Dear Reader:
These excerpts—from a welcome by Michelle Lanier and Johnica Rivers and lyrical essay, “Written by Herself,” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs—first appeared in A Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs, a chapbook created by The Harriet Jacobs Project to commemorate their inaugural journeys.
* * *
We called you in her name.
You answered.
We rang the bell across her first river, the Chowan.
You answered its song.
You retraced her journey from lands that remember her well:
The waterfront of Philadelphia, the boroughs of New York City, Idlewild at Cornwall-on-Hudson, her reading room in Rochester, the Jacobs School of Alexandria, the freedom camps on the Savannah River, and her boarding houses in Cambridge and the District of Columbia.
* * *
No longer hidden nor held, her journey continues through you.
—M. L. & J. R.
“This means that it is not only Harriet Jacobs returning to live alongside her younger self. It is also this reader who must allow herself, myself, to be with the girl in peril, the mother in hiding, the outraged witness, the shuttered survivor. Or else I read in vain.”
—A. P. G.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer Black feminist love evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. She is the author of several books, most recently the biography Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. She lives and loves in Durham, NC.
Michelle Lanier is a scholar, oral historian, geographer, filmmaker, museum professional, and folklorist. Her deep roots, in what she calls AfroCarolina, inspire her multidisciplinary career as a cultural preservationist, which resulted in her current role leading the twenty-seven museum spaces comprising North Carolina Historic Sites. She is an adjunct fellow at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and director of The Harriet Jacobs Project
Johnica Rivers, an interdisciplinary writer and curator, is particularly interested in the relationship between peripatetic ways of being and Black women’s creative and intellectual practices. She is curator-at-large of The Harriet Jacobs Project, working to amplify the story of Harriet Jacobs and her footfalls through place-based art, editorial offerings, and gatherings.
Header image: Coloured school at Alexandria, Virginia, taught by Harriet Jacobs and daughter agents of New York Friends, 1864, MSS 1218, Box 48. Robert Langmuir African American Photograph Collection, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Jacobs is the woman just above the “X.”
