The Bondwoman's Narrative (41 page)

Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity
of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.

pp. 44–47
: Werner Sollors, author of
Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), traces the history of the switched-baby motif in American literature to 1841:

The motif appears in Achim von Arnim,
Isabella von Ägypten
(1812); and in an American interracial context in Joseph Holt Ingraham,
The Quadroone; or, St. Michael’s Day
(1841). In Ingraham’s novel, the quadroon Ninine, mistress of the Marquis de la Caronde, tries to poison her lover’s infant
child. “She was unable to discover the infant; and, in a few months afterward, becoming herself a mother, in the joy of that
event forgot the cause of her disquiet. But ambition soon enthroned itself in her soul. She now aspired to the title and estates
of the father for her illegitimate son. Her hatred to the true heir was again revived, and she gave herself no rest, night
or day, in her desire to discover the retreat. At length—for what will not jealousy, envy, ambition, united in a woman’s heart,
accomplish?— when her own boy was two years old, she discovered the object of her search, now a fine child nearly three years
of age. It was found by one of her hirelings many leagues in the interior. She had him secretly brought to her. The two boys
were wonderfully like each other, both bearing their father’s looks. Hers, being tall for its age, although nearly a year
younger, was equal with the other in height. Suddenly this resemblance suggested a thought upon which she immediately acted.
The box of poisoned sweetmeats she had prepared to give the child was cast aside, and, drawing it to her, she taught it to
call her ‘Ma.’ Her own son she sent back to the hamlet in his stead, knowing that the marquis had not seen his child for a
year, and would easily be deceived by the likeness between the two, while the alteration that he would discover when he should
visit him would be attributed to the natural effect of time and growth; and, lest the face of the other should betray her,
she guardedly kept him out of sight until she could present him without suspicion.”

Other instances from the 1850s up to Mark Twain’s
Pudd’nhead Wilson
include the following:

James S. Peacocke,
The Creole Orphans
(1856)

Emil Klauprecht,
Cincinnati,
or
The Mysteries of the West
(1857)

Harriet Hamline Bigelow,
The Curse Entailed
(1857)

Mrs. C. W. (Mary) Denison,
Old Hepsy
(1858)

Lydia Maria Child,
The Romance of the Republic
(1867)

Anonymous,
The Sisters of Orleans: A Tale of Race and Social Conflict
(1871)

Lizzy M. Elwin,
Millie, the Quadroon
(1888)

(Werner Sollors to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., September 12, 2001)

p. 44
: When Hannah’s mistress unravels the mystery of her racial identity for the reader and for Hannah, the plot is that
of switched babies of different races. Although the interracial exchange of infants as a plot device was not new, Crafts and
the authors above anticipate Mark Twain’s use of this confusion in
Pudd’nhead Wilson
(1894). Eric Sundquist, in
To Wake the Nation: Race in the Making of American Literature
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), sees Twain’s novel as a political response to
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
(1896), which had been pending since 1893. Obviously, the dramatic possibilities had already occurred to previous American
writers.

Chapter 5

p. 52
: In this verse, Saint Paul warns of the danger of spiritual complacency and preaches of the need to prepare for the
coming of the Lord. From I Thessalonians 5:3:

For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and
they shall not escape.

p. 54
: When lost in the forest, Hannah comforts her frightened mistress by reciting the Holy Scriptures. Crafts chooses Psalm
46:1–2 and quotes it almost verbatim. The exact King James verse follows:

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and
though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.

p. 57
: Unlike slave narratives, sentimental and gothic novels rarely use the names of actual people for their characters.
Place names, too, can be fictionalized. However, Milton, Virginia, is in Charles City County on the James River. Crafts’s
use of an actual locale in Virginia, where this section of the novel is set, made it possible to locate several individuals
whose surnames are identical to several characters whom Crafts places in residence near Milton. Milton is upriver from Jamestown
and downriver from Richmond.

p. 58
: Frederick Hawkins is one of the novel’s few characters identified with a first and last name. According to the U.S.
federal census, in 1810 and 1820, Frederick Hawkins was living in Dinwiddie County, Virginia; the distance between Milton
and the closest northwestern boundary of Dinwiddie County is approximately thirty kilometers.

p. 60
: Hannah and her mistress take refuge in a “sanctuary of sweet home influences.” This simple, clean house with its wholesome
food, pious inhabitants, and the absence of slaves is reminiscent of northern, Quaker homes in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
However, this domicile is in Virginia and is pervaded by the influence of slavery, as is revealed when the travelers learn
that Mr. Trappe lives there.

p. 65
: The only safe place that Hannah and her mistress can find in Virginia is a deserted cabin made in the fashion of a
Native American wigwam. However, it was made by “some forester,” presumably white, and the description of the hut emphasizes
its filth and abandonment rather than the connection to Native Americans.

p. 66
: The degraded nature of the wigwam is revealed when dried blood and a hatchet with hair on the heft are found on the
premises. Nearby, in the woods, skeletal remains prove that they are living at the scene of a murder. Hannah’s high-strung
mistress becomes further unbalanced by fear of being haunted. Instead of a pastoral resting place, they have found another
cursed, gothic domicile.

p. 67
: When Hannah’s mistress’s paranoia extends to accusations against her servant, Crafts echoes Jesus in the Garden of
Gethsemane when he asks God to spare him from the Passion. From Matthew 26:39 (and in slightly different forms in Mark and
Luke):

O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.

p. 71
: Horace (65–8 B.C.) was one of the most outstanding Latin lyric poets within the Augustan circle. His work is characterized
by the themes of love and friendship.

pp. 73–74
: Crafts here shifts the tenses of her verbs from past to present when describing a scene from the past.

Chapter 6

p. 75
: This verse is Psalm 11:2:

For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright
in heart.

p. 78
: Crafts describes the darkness of the prison cell as Egyptian; later, the word “Stygian” was substituted. Stygian is
a reference to the Greek myth of the river Styx in Hades, across which the souls of the dead are ferried.

p. 79
: After Hannah is bitten by a rat in prison, she begins “to conjure strange fancies. I had heard of rats in prisons and
ancient charnel-houses.” Any number of gothic stories use the horror of vermin feeding on living flesh, although this passage
seems to invoke Edgar Allan Poe.

p. 79
: When left alone in the dark with the rats, Hannah feels peace when she remembers parts of Scripture. In one line, Crafts
writes, “The hairs of your heads are numbered your tears are in his bottle.” This sentence conflates two verses, one from
the Hebrew Bible and the other from the New Testament. The gospel states in Luke 12:7, “But even the very hairs of your head
are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.” And the Psalmist sings in Psalm 56:8, “Thou
tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?”

p. 82
: Mrs. Wright, a woman driven insane by her imprisonment, is a white woman guilty of defying slavery and attempting to
save her beautiful servant, Ellen, from being sold into sexual bondage in New Orleans. In response, Mrs. Wright had cut Ellen’s
hair, dressed her as a boy, and tried to escape with her. This cross-dressing disguise foreshadows Hannah’s own— successful—escape
in masculine attire. Ellen’s mode of escape—disguised initially as a white boy—mimics that used by Ellen Craft, who escaped
from slavery with her husband, William, in December 1848. Their dramatic escape was widely reported in the abolitionist press
in 1849 and 1850. William Wells Brown’s novel,
Clotel
(1853), employs this device, and two other female slaves, Clarissa Davis and Anna Maria Weems (alias Joe Wright), used this
form of cross-dressing to escape enslavement in 1854 and 1855, respectively.

Chapter 7

p. 85
: From the long Psalm 119, verse 121:

I have done judgment and justice: leave me not to mine oppressors.

p. 90
: Crafts quotes Job 3:25 to indicate her despair:

For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.

p. 94
: One extremely convincing sign that Hannah Crafts was once a slave is her observation that “those who think that the
greatest evils of slavery are connected with physical suffering possess 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.” This sort of counterintuitive
claim is common among exslaves as they attempt to explain what slavery is actually like, what surprising kinds of deprivations
it causes. Frederick Douglass, for example, confesses that the most disturbing aspect of slavery for him as a child was his
inability to know his birth date.

p. 97
: Trappe’s discourse on the relativity of slavery and freedom recalls Hegel’s argument about the mutual dependency of
master and slave for their roles, and their ultimate interchangeability. See Hegel’s “Of Lordship and Bondage.”

p. 98
: “You are not the first fair dame whose descent I have traced back— far back to a sable son of Africa” The scholar Werner
Sollors has traced the history of novels of passing in his masterful study,
Neither Black Nor White Yet Both.

Chapter 8

p. 101
: Crafts uses Psalm 10:12 to begin this chapter:

Arise, O Lord; O God, lift up thine hand: forget not the humble.

pp. 104–105
: According to the historian John W. Blassingame, suicide, such as that which Saddler reports of a slave named
Louise, occurred more frequently than was commonly assumed within the slave community. Saddler also reports that he “lost
six in one season” to suicide. See John W. Blassingame’s
Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977).

p. 105
: “religion is so apt to make people stubborn” Throughout her text, Crafts argues implicitly that truly devout Christians
will inevitably be anti-slavery.

p. 108
: Trappe’s lecture to Hannah on how to deport herself as a slave enables Crafts to expose one of the processes of objectification
of a slave. Trappe admonishes her that as a slave, she “must have no mind, no desire, no purpose of your own.”

p. 109
: “took her to New Orleans … and made her his wife” New Orleans was thought to be a site of unusual ethnic hybridity
and miscegenation in antebellum America.

Chapter 9

p. 111
: Although Crafts identifies her citation as from the Book of Jeremiah, this verse is actually Lamentations 5:1:

Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach.

p. 111
: Seeing the freedom of birds, Hannah despairs of her enslavement until she remembers God’s concern for all living creatures,
but especially for his people. She paraphrases Luke 12:6–7, whose text is quoted below:

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?

But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.

p. 113
: “Very respectable people … ; are they better than I am, who sells them?” Crafts is at pains to weave the blanket of
guilt shared by slave catcher and slaveholder alike.

p. 114
: “to hear my people sing, to have them laugh, and see them jovial and merry” Frederick Douglass makes the point that
“slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved
by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”

p. 116
: “They were all colored” Harriet Wilson, author of the novel
Our Nig
(1859), employs the word
colored
in the same effortless manner as Crafts does here. In the preface to her novel, Wilson appeals to her “colored brethren universally”
to purchase her book.

p. 117
: “I am one of that miserable class” Crafts’s refusal to pass for white—except to escape—is a leitmotif of her novel,
culminating in her decision to live in a free colored community in New Jersey when she finally manages to reach the North.

p. 118
: While recovering from the wreck that kills Saddler, Hannah is strangely calm. She speculates that “it might be that
the Redeemer was leading me in spirit through the green pastures and beside the still waters of Gospel truth and peace.” She
is paraphrasing Psalm 23:2: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”