The Bondwoman's Narrative (5 page)

Dorothy Porter’s letter to Emily Driscoll in 1951 had referred to Crafts’s text as a “manuscript novel” and as a “fictionalized
personal narrative.” Even without researching Crafts’s life or any of the details of her narrative, it is obvious that, however
true might have been the events upon which the episodes in her tale are based, Crafts sought to record her story squarely
within the extremely popular tradition of the sentimental novel, replete with gothic elements.

If all of this were true, however—and all of these fictional elements are to be found in
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
—then how could I ever find Hannah Crafts? That is to say, if her tale is a fiction, how could I verify that she had once
been a slave, and was a fugitive, as her subtitle claims her to be, “recently escaped from North Carolina”? If I were lucky
enough to find a black woman living in New Jersey (where she claims to be teaching “colored” children at novel’s end) named
Hannah Crafts—which I had become increasingly skeptical about being able to do, because of the text’s references to Ellen
Craft’s cross-dressing, possibly pointing to “Crafts” as a protective pseudonym—how could I ever verify her claim to be an
escaped slave? In other words, it occurred to me as I read Dr. Joe Nickell’s amazingly detailed report that I possessed a
manuscript that was written sometime between 1853 and 1861, that read like a novel despite its title and its internal claims
to be a slave narrative, and that was in all probability written by a black woman who might not ever be found, which seemed
to be the way that Hannah Crafts had wanted it. Nevertheless, this quasi-gothic, sentimental slave narrative—no matter how
fictionalized I found it to read—rang true at times, especially in her account of the master-slave power relation; her depictions
of life in Virginia, North Carolina, and Washington; and, as Wyatt Houston Day had suggested, her various passages about routes
and methods of escape adopted by fugitive slaves. How was I to proceed with the search for Hannah Crafts?

As a rule, novels do not depict actual people by their real names. Slave narratives, by contrast, tend to depict all—or almost
all—of their characters by their real names, to help to establish the veracity of the author’s experiences with and indictment
of the brutal excess implicit in the life of a slave. I write “almost all” because of an occasional change of name to protect
the narrator’s modesty or those who might be harmed back on the plantation by the revelation of the author’s identity. Harriet
Jacobs became “Linda Brent” and altered the names of characters, in large part because of her revelations about selecting
a white lover out of wedlock and bearing his children. And indeed, Dickensian names such as the overseer in Frederick Douglass’s
Narrative,
aptly named Mr. Severe, seem a bit too good to be true. (Actually, the overseer’s name was Sevier, but Douglass’s tale is
so chock full of detail that an occasional allegorically named character is a relief!) But as a rule, fictions of slavery—whether
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
or Mattie Griffith’s
Autobiography
—tend not to contain characters named after the author’s actual contemporaries, people who lived and breathed. (A historical
novel like Frederick Douglass’s
The Heroic Slave
is an obvious exception.) If I could find Crafts’s characters in historical records, then, the possibility existed that she
had known them as a slave.

I wrote earlier that I was pursuing the authentication of
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
using two separate procedures. One was the scientific dating of the manuscript, using sophisticated techniques that could
ascertain the approximate date of paper, ink, writing style, type of pen, even the use of thimbles to affix paste wafers,
and the other mysterious processes that Dr. Joe Nickell used to date the manuscript between 1853 and 1861. The second method
on which I had embarked simultaneously was the exploration of census indexes and records, using research tools developed by
the Mormon Family Library, especially its Accelerated Indexing System (AIS), which is an alphabetical listing of the names
recorded in each federal census since 1790.

I became familiar with this index when researching the identity of Harriet E. Wilson. When I found Mrs. Wilson’s residence
in Boston in 1860, using the
Boston City Directory
for that year (essentially the predecessor of a telephone book, without, of course, telephone numbers), I thought that it
would be a straightforward matter to find Mrs. Wilson through AIS, but she was not listed. My colleague at Yale, the great
historian John W. Blassingame, encouraged me to examine the actual manuscript record of the 1860 census for the street on
which Wilson was reported to be living. Reluctantly, I agreed to do so, asking a research assistant to travel to the Boston
Public Library, where the manuscript was held. I presumed that Mrs. Wilson had moved, or died, or been away from home on the
day that the census taker knocked on her door. My research assistant, to her astonishment and my own, found that the bottom
of the page on which Wilson’s name appeared had been folded under. The photographer who had made the microfilm on which the
AIS index was based had not realized this, hence lopping off an entire section of that neighborhood. Had not Blassingame insisted
that I pursue my research to its original source, I could never have established Harriet E. Wilson’s racial identity.

Numerous problems obtain with census records, not the least of which are human error, poor spelling, phonetic spelling, and
the fact that some people will lie about their birth dates or birthplace, their ethnic identity, or their level of literacy.
Not everyone wants to be located, locatable, or identified, especially if she has a reason for which to forge a new identity.
Many former slaves never could be certain of their birth dates in the first place, and some even shifted this date (usually
forward) decade by decade as a researcher tracks them through each successive census. Spellings can also be quite arbitrary,
necessitating a broad approach to an array of phonetic possibilities for one’s subject. Crafts, for example, can be written
as Krafts, Croft, Kroft, Craff, etc. Census records can be a blessing for researchers, but they cannot be used uncritically.
Just as important, indexes of census records are not entirely accurate, as I discovered when I used my great-grandmother Jane
Gates as a control for the 1860, 1870, and 1880 census indexes, since I possessed copies of her listings in those records,
which our family had made ourselves at the relevant county courthouses. Nevertheless, she did not appear in the AIS index.
Electronic indexes—on CD-ROM and on-line, none of which existed, of course, when I went in search of Harriet Wilson—can be
enormous time-savers but can never replace examination of an actual document. Human error in the replication of such an enormous
database as the U.S. federal censuses is inevitable.

All of these caveats notwithstanding, I embarked upon a systematic examination of census records, using the Internet and a
most efficient researcher at the Mormon Family Library in Salt Lake City, Tim Bingaman. Tim Bingaman was a godsend, not only
because of his good humor and expertise with databases but because my travel was still restricted on account of my recuperation
from hip-replacement surgery. I would phone Tim and request a search of this source or that, and back—by phone, fax, or mail—would
come the result. Eventually, the search for Hannah Crafts would involve several archives: the Mormon Family History Library
in Salt Lake City, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, Harvard, and the University of North Carolina, as well
as family genealogy web sites and CD-ROM indexes, including the records of the Freedman’s Bank, recently published by the
Mormon Family History Library.

I began my research by compiling a list of all the proper names of the characters who appear in Hannah Crafts’s manuscript.
As I have written, if I could find at least one actual person named among her characters, then it would be clear that Crafts
based her novel on some aspect of her own experience; that the novel was, to some extent, autobiographical; and that she,
quite probably, knew the institution of slavery personally and may even have been a slave herself. The question would be one
of degree.

By my count, thirty-one characters appear by name in
The Bond-woman’s Narrative.
At least two characters—Mr. Trappe, Hannah’s mulatto mistress’s torturer, and Mr. Saddler, a slave trader—were certainly
named allegorically. Then, too, the slaves listed by first name would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find,
since the slave censuses listed slaves by age and gender under the name of slave owner rather than by the name of the slave.
So I set the names of slaves such as Catherine, Lizzy, Bill, Jacob, Charlotte, and Jane aside. Then I began to pursue each
name in alphabetical order, using the 1840, 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 federal census indexes.

The mountain of research that these searches produced and the frustrations, false starts, and dead ends attendant upon this
kind of research will be analyzed and duplicated in a scholarly edition of this novel. Here I can only summarize my results.
But let me say that the peaks and valleys of exhilaration and frustration when pursuing this sort of research are extreme,
and not for those easily discouraged. Finding Harriet Wilson, as difficult as it was, by contrast was much simpler because
it was more localized, confined initially to Boston. In this search, we cast our net wide, of necessity.

I was convinced that the success of the historical search for Crafts’s characters would turn on locating her masters, especially
Sir Clifford de Vincent. Either in Virginia or in the United Kingdom, I believed, Sir Clifford would be found. When he was
not, I began to despair that Crafts’s tale was entirely fabricated, or at least she had changed the names of all her characters—just
as Harriet Wilson had done—and that this avenue of research would lead to a dead end. Even worse, no one named Hannah Crafts
was listed in any census indexes that we initially searched. Still, she had located the first part of her narrative in Milton,
Virginia—and the Milton that is found in Charles City County, on a bend in the James River, southeast of Richmond, fit her
description of the region so very well. An extended, alphabetical search just might yield some clue about the real identity
of perhaps one or two of her characters. So, rather than abandon this aspect of the search, I pressed on.

The first indication of a name in a census matching a name in the text was that of Charles Henry, the second of the novel’s
three characters having a first and last name. (Sir Clifford was the first.) Two Charles Henrys are listed in the 1850 Virginia
census, and one in the 1860 census. “Charley” Henry, in the novel, was the son of “Mr. and Mrs. Henry,” Hannah Crafts’s kind
new masters.

Crafts’s characters Mr. and Mrs. Cosgrove, who took possession of the Lindendale plantation after the death of Mr. Vincent,
would be difficult to trace, given the absence of a first name of either. But the 1840 Virginia census lists one Cosgrove,
the 1850 Virginia census lists three Cosgroves, while the 1860s census lists four, all living in various parts of Virginia.

These similarities in surname were obviously too vague to be of much use, given the absence of first names. Only geographical
proximity could help connect them in some way. The first promising association came with the location of Frederick Hawkins,
the novel’s third character with two names. The 1810 and 1820 Virginia censuses list a Frederick Hawkins living in Dinwiddie
County. No Frederick Hawkins appears, however, in the censuses between 1830 and 1850. The distance between Milton and the
closest northwest boundary of Dinwiddie County is about thirty kilometers, or 18.6 miles. When we recall that Hannah and her
first mistress, the tragic mulatto, became lost on their way to Milton, it is at the home of Frederick Hawkins that they arrive.
This was a very promising lead, seemingly too much of a correspondence to be entirely coincidental.

Once I had a location for Frederick Hawkins in Dinwiddie County, I could then return to the Virginia census listings in search
of the Vincents, the Henrys, and the Cosgroves, to see if any lived near either Milton in Charles City County or in a nearby
county, such as Dinwiddie. Nathan Vincent and Elisa Vincent lived in Dinwiddie County in 1830. Edward Vincent, Joseph Vincent,
and William Vincent lived in Henrico County in 1840. In 1850 Nathan Vincent lived in Dinwiddie County and Jacob Vincent lived
in Hen-rico County. Thomas Cosgrove lived in Henrico County in 1840, John Cosgrove lived there in 1850, and Frank Cosgrove
lived there in 1860. Twenty kilometers separate Milton from the southeast border of Henrico County. Similarly, seven Henrys are listed as living in Henrico County in 1850, and one John H. Henry is even listed
as a Presbyterian clergyman, age thirty-three, born in New York and living in Stafford County, which is eighty miles from
Milton. It seemed possible to me that the Cosgrove, Henry, and Vincent families in the novel were named after these families
living relatively close to Milton. The names of these characters, like the name of Frederick Hawkins, do not seem to have
been arbitrary; the fact that the surnames of these characters matched real people who lived so closely together in one section
of Virginia suggested that it was at least possible that Hannah Crafts had named her characters after people she had known
in Virginia as a slave.