Jacobs’s narrative is braver than those of her peers, who tended to censor the names of public figures sympathetic toward slaveholders. Jacobs writes with the sense that her narrative would be an important historical record, making it important that she name those politicians who defended and worked to uphold slavery. One such is Senator Albert G. Brown, a Democrat who represented Mississippi in 1854-61, but withdrew from Congress after Mississippi joined the Confederacy and seceded from the Union. Originally from a South Carolina family of poor farmers, Brown was a steadfast defender of slavery—someone who had risen from poverty to privilege by defending this system.

The narrative gives another example of naturopathic medicine, as Jacobs mentions sending her brother to a “Thompsonian” doctor. This is a misspelling of Thomsonian—a school of physicians who followed in the footsteps of Samuel Thomson (1769-1843), an herbalist and botanist who founded the alternative medicine movement in the US.

Jacobs’s references to Senator Brown and Thomson, as well as her knowledge that Mr. Sands’s ran for Congress on the Whig ticket, suggest that, despite the isolation of her attic hiding space, she remained engaged with the world. The Whig Party formed in 1834 in opposition Democratic populist president Andrew Jackson. The Whigs believed in fairer treatment of indigenous people—a point of contention after Jackson ordered the westward movement of the Five Civilized Tribes—but, they were not formally anti-slavery. Indeed, though some Whigs, such as Pennsylvania representative Thaddeus Stevens, were fervently abolitionist, the party was led by Henry Clay, nicknamed “the Great Compromiser.” True to his moniker, Clay played a role in the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Whig party dissolved in the mid-1850s, after its abolitionists defected to the Republicans.

Jacobs also mentions the New York Herald as a pro-slavery newspaper. Published from 1835 to 1924, the Herald was the country’s first major tabloid newspaper. Its publisher, James Gordon Bennett, Sr., endorsed Democratic presidential candidates, and the paper regularly defended slaveholders, derided African Americans, and condemned the Lincoln administration. Jacobs’s allusion reminds readers that there were plenty of Northerners who, while they were not directly involved with slavery as owners or traders, were still complicit with the system. Some, like Bennett, had direct financial interest in its continuance.