With this, Michelle reoriented me not only in that physical space but also in my mind and heart. I have taught Incidents for the past 18 years in nearly every class because it is such a crucial text for understanding American culture. Jacobs navigated state-sanctioned sexual vulnerability because the United States built its economy on treating people as chattels, as movable pieces of property. In that context, “chattels” who could become pregnant were treated as breeding animals that just happened to resemble human beings.
Crucially, Jacobs wrote Incidents in a way that emphasizes how fiction and nonfiction at once collide and collude. In telling her life story, she constantly highlights the law—the real-world statutes that certainly have real-world impacts—while at the same time exposing how much imaginative effort it took for legislators—who were all white men—to treat Black women as if they deserved no rights. White men’s authority was based on fictions preferred by people who could rely on the power of the armed state as they declared their human equals to be their natural inferiors. So, I have consistently taught Incidents because it sheds incomparable light on American culture, then and now.
Jacobs begins Incidents by honoring her father:
I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away. My father was a carpenter, and considered so intelligent and skillful in his trade, that, when buildings out of the common line were to be erected, he was sent for from long distances, to be head workman.
Michelle encouraged my embodied engagement with Jacobs’s story by bringing my attention to an astonishing feature of the fence outside the True Value hardware store: the fence has a hole the size of the one that Jacobs created to bring air and light into her hiding place.
As a folklorist and cultural preservationist, Michelle has developed a methodology she calls “womanist cartography” that involves creating “restorative maps.” Dominant discourses and practices elevate straight white men’s perspectives at the expense of other citizens, so the built environment tells a story in which white men make contributions and never commit crimes. Engaging landscapes while telling Black women’s stories inevitably shifts one’s encounter with a location. This practice of restoring memories honors those whose humanity is denied whenever their experiences are disregarded. However, erasure weakens the connections that make us all human. Therefore, when we use our own storytelling capacity to engage those usually erased, our humanity is restored along with theirs.
