From the ages of 12 to about 22, Harriet Jacobs lived below the watch of her enslaver, a rich doctor named James Norcom Sr. All the way through that decade, as Jacobs grew from a kid to a tender lady, Norcom psychologically and bodily terrorized her.
As soon as, when she was once an adolescent, he threw her down the steps of his Edenton, North Carolina space. He swore it could by no means occur once more. However as Jacobs later wrote, “I knew that he would forget his promise.”
Jacobs’ accidents took weeks to heal. Even once they did, she made positive no person would put out of your mind what came about via together with this harrowing second in her 1861 autobiographical novel, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself,” one of the essential testimonies of captivity and survival ever written.
In July 2025, we stumbled around the staircase all over a discuss with to the Museum of Early Southern Ornamental Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, an establishment recognized for its preeminent collections of art work, pottery, furnishings and advantageous shows on Southern artisans and early American craft.
A portrait of Harriet Jacobs taken in 1894, 3 years prior to her loss of life.
Magazine of the Civil Battle Generation
We’d long past there to peer a desk that belonged to a previously enslaved creator named Samuel “Aleckson” Williams. However our consideration was once in the long run drawn a number of rooms clear of the desk, the place we encountered woodwork – together with the staircase Jacobs had written about – from the home the place Norcom had enslaved her.
As students of Nineteenth-century U.S. literature who incessantly train Jacobs’ “Incidents,” we have been surprised to comprehend that the staircase had survived.
It stuck us much more off guard as a result of Jacobs’ lifestyles has been receiving a large number of consideration from students. For many years, Jacobs’ e book was once learn as a piece of fiction, if it was once even remembered in any respect. However in recent times, historians have recovered her papers and showed various biographical main points. In 2024, a story written via her brother, John Jacobs, was once republished.
For us, the revel in highlighted the significance of those small, regional museums. The staircase hadn’t firstly been salvaged because of its connection to Jacobs. Nevertheless it had however been conserved and cared for, which allowed new meanings to slowly emerge.
A bold get away
In 1964, the Jacobs staircase – in conjunction with a door, a mantle and paneling – have been taken from Norcom’s space in Edenton now not on account of their connection to Jacobs or her enslaver, however on account of their importance to Innovative-era craftsmanship.
We weren’t the primary to comprehend the staircase’s connection to Jacobs. More or less 15 years in the past, curator Robert Leath introduced it to the eye of Anthony Mother or father, a historical past professor at Wake Wooded area College. Mother or father publicized the tale of those subject material items via native outreach and a few scholarship.
However like many histories that emerge from surprising puts, the tale of the staircase hasn’t won a lot traction in broader conversations amongst Jacobs students, a lot much less in common reminiscence and nationwide historical past.
Throughout “Incidents,” Jacobs chronicles many moments of bodily and mental abuse. However the attack at the stairs stands proud a few of the many acts of terror she persevered.
“He had pitched me down stairs in a fit of passion,” she writes, “and the injury I received was so serious that I was unable to turn myself in bed for many days.”
James Norcom, Sr. positioned an advert within the Norfolk, Va., American Beacon after Jacobs escaped, providing a praise for her seize.
State Archives of North Carolina/flickr
Jacobs in the end fled her bondage and exchanged her lifestyles in captivity below Norcom for a lifetime of quasi-freedom: She spent seven years hiding in a close-by attic. Ultimately she made her solution to the North, the place she claimed her freedom and revealed her e book.
Rediscovered within the Nineteen Seventies, Jacobs’ tale was once so astonishing that some readers doubted its autobiographical accuracy. However historian Jean Yellin was once ready to ensure many facets of her narrative, together with the truth that she had hidden in an attic for seven years.
Yellin’s revelations of Jacobs’ lifestyles and paintings – along with the harrowing reviews of alternative girls held in captivity – helped exchange the way in which American citizens were ready to be told about how girls, each enslaved and loose, live to tell the tale coercion and sexual violence.
Hidden in simple sight
On the Museum of Early Southern Ornamental Arts, the staircase seems in between two separate galleries. At the wall alongside the stairs to the primary touchdown, a framed {photograph} of Harriet Jacobs and a framed reproduction of the primary version of “Incidents” dangle. Although guests are allowed to ascend the steps, they don’t lead anyplace. Within the subsequent room are the mantel and wooden paneling from the Norcom space.
The museum’s web page doesn’t come with a write-up of the Jacobs staircase, nor does it exhibit a picture of the spectacular set up, despite the fact that it’s cataloged with care – and, thank you partly to Mother or father’s advocacy, generations of scholars have visited the museum to peer what survives of Jacobs’ space.
The museum workforce recounted the tale of the staircase to us throughout a dialog about Williams. They, too, imagine that the tales in the back of items have some way of tolerating, at the same time as the significance and which means of artifacts exchange over the years.
Harriet Jacobs was once enslaved in Edenton, N.C., as a young person.
Jed Report/flickr, CC BY
Tales that spread in sudden techniques
The set up on the Museum of Early Southern Ornamental Arts demonstrates the facility of regional museums to keep artifacts whose tales spread over generations – whose which means won’t relaxation at the causes they’re salvaged, bought or preserved, and whose importance would possibly appear to be an twist of fate in hindsight. Those tales topic, even – and particularly – once they performed a job in essentially the most violent chapters in U.S. historical past.
Jacobs’ staircase was once precious when it was once received; it was once understood then for example of excellent 18th-century craftsmanship, and that’s a tale price conserving and studying. And but its tale now has extra chapters that enrich the narrative.
Because the Trump management is reassessing “troubling” ideological content material on the Smithsonian and in other places – slashing grants and budgets or even advocating for the elimination or reconstruction of shows that inform tricky tales – we expect it’s essential to seem anew at how museums keep items and the acts of survival they bring ahead.
This isn’t a tale of discovery and restoration. As an alternative, our revel in merely demonstrates why museums, archives and libraries topic. Those establishments require house to play the lengthy sport, in techniques no person can await, so they are able to proceed doing what they do best possible: gather, keep, report and curate.
In doing so, they enable tales like Jacobs’ to spread in outstanding and totally unforeseeable techniques.
