The Bondwoman's Narrative (42 page)

p. 120
: “vows and responsibilities strangely fearful when taken in connection with their servile condition” The slave narratives
frequently draw attention to the perilous nature of “marriage” among slaves. No one is more eloquent about the fragility of
marriage within the slave community than Harriet Jacobs. See her slave narrative,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(1861), edited by Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

p. 120
: “the winds arose, clouds obscured the firmament, and there was darkness, and lightning, and rain” Crafts often indicates
a reversal in fortune for her characters by a rapid weather change. This is a standard convention of gothic novels.

Chapter 10

p. 121
: The author attributes this verse to King Solomon. The King James version of Proverbs 31:30 reads as follows:

Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.

pp. 121–123
: Crafts’s description of the architectural style of the house called Forget Me Not and its furniture demonstrates
her remarkable descriptive skill as a narrator. Whereas plot and character would seem to take a priority over setting in the
slave narratives, in her novel Crafts seems to luxuriate in making observations such as these, observations that are broad
and general rather than specific to the politics of slavery and race.

p. 124
: “and even now it is not my intention to draw their portraits” Crafts, in this passage, substitutes what we might think
of as a metaphysical verisimilitude—a portrait of inner attributes and characteristics—for the physical verisimilitude common
to the slave narratives. John H. Henry, a Presbyterian clergyman, was living in Stafford County, Virginia, in 1850. Stafford
County is eighty miles from Milton. Henry was born in New York.

p. 125
: “a scallion” Crafts meant “scullion,” a kitchen helper.

p. 126
: “Compassionated” means “sympathize with or pity.”

p. 127
: “the accusing spirit of Cesar summoning Brutus to Philippi” Marcus Junius Brutus (78?–42 B.C.) was made governor and
then praetor of Cispaline Gaul by Julius Caesar in 46 and 44 B.C., respectively. He famously took part in the assassination
of Caesar. Mark Anthony and Octavian, the first of the Roman emperors, fought Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 B.C. Brutus
committed suicide after his forces were defeated. Shakespeare immortalized Brutus in his tragedy
Julius Caesar,
which is most probably Crafts’s source for this reference. Crafts, like Harriet Wilson, enjoyed a broad, if not deep, exposure
to literature through the sort of texts or “classics” commonly found in a small library in a middle-class household in America
in the mid-nineteenth century. See Appendix C for books in Wheeler’s library.

p. 127
: “and yet my heart rose against the man…. I almost felt that he had done me a personal injury, an irreparable wrong.”
While Crafts demonstrates remarkable self-control throughout her text, this reaction of anger, disgust, and disbelief seems
quite genuine and human, unlike the unbelievable Christian tolerance and forgiveness of some of the black characters in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Crafts’s attitude here, if rendered in contemporary terms, would be “Are you serious? You must be joking!”

p. 128
: “a friend and distant relative in North Carolina” Mrs. Henry is referring to John Hill Wheeler. Since Wheeler’s servant
Jane escaped in 1855, and since Mrs. Wheeler refers to this event, we can date this section of the novel to 1855.

p. 128
: “Their names are Wheeler” The passage refers to John Hill Wheeler, a native of North Carolina, and his second wife,
Ellen. In Washington, D.C., Mr. Wheeler served in a number of government positions during the Pierce and Buchanan administrations.
See notes to chapter 12.

p. 130
: “Alas; those that view slavery only as it relates to physical sufferings or the wants of nature, can have no conception
of its greatest evils.” Crafts, like Douglass, makes several perceptive counterintuitive claims about the nature of slavery
and its effects on the slaves, seemingly from inside of the slave community.

Chapter 11

p. 131
: This is one of the three chapters in which Crafts uses a poetic as well as a biblical citation. The first quotation
is Psalm 140:1:

Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man: preserve me from the violent man.

p. 131
: “The slave, if he or she desires to be content, should always remain in celibacy” The slave narratives are replete
with observations of this sort about the evils that slavery can inflict, capriciously, on those slaves who think that they
are “married.” Slavery recognized no legal institutions such as marriage among slaves.

p. 132
: “lest ‘de ghost’ should steal on them unaware” Crafts, like Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, uses black dialect to distinguish
between house and field servants, educated and uneducated, rational and superstitious slaves. Crafts does not romanticize
the members of the slave community, drawing distinctions among the slaves as an insider would rather than reducing their differences
and distinctions to a blanket, common identity, consciousness, or culture predetermined by their race or ethnicity. The more
distinctions between blacks that an author draws, in other words, the more likely it is that he or she has observed slavery
from inside the institution. Here, Crafts distances herself from the Henrys’ other house servants by dismissing them as slaves
to superstition, unlike herself. All the slave narrators, in one form or another, draw distinctions between the “representative,”
intelligent, questing narrator and the bulk of the slaves demeaned by slavery whom the narrator will ultimately leave behind.
In a sense, this class of slaves will become the progenitor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1868–1963) famous concept of “The Talented
Tenth.”

p. 133
: “the most ludicrous state of terror conceivable” This hilarious scene, at the servant Jo’s expense, is designed to
reinforce Hannah’s status as a superior, rational person, one capable, of course, of writing her own narrative. This is a
common rhetorical strategy found in the slave narratives. The exslave author William Wells Brown (1814–84) used dialect and
humor brilliantly, especially in his novel,
Clotel.
Parody of the sort that Crafts uses here is dependent for its effect on intimate knowledge of the original. See also Jo’s
argument with the other servants about whether ghosts can eat! Not all of the slaves speak in black vernacular English. See
pp. 140–143 for Charlotte’s and William’s discourse about escape.

p. 136
: “How could I acquit my conscience of cruelty and wrong” Hannah, seemingly obsessed with conformity to duty, here chooses
loyalty to her fellow slave Charlotte over an inner obligation to be a consistently truthful person.

p. 137
: “In attending these religious exercises” The religious practices of the slaves, “earnest and fervid,” as Crafts puts
it, were frequently commented upon in slave narratives. Though obviously conservative in her manners, beliefs, and practices,
Crafts nevertheless found these services “an agre[e]able diversion for my thoughts.”

p. 138
: “a very pleasant walk among the negro lodges” Crafts is demonstrating in this paragraph the inherent love of beauty,
order, and industry among slaves who are respected, nourished, and well cared for.

p. 138
: Crafts states that the “ludicrous countenances” of the fearful slaves could have “provoked a smile on the lip of Heraclitus.”
The author consistently distances herself from other slaves by her lack of fear and superstition. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus
(535 B.C.–475 B.C.) was often contrasted with “the laughing philosopher,” Democritus, because of his “melancholy philosophy.”

p. 139
: “a withered smoke-dried face, black as ebony” Black authors in the nineteenth century often strove to differentiate
among the variety of colors of the slaves, both to chart their individuality and to testify to the master’s or overseer’s
penchant for sexual relations with female slaves, leading to the birth of mulattos. Over subsequent generations, the colors
of members of the black community became quite variegated.

p. 139
: Despite her initial decision to remain discreet, Hannah here shares Charlotte’s secret with Mrs. Henry. She seems
to have done so to enlist Mrs. Henry as Charlotte’s ally rather than to betray her, judging from Mrs. Henry’s calm and circumspect
reaction. The entire scene, as it unfolds over the next four pages, is designed to specify the cruelties of slavery through
the severing of the marriage bond, one of the holiest institutions of Christianity.

p. 142
: “Duty, gratitude and honor forbid it.” Throughout her text, Crafts seeks to chart her inner nobility of spirit in
such a way as to justify—at last— her own inevitable need to flee slavery, ultimately, to protect her virtue and virginity,
contrary to stereotypes of black women as licentious and hyper-sexualized. This was a clever rhetorical and, implicitly, ideological
strategy, but one not without its risks. Crafts often comes across as the metaphorical grandmother—a prototype—of the tragic
mulatto commonly found in black fiction at the turn of the century who renders herself noble against the ignobility of lower-class,
or darker, African Americans. She can also be taken as an antecedent of the light-complexioned members of the middle class
whose aristocratic pretensions are bitterly critiqued in E. Franklin Frazier’s
Black Bourgeoisie
(Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957). While often masked or muted, in other words, class divisions in the black community have
a long and consistent history, and arose within the institution of slavery.

p. 142
: “With me it is liberty or death” William uses the rebellion of the American Revolution and its famous orator Patrick
Henry (1736–99) to authorize his flight to freedom.

p. 143
: “Thy desire shall be thy husband” In Genesis 3:16, God rules that because of Eve’s involvement in eating the fruit
of the tree of knowledge, women shall desire and be ruled by their husbands. Moreover, God says, “I will greatly multiply
thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shall bring forth children.” The actual quotation from Genesis is “thy desire
shall be to thy husband.”

p. 145
: “and with these hounds real Cuban” Bloodhounds were used to track fugitive slaves. The three principal breeds of bloodhound
are English, Cuban, and African. Cuban bloodhounds are thought to be a variety of the mastiff.

Chapter 12

p. 147
: From Psalm 69, verse 29:

But I am poor and sorrowful: let thy salvation, O God, set me up on high.

p. 147
: “death-damps” Crafts refers to the perspiration, the clammy skin, which indicates physiological shock and impending
death.

p. 148
: “Mrs Wheeler came on her summer visit” At this point in the text, Crafts is drawing upon an actual historical event—the
escape of a female slave named Jane Johnson from John Hill Wheeler in 1855—to develop her plot. Her decision to do so and
to use the real names of Jane and the Wheelers greatly facilitated the authentication of her narrative. The most likely time
of Mrs. Ellen Wheeler’s visit to the Henrys, as suggested by a scrutiny of Mr. Wheeler’s diary, was mid-1856. She was in Nicaragua
when Jane escaped, having moved there with her husband in 1854. At this date he still held the post of Resident Minister to
Nicaragua and was therefore absent from the United States. The latter half of Wheeler’s diary for 1856 is lost (last entry:
May 23), but his return in November 1857 is recorded in his diary for the following year. If Mrs. Wheeler visited the Henrys
in summer 1856, then she must have returned to the United States from Nicaragua some time between late 1855 and early 1856.

John Hill Wheeler diary, 1857 [p. 97]:

Sunday, November 15

This day a year ago I landed at New York from Central America in bad health and spirits. Today I am well and contented, thanks
to kind Providence.

p. 148
: “Her two waiting maids had ran [sic] off to the North” Crafts is fictionalizing Jane Johnson’s escape with her two
sons, Daniel and Isaiah, from Wheeler in July 1855, on a trip from Washington to New York. Jane escaped in Philadelphia. Wheeler’s
diary entry on the escape reads as follows:

Wed, 18 [July 1855]

Left Washington City at 6 o’clock with Jane Daniel and Isaiah (my servants) for New York. D. Webster Esq. 6th Street Phila.
in Co. Reached Phila. [a]t 1 1/2—went to Mr. Sully’s to get Ellen’s [i.e., Wheeler’s wife] things—and hurried to the Warf
[sic]. The Boat had just left—so we remained until 5 o’clock—took dinner at Blood-good’s Hotel foot of Walnut Street. At 4
1/2 went on board of the Steamer Washington, and a few minutes before the boat started a gang of Negroes led on by Passmore
Williamson an Abolitionist came up to us, and told Jane that [i]f she would go ashore she was free—On my remonstrating they
seized me by the collar, threatened to cut my throat if I resisted, took the servants by force, they remonstrating and crying
murder.
Hurried them on shore—to a carriage which was waiting, and drove [stricken: “off”] them off.

p. 149
: “Jane was very handy at almost everything.” Mrs. Wheeler is referring to Jane Johnson.

p. 149
: “He wanted me to come, and I couldn’t think of doing without her in my feeble health.” Crafts is fictionalizing an
actual event here: Wheeler was bringing Jane from Washington to Nicaragua, to serve his wife, Ellen. When Mrs. Wheeler remarks
that “I didn’t much like the idea of bringing her to Washington,” Crafts is echoing warnings that Wheeler had received about
attempting to transport a slave from Washington through Philadelphia—a hotbed of anti-slavery sentiment. Slavery was legal
in Washington. It was in Philadelphia that Jane Johnson escaped.