The Bondwoman's Narrative

by Hannah Crafts

  Hannah decides to run away to protect herself from rape by a black man she finds loathsome and reprehensible, uneducated, uncouth, and unwashed and, as she freely admits, to avoid the squalor of life in the slave quarters. But throughout the novel, she bonds with a variety of black characters, starting with her unveiled mulatto mistress on the Lindendale plantation:

  “And will you go with me?” she inquired.

  “I will, my dear mistress.”

  “Call me mistress no longer. Henceforth you shall be to me as a very dear sister” she said embracing me again. “Oh: to be free, to be free.”

  Crafts clearly admires her fellow slave Lizzy, “a Quadroon” who, she tells us, “had passed through many hands, and experienced all the vicissitudes attendant on the life of a slave,” from suffering “the extremes of a master’s fondness” to his wife’s “jealousy and their daughter’s hate.” (Crafts repeatedly stresses the sexual vulnerability of all female slaves, but especially that of house servants and mulattos.) Later, Crafts bonds with Jacob, a “black man” and a fugitive slave fleeing with his sister, as Crafts herself is fleeing near the end of the novel. And most important of all, she ends the novel by willingly selecting an identity as a black person, married to a free-born black Methodist minister, keeping “a school for colored children.” This is all the more remarkable given the fact that she makes the final leg of her escape route in the disguise of a white woman, having been persuaded by Aunt Hetty to abandon her disguise as a white male. Crafts chooses her blackness willingly, in other words, just as she chooses her class identity. Breeding, education, morals, manners, hygiene—these are the values that Hannah Crafts embraces consistently throughout the novel, from her life as a slave to freedom within the colored middle class of New Jersey. In a sense Crafts seems determined to unsanitize depictions of the horrible conditions the slaves experienced, revealing the debilitating effects this brutal institution had upon the victims—the slaves—much as Richard Wright would later, in Native Son (1940), attempt to reveal the brutal effects of racism and capitalism on Bigger Thomas. That she makes no apologies for these attitudes is one of the most fascinating aspects of her narrative strategy, as if class trumps race when a choice is demanded. But class and race combined compose the ideal that Crafts valorizes throughout her text. That combination is the basis of the blissful life that she finds at the conclusion of her tale. Hannah Crafts can be thought of as the figurative grandmother of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth.” Though other mixed-race narrators, such as Harriet Wilson or Harriet Jacobs, stress industry and hard work, none makes it a fetish in the way that Crafts does.

  Throughout the novel, Crafts underscores the fact that the institution of slavery does not respect distinctions among the slaves. Class distinctions are irrelevant.

  He reck[on]ed not that she was a woman of delicate sensibilities and fine perfections—she was a slave, and that was all to him. [p. 82; see also pp. 33 and 76]

  Elsewhere, Crafts rails against an irrational system that privileges “mere accident of birth, and what persons were the least capable of changing or modifying” over their capacity to “improve” themselves. [pp. 76–77] It is native intelligence, diligence, and hard work that should be the ultimate measures of individual worth and success in a truly democratic society, she argues implicitly throughout her novel.

  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 mad
e 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.

  23. Letter from Tom Parramore to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., November 16, 2001.

  24. Bryan Sinche pointed this out to me.

  25. See The Case of Passmore Williamson (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, 1855), and Still, pp. 86–97. Two versions of Jane Johnson’s testimony appear in Appendix B. See Still, pp. 94–95.

  26. David Brion Davis, “The Enduring Legacy of the South’s Civil War Victory,” New York Times, August 26, 2001, section 4, p. 6.

  27. Conversation with Tim Bingaman, Mormon Family History
Library, May 15, 2001.

  28. Giles R. Wright, Afro-Americans in New Jersey (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1988), p. 39.

  29. This book is reprinted in The Black Biographical Dictionary Index, ed. by Randall and Nancy Burkett and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck Healy, 1985).

  30. Elizabeth M. Perinchiet, History of the Cemeteries in Burlington County, New Jersey, 1687–1975 (n.p. 1978), p. 30.

  31. Letter from Nina Baym to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., May 9, 2001.

  32. Letter to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., October 26, 2001.

  33. Letter to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., November 2, 2001.

  A Note on Punctuation and Spelling

  Throughout the text, every effort was made to print the novel as it appeared in the original holograph. Hannah Crafts’s spelling has been retained, though, on occasion, a bracketed insertion has been added to aid readability (e.g., “to[o]”); the use of [sic] has been restricted to syntactical matters.

  Periods at the end of sentences have been inserted globally; question marks after interrogatory sentences appear only where Hannah Crafts put them; crossed-out words indicate Crafts’s own revisions. Bracketed quotation marks have been added around dialogue where their absence would impede the readability of the narrative.

  Preface

  In presenting this record of plain unvarnished facts to a generous public I feel a certain degree of diffidence and self-distrust. I ask myself for the hundredth time How will such a literary venture, coming from a sphere so humble be received? Have I succeeded in portraying any of the peculiar features of that institution whose curse rests over the fairest land the sun shines upon? Have I succeeded in showing how it blights the happiness of the white as well as the black race? Being the truth it makes no pretensions to romance, and relating events as they occurred it has no especial reference to a moral, but to those who regard truth as stranger than fiction it can be no less interesting on the former account, while others of pious and discerning minds can scarcely fail to recognise the hand of Providence in giving to the righteous the reward of their works, and to the wicked the fruit of their doings.