Joy and Pain: Finding a Loophole of Retreat

One day I hit my head against something, and found it was a gimlet. My uncle had left it sticking there when he made the trapdoor. I was as rejoiced as Robinson Crusoe could have been in finding such a treasure. It put a lucky thought into my head. I said to myself, “Now I will have some light. Now I will see my children.” I did not dare to begin my work during the daytime, for fear of attracting attention. But I groped round; and having found the side next the street, where I could frequently see my children, I stuck the gimlet in and waited for evening. I bored three rows of holes, one above another; then I bored out the interstices between. I thus succeeded in making one hole about an inch long and an inch broad. I sat by it till late into the night, to enjoy the little whiff of air that floated in. In the morning, I watched for my children.[1]

Until I read Jacobs’s account of her time in that cramped interstitial space, I had exclusively known a gimlet to be an elegant cocktail. But when I read her chapter “The Loophole of Retreat,” I learned that a gimlet is also a small T-shaped tool with a screw tip for boring holes. Jacobs used a gimlet to bring light and air into the garret where she was being hidden for her protection. The space was only nine feet by seven feet, and “the highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor.”[2] With the gimlet, Jacobs created the holes through which she could observe her children.

This tool seems perfect in size and function for many things. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be wise to carry a gimlet everywhere one goes? Wouldn’t it be a good intention for a Black woman to walk around with a gimlet sewn in the hem of a sleeve or, depending on its size, tucked like a twenty-dollar bill just inside her bra? Perhaps one should not only consider carrying an actual gimlet, but also to have a metaphorical gimlet at one’s disposal, a little something for those times when matters feel precarious and unsafe.

A version of this essay was first developed and presented at Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat in Venice, Italy, October 8, 2022.

Notes:

[1] Harriet Ann Jacobs, “Chapter XXI: The Loophole of Retreat,” in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Lydia Maria Francis Child (Boston: Published for the Author), 1861.
[2] Ibid.

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)