EDENTON — Those ghostly images residents have seen in the upstairs windows of Edenton’s historic 1767 Courthouse aren’t imaginary.
The shadows and faint colors visible to passersby, especially at night, are part of an art installation called “Memorable Proof,” which celebrates the life and accomplishments of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved Edenton woman who risked everything to escape to freedom.
Jacobs escaped her enslaver, Dr. James Norcom, in 1835, hiding for seven years with the help of her mother, a free black woman named Molly Horniblow. Jacobs hid for seven years in a crawl space between the tin roof and the rafters of her mother’s home, refusing to surrender despite an intense search and the imprisonment of her children in the Edenton jail. In freedom, she went on to become an abolitionist and writer whose autobiography, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” was published in 1861.
Photographs, documents, and artifacts tell Jacobs’ story. Still, the star of the installation is a series of translucent flags hung in the windows of the courthouse featuring silhouettes of Jacobs and others that tell her story, said Jonica Rivers, curator-at-large for the Harriet-Jacobs Project.
“It’s a minimalist installation,” Rivers said recently. “Touring the courthouse is powerful and moves you on its own, so we didn’t want to interrupt the architecture of the space or the visitor’s ability to stand in the center and take in the historical structure. The window installations are in conversation with the building. You could still technically hold court here with them hanging. It’s not interrupting the structure or the activity normally occurring here.”
Michelle Lanier, director of the Harriet Jacobs Project and N.C. Historic Sites, said the other half of the exhibit honors the Black women of the Fannie A. Parker Women’s Club in Edenton. American photographer Letitia Huckaby photographed the women, bringing the installation into the 20th and 21st centuries with her images of Edenton’s present-day women of color.
The Fannie A. Parker Women’s Club, founded in 1945, is a subsidiary of the North Carolina Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, which falls under the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. The club’s members first met in the Edenton home of civil rights leader Golden Frinks and his wife, Mildred. It still meets today.
The installation opened on Tuesday at the Historic 1767 Chowan County Courthouse and will remain on display through May 11. Public viewing hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free.
The project is part of the “When Are We US?” theme for America 250 NC, directed by the North Carolina Department of Cultural and Natural Resources.
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