Notes From A Trip To Edenton, North Carolina

A Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs

We Sojourned in your name Harriet.

The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes
her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.
My drooping hopes came to life again with the flowers.
I was dreaming of freedom again…
- Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813-1897)¹

the Chowan, her first river.

Memorable Proof. Letitia Huckaby, 2024. Curated by Johnica Rivers, Curator-at-Large of The Harriet Jacobs Project

Outside view of Memorable Proof, Letitia Huckaby, 2024. Curated by Johnica Rivers, Curator-at-Large of The Harriet Jacobs Project.

“The echos of the garret.” - Michelle Lanier

“A small shed had been added to my grandmother’s house years ago. Some boards were laid across the joists at the top, and between these boards and the roof was a very small garret, never occupied by anything but rats and mice. It was a pent roof, covered with nothing but shingles, according to southern custom for such buildings. The garret was only nine feet long and seven feet wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air.” - Harriet Ann Jacobs²

A Loophole of Retreat.

“If the geographies of slavery are primarily about racial captivities and boundaries, and the garret is both a site of self-captivity and a loophole of retreat, it becomes increasingly clear that it is Brent’s (Jacobs’) different sense of place that allows her to explore the possibilities in the existing landscape.

The spaces Brent (Jacobs) discloses, both in the landscape of slavery and through her sense of place, demonstrate an unresolved, but workable opposition to such geographic domination.

The garret makes available a place for Brent (Jacobs) to articulate her lived experiences and emancipatory desires, without losing sight of the dehumanizing forces of slavery.”- Katherine McKittrick³

The waters of Harriet Ann Jacobs. The waters that carried her to freedom. The Bay of Edenton.

MamaRay, Wangechi Mutu, 2020.

Nasher Museum. Raleigh, NC. March 2024.

Curator-at-Large Johnica Rivers and Director of North Carolina Historic Sites Michelle Lanier.

Thank you for calling us, Johnica and Michelle.

To see and be seen by Black women—past, present, and future…⁴

“Land as source material. It is not enough to read the book. It is not enough to go into the archive. You need to go the place.” - Johnica Rivers

more soon,
Gabrielle

1. Excerpt from Chapter 20, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself.

2. Excerpt from Chapter 21, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself.

3. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. U of Minnesota Press, 2006. Emphasis and parenthetical Jacobs my own.

4. I am and may forever be processing A Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs. But what was clear during and remains clear since our Sojourn is the foresight and love inherent in Black women seeing each other. Harriet Ann Jacobs saw us. Michelle Lanier and Johnica Rivers see us. We see each other. I am struggling to put into words what that means—the implications Black women’s vision has not only on our individual lives and the collective, but how that sight, our foremothers sight, your sight, my sight reverberates into and excavates the past, grounds the present, and illuminates the future. How Black women’s sight has and will continue to create worlds that light the path to freedom.

It was an honor to see. It is an honor to be seen.

”You are a danger to what is not free. You are a danger to what is not love.”- Michelle Lanier

Black women’s sight is dangerous.