The Bondwoman's Narrative (44 page)

Chapter 15

p. 179
: This chapter continues the story related by Lizzy; Crafts omits a heading presumably to aid the flow of Lizzy’s narrative.

p. 181
: “she more resembled a Fury of Orestes” The Furies, or Eumenides, were the avengers of crimes against kinship bonds
in Greek mythology. The Furies play an important role in the classical tragedy of Euripedes titled
Orestes.

p. 185
: “plenty of these human cattle” Slaves were frequently referred to as chattel, and their status compared to that of
cattle.

p. 187
: Rock Glen appears to have been a fictional location.

p. 189
: “negroes working in a field of tobacco” North Carolina was a center of the tobacco industry in antebellum America.

p. 194
: “Sic transit gloria mundi” Well-known Latin phrase meaning “so passes away the glory of the world.” Crafts probably
encountered the phrase through
The Imitation of Christ,
by Sir Thomas à Kempis (1370–1471).

Chapter 16

p. 195
: This introductory quote appears to be drawn from Esther 7:4, although it is a very loose and incomplete variation.
Crafts leaves out the rest of the verse, in which Esther mentions the possibility of the Hebrews being sold into slavery as
“bondmen and bondwomen” as a more attractive possibility than the total destruction that Haman has planned. Considering the
novel’s title, this biblical quotation is obviously very important. In chapters 16 and 17, Crafts, who had fled slavery previously
only to help her mistress, finally rebels when she is given to a male slave as his “wife.” As she says on p. 206, being forced
into a “compulsory union” makes her see that “rebellion would be a virtue.” The full verse from Esther that inspires these
sentiments is as follows:

For we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish. But if we had been sold for bondmen and bondwomen,
I had held my tongue, although the enemy could not countervail the king’s damage.

p. 196
: “As we rode down to the boat designed to convey us to Mrs Wheeler’s ‘place in North Carolina’” John and Ellen Wheeler
and their servants sailed from Baltimore to North Carolina on the steamer
Georgia
on Saturday, March 21, 1857. This is the sort of detail that attests to Crafts’s accuracy and veracity in reporting and to
her firsthand experience as a slave of the Wheelers’ and as a member of their traveling party. The 1857 date is consistent
with the internal sequence of events that transpires in the novel, commencing with Jane Johnson’s escape in 1855.

p. 196
: “and taken refuge beneath the equestrian statue of Jackson” John Wheeler’s diary refers to the equestrian statue of
Andrew Jackson in reference to a monument to Washington of this type commissioned to the same sculptor, Clark Mills (1810
or 1815–1883). The statue of Jackson, the first equestrian monument made in America, is considered Mills’s masterpiece and
was completed in 1853. His statue of Washington was erected in 1860.

Diary for 1857 [p. 65]:

Saturday, August 15

Day hot as blazes. Went to Interior Department, Patent Office about Genl. Jackson’s portrait—

[p. 101]:

Saturday, November 28

Visited Clark Mills, saw his equestrian Statue of Washington—on which he is at work and by which he will be immortalized—as
it is equal or superior to his Jackson.

p. 197
: “and a ship Canal across the Isthmus” Crafts is referring to the suggestion that the United States construct a canal
across the Isthmus of Panama.

p. 197
: “they would quell the Indians and oust the Mormons” In mid-1857 President James Buchanan sent one-third of the American
army to Utah to discipline insurgent Mormons in Utah; the force was led by Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, who would later
become a general in the Confederate Army. The Mormons were forced temporarily to evacuate Salt Lake City. This was known as
the Mormon War. (I am indebted to the historian David Brion Davis for this observation.)

From Mrs. Wheeler’s comment, it is clear that Colonel Johnston’s action against the Mormons had not yet begun, which would
be consistent with John Hill Wheeler’s diary entry of March 21, 1857, reporting that he and his family were leaving Washington
for a visit to North Carolina. See note to p. 198.

p. 198
: “Mr Wheeler’s fine plantation was situated near Wilmington” Wheeler’s plantation was actually in Lincolnton, North
Carolina, which is approximately 220 miles from Wilmington. Crafts situated the plantation here most probably to mask the
Wheelers’ true identity, in accordance with her initial representation of the Wheelers as the “Wh——r” family in her text.

p. 198
: The Wheelers’ 1857 trip to North Carolina lasted six weeks, from March 21 to May 4, as follows:

Diary for 1857 [p. 16]:

At 3 1/2 left for North Carolina in cars via [?] Baltimore. At 6 left Balt. On steamer
Georgia
…

[p. 20]:

Thursday 2 [April]

Went to Sully and Woodbury [Wheeler’s sons].

Weather very cool.

Went to Cousin Mollie Mebane[’s?]

Bertie County—Ellen in company

Also Esther and John & James

Mr. Ferguson and Williams Allan [part of this name cut off in photocopy] … lanching [?: beginning of this word cut off in
photocopy] the Seine Thomas Ganet & others there.

[p. 30]:

Sunday, May 3

Visited with my dear Brother, the gi[graves?] of our Father and Mother [in Murfreesboro, N.C.].

[p. 31]:

Monday, May 4

At 12 left and reached Boykin’s [Landing] and reached Ports.o[Portsmouth, Va.]

At 7—left in steamer
Herald
for Balt.

The place described by Hannah as “Mr. Wheeler’s fine plantation” and “situated near Wilmington” could, in fact, refer to one
of two plantations. One possibly is the estate near Murfreesboro of Mr. Wheeler’s relative Dr. Moore. Dr. Moore married Wheeler’s
sister. Boykin’s Landing, Virginia, which exists today as Boykins, was the last stop toward Murfreesboro, the nearest large
town to Dr. Moore’s plantation. The Wheelers’ own plantation, as is made clear elsewhere in his diary, was located a considerable
distance away, near Lincolnton in the southwest central area of North Carolina. While Lincolnton, near Charlotte, is approximately
220 miles from Wilmington, Murfreesboro is 150 miles from Wilmington. Crafts probably placed the plantation near Wilmington
because it was the largest port in the state and was the site of a large slave market, one well known in abolitionist circles.

pp. 198–199
: “lime-tree walks,” “orange trees,” “peach trees,” “grapes,” “figs,” “pomegranates” Writing her narrative ostensibly
from the safe haven of New Jersey, Crafts is recollecting the types of fruits that she saw growing in North Carolina. Figs,
peaches, and grapes flourished there; pomegranates could be cultivated privately, within the homes of wealthy plantation owners.
Although limes and oranges did not thrive there—efforts to introduce citrus fruits to North Carolina in the colonial period
proved unsuccessful—linden trees, commonly nicknamed “limes,” and osage oranges did. Crafts is most probably using a shorthand
for these two plants. The linden tree is a leitmotif throughout the novel. Cherries, apricots, pears, plums, pecans, quinces,
damsons, and nectarines also flourished in North Carolina. I am indebted to Sharon Adams, a garden designer in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and Brian Sinche, for this information. See also Cornelius Oliver Cathey’s
Agricultural Developments in North Carolina
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956).

p. 199
: “a cotton field … a large plantation of rice” Cotton and rice were both grown on North Carolina plantations.

p. 199
: “The huts of these people” Crafts consistently refers to the slaves as full members of the human community. The casual
use of the phrase “these people” is meant to remind the reader almost subconsciously of that fact.

p. 199
: “by night they contained a swarm of misery, that crowds of foul existence crawled in out of gaps” Crafts’s description
of living conditions in the slave quarters is one of the most vivid in black literature.

p. 200
: “that false system which bestows on position, wealth, or power the consideration only due to a man” Crafts’s critique
of the social system of the antebellum South is quite consistent with abolitionist and Protestant Christian rhetoric of the
period.

p. 200
: “to a lower link in the chain of being than that occupied by a horse” Crafts is referring to the slaves, held to be
subhuman by many pro-slavery advocates, and therefore occupying a lower order on the Great Chain of Being.

p. 201
: “To be made to feel that you have no business here … you are scarcely human” Crafts in this passage moves—in a series
of rhetorical questions asked of “Doctors of Divinity”—back and forth between referring to herself as a member of the class
of slaves (“you have no business here”) and the third person “It must be … strange,” a phrase she repeats for effect. James
Baldwin often used a similar rhetorical device, identifying himself for effect with the “us” or “we” of the non-black American
population.

p. 201
: “to fear that their opinion is more than half right” Crafts’s catalogue of the degrading effects of slavery upon the
slave is astonishingly honest and frank. Rarely do we find in the slave narratives a more compelling statement of slavery’s
debilitating effects upon the sense of self-worth that slaves struggled to maintain. By framing her questions in the form
of “it must be,” Crafts is also distinguishing herself from her fellow slaves who ostensibly have been crushed by the system
of slavery. Both Douglass and Jacobs also draw distinctions of class and individual merit, intelligence, and worth between
themselves and other slaves.

p. 202
: “Of course the family residence was stocked with slaves of a higher and nobler order than those belonging to the fields.”
The traditional class (and often color) distinctions between house slaves and field slaves was commonly remarked upon by slave
narrators and white writers alike, but Crafts’s descriptions are especially stark.

p. 203
: “I had to deal with a wary, powerful, and unscrupulous enemy. She was a dark mulatto, very quick motioned with black
snaky eyes” One of Crafts’s tendencies as a narrator is to draw distinctions—to individuate—effortlessly between black characters
rather than treating them in a blanket or an undifferentiated manner. When the librarian and bibliophile Dorothy Porter refers
to the natural manner in which Crafts treats black characters, it is this sort of description of the slave Maria that I believe
she had in mind, as well as her frank account of the degrading living conditions of life in the slave quarters.

p. 205
: “Retreating to the loneliest garret in the house” Harriet Jacobs hides in a garret in her grandmother’s home in North
Carolina for seven years. See
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
especially the chapter “The Loop Hole of Retreat.”

p. 205
: “and 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 my soul actually revolted with horror unspeakable” Crafts’s “horror” is based in part
upon her perception of the extreme gap in class— breeding, education, sensibility, and cleanliness—between herself as a mulatto
house servant and the lack of these virtues and characteristics among the “degraded” field hands. The severity of her characterizations
here are unusually extreme, compared with similar distinctions drawn in the slave narratives. A large part of her revulsion
arises from being forced to marry someone not “voluntarily assumed,” as she writes in her next sentence. Protecting herself
from rape is Crafts’s motivation for fleeing. See the first paragraph in chapter 17. In comparison, Stowe, in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
describes Legree’s slave huts as being “mere rude shells, destitute of any species of furniture, except a heap of straw,
foul with dirt, spread confusedly over the floor, which was merely the bare ground, trodden hard by the tramping of innumerable
feet.”

Chapter 17

p. 206
: The Psalm cited here is 141, verse 8. The full biblical quotation is as follows:

But mine eyes are unto thee, O God the Lord: in thee is my trust; leave not my soul destitute.

The four lines of poetry are from Richard Ticknell’s (1751–93) “Colin and Lucy.” In this part of Ticknell’s poem, a brokenhearted
maiden is being called to her death.

p. 206
: “a man whom I could only hate and despise” See note for p. 203 above. When Crafts writes that “it seemed that rebellion
would be a virtue, that duty to myself and my God actually required it,” she is referring to the protection of her virginity
as a moral principle worth risking her life for. Crafts goes on to repeat her belief that “marriage” was “something that all
the victims of slavery should avoid as tending essentially to perpetuate that system.” “[N]othing but this,” she writes on
p. 207, “would have impelled me to flight.”

p. 207
: “where Jacob fled from his brother Esau” The narrator opens the Bible and finds the passage in Genesis, chapter 28,
where Jacob flees his brother’s wrath after cheating Esau out of his birthright and Isaac’s blessing. Crafts is invoking divine
authority for her own flight.

pp. 207–208
: “but I remembered the Hebrew Children and Daniel in the Lion’s den, and felt that God could protect and preserve
me through all” In the sixth chapter of the Book of Daniel, King Darius’s exaltation of Daniel leads to jealousy from the
other, non-Hebrew ministers. Daniel must choose between prayer to his God and avoiding the den of lions. Choosing God, Daniel
survives the lions with God’s help and lives to see his accusers devoured.

p. 208
: “The overseer came up” Crafts’s description of the overseer seems quite realistic, as is her description of Bill’s
hut “reeking with filth and impurity.” Crafts is especially gifted at evoking the physicality of the field slaves and their
habitations.