Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

And if you’re wondering how she did that if she was a runaway, well, Harriet was living right underneath her former master’s nose. During the day, she would hide in a nearby swamp. At night, she hid out in Molly’s attic, never revealing her presence to her kids. The attic had no light and at its highest point was three feet tall. Harriet managed to drill a hole in the cramped crawlspace so she could read the Bible and watch her children. She lived that way for seven years. Eventually, she escaped to New York, where she was reunited with her children and her brother, who had been sent north by Sawyer but still essentially lived as slaves. Because of the fugitive slave laws, the evil enslaver still technically owned Harriet. Every so often, he would find out where Harriet lived, and she would have to go into hiding again. It wasn’t until 1852, when Harriet was thirty-nine years old, that abolitionist Cornelia Grinnell Willis, for whom Harriet worked as a nanny, would purchase Harriet’s freedom for $300. The rapist congressman, who still owned Harriet’s children and brother, finally sent them to free states to live with Harriet. She spent the next five years writing the story of her life, but no one would publish it. In January 1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was finally released, and Harriet became an abolitionist icon.