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A small shed had been added to my grandmother's house years ago. Some boards were laid across the joists at the top, and between these boards and the roof was a very small garret, never occupied by anything but rats and mice. It had a pent roof, covered with nothing but shingles according to the southern custom for such buildings. The garret was only nine feet long and seven feet wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air. My uncle Philip, who was a carpenter, had very skilfully [sic] made a concealed trap door, which communicated with the storeroom [. . .] To this hole I was conveyed as soon as I entered the house. The air was stifling; the darkness total . . .1
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
In the above passage from her 1861 slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs offers an interstitial description of the gar- ret space in which she lived for seven years before permanently escaping slavery. Jacobs goes on to call the garret the "loophole of retreat," her "place of concealment," and "my den" throughout her narrative.2 With this initial description and the ways she subsequently refers to the gar- ret, Jacobs consciously positions the garret as a border space, one that exists betwixt and between other more clearly defined spaces. As Jacobs explains, the garret is essentially a makeshift space, which was built by simply laying boards "across the [ceiling] joists" of a storeroom.3 Further, "the board floor" is "loose," suggesting that no nails have been used in the garret's construction, a fact that is emphasized when Jacobs later writes that the boards shift easily as she moves.4 Jacobs's description of the garret reveals that it is a hastily built and impermanent structure; it is a space that was not supposed to exist.5 Indeed, it did not exist as a usable space until her uncle hastily added "a concealed trap door" to it, so that Jacobs could access it as a hiding place. It is a space that has never fulfilled a specific purpose in Jacobs's...