Conclusion: Vexed Alliances: Race and Female Collaborations in the Life of Harriet Jacobs

Summary

To my dear parents, and to David Levin,

whose unofficial parenting never flags

If autobiographies are selective, so too is our recounting of them. Since the details of Harriet Jacobs's ordeals and coups have been amply rehearsed, especially by Jean Fagan Yellin, Jacobs's principal biographer, I will pursue one important trajectory in Jacobs's life and chart its ramifications for her and for us as scholars. Rafia Zafar, coeditor of this volume, has eloquently suggested in the “Introduction” the tensions Incidents has generated in the academy, including those between female African American and female white scholars. Such vexed relations charge not only the recent reception of this book, of course, but also Jacobs's biography itself, with its anxious moments between an African American female and a proliferation of white women guardians and mentors. This productive, if sometimes uneasy, alliance between slave and white woman emerges almost as soon as Jacobs begins the cloistered idyll of her girlhood; and the ambivalent relation between black and white figures lingers as female slaveholders aid in her protracted escape to the North and white women employers shelter her after that flight is precariously achieved. But the chafing bond between the ex-“Slave Girl” and her white helpmates hovers outside the narrative itself, in which Jacobs transcribes private “incidents” into public Incidents: in her relationships with the Quaker abolitionist Amy Post, with the sentimental author Lydia Maria Child (who edits, introduces, and claims to christen the narrative into respectability), and with other white authors whom Jacobs solicits to help steer her life's “incidents” into publication.