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The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers. 2 vols. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008. lxxxi + 1056 pp. $125.00.
One of the most striking documents in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers is also one of the briefest. From the daybook of James Bozman, an Edenton, North Carolina, merchant, the entry, which is also included as a facsimile reproduction, reads:
Mrs Horniblow by Delily
1 1/2 yd Checks - 6/6
11/2 "Ditto - 6/ (12)
This seemingly innocuous document marks the only reference to Delilah, the mother of Harriet Jacobs, outside of legal documents in which she is named as the property of various members of the Horniblow family. Despite the fact that Delilah's daughter left behind dozens of documents testifying to her own existence, she, too, was almost erased from history. That she was not can be attributed to her unyielding will to literacy, her determined effort to render knowable her own experiences as well as those of others who had been enslaved, and the scholarly foresight and generosity of Jean Fagan Yellin. YeIlin's work, which began with the recovery and publication of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1987, has introduced scholars and students to Harriet Jacobs, the only known African American woman to write a narrative prior to the Civil War attesting to her experiences as a slave. Yellin's 2004 biography, Harriet Jacobs: A Life, carefully traces Jacobs's career as a reformer and a writer following the war. The publication of the Papers, many of which were collected during Yellin's work on the edition and the biography, alters drastically the ways in which readers will encounter Incidents and think about Jacobs as an author. It will also force us to rethink our approach to documentary editing in a field that needs responsibly transcribed, edited, and published primary documents by and about American women writers if our recovery efforts are to...