"$300 Reward! Ran away from the subscriber, an intelligent, bright, mulatto girl, named Linda, 21 years of age"
"$150 will be given to whoever takes her in the state, and $300 if taken out of the state and delivered to me, or lodged in jail. Dr. Flint"
Harriet Jacobs resolves not to turn back: "'Give me liberty, or give me death,' was my motto.'" However, her contacts informed her that a place of concealment that has been established at her grandmother's house. She couldn't imagine any place in which to hide there were Flint wouldn't seize her. But she was told to "'wait and see.'"
Once Jacobs was rowed ashore, she "'went boldly through the streets,'" to her grandmother's, dressed in a sailor's uniform, her face blackened with charcoal.
Reaching her grandmother's house, she entered the shed where "'some boards had been laid across the joists at the top,'" she writes, and between these boards and the roof was a very small garret, "'only occupied by rats and mice.'"
This was to be home"
"'This hole I was conveyed as soon as I entered the house.'"
This was to be home for seven years"
Jacobs described the air as "'stifling'" while the bed sloped on one side. "'She could not turn on the other [side] without hitting the roof.'" And light. Barely. Yet, she was free from being a slave. There in that hole of a home she could hear the voices of her children placed near by during the day so she could hear them. Soon, she "'bore three rows of holes'" until it was one hole where she could actually see Benny and Ellen.
How she longed to tell them she was there and had not left them behind.
"'I hardly expected that the reader will credit me, when I affirm that I lived in that little dismal hole, almost deprived of light and air, and with no space to move my limbs, for nearly seven years.'" This seems an incredible story, a crazy story. In America, a woman had to conceal herself in such a manner as to not experience sexual assault and domestic terror, that is, witnessing the forced removal of her children.
But isn't this America?
Mr. Sands didn't keep his promise to free the children. But eventually the children were rushed off North to safety. Jacobs, herself, was subject to the Fugitive Slave Act; however, she finally obtains her freedom and the freedom of her children. In the meantime, while Jacobs was in the North, her grandmother, rejoiced in the realization that her grandchild and great-grandchildren were free, before she, herself, died.
March 7, 1897, Harriet Jacobs dies, but her abolitionist work lives on.
Dr. Flint pursues Jacobs and her children and their descendants. He never dies...
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