Jean Fagan Yellin says that she wrote her analysis of Harriet Jacobs’ letters because another essay had recently claimed that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was a work of fiction. The author of the other essay classified Jacobs’ book as “not credible,” saying that it is probably a “fictional account…in which the major character might have been a real fugitive, but the narrative of [her] life is probably false” (203).

I understand why the credibility of the book was questioned, though I believe that everything Jacobs says happened really did occur. I haven’t read John Blassingame’s essay, so I don’t know why he judges Jacobs’ story to be unbelievable, but my guess is that the chapters about her hiding in an attic for seven years without going insane pushed him over the edge. When I was in seventh grade, I read Night by Elie Weisel. I’d read Holocaust stories before, but they’d all been novels for kids. I kept slipping into the idea that Night was fiction too. It seemed to horrible to have really happened—it was actually worse than the fiction I’d read, which makes sense because it was children’s fiction and they were leaving out some of the worse things. I couldn’t imagine anyone surviving the things Weisel survived and then managing to write about them. I had to actively remind myself that someone had really experienced this, that it was true. I found myself doing the same thing during the attic section of Jacobs’ book.

If this is Blassingame’s reason for being skeptical, it’s understandable. But the fact that he declared it fiction is also problematic: it denies slavery’s brutality and inhumanity by saying something so horrible couldn’t possibly have happened. That’s a dangerous road to go down. I think people have a tendency to forget how brutal humanity has been, historically. It’s easier to deny this capacity in ourselves than accept it and be on guard for its appearance in the world today. But if we deny that terrible things have happened, we make it easier for them to happen again. If for no other reason than, this, we should take Jacobs at her word.