The Bondwoman's Narrative (46 page)

A handwritten manuscript,
The Bondwoman’s Narrative,
was examined as to paper, ink, and other writing materials, as well as internal evidence, in order to authenticate and date
its composition.

It was determined to be an authentic writing of the mid-nineteenth century, and to date between circa 1853 and 1861. It was
probably written by a woman, and her insights as a young female, an African-American, and a Christian seem consistent and
credible. She has apparently struggled to achieve a significant level of education.

It was rendered in modified round hand (a style of American handwriting ca. 1840–1865) with a quill pen and iron-gall ink.
One of the types of stationery she used is known from examples in 1856 and 1860. All of the other accoutrements (vermilion
wafers, writing sand, etc.) are consistent with the 1850s.

This report presents the results of an examination of a manuscript,
The Bondwoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Crafts a Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina.

At the recommendation of manuscript expert Kenneth Rendell, I was commissioned to conduct this examination by Laurence J.
Kirshbaum, Chairman, Time Warner Trade Publishing, which is planning to publish an edition of the narrative. In a letter dated
April 24, 2001, Kirshbaum referred to the preliminary finding of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who acquired the
manuscript and determined that it appeared to date to ca. 1855. “We need your investigative expertise to authenticate this
date,” wrote Kirshbaum. In discussions with him, Gates, and Rendell, I determined to make a detailed examination of the manuscript
that would include a study of the writing materials used to produce it as well as the “internal evidence” of the text that
would bear on its authorship and date. Attempts to verify the existence of Hannah Crafts were being conducted by Professor
Gates and researchers under his direction.

The manuscript is a 301-page, cloth-bound volume measuring about 20 x 25 cm high overall. The binding is broken, but no numbered
pages are missing. The title page bears the handwritten title: “The / Bondwoman’s Narrative / By Hannah Crafts / A Fugitive
Slave / Recently Escaped from North Carolina.”

The investigation included visual, spectral, chemical, microscopic, and textual examinations.

This report discusses the following aspects: Provenance, Paper, Ink, Pen, Handwriting, Erasures and Corrections, Binding,
and Textual Matters. A Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations are presented along with illustrative photographs and photomacrographs,
an Appendix and References.

A paragraph on
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
appears in an article on recent African-Americana manuscript sales by various dealers,notably the Sixth Annual Auction of
Printed and Manuscript African-Americana at Swan Galleries (104 East 25th Street, New York, N.Y. 10010). The Swann auction
consisted of 394 lots—including
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
—offered by Wyatt Houston Day, an African-American cataloguer and dealer in rare books. The article, in
The Manuscript Society News,
referred to the manuscript as a “fictionalized slave narrative” that was “Of highest note, and one of the true crown jewels
of the [Swann] auction” (Feigen 2001).

Professor Gates provided some letters and papers relating to the manuscript’s known provenance. A letter to him from Wyatt
Houston Day, dated April 6, 2001, states that Day first saw the narrative while conducting an appraisal of the Dorothy Porter
Wesley papers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He continued:

The Hannah Crafts Narrative was in a large manilla folder along with a 1948 catalog from Emily Driscoll (a New York based
book and autograph dealer) offering the manuscript narrative. This was together with some correspondence between Dorothy Porter
and Driscoll. The correspondence was from 1948 through 1951. Ms. Driscoll was convinced that the narrative was written by
a “Negro,” and had catalogued it as such. Apparently Dorothy Porter thought so too because she acquired the manuscript for
$80.00 sometime soon after. A pencilled precis is all that accompanied the ms.

Professor Gates also sent me a copy of a letter written September 27, 1951, by Emily Driscoll (from her Fifth Avenue autograph
and manuscript business in New York City) to Mrs. Dorothy Porter (of Howard University, Washington, D.C.). Driscoll notes
that Mrs. Porter has decided to keep the manuscript (which she obviously had on approval), adding: “I bought it from a scout
in the trade” (a man who wanders around with consignment goods from other dealers) but that all she could learn of its prior
history “was that he came upon it in Jersey!”

Accompanying the copy of the Driscoll letter was a typed record (under Howard University letterhead) describing the narrative
as a “Manuscript Novel” and a “fictionalized personal narrative” that was “Written in a worn copy book.” The purchase price
was noted as “85.00.”

The manuscript contains some penciled notations that may be by Mrs. Porter. Notably, on the verso of the inside front flyleaf
(facing the title page) is hand printed “MSS61” which suggests the record of a small archive (i.e., “manuscripts no. 61”).

Being on the flyleaf, this writing was necessarily done after the present binding was affixed. There are also penciled parentheses
on page 64 (beginning line 15, ending line 19), and above the penned word “Egyptian” (in “Egyptian darkness”) someone has
penciled “Stygian?”

Written large on the back page of the original manuscript (facing the end flyleaf) is “C A Alma” (with a final flourishing
or paraph or possibly “Jr.”) also in pencil. The handwriting suggests it may have been done earlier than the other pencil
markings. Also black and white striations in the graphite lines are consistent with soft and hard spots in the “lead,” possibly
indicating natural graphite sawed into square sticks rather than the more homogeneous leads made from a mix of powdered graphite
and clay, extruded into strands, and kiln fired. The former type was used for some American pencils of about the 1860s (see
Nickell 1990, pp. 25–27).

The statement in Mrs. Porter’s record that the narrative was “Written in a worn copy book” is not really correct. It was actually
penned on stationery and subsequently bound. (The binding will be described in more detail presently.)

The stationery is in a form common to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: folio sheets, i.e. sheets of paper folded in
half and thus having two leaves and four pages. By the late 1830s, such folios were often embossed (a group at a time) with
a stationer’s crest or design in the upper-left corner.
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
consists of at least four different types of stationery folios:

1. Folios embossed “SOUTHWORTH / MFG. / CO.” in a horizontally elongated octagon. This type of paper was utilized through
page 78, and also for pages 105–126, 129–144, and 217–301 (the last page of the manuscript).

2. Folios embossed “SOUTHWORTH / [indistinct emblem] / SUPERFINE” in a shield-like crest. This was used for pages 79–104 and
for 127–128 (a single leaf).

3. Folios that are unembossed, pages 145–208 and 213–216.

4. One unembossed folio that is shorter and lighter toned than the ones it separates; this four-page folder was used for pages
209–212.

The wording of the first embossment, “SOUTHWORTH / MFG. / CO.,” represents the name of the company (which still exists in
West Springfield, Massachusetts) as it was used from 1839 to 1873, according to a representative (Kennedy 2001). More specific
dating information comes from the second type of embossment, the “SOUTHWORTH / SUPERFINE” crest. This type is known from documents
dated 1856 and 1860 (Nickell 1993). Although the exact beginning and ending dates for the manufacture are unknown, it is apparent
that it was produced during the second half of the decade of the 1850s. This paper measures about 19.4 by 24.7 cm, the approximate
size of the other folios (except, as mentioned, the slightly shorter type 4).

Stereomicroscopic examination of the surface of the various pages reveals the presence of bits of thread, occasionally still
colored red, blue, etc., indicating the paper pulp was not bleached but was made largely of white cloth. I obtained some small
slivers of paper from frayed outer edges (slivers that were about to become dislodged in any case), moistened a sliver with
distilled water and teased it apart on a microscope slide, stained it with Herzberg stain and observed the fibers microscopically.
I identified rag—linen and cotton—fibers (the latter with their characteristic twist) but found no evidence of ground wood
pulp (first successfully commercially produced in North America in 1867).

Transmitted light shows the paper to be unwatermarked except for a type of “accidental watermark” indicative of the papermaking
process. This is the appearance of stitch marks running across the sheet of paper (across two leaves as folded) produced by
the seam of the wire belt of the early paper machine. This is seen in several places (near the top of leaves pp. 11–12, 105–108,
119–122; at the top edge of pp. 61–64 [scarcely visible on 63–64]; and near the bottom of pp. 191–194).

Because the paper was machine-made, it is necessarily of the “wove”—as opposed to “laid”—pattern. (Some machine-made paper,
after 1825, was impressed with a pseudo-laid pattern by means of a device called a dandy roll, which also was employed when
a watermark was desired. For a discussion see Nickell 1990, pp. 74–79.)

The smoothness of the paper indicates it was calendered, that is, pressed between a series of rollers after the continuous
web of paper was newly formed. (“Calender” is a corruption of the Latin word
cylindrus,
“cylinder.”)

All of the paper was specifically produced as writing paper, having been sized to retard the absorbance of writing ink. Testing
a paper fragment for starch (with iodine reagent) was negative, but stereo-microscopic examination of the surface shows the
typical appearance of gelatine sizing (i.e., of having been dipped in a hot solution of natural collagen made by boiling animal
scraps).

The paper was also given blue guidelines (machine ruling of lines on paper dating back to ca. 1770 in England).

The appearance of the ink in ordinary light is brown, consistent with a typical iron-gall ink that has oxidized over time.
The ink was examined with ultraviolet light and infrared radiation, then tested chemically.

Infrared radiation (observed through a special viewing scope) offers a nondestructive means of differentiating between certain
types of ink (some absorbing the infrared radiation and thus darkening, others reflecting the rays and consequently lightening,
still others transmitting the infrared and so disappearing—see Nickell 1996, 163). The appearance of the ink throughout
The Bond-woman’s Narrative
was unremarkable, merely consistent with the possibility of an iron-gallotannate variety.

The examination with ultraviolet (UV) light was more productive. Under UV, the ink tended to darken, a characteristic consistent
with iron-gall ink. More significantly, there were everywhere instances of “ghost writing”—mirror-imaged, fluorescing traces
of writing from the facing page. Such fluorescence results from cellulose degradation, caused in turn by the acidic nature
of the ink (iron-gall being highly acidic), and it is normally a sign of genuine age in a document (Nickell 1996, 157–158).

Tests were conducted to chemically identify the ink, to determine whether it was indeed an iron-gall type and if so whether
it contained a provisional colorant. (When first written with, iron-gall ink was often dark gray rather than black—although
it later darkened on the page before eventually turning to its rusty brown appearance over time, an effect of the iron oxidizing.
To make the ink darker at the outset, various coloring agents were added, including such dyes as logwood and indigo. See Nickell
1990, 37.)

The tests were done using a technique that I developed with forensic analyst John F. Fischer. Whereas some examiners make
tests directly on the document, or remove pinhead-size samples with a scalpel, or punch out tiny discs of ink-impregnated
paper, our technique is much, much less destructive and more suitable for historical documents.

In this procedure, a small piece of chromatography paper is moistened with distilled water, placed over a heavy ink stroke,
and rubbed with a blunt instrument using moderate pressure, by which means a small trace of ink is lifted onto the paper.
Such samples were taken randomly from several locations throughout the manuscript. The chemical tests were then conducted
on the chromatography paper.

Two reagents were used. First, hydrochloric acid was applied, which produced a light yellow color typical of an iron-gall
ink that lacks a provisional colorant. (A blue reaction would have indicated a colorant such as indigo; red would have indicated
log-wood). This was followed by potassium ferrocyanide which yielded a prussian-blue color, thus proving the presence of iron
and indicating an iron-gallotannate ink. This type of ink was the most common in use during the middle of the nineteenth century.

The text of
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
is characterized by sequences of writing in which the ink becomes progressively lighter before abruptly becoming darker again.
This dark-to-light progression is a feature of a “dip” pen, whereby less and less ink is deposited until the writer recharges
the pen by dipping it once again into the inkwell.