So I started looking at things I could study that made sense in terms of the changes going on in the country.' It was her Irish Catholic father's and Jewish immigrant mother's Old Left influences and the changing times that sparked an interest in what she called 'the nontraditional' and 'oppositional.' 'In the 1960s, the civil rights movement influenced everybody. 'Listen, my hair was a different color when I started on this years ago,' quipped Yellin, a professor emerita at New York's Pace University, where she taught English for 30 years. But she had an air of a woman used to plowing ahead, which probably served her well in the years she, a lone white academic, spent poring over an obscure slave narrative that few other scholars seemed to care about. Astonishingly, Jacobs managed both to author her own book and to get it published before Emancipation.'īeneath the soaring atrium of the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero - she'd recently addressed the American Literature Association in San Francisco on the Jacobs papers - Yellin, a small woman with short gray hair and deep-set brown eyes, looked even tinier. But because of slavery's anti- literacy laws, neither Tubman nor Truth could write her own story. 'We know of the heroic Sojourner Truth and of her relief efforts. 'We know of the heroic Harriet Tubman and her work during the war as a Union spy,' Yellin wrote in Jacobs' biography.

But unlike other narratives dictated to others by illiterate slaves, Jacobs' own eloquent recounting of her remarkable life - she hid for seven years in an attic to escape her white slave master before escaping north and becoming an anti-slavery activist who wrote dispatches for famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's the Liberator - makes her, in Yellin's view, as heroic a figure as 19th century African American giants Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. Slave narratives have been a critical part of the telling of African American history. 'It raises the question of whether slavery was worse for women than it was for men, which was not really talked about much.' 'It's a very important slave narrative because it takes into account directly the experience of being a woman in slavery,' said Rampersad. The growing recognition now given to Jacobs is long overdue, said Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University professor of literature and noted biographer of such African American figures as W.E.B. A PBS series, 'Slavery and the Making of America,' now in production, will also feature Jacobs' story.

Yellin has recently published a biography of Jacobs, titled 'Harriet Jacobs, A Life,' and is working on publishing Jacobs' papers. 'Jacobs wrote what nobody dared to write,' said literary scholar Jean Fagan Yellin, 73, who toiled for six years to uncover the identity of Jacobs as the true author of the book in the late 1980s. Stripped, beaten, raped and forced to 'breed' more slaves, black women suffered a double burden of slavery because of their sexual vulnerability. The brutalization of black girls and women by white slave-masters, who justified their dehumanizing treatment by viewing them as 'sexual savages,' was a daily fact of life under slavery. Today, with Jacobs' authorship authenticated, her dramatic narrative provides new generations with a revealing look at a often-hidden side of slavery: the sexual exploitation of women. As recently as two decades ago, the book was considered an obscure literary oddity written by white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. When North Carolina slave Harriet Jacobs penned those words in 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,' a book she self-published in 1861, she became the first black woman to write a slave narrative. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing of his voice.' 'Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is like to be a slave to be entirely unprotected by law or custom to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another.

Oriental beat and raped