As Jacobs was growing up, she got separated from her family when her mother died. She had different owners as she grew older. She got sexually threatened by her doctor and got abused domestically by her owner’s wife. So indeed Harriet Jacobs suffered a lot living a life as a slave. She later “became involved with an unmarried man white attorney, Samuel Treadwell Sawyer, with whom she had two children: Joseph, born in 1829, and Louisa Matilda, born in 1833” (Baym, 920). Jacobs later realized how hard it would be to raise both of her children. Later she came up with an idea of selling her kids to their father so they don’t have to go through what she went through growing up. Her kids were successfully sold to her father as she wished to, he moved
