Early in Harriet Jacobs’s memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs receives a new pair of shoes from her grandmother in time for a February snowstorm, only for the mistress of the household to make her take them off. The mistress—jealous of her husband’s lecherous attentions to the slave—then sends the barefoot teenager on a long errand in the snow. In the neatly handwritten term paper I was grading, my student compared this story to something he witnessed on a New York State prison walkway: outdoors, in the snow, a friend stopped by the guards, roughed up, told to strip, shivering, his shoes thrown over the barbed-wire fence. In Jacobs’s narrative, her master’s sexual predations are the driving force of his relentless efforts to keep her enslaved, but are never made explicit. The essay I was grading suffered from no such Victorian restraint: in a bare sentence, it dealt with the rape of a prisoner from his dormitory by a group of guards.…