Fugitive Slave Harriet Jacobs: Coming Up For Air For seven years, fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs hid out in an attic to escape slavery. Slavery is terrible for men but it is far more terrible for women, wrote escaped slave Harriet Jacobs (1818-1896) in her 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written under the name Linda Brent. At age 15, Jacobs began resisting the sexual ...