Bibb’s owner moved away and eventually Henry was sold to Malinda’s master, a situation not at all to his liking, “to live where I must be eye witness to her insults, scourgings and abuses…was more than I could bear.” When a daughter, Mary Frances, was born, Bibb became even more restive. While her mother and father worked in the field, the baby stayed with the owner’s wife, who treated her roughly. It was too much for Bibb—to see his family abused and to be powerless to do anything about it; he decided he must break free. First he would go, then he would find a way to rescue his wife and child. Lucky for him, the Ohio River wasn’t far from home. He was able to accumulate a little money by doing some work on the side, and he hopped a steamship and counted on his almost white skin to camouflage him through the night until landing the next morning in Cincinnati. Though Ohio was a free state, the fear of slave hunters was real, so Bibb moved carefully until he found a black man who hooked him up with the Underground Railroad. Moving to a safer spot north, Bibb spent the spring working in Perrysburg, Ohio, then, against the advice of his protectors, went back to Kentucky to collect his family. Think of it: he was free and could have lived out the rest of his life in freedom, but the matrimonial ties pulled him back to the dangers of a slave state.
Wearing a disguise, Bibb crept back into Kentucky, gave his wife money, and quickly stole away again, telling her to meet him in Cincinnati the next Sunday. Once again he successfully made his way to Ohio, but this time he was tricked by some slave catchers, who went quickly down the river to his master and collected a three-hundred-dollar reward for revealing Bibb’s whereabouts. The owner and some neighbors arrived in Cincinnati, hired a small mob, and captured Bibb, who later lamented, “All my flattering prospects of enjoying my own fire side, with my little family, were then blasted and gone; and I must bid farewell to friends and freedom together.” Taking no chances, the owner immediately took Bibb across the river and put him in jail overnight in Kentucky until a steamship arrived to take him to Louisville. Bibb’s owner wanted to get rid of the troublemaker, to sell him down the river to New Orleans. But once the ship docked in Louisville, Bibb bolted again and once again made the perilous trip to see his wife. “We met under the most fearful apprehensions,” he later wrote, because all the slaveholders in the region wanted to make an example of him. Of course, they kept a watch on Malinda day and night: “they well knew that my little family was the only object of attraction that ever had or ever would induce me to come back and risk my liberty over the threshold of slavery.” It would be impossible for the couple to escape together.
Once again Bibb set out on his own, with an agreement to meet in a certain place in Ohio after all the excitement had died down. But Malinda had no faith that would ever happen: “This may be the last time we shall ever see each other’s faces in this life, which will destroy all my future prospects of life and happiness forever,” she told him tearfully. But he was absolutely determined to make sure she was wrong. For the third time, he successfully made his way to freedom, and after eight or nine months without hearing from his family, for the third time he dared return to slave territory to rescue his wife and child.
From there, the story gets very grim indeed. Bibb was captured again. The owner, worried that he might have told Malinda how to get to Canada and fearful that she would tell other slaves, decided to sell the whole family downriver, farther away from any free state. After a horrible sojourn in a Louisville workhouse, the family finally was taken to New Orleans and offered for sale. Eventually, a Baptist deacon bought them and brought them to his home up the Red River. One day Bibb went to a prayer meeting off the property against the master’s wishes. On his way home, Malinda met him and told him of the owner’s plan to give him five hundred lashes. Bibb made his move. He stole a donkey, gathered his wife and child, and set out through the insect-infested Louisiana marshland hoping somehow to escape. When they were caught ten days later, Bibb was brought back and brutally beaten, almost to death. He was kept separate from his wife and forced to sleep with his feet in stocks, but he managed to break away again. When he was captured once more, the deacon decided to sell the troublesome worker and be rid of him for good.
Some gamblers, or “southern sportsmen” in Bibb’s words, who were traveling through Louisiana, saw the slave, decided he looked clever, and bought him to resell. They took him to Texas, and as he unraveled his story, they took pity on him and returned to the Red River plantation to offer to buy his wife and child. When they arrived, Malinda saw Bibb and rushed out to greet him: “Oh! My dear husband! I never expected to see you again!”
She would have been better off if she had not. The infuriated deacon stepped between them and started whipping her, much to the horror of the gamblers, who offered a thousand dollars for her and her child. But the deacon was determined to make the couple suffer, and he sent the men away to the wails of Malinda and Mary Frances, who was watching. After all that, after all the times that Bibb had had the opportunity to be free but had returned to risk capture for the love of his wife and child, he ended up a slave without a family. He and the gamblers left the deacon’s property in December 1840. “I have never seen Malinda since that period,” Bibb wrote in 1849. “I never expect to see her again.”
The gamblers felt so sorry for Bibb that they gave him directions to Canada, sold him to an Indian, and gave him part of the money they made from the sale. After his Indian master died, Bibb found an opportunity to take off and make his way through Indian Territory all the way to Jefferson City, Missouri, where through clever subterfuge he boarded a ship to Ohio. He went back to Perrysburg for a while and then on to Detroit. There, in 1845, abolitionists who hired him to lecture against slavery collected money to look for his wife and child and try to buy them. No luck. It was a verdict Bibb couldn’t accept: “In view of the failure to hear anything of my wife, many of my best friends advised me to get married again, if I could find a suitable person. They regarded my former wife as dead to me, and all had been done that could be. But I was not yet satisfied myself, to give up.”
So yet again, he took the risk and returned to Kentucky one last time. He soon learned that Malinda “was living in a state of adultery with her master, and had been for the last three years.” After the scene with the gamblers on the Red River plantation, she had finally given up on Bibb and the deacon had sold her to a white man as a concubine. “From that time I gave her up into the hands of an all-wise Providence. As she was then living with another man, I could no longer regard her as my wife. After all the sacrifices, sufferings, and risks which I had run, striving to rescue her from the grasp of slavery, every prospect and hope was cut off.”
Two years later, at an antislavery event in New York, Henry Bibb met “Miss Mary E. Miles.” It’s interesting; he never prefaced Malinda’s name with a “Miss” and we never learn her last name in his narrative, but this was a different situation and he was well aware of it. They courted for a year, then, in June 1848, “we had the happiness to be joined in holy wedlock. Not in the slaveholding style which is a mere farce, without the sanction of law or gospel; but in accordance with the laws of God and our country…. I presume there are no class of people in the United States who so highly appreciate the legality of marriage as those persons who have been held and treated as property.” Still, Bibb was defensive about Malinda because he knew that their marriage, though not legal, was true. “The relation once subsisting between us, to which I clung, hoping against hope, for years, after we were torn asunder, not having been sanctioned by any loyal power cannot be cancelled by a legal process…. It was not until after living alone in the world for more than eight years without a companion known in law or morals, that I changed my condition.”
Harriet Jacobs: “My Story Ends with Freedom; Not in the Usual Way, with Marriage”
Harriet Jacobs was never any man’s wife, but her story is still illustrative of slave marriage, because it is the tale of a woman who wanted desperately to marry the man she loved and
was thwarted by the system. She came right up against the plain fact that slaves had no legal rights, that for her marriage was out of the question simply because she was a slave. That’s the message she sought to convey in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; she was convinced the women of the North would rise up and force the men to do something about slavery if they knew what slave women suffered. But Jacobs had a problem in telling her story. Sex was not a subject anyone talked about in the mid-nineteenth century. It certainly wasn’t a subject for proper women to read about. But it’s central to her story. She changed her name and those of her characters for publication, and it took until the 1980s for scholars to authenticate the autobiography.
Harriet Jacobs never was subjected to the harsh physical treatment Henry Bibb describes; in fact, she was raised in relatively comfortable circumstances. She grew up in a North Carolina town where her father was such a fine carpenter that he was allowed to live and work on his own, paying his mistress two hundred dollars every month from the money he made in his business. His wife, Harriet’s mother, died when her little girl was six, and the slave child went to live with a kind woman who was her mother’s mistress. Not only was Harriet loved in that household, she was educated, and when her mistress died, the twelve-year-old slave hoped the woman had set her free. Instead, the young slave was bequeathed to the mistress’s five-year-old niece. Harriet’s father tried to make enough money to buy her, but he soon died as well.
The new household of a doctor and his wife, the parents of the five-year-old, turned out to be far less friendly for Harriet, but still she had certain advantages. Her grandmother, who had been freed many years before, was a well-known personage in the community. “Aunt Marthy” baked a type of cracker all the fancy ladies bought for their parties, and often when they stopped by her house to buy her pastries, they sought out her advice as well. No one wanted to offend her; she had once chased a white man with a loaded pistol when he insulted one of her daughters. Living in a city, instead of out on a plantation, meant that Harriet’s master had to worry about his reputation as a professional man; he couldn’t commit blatantly improper acts under the noses of his neighbors. Still, when Harriet started blossoming into her teenage years, the doctor started to stalk her and “to whisper foul words in my ear,” trying to lure her into his bed. Remember, this was the Victorian era; this was shocking stuff to be writing about. The young slave managed by one ruse after another to avoid her master, but she was terrified living under his roof and she was afraid to tell her grandmother; the doctor swore he would kill her if she did. Speaking to the women of the North, Harriet lectured: “There is no shadow of law to protect [the slave girl] from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men. The mistress, who ought to protect the helpless victim, has no other feelings towards her but those of jealousy and rage.” Seeing the girl growing into womanhood, Harriet’s grandmother worried about her situation and tried to buy her, but the doctor insisted that she belonged to his little girl and that he had no right to sell her. It was a grand excuse, which he used again after Harriet fell in love.
A young black carpenter in the neighborhood, a free man, started calling on Harriet and eventually proposed marriage to her. “I loved him with all the ardor of a young girl’s first love,” she wrote many years later, and he was ready to buy her, but again her master refused. “If you must have a husband, you may take up with one of my slaves,” he told her. “Don’t you suppose, sir, that a slave can have some preference about marrying? Do you suppose that all men are alike to her?” The doctor ripped into her: “Never let me hear the fellow’s name mentioned again. If I ever know of your speaking to him, I will cowhide you both; and if I catch him lurking about my premises, I will shoot him as soon as I would a dog.” She, of course, was devastated. “My lover was an intelligent and religious man. Even if he could have obtained permission to marry me while I was a slave, the marriage would give him no power to protect me from my master. It would have made him miserable to witness the insults I should have been subjected to.” Also, if they had children, they would be slaves, because the children “followed the condition of the mother.” She convinced her love to leave, to head for a free state, which he did, and she later declared, “the dream of my girlhood was over.”
The doctor decided that it was fear of his wife that was causing Harriet to reject him, so he told her he was building a house where he could be with her. She panicked. There was a young, unmarried white gentleman in the town who started to take an interest in her, to show some sympathy for her situation. She understood she could never marry him; it was against the law for whites to marry blacks. “I knew the impassable gulf between us but to be an object of interest to a man who is not married, and who is not her master, is agreeable to the pride and feelings of a slave,” she explained to her female readers. “It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion. There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.” Harriet was well aware that other emotions were also governing her decision to take up with the young man. It would be a way to humiliate the doctor, and to avoid him: “I shuddered to think of being the mother of children that should be owned by my old tyrant.”
As much as she justified her relationship with the young gentleman, Harriet knew she was defying all of the standards of the day; she was a scarlet woman. When she wrote about it, Harriet feared her readers might discount her story because of her sinfulness. When she was in the relationship, she was terrified about her grandmother’s reaction to her out-of-wedlock arrangement. But she relished the doctor’s. When he told her the house he was building for her was ready, she responded that she would never move there, and that soon she would be a mother. His furor simply kindled her self-righteousness: “but for him I might have been a virtuous, free and happy wife.” Her delight at her master’s reaction was short-lived, however, because she knew now her relatives would find out, and would be disgraced: “humble as were their circumstances, they had pride in my good character.” Harriet’s grandmother, particularly, was sorely saddened. But she took her in and cared for her, since the doctor’s wife wanted her out of their house. When Harriet gave birth to a premature baby boy, she reflected, “It was a sad thought that I had no name to give my child.” The father tried to buy Harriet and give the boy his name, but the master wouldn’t hear of it.
At least her situation got Harriet out of the doctor’s house. But he kept after her, determined to have her. He would threaten to sell her baby boy. Then, when, at the age of nineteen, she had a second child, a girl, he was truly infuriated. After some dramatic scenes, the doctor came back with an offer: move in with him and she and the children could be free. She refused. The consequence: she and the children would be sent to his ruffian son’s plantation, where they would be treated like all the other slaves. She didn’t trust the offer of freedom and she knew the plantation would be intolerable, so she determined to escape. Harriet went to the plantation, but soon did run away, to the home of a kind white woman who hid her in the attic. Hoping to smoke her out of hiding, her master threw her brother, son, and daughter in jail and kept them there for two months. Once he became convinced she really had left, the doctor traveled to New York looking for her, which cost him a good deal of money. That had one beneficial effect—he sold Harriet’s children to their father to make up for his losses. Harriet knew she was endangering the woman whose house she was in, so she stole away to her grandmother’s and hid in a tiny space over a storeroom across a courtyard from the house. She stayed there almost seven years.
From her hiding place, the young mother could see her children playing in her grandmother’s courtyard, but she could never let them know she was there. When their father was elected to Congress, he and his wife decided to take the little girl with them to Washington, to help care for their baby. Then they promised to take her to relatives in
Brooklyn who would send her to school. Through her grandmother, Harriet agreed to the arrangements and then dared detection to say good-bye to her daughter. She crept across the courtyard into her grandmother’s house and waited in her room, where she hadn’t been for five years. When the little girl was brought to her, Harriet said, “‘Ellen, my dear child, I am your mother.’ She drew back a little, and looked at me then, with sweet confidence, she laid her cheek against mine, and I folded her to the heart that had been so long desolated.” When, a few months later, the Brooklyn relatives wrote to Harriet’s grandmother about Ellen’s safe arrival, the letter troubled the family in North Carolina. It appeared that, contrary to his promises, the child’s father had not set her free.
One day, after she had hidden for seven years, Harriet had come down from her hole and was talking to her grandmother in the storeroom. Carelessly, the grandmother had left the storeroom door open, and when a neighbor came to buy crackers, and went looking for Aunt Marthy, she looked in the storeroom. Harriet couldn’t be sure whether she had been seen, but she was afraid to risk it. The doctor had gone to New York three times looking for her, and had never given up the chase. Though it was incredibly risky, the family decided it would probably be safer for her to try to board a friendly ship that was in the harbor than to take her chances with the doctor. Before she left, Harriet was determined to see her son. “It was an agitating interview for both of us. After we had talked and wept together for a little while, he said, ‘Mother, I’m glad you’re going away. I wish I could go with you. I knew you were here; and I have been so afraid they would come and catch you!’” She was amazed. It turned out he had heard a cough one day, and concluded it was his mother. From there on out, he tried to keep people away from that side of the storeroom.
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