Flight to the Margins: Harriet Jacobs and Liminal Fugitivity

Abstract

What would it look like to flee oppression and violence if you could not get very far away? Although enslaved people’s fugitivity in the United States is often understood through the story of complete escape, there were many more enslaved people who fled within slave states. This article defines liminal fugitivity as a type of flight in which enslaved people fled to peripheral spaces near sites of enslavement, such as crawl spaces, edges of forests, or borders of towns and plantations. It reads Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as an illustration of liminal fugitivity. Jacobs spent seven years hiding in an attic near the home of her enslaver in order to watch over her children and secure their escape. Her narrative both shows how enslaved women’s lives often necessitated fugitivity within slave states and illustrates some of the generative possibilities of liminal fugitivity. In particular, liminal fugitivity illustrates the importance of kinship and social ties, as hiding in liminal spaces allowed fugitives to escape while retaining networks of care. This article contributes to recent work on fugitivity and fugitive democracy by theorizing liminal fugitivity’s relational characteristics as a form of resistance to slavery itself, as enslaved people who fled to keep their families together were refusing the regime of family separation on which U.S. chattel slavery partially depended. This political ethos may be generative for fugitive politics and theory today, particularly regarding fleeing injustice within systems of oppression that are impossible to fully escape.