Born: ca. 1813, Edenton, NC

Education: Taught as a slave

Died: March 7, 1897

Jacobs's Edenton, North Carolina mistress taught her to read and write. Her master's sexual harassment later forced her to escape and write Incidents in Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), the first published narrative of a black bondwoman.

Using pseudonyms, Jacobs related a “harrowing and sensational story,” which many scholars assumed a white person had written. But historian Jean Yellin confirmed her authorship in 1987. Jacobs aimed “to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of the two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse” (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1987, p. 1).

Thus Linda resisted the advances of her master, Dr. Flint. Her grandmother Martha, a freedwoman and homeowner, provided refuge, as did Sawyer, a white neighbor, who fathered Linda's two children. Hoping that her absence ultimately would force Flint to sell them to their father, she hid in the crawl space of her grandmother's attic for seven years. In 1842, aided by the antislavery underground, she escaped to Boston. Antislavery women furnished material and moral support and helped purchase the children's freedom. Linda's female employer paid for and freed her in 1853.