The Bondwoman's Narrative (10 page)

There can be little doubt that Crafts is intimately familiar with slavery, just as she is intimately familiar with the Wheeler
family. Again and again she makes telling observations about the mind of both slaves and slave owners that are astonishingly
perceptive, novel, and counterintuitive. For example, she writes that

But those who think that the greatest evils of slavery are connected with physical suffering posses [sic] no just or rational
ideas of human nature. The soul, the immortal soul must ever long and yearn for a thousand things inseperable [sic] to liberty.
Then, too, the fear, the apprehension, the dread, and deep anxiety always attending that condition in a greater or less degree.
There can be no certainty, no abiding confidence in the possession of any good thing. [p. 94]

Crafts repeatedly objects to slaves getting married, because their masters were not bound to honor the sanctity of this institution
and because children of slaves were, by definition, slaves as well:

Marriage like many other blessings I considered to be especially designed for the free, and something that all the victims
of slavery should avoid as tending essentially to perpetuate that system. Hence to all overtures of that kind from whatever
quarter they might come I had invariably turned a deaf ear. I had spurned domestic ties not because my heart was hard, but
because it was my unalterable resolution never to entail slavery on any human being. [pp. 206–207]

True marriage, she tells us earlier in the text, was an inconceivable idea for a slave:

… vows and responsibilities [were] strangely fearful when taken in connection with their servile condition. Did the future
spread before them bright and cloudless? Did they anticipate domestic felicity, and long years of wedded love: when their
lives, their limbs, their very souls were subject to the control of another’s will; … and then might be decreed without a
moment’s warning to never meet again[?] [p. 120]

No, she concludes with the greatest finality, “The slave, if he or she desires to be content, should always remain in celibacy.”
“If it was my purpose,” she continues, “I could bring many reasons to substantiate this view, but plain, practical common
sense must teach every observer of mankind that any situation involving such responsibilities as marriage can only be filled
with profit, and honor, and advantage by the free.” [p. 131]

In her own case, it is Mrs. Wheeler’s attempt to force her to “marry” a field slave—that is, to allow Bill to rape her and
to force her to live in the squalor of the cabins (“most horrible of all doomed to association with the vile, foul, filthy
inhabitants of the huts, and condemned to receive one of them for my husband”)— that forces her to run away. As Crafts puts
it, combining her concerns about the violation of her virtue and the integrity and sanctity of her sexuality with the violation
of her sensibilities:

And now when I had voluntarily renounced the society of those I might have learned to love[,] should I be compelled to accept
one, whose person, and speech, and manner could not fail to be ever regarded by me with loathing and disgust. Then to be driven
in to the fields beneath the eye and lash of the brutal overseer, and those miserable huts, with their promiscuous crowds
of dirty, obscene and degraded objects, for my home[,] I could not, I would not bear it. [p. 207]

Only this double violation—“a compulsory union with a man whom I could only hate and despise” (p. 206)—could force Hannah
to flee: “it seemed that rebellion would be a virtue, that duty to myself and my God actually required” her to run away, she
concludes. Rarely, if ever, in the literature created by exslaves has the prospect of rape, and the gap in living conditions
between house and field, been put more explicitly and squarely. Obviously, Hannah Crafts had no fear about offending the sensibilities
of northern abolitionists nor the tastes of her putative middle-class readership, or other black people. One is forced to
wonder if her bluntness about these matters stood as an obstacle to her ability to publish her tale.

A final example of Crafts’s intimate knowledge of slavery is a subtle one. It involves the degree of intimacy possible between
a mistress and a female slave. Crafts’s account reads as follows:

Those who suppose that southern ladies keep their attendants at a distance, scarcely speaking to them, or only to give commands
have a very erroneous impression. Between the mistress and her slave a freedom exists probably not to be found elsewhere.
A northern woman would have recoiled at the idea of communicating a private history to one of my race, and in my condition,
whereas such a thought never occurred to Mrs Wheeler. I was near her. [p. 150]

William Andrews (the author of the definitive study of the slave narratives) analyzes this passage as follows, relating it
directly to a similar observation made in the slave narrative written by Elizabeth Keckley, titled
Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House
(1868):

In chapter 14 of
Behind the Scenes
Keckley notes that soon after the war is over, her former mistress, Ann Garland, asks her to come back to see the family
in Virginia. The idea that such a reunion would appeal to her former owners is incredible to Keckley’s northern friends, who
think that since Keckley was a slave she couldn’t possibly care about the Garlands or they about her. Keckley goes on to recount
her reunion with the Garlands to show that they think very highly of her even after the war.
³²

Andrews continues his fascinating line of reasoning as follows:

Of course, Mrs. Wheeler doesn’t think highly of Hannah, but the fact that the narrator of that story is at pains to point
out to her reader that female slaveholders treat their female slaves with a great deal more intimacy than standard abolitionist
propaganda acknowledges allies the Crafts narrative to that of Keckley, who also insists to her northern white friends, equally
convinced by antislavery propaganda that black women and white women couldn’t possibly have any basis for communication after
the war, that there was an intimate connection between her and her former mistress. In Keckley that intimacy is based on genuine
mutual concern—at least that’s the way she portrays it—whereas in Crafts’s, Mrs. Wheeler cares nothing for Hannah as a person.
The key similarity, however, is that in both texts, a black woman is trying to get her white readers to realize that the relationship
between white and black women in slavery was not one of mere dictation, white to black, or mere subjugation of the black woman
by the white woman. A white woman in the North in the antebellum era who wanted to preserve her antislavery credentials would
have found it hard to make such a characterization of intimacy between women slaveholders and their female slaves. A white
southern woman sympathetic to slavery might make such a claim, but she wouldn’t suggest that Mrs. Wheeler is as shallow and
self-interested in cultivating Hannah as Crafts makes her out to be. Thus only a black woman who had herself been a slave
would be in a position of authority to make such a claim about this kind of intimacy between white and black women in slavery.

Andrews’s observation convincingly reinforces Crafts’s authenticity both as a black woman and a former slave.

Given the extent of the circumstantial evidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that Dorothy Porter’s intuition was correct.
While we may not yet be certain of her name, we do know who Hannah Crafts is, that is, we know the central and defining facts
about her life: that she was female, mulatto, a slave of John Hill Wheeler’s, an autodidact, and a keen observer of the dynamics
of slave life. Hannah Crafts has given us a black sentimental novel, one based closely on her experiences as a slave, but
one at times written in a most unsentimental manner. As scholar Rudolph Byrd puts it, “
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
is a text in which we have for the first time encountered the unmediated consciousness of a slave commenting upon the world
of slavery.”
³³

Did Hannah pass for white? Did she open a bank account at the Freedman’s Bank in New Orleans in 1874, under the name of Maria
H. Crafts? Or did Hannah marry Thomas Vincent, teach Sunday school in a black Methodist church in New Jersey, and use the
unusual name of Crafts (plural) as an homage to Ellen and William Craft, to whose cross-dressing disguise Hannah refers twice
in her novel? Only further research can determine the answer to these questions. To facilitate that process and to restore
Hannah Crafts to her rightful place as the author of the first novel written by a female futigive slave, I have decided to
publish this fascinating novel, dedicated in memory of Dorothy Porter Wesley, who found it, to encourage other scholars to
continue this search. Until that time, the life of the woman who just may have been the first female African American novelist
will remain one of the most exciting mysteries of African American literature.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

Oak Bluffs, MA

August 24, 2001

Notes

1.
Joe Lockard, “Afterword,”
Autobiography of a Female Slave
by Mattie Griffith (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1998), pp. 407–08. The novel was first published in 1856. On Stowe’s
sales, see Richard Newman,
Words Like Freedom
(Westport, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1996), p. 20.

2.
See William L. Andrews,
To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography
(Urbana: University of Illinois, 1986), for the most sophisticated study of the various subgenres of the slave narratives
and fictional slave narratives. See also Jean Fagan Yellin,
The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776–1863
(New York: New York University Press, 1992).

3.
Although Hildreth published his novel anonymously, it was copyrighted under the name of the printer and publisher, John
Eastburn. Hildreth’s name, however, appears on the copyright page of the second edition (Boston, 1840), and on the title page
as editor in the expanded 1852 edition, titled
The White Slave: or, Memoirs of a Fugitive
(London: Ingram, Cooke and Company, 1852). The review in
The Liberator
(March 31, 1837) defends the novel against those who doubted its authenticity, arguing that “it purports to have been written
by a slave, and it is no more difficult to imagine this to be the case, than to imagine who could write it, if a slave did
not.” But reviews such as that published in
The Christian Examiner
in 1839 were far more typical: “We read, in what professes to be the language of a slave, that which we feel a slave could
not have written” (quoted in Yellin,
The Intricate Knot
, p. 102).

4.
Lockard, pp. 405, 408–09, 411.

5.
Letter from Jean Fagan Yellin to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., November 21, 2001.

6.
Letter from Werner Sollors to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., September 12, 2001.

7.
See also
The North Star,
June 15, 1849;
The National Era,
November 7 and November 28, 1850;
Frederick Douglass’s Paper,
January 1 and January 15, 1852.

8.
William Still,
The Underground Railroad
(Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872), pp. 60–61 and 177–89.

9.
Letter from Augusta Rohrbach to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., July 23, 2001.

10.
Ibid.

11.
Letter from Ann Fabian to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., July 31, 2001.

12.
Ibid.

13.
Ibid.

14.
Letter from Leslie A. Morris to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., April 5, 2001.

15.
Letter from Craigen W. Bowen to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., April 5, 2001.

16.
Letter from Wyatt Houston Day to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., April 6, 2001.

17.
Letter from Kenneth Rendell to Laurence Kirshbaum, April 26, 2001.

18.
Nickell’s report, pp. 13–14.

19.
Ibid., pp.

12–13.

20.
Ibid., p. 27.

21.
Letter to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., December 13, 2001. See also Robert E. May,
The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), pp. 96–98 and 107.

22.
On Wheeler, see S. Austin Allibone, editor,
Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1897), p. 1511; “Sally’s Family Place” website (www2.txcyber.com/ smkoestl/; John E. Findling,
editor,
Dictionary of American Diplomatic History,
2d ed., rev. and expanded (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), pp. 543–44;
Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography,
ed. by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske (New York: Appleton, 1888), p. 453;
Dictionary of American Biography
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928–58), vol. 22, p. 50; see also p. 139 of vol. 23 of the 1999 edition of the
ANB
.