9 Feet Long and 7 Wide

The Crafting Freedom Materials Project

This short video highlights a segment extracted from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the slave narrative of Harriet Jacobs (a bestseller in its day). A mature Jacobs sits in a parlor in a northern city sipping tea and remembering many years earlier when she was a slave. We see the small 9 x 7 foot garret in which she hid. The video focuses on her dramatic escape from slavery and the years she spent hiding in this small, cramped, crawl space above a porch in the house of her grandmother, a free woman who lived independently and had a bakery.

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