The Bondwoman's Narrative (47 page)

Also, pen strokes in the narrative are sometimes much finer than others. Note that the writing at the top of page 259 (the
four lines that end Chapter 16) is noticeably more heavily stroked than the heading and opening lines of Chapter 17. This
indicates a sharper pen being used for the latter, and such variance—moving from a blunt to sharp nib—is a characteristic
of the quill pen. The more hairline appearance of the latter results from the quill having been sharpened (a special quill-pen
knife was used for the purpose) or from the pen having been put aside for a sharp one. (Inkstands of the period often had
a series of “quill holes” around the inkwell into which quills could be stood ready for use. Boxes of machine-built quill
pen nibs, for use on a holder, were also sold [Nickell 1990, 3–8].)

Stereomicroscopic examination confirmed that the narrative was indeed written with quill pens. There are no nib tracks (furrows
caused by metal pens or by “dutched,” i.e. fire-hardened, quills) in the paper. Quill pens began to be supplanted by steel
pens in the 1840s and 1850s, and—by the end of the Civil War (during which quills were used by the impoverished Confederates)—the
quill was almost completely abandoned (Nickell 1996, 108).

The writing in the narrative is consistent with that produced by the standard goose quill rather than by the crow quill. (The
latter was used for the minuscule script that was sometimes affected by Victorian ladies as an expression of femininity. See
Nickell 1990, pp. 3–4.)

The handwriting of the manuscript is of a class succeeding that of the American round-hand system (ca. 1700–1840). That earlier
penmanship style was characterized by uniformly hairline up-strokes and heavy (“shaded”) downstrokes, flourishes, and such
now-archaic forms as the long
s
and superscript abbreviations (i.e. the use of raised letters in such contracted forms as “W
^m
” for “William”). The manuscript handwriting is rather of the transitional form called modified round-hand (ca. 1840–1865),
lacking the features of the later “Spencerian” system (1865–1890) that had more angular connecting strokes and was relatively
devoid of shading on the small letters.

Of course it is difficult to precisely date a handwriting from its style, especially since people tended to continue writing
the way they had been taught, into their old age. Given that the writing materials indicate composition in the 1850s, the
absence of archaic forms like the long
s
suggests to me that the writer was relatively young when the pages were penned.

The author’s handwriting may best be described as serviceable. It is neither an untutored hand nor an example of elegant penmanship,
and it lacks the diminutive size sometimes affected by ladies (referred to earlier in the discussion of quills). It is not
possible to determine on the basis of the script alone whether such a handwriting was produced by a man or woman, although
there are indications (to be discussed later) that it was the latter. It is consistent with the writing of a woman.

The script was produced with relative slowness rather than swiftness, but it is a natural, genuine handwriting (unlike, say,
the bogus script of the alleged Jack the Ripper Diary [Nickell 1996, 45–48].) The author apparently desired to make the writing
legible. It is generally unadorned, although one interesting feature is an extra little stroke—a deliberate fillip (comparable
to a comma)—that is found as a final stroke of lower-case
s
but only when it is at the end of a word. This feature does not seem to have precise date significance. I find examples in
my reference collection dating from 1821 to 1878.

The punctuation is eccentric. Periods are absent, although semicolons are sometimes used. Hyphens used for word breaks typically
appear not at the end of the line but at the beginning of the next (although occasionally—including three instances on page
18—there is a hyphen at both places). Most curiously, apostrophes and quotation marks appear not as they should, raised (at
the top of the lettering), but rather at the baseline (like commas). These characteristics differ even from the conventions
of the period (see Cahoon et al. 1977) and seem explicable only as a measure of unsophistication on the part of the writer.
(One possibility is that the placement of quotation marks somehow derived from European romance-language [French, Italian,
Spanish, etc.]
guillemets,
small angled marks used for quotations and “placed on the lower part of the type body” [
Chicago Manual
1993].)

The author of the manuscript has utilized a wide variety of methods for correcting and revising the text. Kenneth Rendell
(2001) is quite justified in having suggested “that the manuscript is a composing copy, and it is not a fair copy.”

Many changes were made in progress, quite often utilizing a common method of the quill-pen era: wipe erasures. This method
(mentioned by Charles Dickens in
The Pickwick Papers,
1837) involved the writer “smearing out wrong letters with his little finger, and putting in new ones which required going
over very often to render them visible through the old blots.” This method is employed frequently in
The Bondwoman’s Narrative,
one instance being page 132, line 9, where “with” was wiped off—while the ink had remained wet on the page—and “in” was written
over the spot. The process is facilitated in the manuscript by the “calendered” (smooth) surface of the paper. The direction
of the wipe indicates that the author is using the little finger of the right hand and is thus almost certainly right-handed
(as the script also indicates). Wipe erasures declined with the advent of the steel pen which dug into the paper and left
furrowed nib tracks that filled with ink and were not so readily removed (Nickell 1991).

The writer also used the techniques of striking out words (utilizing a series of slashes or multiple long lines) and making
insertions using a caret (inverted v) to indicate the exact placement of added words. Some of these corrections were made
in the process of writing, others as later changes.

Where the author wished to erase a small portion of text after the ink had thoroughly dried, the offending portion was scraped
off with an ink-eraser knife. (See Nickell 1990, 64–66.) An example is found on page 41, line 17, when a word was scraped
off and the word “salver” was written over. (If a special ink-eraser knife was unavailable, the writer might have used the
available penknife for the erasure.) Note the rough appearance of the overwriting and the scrape marks (visible by transmitted
light).

It is with the knife erasures that I found the only evidence of blotting in the manuscript. I searched in vain for any use
of blotting paper, instead discovering a few instances of the use of writing sand. For example on page 67 is a blot of ink
that has a speckled appearance. When one turns the leaf there is a corresponding blob. What happened is that the author penned
a sentence that included the word “oblidged” (misspelled). Later deciding to correct this, the writer used a knife to scrape
off the last half of the word (all but “obli”), then wrote “ged” to complete the word. However, the knife had removed the
sizing, roughened the paper, and left thin places in it. As a consequence, the ink was drawn out of the quill by capillary
attraction, making a heavy blob that soaked through to the other side. Quickly, the writer grabbed for her sand-box or sander
(similar to a small confectionary shaker only with a recessed top) and dusted sand over the blob on each side of the leaf.
In the writer’s subsequent brushing off of the particles—which has left a speckled appearance—a few still inkwet grains were
carried down and to the right, leaving a little trail in the form of a smear with more speckles.

Writing sand was used on some other ink blobs that resulted from knife erasures. On page 225, line 17, there are tiny indentations
in the letter “A” of “Accordingly” that I attribute to sand. At the left side of that letter is embedded a single speck of
clear crystalline material that suggests the sand was a quartz variety (not the presumably more expensive “black writing sand”—powdered
biotite—that was often preferred; see Nickell 1990, 59–60).

When more extensive revisions were necessary, involving a few lines, the writer used a slip of paper attached to the page
to cover the old text. The new text was written on the slip before it was attached. (The paper used is, in most instances,
recycled from rejected manuscript pages, utilizing a blank side but leaving old text on the underside. The recovered text
of one such slip is given in Appendix.)

The slips have been cut with small scissors (possibly sewing scissors) and attached by affixing halves of moistened paste
wafers. (A wafer was a disc of flour paste usually colored—like those in the manuscript—with vermilion.) To make the paste
bond better to the paper, it was common to impress the paper over the wafer with a small seal-like device having a pattern
like a waffle iron. Sometimes a writer improvised, for example using a knife to score the paper (Nickell 1990, 97).

In the narrative the writer appears to have used a thimble. (This would not be surprising because a thimble was sometimes
employed, as was the top of a key, as an improvised seal for pressing into sealing wax [Nickell 1990, 91].) Unlike the typical
squarish grid pattern, that of the manuscript shows rows of raised dots that are quite like those I produced experimentally
using old thimbles. (The tiny hemispheres are convex, corresponding to the concave indentations of thimbles.) If this evidence
is correct, it is a further indication (not proof of course) that the author was a woman.

In any event, the use of wafers is instructive. With the advent of adhesive envelopes in the 1850s, wafers began to disappear.
The last example I find in my reference collection (without claiming this as definitive) is on a Confederate letter sheet
dated 1863.

More substantive revisions were apparently made by replacing a folio. A clear example of this is found in a break between
pp. 194 and 195. The last two inches of p. 194 have uncharacteristically been left blank, and the top of the next page (before
the heading for the next chapter) has three lines crossed out. This indicates that the folio ending with p. 194 was replaced.
(If folios were replaced in the progress of writing, rather than later, there would not be such a gap to betray the fact.)

Some single leaves have been used, which fact further indicates the discarding and revising of text. One such single leaf
is numbered pp. 11–12, having the seam mark of the paper-machine belt; that mark being absent from the preceding and succeeding
pages shows necessarily that a single leaf is present from the folio that had been so marked. Also (as mentioned earlier)
pp. 127–128 represent a single leaf as indicated by the fact that the stationers’ embossment is different from that of the
leaves before and after.

Simple arithmetic indicates there must be at least one more single leaf. After the first folio (the title page, followed in
turn by a blank page, the preface, and another blank page), there are 302 pages (301 numbered pages plus a blank final page).
The two single leaves already identified represent four pages, so 302 minus 4 equals 298, but that is not evenly divisible
by four. However subtracting one more leaf (two pages)
would
give a number so divisible (296 [H11504] 4 = 74 folios), so there must be one additional single leaf; or there could be three,
five, etc. The halving of a folio was probably done by slitting the fold with a paper knife (somewhat like the later letter
opener only with a wider blade having a rounded tip—see Nickell 1990, pp. 106, 107), or again the pen knife could have been
pressed into service.

As will be clear from much of the foregoing,
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
was composed not in a blank book but on sheets of stationery. Because of this the manuscript, subsequently bound, was not
sewn in interfolded gatherings. The manuscript appears to have existed in two distinct forms: one without covers and one with.

The decidedly soiled and abraded condition of the first and last page of the original manuscript (i.e., ignoring the flyleaves)
is evidence that the manuscript was not bound immediately upon completion.

I find no evidence of the manuscript having been tied in a bundle with string or ribbon (as might have been indicated by damaged
edges or a narrow, less-soiled crisscross area where ribbon or string had been).

Instead, although one conservation expert saw no obvious evidence of prior binding (Bowen 2001), I found what I believe is
subtle evidence of it. Two sets of pinholes are seen in the interior margins of the pages (next to the book’s “gutter”). These
are within a few centimeters of the top and bottom and exist throughout the book (Figure 8.1). The pinholes penetrate the
pasteovers whenever they intrude into the punched areas (e.g., on p. 222), indicating the holes were made after the narrative
was effectively completed.

I considered but rejected the hypothesis that the pinholes were mis-punchings by the later bookbinder. The holes have occasionally
been enlarged by tearing (e.g., the lower one on p. 97 and adjacent pages). This indicates that the holes had been threaded
and the improvised volume subjected to some handling at that time.

Because the extraneous pinholes are located too far from the edge, the fastening would have obscured some of the text. They
are also out of alignment and may represent two different attempts at an amateurish binding, probably by the author. (This
was perhaps somewhat like Emily Dickinson did with groups of her poems, written on similarly folded sheets of stationery:
“When the copying was completed she stacked the sheets one on top of another, stabbed holes through them at the edge, and
secured the booklets with string.” Those poems are believed to date from about 1858 to early 1860 [Shurr 1983].)