Dating norcom

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself

Boston: Published for the Author, 1861, c1860.

Summary

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina in 1813. After both her mother, Delilah, and father, Elijah, died during Jacobs's youth, she and her younger brother, John, were raised by their maternal grandmother, Molly Horniblow. Jacobs learned to read, write, and sew under her first mistress, Margaret Horniblow, and hoped to be freed by her. However, when Jacobs was eleven years old, her mistress died and willed her to Dr. James Norcom, a binding decision that initiated a lifetime of suffering and hardship for Jacobs. Dr. Norcom, represented later as Dr. Flint in Jacobs's narrative, sexually harassed and physically abused the teenaged Jacobs as long as she was a servant in his household. Jacobs warded off his advances by entering into an affair with a prominent white lawyer named Samuel Treadwell Sawyer and bearing him two children: Joseph (b. 1829) and Louisa Matilda (c. 1833-1913), who legally belonged to Norcom. Fearing Norcom's persistent sexual threats and hoping that he might relinquish his hold on her children, Jacobs hid herself in the storeroom crawlspace at her grandmother's house from 1835 until 1842. During those seven years Jacobs could do little more than sit up in the cramped space. She read, sewed, and watched over her children from a chink in the roof, waiting for an opportunity to escape to the North. Jacobs was finally able to make her way to New York City by boat in 1842 and was eventually reunited with her children there. Even in New York, however, Jacobs was at the mercy of the Fugitive Slave Law, which meant that wherever Jacobs lived in the United States, she could be reclaimed by the Norcoms and returned to slavery at any time. Around 1852, her employer, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, purchased her freedom from the Norcoms.

Jacobs's decision to write her autobiography stemmed from correspondence with her friend, Amy Post, a Quaker abolitionist and feminist activist. Jacobs had befriended Post in Rochester, New York in the late 1840s after she had moved there to join the abolitionist movement with her brother John. Jacobs confided her past to Post, who encouraged her to write it down herself after Harriet Beecher Stowe rejected Jacobs's request for an amanuensis. In 1861, with the aid of white abolitionist editor Lydia Maria Child, Jacobs published her narrative entitled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl pseudonymously as "Linda Brent." Jacobs's surviving correspondence with Child validates Incidents as entirely Jacobs's work, with only minor editing on Child's part. Despite her use of a pseudonym, Jacobs did gain fame for a time after its publication. She entered into public service with her daughter during the 1860s, aiding refugees during the Civil War and opening the Jacobs Free School in Alexandria, Virginia. After several trips south and one abroad to England, Jacobs reestablished herself as a relief worker in Washington, D. C. in the 1880s and died there on March 7, 1897.

Harriet Jacobs's autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), is the most widely-read female antebellum slave narrative. In recounting her life experiences before she was freed, Jacobs offered her contemporary readers a startlingly realistic portrayal of her sexual history while a slave. Although several male authors of slave narratives had referred to the victimization of enslaved African American women by white men, none had addressed the subject as directly as Jacobs finally chose to. She not only documented the sexual abuse she suffered, but also explained how she had devised a way to use her sexuality as a means of avoiding exploitation by her master. Risking her reputation in the disclosure of such intimate details, Jacobs appealed to a northern female readership that might sympathize with the plight of a southern mother in bondage. Indeed, throughout her narrative, Jacobs focuses on the importance of family and motherhood. She details the strain of being separated from her grandmother and two children during her seven years in hiding, and afterwards in New York and Boston, when she lacked the means to free her daughter. As her biographer Jean Fagan Yellin has noted, Jacobs's slave narrative is similar to other narratives in its story of struggle, survival, and ultimately freedom. Yet she also reworks the male-centered slave narrative genre to accommodate issues of motherhood and sexuality. By confronting directly the cruel realities that plagued black women in the nineteenth century, Jacobs's work occupies a significant place in American literary tradition.

Works Consulted: Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company; Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Ann Jacobs, The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. eds. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Harriet A. Jacobs (Harriet Ann), 1813-1897

Harriet Jacobs, daughter of Delilah, the slave of Margaret Horniblow, and Daniel Jacobs, the slave of Andrew Knox, was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in the fall of 1813. Until she was six years old Harriet was unaware that she was the property of Margaret Horniblow. Before her death in 1825, Harriet's relatively kind mistress taught her slave to read and sew. In her will, Margaret Horniblow bequeathed eleven-year-old Harriet to a niece, Mary Matilda Norcom. Since Mary Norcom was only three years old when Harriet Jacobs became her slave, Mary's father, Dr. James Norcom, an Edenton physician, became Jacobs's de facto master. Under the regime of James and Maria Norcom, Jacobs was introduced to the harsh realities of slavery. Though barely a teenager, Jacobs soon realized that her master was a sexual threat.

From 1825, when she entered the Norcom household, until 1842, the year she escaped from slavery, Harriet Jacobs struggled to avoid the sexual victimization that Dr. Norcom intended to be her fate. Although she loved and admired her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, a free black woman who wanted to help Jacobs gain her freedom, the teenage slave could not bring herself to reveal to her unassailably upright grandmother the nature of Norcom's threats. Despised by the doctor's suspicious wife and increasingly isolated by her situation, Jacobs in desperation formed a clandestine liaison with Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a white attorney with whom Jacobs had two children, Joseph and Louisa, by the time she was twenty years old. Hoping that by seeming to run away she could induce Norcom to sell her children to their father, Jacobs hid herself in a crawl space above a storeroom in her grandmother's house in the summer of 1835. In that "little dismal hole" she remained for the next seven years, sewing, reading the Bible, keeping watch over her children as best she could, and writing occasional letters to Norcom designed to confuse him as to her actual whereabouts. In 1837 Sawyer was elected to the United States House of Representatives. Although he had purchased their children in accordance with their mother's wishes, Sawyer moved to Washington, D. C. without emancipating either Joseph or Louisa. In 1842 Jacobs escaped to the North by boat, determined to reclaim her daughter from Sawyer, who had sent her to Brooklyn, New York, to work as a house servant.

For ten years after her escape from North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs lived the tense and uncertain life of a fugitive slave. She found Louisa in Brooklyn, secured a place for both children to live with her in Boston, and went to work as a nursemaid to the baby daughter of Mary Stace Willis, wife of the popular editor and poet, Nathaniel Parker Willis. Norcom made several attempts to locate Jacobs in New York, which forced her to keep on the move. In 1849 she took up an eighteen-month residence in Rochester, New York, where she worked with her brother, John S. Jacobs, in a Rochester antislavery reading room and bookstore above the offices of Frederick Douglass's newspaper, The North Star. In Rochester Jacobs met and began to confide in Amy Post, an abolitionist and pioneering feminist who gently urged the fugitive slave mother to consider making her story public. After the tumultuous response to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Jacobs thought of enlisting the aid of the novel's author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in getting her own story published. But Stowe had little interest in any sort of creative partnership with Jacobs. After receiving, early in 1852, the gift of her freedom from Cornelia Grinnell Willis, the second wife of her employer, Jacobs decided to write her autobiography herself.

In 1853 Jacobs took her first steps toward authorship, sending several anonymous letters to the New York Tribune. In the first, "Letter from a Fugitive Slave. Slaves Sold under Peculiar Circumstances" (June 21, 1853), Jacobs broached the sexually sensitive subject matter that would become the burden of her autobiography -- the sexual abuse of slave women and their mothers' attempts to protect them. By the summer of 1857 Jacobs had completed what she called in a June 21 letter to Post "a true and just account of my own life in Slavery." "There are some things that I might have made plainer I know," Jacobs admitted to Post, but, acknowledging her anxiety about telling her story to even as sympathetic and supportive a friend as Post, Jacobs continued, "I have left nothing out but what I thought the world might believe that a Slave Woman was too willing to pour out—that she might gain their sympathies." Still Jacobs hoped her book "might do something for the Antislavery Cause" both in England and the United States. To that end she engaged the editorial services of Lydia Maria Child, a prominent white antislavery writer, who, as she put it in an August 30, 1860 letter to Jacobs, "exercised my bump of mental order" on the manuscript, before contracting with a Boston publishing house, Thayer & Eldridge, to publish the book. Thayer & Eldridge went bankrupt before Jacobs's autobiography could be published, however. Persevering, Jacobs with the support of her antislavery friends saw to the publication of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl late in 1860 by a Boston printer. In 1861 a British edition of Incidents. entitled The Deeper Wrong; Or, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. appeared in London.

Praised by the antislavery press in the United States and Great Britain, Incidents was quickly overshadowed by the gathering clouds of civil war in America. Never reprinted in Jacobs's lifetime, it remained in obscurity until the Civil Rights and Women's Movements of the 1960s and 1970s spurred a reprint of Incidents in 1973. Not until the extensive archival work of Jean Fagan Yellin did Incidents begin to take its place as a major African American slave narrative. Published in Yellin's admirable edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harvard University Press, 1987), Jacobs's correspondence with Child helps lay to rest the long-standing charge against Incidents that it is at worst a fiction and at best the product of Child's pen, not Jacobs's. Child's letters to Jacobs and others make clear that her role as editor was no more than she acknowledged in her introduction to Incidents. to ensure the orderly arrangement and directness of the narrative, without adding anything to the text or altering in any significant way Jacobs's manner of recounting her story.

Harriet Jacobs was the first woman to author a fugitive slave narrative in the United States. Yet she was never as celebrated as Ellen Craft, a runaway from Georgia, who had become internationally famous for the daring escape from slavery that she and her husband, William, engineered in 1848, during which Ellen impersonated a male slaveholder attended by her husband in the role of faithful slave. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), the thrilling narrative of the Crafts' flight from Savannah to Philadelphia, was published under both of their names but has always been attributed to William's hand. Harriet Jacobs's autobiography, by contrast, was "written by herself," as the subtitle to the book proudly states. Even more astonishing than the Crafts' story, Incidents represents no less profoundly an African American woman's resourcefulness, courage, and dauntless quest for freedom. Yet nowhere in Jacobs's autobiography, not even on its title page, did its author disclose her own identity. Instead, Jacobs called herself "Linda Brent" and masked the important places and persons in her narrative in the manner of a novelist, renaming Norcom "Dr. Flint" and Sawyer "Mr. Sands" in her narrative. Despite her longing to speak out frankly and fully, Jacobs dreaded writing candidly about the obscenities of slavery, fear that disclosing these "foul secrets" would impute to her the guilt that should have been reserved for those, like Norcom, who hid behind such secrets. "I had no motive for secrecy on my own account," Jacobs insists in her preface to Incidents, but given the harrowing and sensational story she had to tell, the one-time fugitive felt she had little alternative but to shield herself from a readership whose understanding and empathy she could not take for granted.

Jacobs's primary motive in writing Incidents was to address white women of the North on behalf of thousands of "Slave mothers that are still in bondage" in the South. The mother of two slave children fathered by a white man, Jacobs faced a task considerably more complicated than that of any African American woman author before her. She wanted to indict the southern patriarchy for its sexual tyranny over black women like herself. But she could not do so without confessing with "sorrow and shame" her willing participation in a liaison that produced two illegitimate children. Resolved, she informs her female reader, "to tell you the truth. let it cost me what it may," Jacobs fully acknowledges her transgressions against conventional sexual morality when she was a "slave girl." At the same time, however, Jacobs articulates a bolder truth—that the morality of free white women has little ethical relevance or authority when applied to the situation of enslaved black women in the South.

White abolitionist propaganda in the antebellum era only rarely discussed how slave women resisted sexual exploitation. Jacobs, however, was determined to portray herself as an agent rather than a victim, a woman motivated by a desire for freedom much stronger than a fear of sexual retribution. "I knew what I did," Jacobs admits in an extraordinarily candid explanation of her decision to accept Sawyer as her lover, "and I did it with deliberate calculation." But "there is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you," Jacobs informs her reader. It was a desire for freedom, rather than a white lover, Jacobs argues, that ultimately impelled her affair with Sawyer. "I knew nothing would enrage Dr. Flint so much as to know that I favored another. I thought he would revenge himself by selling me, and I was sure my friend, Mr. Sands, would buy me." Such a "calculated" use of sexuality as both an instrument of "revenge" against Norcom and as a means to freedom via Sands may have unsettled Jacobs's northern readers as much as her confessions of sexual transgressions. But in the end, Jacobs claims, "in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others." Whatever her moral failings, Jacobs claims in recounting her sexual affairs as a slave woman, the traditional ideals of the nineteenth-century "cult of true womanhood" could not adequately address them.

Writing an unprecedented mixture of confession, self-justification, and societal expose, Harriet Jacobs turned her autobiography into a unique analysis of the myths and the realities that defined the situation of the African American woman and her relationship to nineteenth-century standards of womanhood. As a result, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl occupies a crucial place in the history of American women's literature in general and African American women's literature in particular. Published in the North, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl proved that until slavery was overthrown, only expatriate southern women writers, such as Jacobs and her contemporary, Angelina Grimke Weld, who left South Carolina to speak out against slavery in the South, could write freely about social problems in the South.

From 1862 to 1866 Jacobs devoted herself to relief efforts in and around Washington, D. C. among former slaves who had become refugees of the war. With her daughter Jacobs founded a school in Alexandria, Virginia, which lasted from 1863 to 1865, when both mother and daughter returned south to Savannah, Georgia, to engage in further relief work among the freedmen and freedwomen. The spring of 1867 found Jacobs back in Edenton, actively promoting the welfare of the ex-slaves and reflecting in her correspondence on "those I loved" and "their unfaltering love and devotion toward myself and [my] children." This sense of dedication and solidarity with those who had been enslaved kept Jacobs at work in the South until racist violence ultimately drove her and Louisa back to the Cambridge, Massachusetts, where in 1870 she opened a boarding house. By the mid-1880s Jacobs had settled with Louisa in Washington, D. C. Little is known about the last decade of her life. Harriet Jacobs died in Washington, D. C. on March 7, 1897.

Suggested further reading: William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story (1986); Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood (1987); Joanne M. Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography (1989); Dana D. Nelson, The Word in Black and White (1992); Carla L. Peterson, "Doers of the Word" African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) (1995); Deborah Garfield and Rafia Zafar, eds. Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays (1996); and Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004).

William L. Andrews

Titles by Harriet A. Jacobs (Harriet Ann) available on this site:

10 Stories Of Triumph Over Slavery In The American South

Courage and strength in the face of a system that’s designed to be as repressive as humanly possible is an amazing thing, and the stories of those who struggled against their oppressors can be truly inspiring. Here are just some of the stories of those living—and struggling—in the pre–Civil War South who took their lives and their fates into their own hands and won. although, sadly, some didn’t live to see the effect that their actions had on the world around them.

10 Ellen And William Craft

When Ellen and William Craft decided to escape their Southern masters and make a bid for freedom, they did it in an incredibly harrowing—and unbelievably brave—way: They did it in plain sight. Ellen, the daughter of a white plantation owner and one of his half-white slaves, had already spent much of her life being mistaken for a white family member (and getting the wrath of her masters for it). So when she and her husband decided to go north, Ellen cut her hair, wrapped bandages around part of her face, and donned colored spectacles and men’s clothes. She would be traveling as a man, with William posing as her slave. To hide the fact that she was illiterate, she put her arm in a sling as an excuse as to why she couldn’t sign her name.

Having gotten passes from their masters to go see family for the holiday, they headed to the train station instead, and their journey was far from easy. On the first leg of their trip north, Ellen was seated next to a close friend of her master’s, whom she had seen countless times; she pretended to be deaf to avoid conversation. Several times they were stopped by authorities who demanded to see Ellen’s proof of ownership of William, and each time, someone intervened. At one point, a woman in Virginia accosted them, insisting that William was her runaway slave.

It wasn’t until they reached Philadelphia that they dared reveal their identities. There, Northern abolitionists helped them find a place to stay. Several years later, they found themselves still being pursued by slave hunters; the pair moved to England until the 1870s, when they went back to Georgia and established a school.

9 William Wells Brown

William Wells Brown was born in Kentucky in 1814, the son of a slave and an unnamed white relative of his mother’s master. He and his mother traveled with the family, and in 1832, they tried—and failed—to escape. Afterward, he was sold and put to work on riverboats, where he quickly learned all he would need to know to escape for good. And escape he did. In 1834, he made his way to Cleveland, where he started his career as an abolitionist, lecturer, and writer. He settled in Buffalo, New York for a while, but eventually moved on to England after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was established. It was there that he wrote the first novel credited to an African-American author .

The book, Clotel . tells the story of one of Thomas Jefferson’s children, born from his slave mistress, and of her attempts to find happiness in the face of hate, prejudice, and the ever-present threat of slavery. She even gets a taste of that happiness, secretly marrying a wealthy plantation owner and bearing his daughter; the happiness is short-lived, though, and only lasts until he leaves her for a white woman and she is sold back into slavery .

Later, after moving back to Boston, Brown went on to write what’s considered the first play by an African-American playwright, The Escape; Or, A Leap For Freedom . Published in 1858, the work is a sweeping social commentary on the conflict between the pre–Civil War North and South and, on a smaller scale, it’s also the story of two slaves married in secret.

8 Priscilla’s Homecoming

Family records and documents dating back to the beginning of the slave trade are rare enough, and an unbroken chain of documents telling the complete story of a single person’s family is even more rare. That’s what makes Priscilla and her ancestors so unique. On April 9, 1756, a ship called the Hare left Sierra Leone bound for America. On board were captives, and those fortunate enough to survive the trip had a lifetime of slavery waiting for them. Among those captives was a 10-year-old girl who was given the name Priscilla when she was sold to the owner of a South Carolina rice plantation .

Priscilla spent her entire life on the plantation and gave birth to 10 children. The lives of some of those children were documented as well, in what would eventually be assembled to become an unbroken, 250-year chain of documents leading to her great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Thomalind Martin Polite. Since finding out the history of her family, Polite has returned to Sierra Leone as an ambassador to the home that her ancestor was forced to leave behind so many generations ago.

In addition to undertaking what she called a spiritual journey, Priscilla’s records are also shedding light on an often-overlooked part of the slave trade—the part that Northern ships had to play. The Hare . the ship that brought Priscilla to America, was based out of Newport, Rhode Island. In fact, the Northern state was one of the most prolific ports when it came to the transport of captives who had been taken from their homes in Africa and brought to America. While it’s easy to look at the issue of slavery in America as having a strict North-South division, the existence of Priscilla’s records has resulted in the penning of another chapter in the slave trade.

7 Levi And Catharine Coffin

The Coffins were devoutly religious Quakers from North Carolina who, fortunately for thousands of people fleeing slavery, believed that the laws of man were null and void when they directly opposed the morals and values of their God. Not agreeing with the laws of man and actively opposing them are two entirely different things, and the Coffins were of the “actively opposing ” viewpoint. Levi Coffin’s strong anti-slavery opinions were formed young, when he and his father witnessed a group of chained men on their way to a slave market. He questioned one of the men and was told that they had been taken from their families and that the road before them was a bleak one indeed.

At 15 years old, Coffin helped a boy his own age escape slavery, arranging for safe passage to freedom with friends of the family. As an adult, Coffin never forgot the encounter, and after he moved to Newport, Indiana, he set up his eight-room house as a safe stop on the Underground Railroad. He used his position as the executive director of State Bank’s Richmond office to fund his humanitarian activities, giving those who stayed a night at his home a hot meal and fresh clothes in addition to shelter and safety. Thousands of people passed through the safe haven of their home. By 1864, he had gone abroad to organize the English Freedmen’s Aid Society, which supplied money and aid to those in need back in America .

6 Blind Tom

Unfortunately, Blind Tom also suffered from another, undiagnosed disorder (in retrospect, many people believe he was autistic). His lack of maturity and emotional growth meant that even after the Civil War, he still needed a guardian to manage his performances, tours, and finances; when he died in 1908, he still lived in the Hoboken home of Eliza Bethune. Sometimes called “the last slave,” Blind Tom’s ability to touch people through his music was undeniable. He played for President James Buchanan at the White House at a time when it was unheard of for any slave to use anything but the back door. Mark Twain wrote of his abilities, going to performance after performance. And when he was 15, Tom composed what would be his most famous piece—“The Battle of Manassas .”

5 Gordon

Not much is known about the man simply known as Gordon, but according to the few accounts that have survived, he was bedridden for several months after receiving a severe beating from the overseer on the plantation where he worked as a slave. During his time recuperating, he made plans to escape. In 1863, not long after receiving the beating that would make the slave’s plight real for so many, he fled his captors and successfully evaded the bloodhounds by rubbing himself with onions. For Gordon, safety was enlisting in the Union army. It was during a medical exam that his scars were uncovered by doctors, who documented his condition in a photograph that would be seen around the world. Copies of the photograph were widely distributed, and suddenly, those who had never seen the brutality suffered by those who lived a life of slavery saw what people had to endure.

The photograph was distributed throughout the Northern states and even in Europe, along with a letter from the doctor who examined him. He called Gordon “intelligent and well-behaved.” Knowing that the photograph would elicit an emotion that words never could, he let it speak for itself. And speak for itself it did. Gordon became a symbol of triumph, of strength of spirit, and of bravery. Unfortunately, much of what happened to Gordon after he enlisted has been lost. The last record of his actions is a reference to his service at the siege of Port Hudson, but the effect of that single photograph has been immeasurable.

4 Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813, but her early childhood was a happy one. Her mistresses taught her how to read and sew and nurtured her in what was by all accounts a loving family. When she was a teenager, her mistress passed away and gave her to the service of her niece. Because the niece was only a toddler at the time, Harriet became the property of the girl’s father, Dr. James Norcom.

Norcom became obsessed with the teenage girl, who suddenly found herself the target of a sexual predator and his jealous wife. She took shelter in a relationship with a nearby attorney, having two children with him. Those children by law belonged to Norcom, and in an attempt to anger Norcom into selling her children (to their waiting father), Jacobs made him think that she had escaped. In reality, she was hiding in the crawlspace above the home, where she could watch her children.

Harriet spent seven years hiding. until her children were sold into the custody of their father and taken to Washington, DC. Once they were out of Norcom’s reach, she escaped and headed to New York. Eventually, she met up with her children in New York, where she was still pursued by Norcom. It was while she was living in New York that she started writing, first in the form of letters and finally penning a book that touched on a subject that was sadly overlooked even by abolitionists: the sexual abuse suffered by female slaves. Her book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl . was written under the name Linda Brent. Names were changed, but her mission was accomplished.

Suddenly, abolitionists in the North saw the truth of what many female slaves had to endure. Eventually, Jacobs returned to the Washington, DC area where she worked with refugee slaves who had been displaced by the war.

3 George Liele

George Liele was born into a deeply religious Virginia family around 1750. Separated from his biological family early, Liele was sold to a Baptist deacon who allowed Liele to go to church with the rest of the family. It was after they moved to Georgia that he knew he had found a calling. Liele began preaching to other slaves who weren’t able to read the Bible for themselves, and Liele was eventually ordained and licensed to preach by the same church that he had first attended with his owners. Liele went on to preach throughout Georgia before going on to establish his own church in Kingston, Jamaica .

He converted several hundred people and eventually established a school as well. His parish consisted of both free men and slaves, and he faced his share of conflict even though he did his best to avoid problems. Soon, one of his converts, a man named Moses Hall, opened a church of his own and garnered the wrath of slave owners. They stormed the church and beheaded David, one of Moses’s assistants, as a warning, then threw Moses on the ground before the severed head. They asked him if he knew why they had done it, and Moses answered, “For praying.” “From this time let us have no more of your prayer meetings,” they replied, “for if we catch you at it we shall serve you as we have served David.”

Without hesitation, Moses knelt on the ground, clasped his hands together, and said, “Let us pray .” The other slaves gathered around, and the flummoxed slave owners left without touching them again. Liele himself continued founding other churches throughout Jamaica and has since been credited with starting the first African-American churches in the United States.

2 Polly Berry And Lucy Delaney

Polly Berry was born a free woman in the early 1800s in Illinois. As a child, she was kidnapped by slave-catchers and sold to a Southern general. Polly had two daughters named Lucy and Nancy with another slave. With their owner’s death, the girls were sent even farther south and farther away from freedom. Nancy was the first to escape, making her way into Canada. Polly soon followed, returning to her home in Illinois. It was there that she took her case to the courts, suing her owners for her freedom on the grounds that she had been born free and kidnapped into slavery. Because she was able to prove that she had been born free, the courts awarded her continued freedom.

After Polly won the case, she went back to the courts to free her daughter. Lucy. In 1842, Lucy escaped her masters, who were threatening to sell her. She fled to her mother and was held in jail as Polly fought in court to have her daughter officially freed. As the daughter of a free woman, there was no legal grounds for Lucy to be enslaved. Lucy spent 17 months in jail, but was eventually freed at the end of the court case. She was 14 years old. Lucy later married a man named Frederick Turner, who was killed in a steamboat explosion while working. The steamboat had been named for the attorney who had argued for Lucy’s freedom, Edward Bates. Lucy later went on to write their story in the narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom .

1 Elizabeth Keckley

Keckley also wrote her autobiography, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House . in order to raise more money to help the ailing widow. Mary Lincoln refused much of the money that Keckley raised for her, and in the end, it was the autobiography that drove them apart. Keckley had a writer helping her, and she turned over personal letters and documents with a promise that personal, potentially embarrassing entries would be omitted. The omissions never happened, which caused a rift that was never mended between the two women. Keckley eventually returned to Washington, DC, all but destitute. Now, her work is considered one of the few candid glimpses into the lives of the Lincolns .

The Wonder Years

On this website you can watch all "The Wonder Years" episodes online and of course for free.

The Wonder Years is an American television comedy-drama created by Neal Marlens and Carol Black.

It ran on ABC from 1988 through 1993. The pilot aired on January 31, 1988, following ABC's coverage of Super Bowl XXII.

The show achieved a spot in the Nielsen Top Thirty for four of its six seasons. TV Guide named the show one of the 20 best of the 1980s. After only six episodes aired, The Wonder Years won an Emmy for best comedy series in 1988.

In addition, at age 13, Fred Savage became the youngest actor ever nominated as Outstanding Lead Actor for a Comedy Series.

The show was also awarded a Peabody Award in 1989, for pushing the boundaries of the sitcom format and using new modes of storytelling.

The series won 22 awards and was nominated for 54 more. In 1997, "My Father's Office" was ranked #29 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time and in the 2009 revised list the pilot episode was ranked #43.

So, "The Wonder Years" was very successful show at that time, and even today many people get together, raising memories and reminding of the good old times.

The series depicts the social and family life of a boy in a typical American suburb from 1968 to 1973, covering his ages of 11 through 17. Each fictional year in the series takes place exactly twenty years before airing (1988 to 1993).

The show's plot centers on Kevin Arnold, son of Jack and Norma Arnold. Kevin's dad holds a management job at NORCOM, a defense contractor, while his mother is a homemaker. Kevin also has an older brother, Wayne, and an older sister, Karen. Two of Kevin's age peers and neighbors are prominently featured throughout the series: his best friend, Paul Pfeiffer, and his crush-turned-girlfriend Gwendolyn "Winnie" Cooper. Story lines are told through Kevin's reflections as an adult in his mid-30s, voiced by narrator Daniel Stern.

Earlier seasons of the show tended to focus on plots involving events within the Arnold household and Kevin's academic struggles, whereas later seasons focused much more on plots involving dating and Kevin's friends.

Anyway, I can talk in many pages about this show, but I'll stop here. I hope you enjoy this as much as I do and I hope that it will offer you a nice experience.