The Virtues of Exit: On Resistance and Quitting Politics by Jennet Kirkpatrick

Author:Jennet Kirkpatrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Process, General, Campaigns & Elections
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-10-03T00:45:27.318000+00:00

Political Obligation and Gender: Harriet Jacobs’s Flight

Thus far, we have looked at many political slave narratives, examining their commonalities in terms of a positive, collectivist idea of exit. While the broad view of many accounts has its advantages, it also misses much because it cannot give a sense of how these narratives unfold and the struggles that the authors endured. It makes sense to take a finer-grained view and to turn to a particular slave narrative, Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, to see how the collectivist idea of exit appears in a specific narrative.

Jacobs’s account is well suited to exposing the details of exit because her decision to leave was particularly fraught. As a teenager, Jacobs faced the sexual predation of her master, Dr. James Norcom, and the unrelenting threat of rape gave her a pressing reason to flee.44 When she turned fifteen, her world transformed into an “atmosphere of hell” in which her master “began to whisper foul words in [her] ear.” His presence was constant—he followed Jacobs to the graveyard, where she knelt at her mother’s grave—as was the threat: “No animal ever watched its prey more narrowly than [my master] watched me.” Looking for protection, Jacobs realized that her mistress, though she should be Jacobs’s natural ally, was not to be trusted. The law was useless: for the slave girl, “there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death.” She sought protection where she could find it, developing a romantic attachment with a prominent white bachelor, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, who was the father of Jacobs’s two children and a future member of Congress. Jacobs’s second child was a girl, a cause of some regret. The birth of her daughter led her to note, “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”45

Furious at Jacobs’s relationship with a rival, Dr. Norcom used every means at his disposal to make her submit to his will, including violence, punishment, and threats against her children. Jacobs resisted at every turn and thought about fleeing often. Leaving required deserting her children, something she was unable to do. Caught in the dilemma of exit, Jacobs had every reason to flee but could not. She devised a stop-gap measure that was ingenious, liberating, and masochistic. Pretending to run away, Jacobs hid in a tiny low-ceilinged garret in her grandmother’s house, a space that had been built by her uncle especially for her concealment. Unable to stand up or move or to get outside air, Jacobs was constrained, almost buried alive. Stifled by blazing heat in the summer and frostbitten in the winter to the point of illness, she watched her children play below her year after year and waited for an opportunity to flee with them.

At the same time, Jacobs considered the garret her “loophole of retreat” and a space of freedom that enabled her to eventually escape.46 Her experience of freedom in the garret was heightened by an additional ruse: Jacobs had letters sent to Edenton from the North, leading Dr.

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