The Bondwoman's Narrative (3 page)

In response to Porter’s undated letter, Emily Driscoll wrote back on September 27, 1951. After saying she was “delighted”
that Porter was keeping the manuscript for her personal collection, Driscoll reveals how she came upon it:

I bought it from a scout in the trade (a man who wanders around with consignment goods from other dealers). Because of my
own deep interest in the item as well as the price I paid him I often tried to find out from him where he bought it and all
that I could learn was that he came upon it in Jersey!

“It’s my belief,” Driscoll concludes, “that it is based on a substratum of fact, considerably embroidered by a romantic imagination
fed by reading those 19th Century novels it so much resembles.” Driscoll, like Porter, believed the book to be an autobiographical
novel based on the actual life of a female fugitive slave.

It is difficult to explain how excited I became as I read this exchange of letters. Dorothy Porter was one of the most sophisticated
scholars of antebellum black writing; indeed, her work in this area, including both subtle critical commentary and the editing
of an anthology that had defined the canon of antebellum black writing, was without peer in her generation of scholars. Because
she thought Hannah Crafts to have been black, I wanted to learn more. But Dorothy Porter had apparently not attempted to locate
the historical Hannah Crafts; she had, however, located a Wheeler family living in North Carolina “both before and after the
war,” the Wheelers being Hannah Crafts’s masters. And, almost in passing, she mentioned to Driscoll that she had come across
“one John Hill Wheeler (1806–1882)” who “held some government positions,” presumably in Washington, D.C.

Curious about Dorothy Porter’s report of her instincts, and filing away her observation about the Wheeler who had held government
positions, I finally read the manuscript before embarking upon the arduous, detailed search through nineteenth-century U.S.
census records for the characters in Crafts’s novel and, indeed, for Crafts herself.

What I read is a fascinating novel about passing, set on plantations in Virginia and North Carolina and in a government official’s
residence in Washington, D.C. The novel is an unusual amalgam of conventions from gothic novels, sentimental novels, and the
slave narratives. After several aborted attempts to escape, the heroine ends her journey in New Jersey, where she marries
a Methodist minister and teaches schoolchildren in a free black community.

I found
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
a captivating novel for several reasons. If indeed Hannah Crafts turned out to be black, this would be the first novel written
by a female fugitive slave, and perhaps the first novel written by any black woman at all. Hannah Crafts’s novel ends with
the classic conclusion of a sentimental novel, which can be summarized as “and they lived happily ever after,” unlike Wilson’s
novel, which ends with her direct appeal to the reader to purchase her book so that she can retrieve her son, who is in the
care of a foster home. Crafts also uses the story of a fugitive slave’s captivity and escape for the elements of her plot,
as well as a subplot about passing, two other “firsts” for a black female author in the African American literary tradition.

The Bondwoman’s Narrative
contains one of the earliest examples of the topos of babies switched at birth—one black, one white—in African American literature.
⁶
The novel begins with the story of the mulatto mistress of the Lindendale plantation, who tries to pass but is trapped—appropriately
enough—by one Mr. Trappe. Her story unfolds in chapter four, “A Mystery Unraveled.” On page 44, Crafts tells us that a nurse
had placed her mistress “in her lady’s bed, and by her lady’s side, when that Lady was to[o] weak and sick and delirious to
notice[, and] the dead was exchanged for the living.” The natural mother is sold south, the child is reared as white, and
Mr. Trappe, who eventually uncovers the truth through his position as the family’s lawyer, uses his knowledge to blackmail
Hannah’s mulatto mistress. Mark Twain, among others, would employ a similar plot device in his novel
Pudd’nhead Wilson
(1894).

The costuming, or cross-dressing, of the character Ellen as a boy (pp. 81–84) foreshadows Hannah’s own method of escape and
echoes the method of escape used in real life by the slave couple Ellen and William Craft in December 1848. The sensational
story of Ellen’s use of a disguise as a white male was first reported in Frederick Douglass’s newspaper,
The North Star,
on July 20, 1849.
⁷
William Wells Brown’s novel,
Clotel
(1853), employed this device, and William Still, in his book,
The Underground Railroad
(1872), reports similar uses of “male attire” by female slaves Clarissa Davis (in 1854) and Anna Maria Weems (alias Joe Wright)
in 1855.
⁸
I wondered if Hannah’s selection of the surname Crafts for her own name could possibly have been an homage to Ellen, as would
have been the use of Ellen’s name for the character in her novel.

Hannah Crafts, as a narrator, is at pains to explain to her readers how she became literate. This is a signal feature of the
slave narratives, and of Wilson’s
Our Nig.
She also establishes herself as blessed with the key characteristics of a writer, as someone possessing “a silent unobtrusive
way of observing things and events, and wishing to understand them better than I could.” (p. 5)
⁹
“Instead of books,” she continues modestly, “I studied faces and characters, and arrived at conclusions by a sort of sagacity”
similar to “the unerring certainty of animal instinct.” (p. 27) She then reveals how she was taught to read and write by the
elderly white couple who ran afoul of the law because of their actions. Early in her novel, Crafts remembers that, even as
a child, “while the other children of the house were amusing themselves I would quietly steal away from their company to ponder
over the pages of some old book or newspaper that chance had thrown in [my] way…. I loved to look at them and think that some
day I should probably understand them all.” (pp. 6–7)

Crafts is also remarkably open about her feelings toward other slaves. Her horror and disgust at moving from the Wheeler home
to the “miserable” huts of the field slaves, whose lives are “vile, foul, filthy,” her anger at her betrayal by the “dark
mulatto” slave Maria with “black snaky eyes” (p. 203), and her description of Jo (p. 133), are among the sort of observations,
you will recall, that Dorothy Porter felt underscore the author’s ethnic identity as an African American—that is, the very
normality and ordinariness of her reactions, say, to the wretched conditions of slave life or to being betrayed by another
black person. Rarely have African American class or color tensions—the tensions between house slaves and field slaves—been
represented so openly and honestly as in this novel, foreshadowing similar comments made by writers such as Nella Larsen in
the 1920s and 1930s, in another novel about a mulatto and passing:

Here the inscrutability of the dozen or more brown faces, all cast from the same indefinite mold, and so like her own, seemed
pressed forward against her. Abruptly it flashed upon her that the harrowing invitation of the past few weeks was a smoldering
hatred. Then she was overcome by another, so actual, so sharp, so horribly painful, that forever afterwards she preferred
to forget it. It was as if she were shut up, boxed up, with hundreds of her race, closed up with that something in the racial
character which had always been, to her, inexplicable, alien. Why, she demanded in fierce rebellion, should she be yoked to
these despised black people? (
Quicksand,
Chapter 10)

Often when reading black authors in the nineteenth century, one feels that the authors are censoring themselves. But Hannah
Crafts writes the way we can imagine black people talked to—and about—one another when white auditors were not around, and
not the way abolitionists
thought
they talked, or black authors thought they
should
talk or wanted white readers to believe they talked. This is a voice that we have rarely, if ever, heard before. Frederick
Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, for example, all drew these sort of class distinctions in their slave narratives
and fictions (in the case of Douglass and Brown)—even contrasting slaves speaking dialect with those speaking standard English—but
toned down, or edited, compared with Hannah Crafts’s more raw version. This is the sort of thing Porter observed that led
her initially to posit a black identity for Hannah Crafts.

Crafts, as Porter noted, tends to treat the blackness of her characters as the default, even on occasion signaling the whiteness
of her characters, such as little Anna’s “white beautiful arms.” (p. 129) Often we realize the racial identity of her black
characters only by context, in direct contrast to Stowe’s direct method of accounting for race as the primary indication of
a black character’s identity. When the maid Lizzy is introduced in the novel, we learn that she was “much better educated
than” Hannah was, that she was well traveled, and that she had “a great memory for dates and names” before we learn that she
was “a Quadroon.” When near the novel’s end we meet Jacob and his sister, two fugitive slaves, Crafts describes them in the
following manner: “Directly crossing … were the figures of two people. They were speaking, and the voices were those of a
man and a woman.” (pp. 214–215) Only later does she reveal Jacob’s race by reporting that “I opened my eyes to encounter those
of a black man fixed on me,” a description necessary to resolve the mystery of the identity of these two people who, it turns
out, are fugitive slaves like Hannah. Crafts, a visual narrator who loves to use language to paint landscapes and portraits
of her characters, in the most vivid manner, does distinguish among the colors and characteristics, the habits and foibles,
of the black people in her novel—one woman, she tells us, has “a withered smoked-dried face, black as ebony” (p. 139)—but
she tends to do so descriptively, as a keen if opinionated observer from within. Crafts even describes her fellow slave Charlotte
as “one every way my equal, perhaps my superior” (p. 136), which would have been a remarkable leap for a white writer to make.

When she describes the wedding of Mrs. Henry’s “favorite slave,” she tells us about “[q]ueer looking old men,” then adds a
description of their “withered and puckered” black faces that “contrasted strangely with their white beards.” Similarly, we
see “fat portly dames” and then learn of their “ebony complexions” only as contrast to their “turbans of flaming red” and
“gay clothes of rainbow colors.” (p. 119) The color of her characters here is called upon to paint a picture; Stowe, by contrast,
almost never uses a black character’s color in this way. For Stowe, it is their defining marker of identity. For Crafts, slaves
are always, first and last, human beings, “people” as she frequently puts it. (pp. 199–215) Similarly, Crafts tells us that
she was betrayed by a slave named Maria, “a wary, powerful, and unscrupulous enemy.” It is only after describing Maria’s attributes
as an antagonist that Crafts thinks to tell us that she was “a dark mulatto, very quick motioned with black snaky eyes,” physical
characteristics rendered here as outward reflections of her inner personality. Even for a well-meaning abolitionist author
such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the reverse was often true: the sign of blackness or race predetermined the limited range of
characteristics even possible for a black person to possess. The difference is a subtle one, but crucial. Occasionally, Crafts
does not disclose the color or physical features of her black characters at all, as in her depiction of her mother and her
husband in the final chapter of her novel (pp. 237–239). Few, if any, white novelists demonstrated this degree of ease or
comfort with race in antebellum American literature.

As the scholar Augusta Rohrbach pointed out to me, Crafts’s novel manifests a surprisingly sophisticated storytelling technique—such
as the way she relinquishes her tale on two occasions to the character, Lizzy (pp. 34, 172), only to reinsert herself after
Lizzy’s tale (which “made the blood run cold to hear”) has finished.
¹⁰
But the novel also contains “all the clumsy plot structures, changing tenses, impossible coincidences and heterogeneous elements
of the best” of the sentimental novels, as the critic Ann Fabian noted when I showed her the manuscript.
¹¹
It is the combination, the unfinished blend of its clashing styles, that points to the untutored and self-educated level
of the author’s writing abilities, reflected in her vocabulary, in her spelling errors, in her uneven use of punctuation,
in her narrative techniques, and in the clash of rhetorical devices borrowed from gothic and sentimental novels and the slave
narratives.

Ann Fabian, the author of
The Unvarnished Truth,
a study of women’s and blacks’ narrative strategies in the nineteenth century, shared several telling observations with me
about Crafts’s mode of narration. The novel’s plot elements, she writes,