"I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away."

A haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina and of her final escape and emancipation, Harriet Jacobs's classic narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published pseudonymously in 1861, tells firsthand of the horrors inflicted on slaves. In writing this extraordinary memoir, which culminates in the seven years she spent hiding in a crawl space in her grandmother's attic, Jacobs skillfully used the literary genres of her time, presenting a thoroughly feminist narrative that portrays the evils and traumas of slavery, particularly for women and children.

With an Introduction by renowned historian Nell Irvin Painter, this edition also includes "A True Tale of Slavery," the brief memoir of Harriet Jacobs's brother, John S. Jacobs, originally published in a London periodical in 1861.