Harriet Jacobs, Marronage, and Alternative Freedoms in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Abstract

Harriet Jacobs, Marronage, and Alternative Freedoms in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Sean Gerrity Five hundred years of flights from captivity, into communal and conceptual wilderness, created the maroon philosophers’ natural habitat at the boundary of democracy. Such outsider terrain superficially appears as a reservation or cell; yet it is in part a trajectory into freedom. (124) Joy James, “Afrarealism and the Black Matrix” (2013) What if we were to imagine Harriet Jacobs—or Linda Brent, her pseudonym in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)—as a maroon during her almost seven years famously concealed in the tiny garret above her grandmother’s shed?1 This essay argues that doing so is both accurate and generative. It also illustrates that Incidents is pervaded by representations of all kinds of maroons, and seeks to complicate and expand our understanding of a term traditionally used to denote enslaved people throughout the hemisphere who took flight from bondage and sought freedom and refuge by concealing themselves in the remote, inhospitable landscapes of swamps, forests, and mountains. Through sustained attention to marronage in Incidents, I identify a constellation of alternative tactics and forms of freedom and marronage and locate these within a broader discourse on freedom and unfreedom found throughout early and antebellum African American literature. Angela Davis has proposed that “the history of Black literature contains a much more illuminating account of the nature of freedom, its extent and limits, than all the philosophical discourses on this theme in the history of Western society” (Lectures 1), and I intend to read Incidents in part as a literary text that exemplifies this claim. During her time in the garret (and nearby), Brent is hiding in places technically in the purview of the slave system, within the homes and outdoor [End Page 67] locales of Edenton, the small North Carolina town of her birth and upbringing. Her condition, her maroon subject position, though one of extreme hardship, still affirms enslaved Black women’s subjectivity, community, and affective kinship relations in the face of systemic and de jure white supremacy vis-àvis chattel slavery. It is a total denial of slavery from within slavery’s borders, from within the borders of the plantation landscape itself, and a realization of a de facto freedom. Reading Brent’s retreat to her garret as marronage reconfigures the contours of freedom and unfreedom in Incidents. It enables us to recognize how Jacobs documents and explores a broad spectrum of previously overlooked freedom-seeking tactics. If we have not been able to recognize or affirm these before, it is in large part because we have been beholden to what Steven Hahn laments as “rather limited and one-dimensional images and understandings of what a maroon is” in the United States, and also because maroons’ often illegible presence in the textual archive mirrors their deliberate concealment within slaveholding societies during the times in which they lived (26). Incidents suggests that spaces of marronage are imbued with nonmaterial resources like the hopes, fears, aspirations, memories, desires, and epistemes of the enslaved—particularly of enslaved women. From these spaces of marronage, from the maroons who created and inhabited them, and from Jacobs’s representation of them, there arise ways of being and knowing that are overlooked when critical focus remains attached to an imagined political and geographical trajectory that locates unfreedom in the South and freedom in the North or Canada. We also come to realize that Incidents is not a text that exceptionalizes the individual experiences of its narrator (and author), but rather one that links those experiences with a network of maroon activities and subject positions oriented toward alternative possibilities for freedom. Carolyn Sorisio has argued that Incidents “participates in heated philosophical debates over the nature of identity that were prevalent during her time” (2; emphasis added). I argue as well that the narrative participates in debates about the nature of freedom in opposition to traditional liberal conceptions centering on civil rights and official state recognition. The essay’s series of contentions take it as understood that, as Manisha Sinha asserts, “Slave resistance, not bourgeois liberalism, lay at the heart of the abolition movement” (1...