The Bondwoman's Narrative (2 page)

Just as exciting was the fact that this three-hundred-page holograph manuscript was unpublished. Holograph, or handwritten,
manuscripts by blacks in the nineteenth century are exceedingly rare, an especially surprising fact given that hundreds of
African Americans published books—slave narratives, autobiographies, religious tracts, novels, books of poems, anti-slavery
political tracts, scientific works, etc.—throughout the nineteenth century. Despite the survival of this large body of writing,
to my knowledge no holograph manuscripts survive for belletristic works, such as novels, or for the slave narratives, even
by such bestselling authors as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, or William Wells Brown. And because most
of the slave narratives and works of fiction published before the end of the Civil War were edited, published, and distributed
by members of the abolitionist movement, scholars have long debated the extent of authorship and degree of originality of
many of these works. To find an unedited manuscript, written in an exslave’s own hand, would give scholars an unprecedented
opportunity to analyze the degree of literacy that at least one slave possessed before the sophisticated editorial hand of
a printer or an abolitionist amanuensis performed the midwifery of copyediting. No, here we could encounter the unadulterated
“voice” of the fugitive slave herself, exactly as she wrote and edited it.

One other thing struck me about Hannah Crafts’s claim to authorship as “a fugitive slave,” as she puts it in the subtitle
of her manuscript. Fewer than a dozen white authors in the nineteenth century engaged in literary racial ventriloquism, adopting
a black persona and claiming to be black. Why should they? Harriet Beecher Stowe had redefined the function—and the economic
and political potential—of the entire genre of the novel by retaining her own identity and writing
about
blacks, rather than
as
a black. While it is well known that
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
sold an unprecedented 300,000 copies between March 20, 1852, and the end of the year, even Stowe’s next anti-slavery novel,
Dred,
sold more than 100,000 copies in one month alone in 1856.
¹
There was no commercial advantage to be gained by a white author writing as a black one; Stowe sold hundreds of thousands
more copies of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and
Dred
than all of the black-authored slave narratives combined, despite the slave narrative’s enormous popularity, and had no need
to disguise herself as a black author.

The
artistic
challenge of creating a fictional slave narrative, purportedly narrated or edited by an amanuensis, did appeal to a few writers,
however, as the scholars Jean Fagan Yellin and William L. Andrews have shown.
²
As early as 1815, Legh Richmond published a novel in Boston titled
The Negro Servant: An Authentic and Interesting Narrative,
which, Richmond claims in the novel’s subtitle, had been “Communicated by a Clergyman of the Church of England.” Nevertheless,
these fictionalized slave narratives were published with the identity of a white “editor’s” or printer’s presence signified
on the title or copyright page, thereby undermining the ruse by drawing attention to the true author’s identity as a white
person. And even the most successful of these novels, Richard Hildreth’s popular novel,
The Slave: or Memoirs of Archy Moore
(1836), was consistently questioned in reviews.
³

Similarly, in the case of the sole example of a female fictionalized slave narrative—Mattie Griffith’s
Autobiography of a Female Slave,
published anonymously in October 1856—“few readers seemed to credit the narrative voice as one that belonged to a former
slave,” as the editor of a recent edition, Joe Lockard, concludes from a careful examination of contemporary reviews. Accordingly,
Griffith revealed her identity as a white woman within weeks of the book’s publication, in part because reviews, such as one
published in the
Boston Evening Transcript
on December 3, 1856, argued that the work could only be taken as the work of “some rabid abolitionist.”
⁴

Moreover, reading these ten slave narrative novels today reveals their authors often to be firmly in the grip of popular nineteenth-century
racist views about the nature and capacities of their black characters that few black authors could possibly have shared,
as in this example from Griffith’s novel:

Young master, with his pale, intellectual face, his classic head, his sun-bright curls, and his earnest blue eyes, sat in
a half-lounging attitude, making no inappropriate picture of an angel of light, whilst the two little black faces seemed emblems
of fallen, degraded humanity. [p. 113]

Griffith’s passage—as Jean Yellin notes—echoes one from
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

There stood the two children, representatives of the two extremes of society. The fair, high-bred child, with her golden head,
her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbor.
They stood the representatives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, commands, education, physical and moral
eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice. (Chapter 20)
⁵

Or this exchange purportedly between Griffith’s mulatto heroine and the slave Aunt Polly:

“Oh child,” she begun [sic], “can you wid yer pretty yallow face kiss an old pitch-black nigger like me?”

“Why, yes, Aunt Polly, and love you too; if your face is dark I am sure your heart is fair.” [p. 55]

Whereas several black authors of the slave narratives drew sharp class and intellectual distinctions between house and field
slaves, and sometimes indicated these differences by color and dialect (I am thinking here of Frederick Douglass, Harriet
Jacobs, William Wells Brown, among others), rarely did they allow themselves to be caught in the web of racist connotations
associated with slaves, blackness, and the “natural capacities” of persons of African descent, as often did the handful of
white authors in antebellum America attempting to adopt a black persona through a novel’s narrator.

It occurred to me as I studied the Swann catalogue that another telling feature of this manuscript that would be essential
to establishing the racial identity of its author would be the absence or presence of the names of real people—that is, people
or characters who had actually existed and whom the author had known herself. Novels pretending to be actual autobiographical
slave narratives rarely use anything but fictional names for their characters, just as Harriet Beecher Stowe does, even if
Stowe had based her characters on historical sources, including authentic slave narratives, as she revealed in
The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded
(1853). In other words, no white author had written a fictionalized slave narrative that used as the names of characters
the real names of people who had actually existed. Nor had a white author created a fiction of black slave life that either
did not read “like a novel,” falling outside of the well-established conventions of the slave narrative as a genre, or did
not unconsciously reflect racist assumptions about black people, flaws even more glaring because of the author’s hatred of
the institution of slavery.

Nor did a nineteenth-century white writer, attempting these acts of literary minstrelsy or ventriloquism, successfully “pass
for black.” Just as the minstrels in the nineteenth century—or Al Jolson, Mae West, Elvis Presley, and Eminem in the twentieth
century—undertook the imitation of blackness to one degree or another, few of the contemporaries of these authors confused
their fictional narrators with real black people. Whereas numerous black people have been taken for white, including the extremely
popular twentieth-century historical novelist Frank Yerby or the critic Anatole Broyard, in acts of literary ventriloquism,
virtually no white nineteenth-century author successfully passed for black for very long. My fundamental operating principle
when engaged in this sort of historical research is that if someone
claimed
to have been black, then they most probably were, since there was very little incentive (financial or otherwise) for doing
so.

Armed with these assumptions, I decided to attempt to obtain Hannah Crafts’s manuscript. At the time of the auction—February
15, 2001—I was recovering from a series of hip-replacement surgeries and was forbidden to travel. I asked a colleague, Richard
Newman, a well-known scholar, librarian, and bibliophile, and the Fellows Coordinator at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at
Harvard, if he would go in my stead and bid on lot 30. He agreed. We discussed an upper limit on the bid.

The next day I waited expectantly for Dick’s call, fearful that the bidding would far surpass my modest cap on the sale. When
no phone call came by the end of office hours, I knew that we had failed to acquire the manuscript. Finally, late that night,
Dick phoned. He had waited to call until the auction was complete. His first bid had been accepted, he reported, for far less
than the floor proposed in the catalogue. No one else had bid on lot 30. I was astonished.

Dick also told me that he had spoken about the authenticity of the manuscript with Wyatt Houston Day, the only person who
had read it in half a century other than Dorothy Porter Wesley. Day had told Dick that he had found “internal evidence that
it was written by an African American.” Moreover, he didn’t think that Wesley would have bought it, as it turned out, in 1948—“if
she didn’t think it authentic.” He also promised to send me the correspondence between Dorothy and the bookseller from whom
she had purchased the manuscript. My suspicion about the curious line in the Swann catalogue description had been confirmed:
Dorothy Porter Wesley had indeed believed Hannah Crafts to be black, and so did Wyatt Houston Day. Accordingly, I was even
more eager to read the manuscript than I had been initially, and just as eager to read Porter’s thoughts about its origins
and her history of its provenance.

It turned out that Porter had purchased the manuscript in 1948 for $85 from Emily Driscoll, a manuscript and autograph dealer
who kept a shop on Fifth Avenue. In her catalogue (no. 6, 1948), item number 9 reads as follows:

A fictionalized biography, written in an effusive style, purporting to be the story of the early life and escape of one Hannah
Crafts, a mulatto, born in Virginia, who lived there, in Washington, D.C., and Wilmington, North Carolina. From internal evidence
it is apparent that the work is that of a Negro who had a narrative gift. Interesting for its content and implications. Believed
to be unpublished.

Driscoll dated the manuscript’s origin as “before 1860.” (Wyatt Houston Day, judging from the appearance of the paper and
ink as well as internal evidence, had dated it “circa 1850s.”)

Dorothy Porter (she would marry the historian Charles Wesley later) wrote to Driscoll with her reactions to Hannah Crafts’s
text. Porter perceptively directed Driscoll’s attention to two of the manuscript’s most distinctive features: first, that
it is “written in a sentimental and effusive style” and was “strongly influenced by the sentimental fiction of the mid-Nineteenth
Century.” At the same time, however, despite employing the standard conventions of the sentimental novel, which thrived in
the 1850s as a genre dominated by women writers, this novel seems to be autobiographical, reflecting “first-hand knowledge
of estate life in Virginia,” unlike even those sentimental novels written about the South. Despite this autobiographical element,
this text is a novel, replete with the conventions of the sentimental: “the best of the writer’s mind was religious and emotional
and in her handling of plot the long arm of coincidence is nowhere spared,” Porter concludes with considerable understatement.

Most important of all, Porter strongly stresses to Driscoll that she is firmly convinced that Hannah Crafts was an African
American woman:

The most important thing about this fictionalized personal narrative is that, from internal evidence, it appears to be the
work of a Negro and the time of composition was before the Civil War in the late forties and fifties.

Porter arrived at this conclusion not only because of Crafts’s intimate knowledge of plantation life in Virginia but also—and
this comment was the most striking of all—because of the subtle, “natural” manner in which she draws black characters.

There is no doubt that she was a Negro because her approach to other Negroes is that they are people first of all. Only as
the story unfolds, in most instances, does it become apparent that they are Negroes.

I was particularly intrigued by this observation. Although I had not thought much about it before, white writers of the 1850s
(and well beyond) did tend to introduce Negro characters in their works in an awkward manner. Whereas black writers assumed
the humanity of black characters as the default, as the baseline of characterization in their texts, white writers, operating
on the reverse principle, used whiteness as the default for humanity, introducing even one-dimensional characters with the
metaphorical equivalent of a bugle and drum. In
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
to take one example, white characters receive virtually no racial identification. Mr. Haley is described as “a short, thick-set
man.” Solomon is “a man in a leather apron.” Tom Loker is “a muscular man.” Whiteness is the default for Stowe. Blackness,
by contrast, is almost always marked. For example, Mose and Pete, Uncle Tom’s and Aunt Chloe’s sons, are “a couple of wooly
headed boys,” similar in description to “wooly headed Mandy.” Aunt Chloe surfaces in the text with a “round black shining
face.” Uncle Tom is “a full glossy black,” possessing “a face [with] truly African features.” At one point in the novel “little
black Jake” appears. Black characters are almost always marked by their color or features when introduced into Stowe’s novel.
Thinking about Stowe’s use of color when introducing black characters forced me to wonder what Porter had meant about Crafts’s
handling of the characterization of black people. Porter’s observation was both acute and original.