The Bondwoman's Narrative (9 page)

Because Hannah Crafts claims to be living in New Jersey at novel’s end, in a community of free blacks, married to a Methodist
clergyman, teaching schoolchildren, I decided in a last-ditch effort to research the history of black Methodists in New Jersey,
taking Crafts at her word. (The obvious problem with an autobiographical novel is determining where fact stops and fiction
starts. Still, the New Jersey provenance of the manuscript in 1948 supported this line of inquiry.) What is especially curious
about Crafts’s selection of New Jersey as her home in the North is that New Jersey “was the site of several Underground Railroad
routes” and that “the region became a haven for slaves escaping the South,” as Giles R. Wright puts it in his
Afro-Americans in New Jersey.
²⁸
Moreover “by 1870, New Jersey had several all-black communities,” including Skunk Hollow in Bergen County; Guineatown, Lawnside,
and Saddlerstown in Camden County; Timbuctoo in Burlington County; and Gouldtown and Springton in Cumberland County. In addition,
Camden, Newton, Center, Burlington, Deptford, Mannington, Pilesgrove, and Fairfield also “had a sizeable number of Afro-Americans.”
(p. 38) It is, therefore, quite possible that Crafts was familiar with these communities and that she either lived in one
or chose to end her novel there because of New Jersey’s curious attraction for fugitive slaves. Yet, few, if any, authors
of the slave narratives end their flight to freedom in New Jersey, making it difficult to imagine how Crafts knew about these
free black communities as a safe haven from slavery if she did not indeed live in or near one. She did not, in other words,
select New Jersey from a reading of slave narratives or abolitionist novels. Slave narrators such as Douglass, Brown, and
Jacobs end their flight to the North in places such as Rochester, New Bedford, Boston, or New York.

Joseph H. Morgan’s book, titled
Morgan’s History of the New Jersey Conference of the A.M.E. Church,
published in Camden, New Jersey, in 1887, lists every pastor in each church within the conference since the church’s founding,
as well as each congregation’s trustees, stewards, stewardesses, exhorters, leaders, organists, local preachers, officers,
and Sunday school teachers.
²⁹

Hannah Vincent was listed in the church at Burlington as a stewardess, church treasurer, and teacher. (The church was named
the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, located on East Pearl Street in Burlington, and was founded in 1830.) Could
this Hannah Vincent be the person who was living in Burlington in 1850? I presumed so, but checked anyway.

I turned to the 1870 and 1880 federal census records from New Jersey. Hannah Vincent, age forty-six in 1870, was living in
the household of Thomas Vincent, age forty-eight. He was listed as black, she as a mulatto. He was a porter in a liquor store,
she was “keeping house.” Both were said to have been born in Pennsylvania. Since the Hannah Vincent I had found in 1850 had
been listed as twenty-two, single, and a mulatto, I presumed this Hannah Vincent (age forty-six) to be the same person, living
with her brother, twenty years later. But in the 1880 census, Hannah—now claiming that her age was still forty-eight!—is listed
as Thomas’s wife, both now identified as having been born in New Jersey. Unless the 1850 Hannah Vincent had married a man
also named Vincent, this Methodist Sunday school teacher was a different person from her 1850 namesake. To add to the confusion,
a birth record for a Samuel Vincent, dated 1850, lists his parents as one Thomas and Hannah, despite the fact that our Hannah
Vincent was single according to the 1850 census. Samuel Vincent’s race is not identified. Only her marriage certificate could
reveal her maiden name. But a search of the New Jersey marriage licenses stored in Trenton failed to uncover a record of Thomas’s
marriage to Hannah. Neither did a search of the tombstones at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Burlington found in the cemetery adjacent
to the church uncover the graves of the Vincents.
³⁰
Unless a marriage certificate, death records of their children, or some other document appears, we won’t be able to ascertain
the maiden name of this Hannah Vincent. But given the Methodist and Vincent connections, this person remains a candidate as
the author of
The Bondwoman’s Narrative.

Why did Hannah Crafts fail to publish her novel? Publishing at any time is extraordinarily difficult, and was especially so
for a woman in the nineteenth century. For an African American woman, publishing a book was virtually a miraculous event,
as we learned from the case of Harriet Wilson. If Hannah Crafts had indeed passed for white and retained her own name once
she arrived in New Jersey, then obviously she would not have wanted to reveal her identity or her whereabouts to John Hill
Wheeler, who would have tried to track her down, just as he longed to do with Jane Johnson. Even if she changed her name and
pretended to be simply writing a novel, the manuscript is so autobiographical that the copyright page would have revealed
her new identity and would have led to her exposure.

Ann Fabian speculates that “perhaps she composed her narrative in the late 1850s and by the time” she finished it, saw she
had missed the market as she watched a white abolitionist readership and the cultural infrastructure it supported dissolve
and turn elsewhere. By the time the war was over, maybe she too was doing other things and never returned to a story “she
had written in and for a cultural world of the 1840s and 1850s.” The failure to publish is all the more puzzling, she continues,
because the novel does not read as if she were “writing this for herself,” since “it is not an internal sort of story (she
doesn’t grow or change) which makes me want to think of her imagining a public for it.” Crafts obviously wanted the story
of her life preserved at least for a future readership, because she preserved the manuscript so carefully, as apparently did
several generations of her descendants. These facts make her inability to publish her manuscript all the more poignant.

Nina Baym suggests that her decision to write a first-person autobiographical novel could have made publication difficult
in the intensely political climate of the anti-slavery movement of the 1850s. Veracity was everything in an exslave’s tale,
essential both to its critical and commercial success and to its political efficacy within the movement. As Baym argues:

The first-person stance is also a possible explanation for her not trying to publish it. Given the public insistence on veracity
in the handling of slave experiences (you know all those accusations about black fugitive speakers being frauds), she might
well have hesitated after all to launch into the marketplace an experimental novel in the first person under her own name.
³¹

As soon as pro-slavery advocates could discredit any part of it as a fiction, “the work and its author,” Baym concludes, “would
be discredited. But if she offered it as a fiction pure and simple, it would be ignored.” Regardless of the reasons this book
was never published, one thing seems certain: the person who wrote this book knew John Hill Wheeler and his wife personally,
hated them both for their pro-slavery feelings and their racism, and wanted to leave a record of their hatred for posterity.

I have to confess that I was haunted throughout my search for Hannah Crafts by Dorothy Porter’s claim that—judging from internal
evidence—Hannah Crafts was a black woman because of her peculiar, or unusually natural, handling of black characters as they
are introduced to the novel: “her approach to other Negroes,” we recall that Porter wrote to Emily Driscoll, is “that they
are people first of all.” “Only as the story unfolds, in most instances,” she concludes, “does it become apparent that they
are Negroes.” While speculation of this sort is risky, what can we ascertain about Hannah Crafts’s racial identity from internal
evidence more broadly defined?

It is important to remember that Hannah Crafts is a prototype of the tragic mulatto figure in American and African American
literature, which would become a stock character at the turn of the century. She is keenly aware of class differences within
the slave community and makes no bones about describing the unsanitary living conditions of the field hands in their cramped
quarters with far more honesty, earthiness, and bluntness than I have encountered in either the slave narratives or novels
of the period. These descriptions are remarkably realistic and are quite shocking for being so rare in the literature. Whereas
Crafts clings to her class orientation as an educated mulatto, as a literate house slave, she does not, on the other hand,
reject intimate relationships with black people
tout court.
She is a snob, in other words, but she is not a racist.

Hannah decides to run away to protect herself from rape by a black man she finds loathsome and reprehensible, uneducated,
uncouth, and unwashed and, as she freely admits, to avoid the squalor of life in the slave quarters. But throughout the novel,
she bonds with a variety of black characters, starting with her unveiled mulatto mistress on the Lindendale plantation:

“And will you go with me?” she inquired.

“I will, my dear mistress.”

“Call me mistress no longer. Henceforth you shall be to me as a very dear sister” she said embracing me again. “Oh: to be
free, to be free.”

Crafts clearly admires her fellow slave Lizzy, “a Quadroon” who, she tells us, “had passed through many hands, and experienced
all the vicissitudes attendant on the life of a slave,” from suffering “the extremes of a master’s fondness” to his wife’s
“jealousy and their daughter’s hate.” (Crafts repeatedly stresses the sexual vulnerability of all female slaves, but especially
that of house servants and mulattos.) Later, Crafts bonds with Jacob, a “black man” and a fugitive slave fleeing with his
sister, as Crafts herself is fleeing near the end of the novel. And most important of all, she ends the novel by willingly
selecting an identity as a black person, married to a free-born black Methodist minister, keeping “a school for colored children.”
This is all the more remarkable given the fact that she makes the final leg of her escape route in the disguise of a white
woman, having been persuaded by Aunt Hetty to abandon her disguise as a white male. Crafts chooses her blackness willingly,
in other words, just as she chooses her class identity. Breeding, education, morals, manners, hygiene—these are the values
that Hannah Crafts embraces consistently throughout the novel, from her life as a slave to freedom within the colored middle
class of New Jersey. In a sense Crafts seems determined to
unsanitize
depictions of the horrible conditions the slaves experienced, revealing the debilitating effects this brutal institution
had upon the victims—the slaves—much as Richard Wright would later, in
Native Son
(1940), attempt to reveal the brutal effects of racism and capitalism on Bigger Thomas. That she makes no apologies for these
attitudes is one of the most fascinating aspects of her narrative strategy, as if class trumps race when a choice is demanded.
But class
and
race combined compose the ideal that Crafts valorizes throughout her text. That combination is the basis of the blissful
life that she finds at the conclusion of her tale. Hannah Crafts can be thought of as the figurative grandmother of W. E.
B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth.” Though other mixed-race narrators, such as Harriet Wilson or Harriet Jacobs, stress industry
and hard work, none makes it a fetish in the way that Crafts does.

Throughout the novel, Crafts underscores the fact that the institution of slavery does not respect distinctions among the
slaves. Class distinctions are irrelevant.

He reck[on]ed not that she was a woman of delicate sensibilities and fine perfections—she was a slave, and that was all to
him. [p. 82; see also pp. 33 and 76]

Elsewhere, Crafts rails against an irrational system that privileges “mere accident of birth, and what persons were the least
capable of changing or modifying” over their capacity to “improve” themselves. [pp. 76–77] It is native intelligence, diligence,
and hard work that should be the ultimate measures of individual worth and success in a truly democratic society, she argues
implicitly throughout her novel.