Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Glossary
A
- Aunt Martha
- Linda's maternal grandmother, the moral center of the family and one of the most respected figures in the town. Permitted to bake crackers and preserves at night after her mistress's housework was done, she built a small business, saved her earnings, and even loaned money to her mistress — a loan never repaid. Her house becomes the family's one fixed refuge, and her standing among both Black and white townspeople gives her a limited but real power that few enslaved or formerly enslaved women could claim.
- Related: Linda Brent, Uncle Benjamin, The Auction Block
- Aunt Nancy
- Linda's aunt, twin sister of her mother, who served the Flint household for decades as housekeeper and seamstress — nursing Mrs. Flint's children while her own, born prematurely under the strain of her duties, died one after another. Married in form but never allowed a household of her own, she slept on the floor outside her mistress's door for years. Her death, and Mrs. Flint's wish to bury her in the Flint family plot as a testament of affection, close the account Jacobs gives of a woman whose whole life was consumed in service to the family that owned her.
- Related: Mrs. Flint, Aunt Martha
D
- Dr. Flint
- The town physician into whose household Linda passes when his young daughter inherits her, and the book's central antagonist. Because Linda legally belongs to his child, he wields an owner's total practical power over her while claiming his hands are tied whenever she seeks to be sold away. Jacobs presents him precisely: not an exceptional monster but a respectable professional man whose conduct the law permitted and whose neighbors' opinion was his only real restraint.
- Related: Mrs. Flint, Emily Flint, The Trials of Girlhood
E
- Ellen and Benny
- Linda's two children by Mr. Sands — a son and a daughter born while she remained enslaved in the Flint household. Under the law they followed their mother's condition and belonged, like her, to Dr. Flint's young daughter; Dr. Flint understood precisely what leverage this gave him, and the children become the axis around which every subsequent decision of Linda's turns. Jacobs's portrayal of motherhood under a system that made her children another man's property is the emotional core of the book.
- Related: Mr. Sands, Follow the Condition of the Mother, Dr. Flint
- Emily Flint
- Dr. Flint's daughter, the child to whom Linda was bequeathed at age twelve and thus, through all the years of persecution, Linda's actual legal owner. Her ownership was Dr. Flint's standing excuse — he claimed he had no right to sell what belonged to his daughter — and as Emily comes of age, her claim over Linda and its possible transfer by marriage or inheritance becomes a live threat again. Jacobs uses her to show how the chattel principle outlived any individual master: the property right simply descended to the next holder.
- Related: Dr. Flint, The Chattel Principle, The Bill of Sale
F
- Follow the Condition of the Mother
- The legal rule — partus sequitur ventrem — that a child's status as slave or free descended from the mother, not the father. Linda first invokes it when explaining why she refused to marry the free-born carpenter who loved her: any children of theirs would still be slaves, a "terrible blight" on a free father. Jacobs later observes that slaveholders were "cunning enough" to enact the rule this way, ensuring that a master's own children by enslaved women added to his property rather than diminishing it.
- Related: The Chattel Principle, The Trials of Girlhood
- Free Papers
- The documents by which a free Black person proved their status — the only thing standing between legal freedom and seizure as a suspected runaway. In the slaveholding South, freedom was not presumed from appearance or reputation; it had to be producible on demand, and papers could be issued, withheld, or used to hustle an inconvenient free man out of the state, as in the episode Jacobs recounts. The fragility of paper freedom is one of the book's quiet, recurring lessons.
- Related: The Bill of Sale, The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
H
- Hiring-Day
- January 1st, the day on which enslaved people rented out by the year learned who would command them next; on January 2nd they were expected to report to their new masters. Hiring-out let owners collect income from enslaved labor without supervising it, and it meant that each new year could bring an unknown master, a new town, or separation from family. Jacobs pairs the slaveholders' festive New Year with the enslaved community's day of dread and parting.
- Related: The Auction Block, The Chattel Principle
L
- L. Maria Child's Introduction
- The prefatory note by Lydia Maria Child, the prominent white abolitionist author who edited the manuscript and vouched for its authorship. At a time when readers routinely doubted that formerly enslaved people wrote their own books, Child's role was to certify that the changes she made were "mainly for purposes of condensation and orderly arrangement" and that the story was Jacobs's own. Her introduction also defends presenting the sexual exploitation of enslaved women to a public that considered the subject indelicate, arguing the public ear ought to hear it.
- Related: Linda Brent, The Trials of Girlhood
- Linda Brent
- The pseudonym under which Harriet Jacobs tells her own story, part of a deliberate frame in which every person and place in the book is given a fictitious name. Jacobs explains in the Preface that she concealed real names not to protect herself but out of consideration for others still living, while insisting that the narrative itself is "no fiction" and that her descriptions "fall far short of the facts." The pseudonym also protected family members still in the South from retaliation.
- Related: L. Maria Child's Introduction, Aunt Martha, Dr. Flint
M
- Mr. Sands
- An unmarried white gentleman of the town, educated and eloquent, who takes an interest in fifteen-year-old Linda. Trapped between Dr. Flint's relentless pursuit and a law that gave her no right to refuse any white man, she enters a relationship with Mr. Sands as the one choice that still resembled a choice — calculating that he was kinder than Flint and might one day buy and free any children. Jacobs presents this decision with painful candor, asking readers to weigh it against the alternatives slavery actually offered her, not against the standards of free women.
- Related: The Trials of Girlhood, Dr. Flint, Follow the Condition of the Mother
- Mrs. Bruce
- The Englishwoman in New York who employs Linda as nurse to her baby daughter and becomes her first true protector in the free states. Jacobs notes that, being English, she entertained less prejudice against color than Americans; the trial week's engagement grows into genuine friendship and shelter. The name, like all names in the book, is fictitious — and Jacobs is careful to distinguish the first Mrs. Bruce from the second wife who later occupies the same role in her life.
- Related: Prejudice Against Color in the North, The Bill of Sale
- Mrs. Flint
- Dr. Flint's second wife, a church member whom Jacobs describes as lacking the strength to superintend her household but not the nerve to watch a woman whipped. Aware of her husband's designs on Linda, she directs her jealousy at the enslaved girl rather than at him — interrogating her, watching over her sleep, and treating her as a rival rather than a victim. Jacobs uses her to show how slavery corrupted the slaveholding wife, converting a wronged woman into an instrument of persecution.
- Related: Dr. Flint, The Trials of Girlhood
N
- Nat Turner's Insurrection
- The 1831 uprising of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, led by Nat Turner, which threw Linda's town into panic despite its distance from the events. Jacobs notes the irony that a community insisting its slaves were "contented and happy" armed every white man at the first news of revolt. The aftermath she describes — houses of Black families ransacked, innocent people whipped and jailed on rumor, church meetings of enslaved people broken up — shows how white fear translated directly into organized violence against people who had done nothing.
- Related: Slave Patrols and the Muster, The Church and Slavery
P
- Peter
- A trusted friend of the family, himself formerly enslaved, who repeatedly risks his own safety to move Linda between hiding places during the months when the town is being searched for her. His quick judgment and nerve — knowing when to move her, by what route, and in what disguise — represent the informal network of Black solidarity on which every escape in the book depends. Assisting a fugitive was a crime, and Peter's help is given with full knowledge of the price.
- Related: The Flight, Snaky Swamp
- Prejudice Against Color in the North
- The system of exclusion Linda meets in the free states: segregated cabins and tables on steamboats and trains, hotels that would lodge her only as a servant, and public conveyances where she could be ordered from her seat. Jacobs records these incidents with the same precision she gave to slavery, including the bitter detail of a Black employee enforcing the rules against her. The North offered freedom from sale and the whip, but not equality — a distinction the book insists its Northern readers confront.
- Related: Mrs. Bruce, What Slaves Are Taught to Think of the North
S
- Slave Patrols and the Muster
- The armed apparatus by which the white community policed the enslaved population: an annual muster in which every white man shouldered a musket, and patrols — often drawn from poor whites who owned no slaves — empowered to search homes, break up gatherings, and punish Black people found abroad. Jacobs observes that slaveholders used the patrols to bind non-slaveholding whites to the system, giving the poorest white man the exercise of power over any Black person as compensation for his own poverty. After Nat Turner's revolt this machinery ran wild through the town's Black households.
- Related: Nat Turner's Insurrection, The Flight
- Snaky Swamp
- The snake-infested swamp where Linda is hidden when no house in town is safe, crouching among mosquitoes and serpents until a better concealment can be arranged. Jacobs renders the swamp without romance — she is frightened of the snakes and made ill by the exposure — yet notes the bitter comparison the place forces on her: even this was preferable to the power of Dr. Flint. The swamp marks the lowest physical point of her flight and the threshold of its strangest chapter.
- Related: The Flight, Peter, The Loophole of Retreat
T
- The Auction Block
- The public sale by which enslaved people were converted into cash, most often at the new year or at the settlement of an estate. Jacobs's grandmother, promised freedom in her mistress's will, is instead put up at public auction; the townspeople, ashamed, refuse to bid until the seventy-year-old sister of her deceased mistress buys her for fifty dollars and frees her. The scene shows both the machinery of the sale and the narrow, personal, unreliable channels through which freedom occasionally arrived.
- Related: Aunt Martha, The Chattel Principle, Hiring-Day
- The Bill of Sale
- The document that finally ends the hunt: without Linda's knowledge, the second Mrs. Bruce employs a gentleman to negotiate with Mr. Dodge, who has acquired the Flint family's claim, and three hundred dollars purchases Linda with a binding relinquishment of all claim to her and her children forever. Jacobs's feelings are famously divided — she is grateful beyond words to her friend, and revolted that a bill of sale for a free woman of God could be executed in New York in the nineteenth century. "The bill of sale is on record," she writes, offering the document itself as evidence of what the law of the land still was.
- Related: Mrs. Bruce, The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Emily Flint
- The Candidate for Congress
- Mr. Sands's run for Congress, which he wins — an episode Jacobs uses to display the strange intimacy of Southern politics with slavery. Dr. Flint campaigns against him out of personal vendetta, and Linda, still in hiding, risks discovery to speak to Mr. Sands as he passes, extracting a renewed promise concerning their children before he leaves for Washington. The chapter underlines how completely her children's future depended on the private conscience of a public man whom she had no legal means to hold to his word.
- Related: Mr. Sands, Ellen and Benny, Dr. Flint
- The Chattel Principle
- The legal doctrine that an enslaved person was movable property — able to be bequeathed, sold, mortgaged, and inventoried like furniture or livestock. Jacobs shows it operating rather than lecturing about it: she learns at six, on her mother's death, that she is a slave; at twelve her kind mistress's will bequeaths her to a five-year-old child, proving that affection and "faithful service" counted for nothing against the estate's property interest. Nearly every calamity in the book — separations, sales, the pursuit of fugitives — follows from this single principle.
- Related: The Auction Block, Follow the Condition of the Mother, The Bill of Sale
- The Church and Slavery
- Jacobs's account of religion as practiced under slavery: after the Turner panic, the town's enslaved people were given a separate service with a white pastor whose text was "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters." She distinguishes sharply between this instrument of control and genuine Christianity, which some enslaved people and a few whites practiced at real cost. The chapter documents catechisms of obedience, the barring of Black worship without white oversight, and the church membership of the cruelest masters — including Dr. Flint, who joined the church without changing his conduct.
- Related: Nat Turner's Insurrection, Dr. Flint
- The Flight
- Linda's decision to run, taken when she learns her children are to be brought to the plantation to be "broke in" — calculating that if she vanished, the children would become an inconvenience Dr. Flint might sell to their father. She slips away at night, and Dr. Flint's published runaway advertisement, offering a reward and describing her person, marks her legal transformation into a fugitive. The chapter begins the long central section of the book in which she is hunted while hiding within reach of her family.
- Related: Ellen and Benny, Snaky Swamp, Slave Patrols and the Muster
- The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
- The federal law that made every free state a hunting ground: it required Northern citizens and officials to assist in recapturing escaped slaves, denied the accused a jury trial or the right to testify, and paid commissioners more for ruling a person a slave than for ruling them free. For Linda, its passage transforms New York from refuge into trap — she must watch the streets, avoid certain districts, and depend on employers willing to break federal law to shelter her. Jacobs describes families of long-settled fugitives thrown into terror, and the law's effect of converting Northern indifference into complicity.
- Related: Free Papers, Mrs. Bruce, The Bill of Sale
- The Loophole of Retreat
- The garret above a shed attached to Aunt Martha's house, where Linda is finally concealed: nine feet long, seven feet wide, three feet high at its tallest point, sloping to the floorboards, without light or air, entered through a trap-door her uncle Phillip built. With a gimlet she bores a hole an inch square through which she can watch the street — and see her children pass below without being able to speak to them. The title, borrowed from Cowper's poem, is bitterly ironic: the poet's peaceful retreat from the world becomes a formerly enslaved woman's voluntary cell, chosen because a coffin-sized crawlspace in her grandmother's house was freer than slavery.
- Related: Aunt Martha, Uncle Phillip, Ellen and Benny
- The Plantation
- The country estate of Dr. Flint's son, to which Linda is sent as punishment — and the book's clearest illustration of the difference between town and plantation slavery. In town, enslaved people lived under the eyes of neighbors whose opinion set some limit on treatment; on the plantation, isolation removed even that check, and field hands lived under the overseer's whip with coarser rations, harder labor, and no witnesses. Jacobs, who had been a town house servant all her life, registers the plantation as a distinct and harsher country within the same system.
- Related: Dr. Flint, The Flight
- The Sham Sale of the Children
- The maneuver by which Linda's children pass out of Dr. Flint's hands: a speculating slave-trader offers to buy William, Benny, and Ellen, and Flint — needing money and fearing the children might die or be spirited away before they grew valuable — accepts, not knowing the trader is quietly acting for Mr. Sands. The children are resold to their father, but Jacobs is precise about the limits of the arrangement: no emancipation is recorded, and their freedom rests entirely on Mr. Sands's good faith rather than on any legal instrument. It is protection, not liberty.
- Related: Mr. Sands, Ellen and Benny, The Bill of Sale
- The Trials of Girlhood
- Jacobs's phrase for the sexual persecution that began when she turned fifteen and Dr. Flint began whispering "foul words" in her ear. She states the general rule plainly: the enslaved girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness, has no legal protection from her master's will, and can expect the mistress's jealousy rather than her aid. Jacobs addresses this material directly but without sensational detail, writing for Northern white women whom she asks to judge an enslaved woman's choices by a different standard than their own protected circumstances allow.
- Related: Dr. Flint, Mrs. Flint, Mr. Sands
U
- Uncle Benjamin
- Linda's young uncle, only a few years her senior, "the slave who dared to feel like a man." When his master strikes him, Benjamin throws him to the ground rather than submit — a capital act of defiance for an enslaved man — and chooses flight and prison over begging pardon. His story establishes early the book's argument that the spirit slavery punished most severely was ordinary self-respect.
- Related: Aunt Martha, Uncle Phillip, The Flight
- Uncle Phillip
- Another of Aunt Martha's sons, a skilled carpenter who remains in the town and becomes the family's steady, practical protector. Where Benjamin's response to slavery is open defiance, Phillip's is patience and quiet competence — a contrast Jacobs draws without ranking one above the other. His trade and his reliability make him indispensable to the family at several critical turns.
- Related: Aunt Martha, Uncle Benjamin
W
- What Slaves Are Taught to Think of the North
- The deliberate misinformation campaign by which slaveholders portrayed the free states as a place of starvation, cold, and abandonment, where fugitives begged to be taken back. Jacobs describes masters returning from Northern trips with stories of ragged, freezing free Black people, calculated to make slavery seem the safer condition. The chapter documents propaganda as one of slavery's instruments of control, working on the mind where the patrols worked on the body.
- Related: Slave Patrols and the Muster, The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
- William
- Linda's younger brother, intelligent and restive under bondage from childhood. An early scene shows him called simultaneously by his father and his mistress — and punished for obeying his father first, a small incident Jacobs uses to show how slavery claimed precedence over the parental bond itself. His fortunes remain entwined with Linda's throughout the narrative.
- Related: Linda Brent, The Chattel Principle