The year is 1830. The place is Edenton, a waterfront town in North Carolina. You’re sixteen years old and the enslaved servant of Matilda Norcom, a seven-year-old girl. Your young brother, John, is a slave too. He’s an office boy for Matilda’s father, Dr. James Norcom.
The doctor is fifty-three years old and addicted to morphine. A violent man, he’s the master of the Norcom household. Though you’re his daughter’s property, he holds the power over you.
The doctor learns that you’ll soon be a mother. When you won’t tell him who the father is, he throws you out of his house. You move in with your grandmother and her son, Mark. About six months later, you give premature birth to a boy whom you name Joseph.
Thankfully, your grandmother—white people in town call her Yellow Molly—is a free woman and owns her own cottage. She can support you and your infant by selling bread that she bakes in her kitchen. Living with her is a great comfort.
But the doctor refuses to let Molly buy your freedom, and he never lets you forget that you’re still a slave. Molly’s cottage is just down the street from his office and only two blocks from his town house. On his way to work, he often stops in to threaten you. One time he pitches you down the stairs. The bruises are so painful that you can’t turn in bed for days.
Two years later Norcom finds out that you’re expecting another child. Furious, he comes to Molly’s cottage and cuts your hair close to your head. When your daughter, Lulu, is born, he visits again and taunts you until you faint.
Despite Norcom’s abuse, Lulu’s sweet face and Joseph’s childish giggles bring you much joy. It’s a joy that could quickly turn to tragedy. According to law, the children are the property of Matilda Norcom. The law is brutally clear about this: the child follows the condition of the mother from the instant it is born. Legally, Joseph and Lulu are Matilda’s slaves, just as you are. They can be sold at any time.
You never tell the children about their white father, Samuel Sawyer. In public, he doesn’t claim them as his offspring. He seldom even sees them, since they aren’t his slaves. You follow his wishes for privacy, because he’s promised to purchase all of you one day, then set you free. You hold that picture of freedom in your mind, and it gives you hope.
Two years pass. Joseph is five, Lulu is a toddler of two. Now you’re faced with a terrible dilemma. Dr. Norcom has built a lonely cabin in the woods outside of town. He wants you to live there so he can control you at all times. If you refuse, the children will be torn from your arms. “Your boy shall be put to work,” he warns, “and he shall soon be sold. Your girl shall be raised for the purpose of selling as well.”
Joseph put to work! The child is small for his age and sickly. He’d never survive the harsh conditions of field labor. And you can’t let Lulu be raised in the Norcom household. She’s afraid of the doctor’s wife, who calls her a white-faced brat.
Frantic, you consider ways out of this desperate situation. Maybe you should flee with Joseph and Lulu. But could their little legs run for hours through the woods? Perhaps you should escape with them by ship. But what if a slave catcher comes aboard? Could Joseph and Lulu sit perfectly still in a hiding spot? No, you think. My babies are too young to risk it.
Should you run away alone, leaving the children with Molly? She could send them to you later—if you survive the escape. If you don’t, they’ll never see their mother again.
Or you could hide somewhere in Edenton. After all, Dr. Norcom is using the children to blackmail you. If he thinks you’ve escaped to the North, he might agree to sell them to Samuel Sawyer. Of the four possibilities, this one is the most dangerous. Edenton is a small town, so Norcom could easily find you. Captured runaways here are severely punished, even beheaded.
Which will it be? What decision will you make?
In June of 1835, an enslaved mother named Harriet Jacobs faced these same impossible choices. She chose the last one: She ran from Norcom and hid in Edenton to be near her children. Her first hiding spot was an upstairs room in a house owned by a sympathetic white woman.
Norcom was enraged. He organized patrols to search for Harriet and stationed night sentries through town. The next day he posted announcements that offered a one-hundred-fifty-dollar reward for her capture in North Carolina. Anyone who found her out of state would receive three hundred dollars. For the next eight weeks, he ran newspaper advertisements describing his “light mulatto” runaway. The ads stated that Harriet was probably headed north. Her ploy had worked; Norcom had no idea she was still in Edenton.
Soon after, Samuel Sawyer kept part of his promise to Harriet. He tricked the doctor into selling Joseph and Lulu to a slave trader. Then Sawyer bought them himself for five hundred dollars. He also paid nine hundred dollars for Harriet’s brother, John.
When Norcom discovered the trick, he threatened to kill Molly and Mark and to whip John nearly to death. Harriet, of course, rejoiced when she heard that Sawyer now owned her children. Joseph and Lulu still weren’t free, but at least they were out of Norcom’s control.
By then it was time to move to a safer hiding spot. Late that same summer, Harriet quietly slipped into an enclosed storeroom on Molly’s back porch. In the corner was a cupboard with a trapdoor at the top. It led to the crawl space beneath the eaves of Molly’s roof. Molly’s son, Mark, lifted Harriet up into a space about the size of two coffins. Molly passed food through the trapdoor, whispered messages in the dark of night, and carried away the slop pot. It was the beginning of a long ordeal.
Joseph and Lulu didn’t know that their mother was living just over their heads. They were too young to keep such a dangerous secret, so Molly told them she had left for New York. But Harriet could hear them playing on the piazza below. After she hand-drilled a one-inch-round hole in the house wall, she could even see them playing in the yard.
Two years later, Samuel Sawyer had yet to give her children their free papers. One night she saw him passing on the street. She slipped down from her hiding spot. “All I ask,” she whispered through a shuttered window, “is that you will free my children.”
Sawyer agreed, but he must have known that this would ruin his reputation as a gentleman. To free Joseph and Lulu, he would have to appear before a judge and sign their emancipation papers. His signature would be a public confession to everyone in Edenton that the children were his offspring. He never could bring himself to do it.
Meanwhile, Harriet prayed that he would. Still a Norcom family slave, still waiting for Sawyer to free her children, she endured the crawl space. Almost seven years passed. Broiling heat, freezing temperatures, and raging fevers were her only companions in that hellish spot.
In Letters from a Slave Girl: The Story of Harriet Jacobs, readers imagine Harriet’s suffering through her eyes. Letters from a Slave Boy is a tandem tale told through Joseph’s eyes. It begins in Edenton while his mother is in hiding, then follows his journeys through the wider world. It is the story of a hunted woman’s son—a boy who struggles to free his family and himself, and to decide who he really is.*