Hearts

When Jacobs was 21, she once again adamantly rejected Dr. Norcom's offer to become his concubine. He punished her by sending her out to do fieldwork on a local plantation, leaving her children in the care of her grandmother. When she learned that Dr. Norcom planned to send them to work at the plantation as well, she decided to run away. Skilled in the implacable logic of slavery, Jacobs assumed correctly, as it turned out, that …

…the Civil War, one of the few full-length slave narratives written by a woman. After the Civil War broke out, Jacobs left New York to do relief work among the slaves who escaped to the Union Army, raising funds for them and working in Washington, D.C.; Arlington, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia. After 1868 she returned north, spending her last years with her daughter in Boston and Washington, D.C. She died in 1897. -J.A.M.