The Bondwoman's Narrative

by Hannah Crafts

  p. 8: Describing her desire to share her feelings, Crafts writes, “I had no mother, no friend.” Douglass says, in his 1845 Narrative, that he saw his mother only “four or five times,” and only “at night.” He “received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions [as] I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.”

  p. 8: In what appears to be an appeal for abolitionist support, the narrator states that in the North “the colored race had so many and such true friends.” On p. 10, she idealizes northern whites as those who implicitly feel “keenly on the subject of slavery and the degradation and ignorance it imposes on one portion of the human race.” The claim that slaves were members of “the human race” was meant to counter pro-slavery claims that they were not, that they were subhuman.

  p. 10: Describing her trips to Aunt Hetty and Uncle Siah, Hannah says that she would “steal away” to learn about Christianity. This invocation of the spiritual titled “Steal Away” is one of the few references to the African American musical tradition in this text. Hannah’s admirable piety is underscored by the smugness of the contrast between her evening activities and the other slaves’ enjoyment of “the banjo and the dance.” Frederick Douglass makes similar critiques of white-sanctioned slave entertainment.

  p. 11: “slaves though they were, … ignorant, and untutored, assimilated thus to the highest and proudest in the land—thus evinced their equal origin, and immortal destiny.” Pro-slavery ideology held that slaves, as persons of African descent, were destined by nature to be slaves and could not be educated or could not “improve” themselves. Crafts here is countering this argument. With education and moral training, in other words, slaves were capable of scaling the great chain of being. Crafts’s confession of her earliest ambition, “to become their teacher,” foreshadows the career she will undertake at the end of the narrative.

  p. 13: Aunt Hetty’s banishment is a restatement of the text’s valorization of white abolitionists and their willingness to be punished for their defiance of unjust laws on behalf of the slave.

  p. 13: With the marriage of Lindendale’s master, the narrative switches from the style suggestive of the slave narrative and the sentimental novel to a text heavily influenced by gothic patterns and themes. Conventions of the sentimental novel reappear throughout the novel, especially at its denouement.

  p. 13: “it was whispered” Douglass uses whispered in this sense, describing the slaves’ rumors of their master’s secrets, and more especially of his own paternity.

  p. 14: “whose sweat and blood and unpaid labor had contributed to produce it” Crafts here echoes the economic-justice argument from abolitionist propaganda for the abolition of slavery.

  p. 15: The description of the long galleries filled with portentous portraits of the family of Sir Clifford De Vincent, the current master’s ancestor, is reminiscent of the central role played by portraiture in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765). Walpole’s novel is considered to begin the gothic novel tradition. In American literature of the nineteenth century, Edgar Allan Poe is the most important practitioner of this genre, which often involves ancient houses, forlorn brides, and supernatural occurrences. Even for Virginia (the Old Dominion), Lindendale seems to be exceedingly aristocratic and antique for a New World setting.

  p. 17: “I was not a slave with these pictured memorials of the past…. In their presence my mind seemed to run riotous and exult in its freedom as a rational being, and one destined for something higher and better than this world can afford.” Crafts here argues for the transformative powers of the higher arts—in this case, the visual arts—on even a humble slave. While virtually all the slave narrators used the mastering of literacy in this way, few slave narrators, if any, used an appreciation of painting to show the common humanity of the slave and his white masters. Crafts’s mistress’s true identity as the daughter of a slave mother will be authenticated by a portrait. See p. 47.

  Chapter 2

  p. 19: In addition to the author’s modernization of “speaketh” to “speaks,” she changes Proverbs’ seven abominations to “severe” abominations. Proverbs 26:25:

  When he speaketh fair, believe him not: for there are seven abominations in his heart.

  p. 20: “The clear cold sunshine glancing down the long avenue of elms” Crafts, in passages such as these, reveals exceptional powers of description. See pp. 121–123, and 192.

  p. 20: Stormy weather and the creaking of the old linden tree trigger the narration of the legend of the linden and its “wild and weird influence.” In much of this text, storms, particularly at night, foreshadow crises, particularly for African Americans.

  p. 21: The beating and torture of “an old woman” echo Douglass’s description of the beating of Aunt Hester.

  p. 21: The curse on the house is earned by a series of cruelties by its first owner, culminating in the torture and death of a trusted old nurse and a lovable, shaggy, white dog. In the South, it is only the “direst act of cruelty” that could distinguish this master from other slave owners. Of course, the reason that a tree symbolizes extreme cruelty is partly historical, the very real use of trees for lynching. Its other connection is to crucifixion imagery, the use of a “tree” during the Passion.

  p. 22: Sir Clifford boasts that his commands are comparable to “the laws of the Medes and Persians.” This classical reference is to Media, an ancient country of West Asia that extended its rule over Persia circa 700 B.C. This dynasty was not overthrown until 550 B.C.

  p. 26: The “Madras handkerchiefs” that are worn by many of the slaves for the celebration of their master’s wedding was a term used from approximately 1833 to 1881 to describe the slaves’ silk-and-cotton kerchiefs used as headdresses.

  p. 27: The true identity of Hannah’s mistress is implied upon her introduction in the text. Physically, she is “small” and “brown” with a profusion of wavy, curly hair. Although those might be neutral descriptions, her lips, which are “too large,” signal a warning about hidden ancestry, particularly in the racially charged South. Although the narrator owns to being “superstitious”—“people of my race and color usually are,” she writes—her fear of her mistress being “haunted by a shadow or phantom” foreshadows coming disclosures.

  p. 27: “Instead of books I studied faces and characters” Crafts here is reinforcing her authority as a narrator who, though a slave and uneducated formally, nevertheless possesses “the unerring certainty of animal instinct.”

  p. 28: The “old gentleman in black” who shadows Hannah’s mistress is reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “elder person” of the woods, who is possibly the devil, in “Young Goodman Brown” (1835).

  p. 29: During the wedding party, the groaning of the linden tree signals the invocation of Rose’s curse upon the house’s descendants. In apparent protest, Sir Clifford’s portrait falls from the wall as the new bride enters the portrait gallery. While this is not as dramatic as Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, in which a ghost steps out of his portrait, the echoes of the first gothic novel can be heard.

  Chapter 3

  p. 31: To begin this chapter, Crafts offers a portion of Psalm 39:6:

  Surely every man walketh in a vain show: surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.

  Immediately following is a line of verse from “Lochiel’s Warning” by Thomas Campbell (1777–1844). This warning, heavy with supernatural language, is issued by a wizard. The setting and the language of this citation underscore the gothic nature of the text:

  Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore

  And coming events cast their shadows before [55–56]

  p. 33: Lizzy’s, a quadroon, pride in the fact that her white ancestors came from “a good family” and her contention “that good blood was an inheritance,” even to the slave, is a common theme in the African American literary tradition.

  p. 34: “suffered the extremes of a master’s fondness, a mistress�
�s jealousy and their daughter’s hate” Crafts is unusually open about discussing sexual relations between masters and their female slaves. See below, p. 172.

  p. 36: “My mistress was very kind, and … she indulged me in reading whenever I desired.” Compare this indulgence with that of Douglass’s mistress, Sophia Auld. A mistress flouting her husband’s strict prohibitions about literacy training for a slave is extraordinarily rare in the slave narratives. But so, too, of course, is a mistress who turns out to be black.

  pp. 35–42: Crafts frequently shifts back and forth from past to present tense when she describes action between her characters, as in “she asks” or “speaks” (p. 35), “Trappe proceeds” or “she remembers” (p. 39), “he interrupts” (p. 41), “she repulses,” “he inquired” (p. 42).

  Chapter 4

  p. 43: In the Pentateuch, the following verse is repeated in two books, inspiring the commonplace saying that Crafts attributes to Moses, the traditionally recognized author of this part of the Hebrew Bible. Both Deuteronomy 5:9 and Exodus 20:5 use the same language:

  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.