The Bondwoman's Narrative
Page 31
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.”
p. 120: “vows and responsibilities strangely fearful when taken in connection with their servile condition” The slave narratives frequently draw attention to the perilous nature of “marriage” among slaves. No one is more eloquent about the fragility of marriage within the slave community than Harriet Jacobs. See her slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), edited by Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
p. 120: “the winds arose, clouds obscured the firmament, and there was darkness, and lightning, and rain” Crafts often indicates a reversal in fortune for her characters by a rapid weather change. This is a standard convention of gothic novels.
Chapter 10
p. 121: The author attributes this verse to King Solomon. The King James version of Proverbs 31:30 reads as follows:
Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.
pp. 121–123: Crafts’s description of the architectural style of the house called Forget Me Not and its furniture demonstrates her remarkable descriptive skill as a narrator. Whereas plot and character would seem to take a priority over setting in the slave narratives, in her novel Crafts seems to luxuriate in making observations such as these, observations that are broad and general rather than specific to the politics of slavery and race.
p. 124: “and even now it is not my intention to draw their portraits” Crafts, in this passage, substitutes what we might think of as a metaphysical verisimilitude—a portrait of inner attributes and characteristics—for the physical verisimilitude common to the slave narratives. John H. Henry, a Presbyterian clergyman, was living in Stafford County, Virginia, in 1850. Stafford County is eighty miles from Milton. Henry was born in New York.
p. 125: “a scallion” Crafts meant “scullion,” a kitchen helper.
p. 126: “Compassionated” means “sympathize with or pity.”
p. 127: “the accusing spirit of Cesar summoning Brutus to Philippi” Marcus Junius Brutus (78?–42 B.C.) was made governor and then praetor of Cispaline Gaul by Julius Caesar in 46 and 44 B.C., respectively. He famously took part in the assassination of Caesar. Mark Anthony and Octavian, the first of the Roman emperors, fought Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 B.C. Brutus committed suicide after his forces were defeated. Shakespeare immortalized Brutus in his tragedy Julius Caesar, which is most probably Crafts’s source for this reference. Crafts, like Harriet Wilson, enjoyed a broad, if not deep, exposure to literature through the sort of texts or “classics” commonly found in a small library in a middle-class household in America in the mid-nineteenth century. See Appendix C for books in Wheeler’s library.
p. 127: “and yet my heart rose against the man…. I almost felt that he had done me a personal injury, an irreparable wrong.” While Crafts demonstrates remarkable self-control throughout her text, this reaction of anger, disgust, and disbelief seems quite genuine and human, unlike the unbelievable Christian tolerance and forgiveness of some of the black characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Crafts’s attitude here, if rendered in contemporary terms, would be “Are you serious? You must be joking!”
p. 128: “a friend and distant relative in North Carolina” Mrs. Henry is referring to John Hill Wheeler. Since Wheeler’s servant Jane escaped in 1855, and since Mrs. Wheeler refers to this event, we can date this section of the novel to 1855.
p. 128: “Their names are Wheeler” The passage refers to John H
ill Wheeler, a native of North Carolina, and his second wife, Ellen. In Washington, D.C., Mr. Wheeler served in a number of government positions during the Pierce and Buchanan administrations. See notes to chapter 12.
p. 130: “Alas; those that view slavery only as it relates to physical sufferings or the wants of nature, can have no conception of its greatest evils.” Crafts, like Douglass, makes several perceptive counterintuitive claims about the nature of slavery and its effects on the slaves, seemingly from inside of the slave community.
Chapter 11
p. 131: This is one of the three chapters in which Crafts uses a poetic as well as a biblical citation. The first quotation is Psalm 140:1:
Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man: preserve me from the violent man.
p. 131: “The slave, if he or she desires to be content, should always remain in celibacy” The slave narratives are replete with observations of this sort about the evils that slavery can inflict, capriciously, on those slaves who think that they are “married.” Slavery recognized no legal institutions such as marriage among slaves.
p. 132: “lest ‘de ghost’ should steal on them unaware” Crafts, like Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, uses black dialect to distinguish between house and field servants, educated and uneducated, rational and superstitious slaves. Crafts does not romanticize the members of the slave community, drawing distinctions among the slaves as an insider would rather than reducing their differences and distinctions to a blanket, common identity, consciousness, or culture predetermined by their race or ethnicity. The more distinctions between blacks that an author draws, in other words, the more likely it is that he or she has observed slavery from inside the institution. Here, Crafts distances herself from the Henrys’ other house servants by dismissing them as slaves to superstition, unlike herself. All the slave narrators, in one form or another, draw distinctions between the “representative,” intelligent, questing narrator and the bulk of the slaves demeaned by slavery whom the narrator will ultimately leave behind. In a sense, this class of slaves will become the progenitor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1868–1963) famous concept of “The Talented Tenth.”
p. 133: “the most ludicrous state of terror conceivable” This hilarious scene, at the servant Jo’s expense, is designed to reinforce Hannah’s status as a superior, rational person, one capable, of course, of writing her own narrative. This is a common rhetorical strategy found in the slave narratives. The exslave author William Wells Brown (1814–84) used dialect and humor brilliantly, especially in his novel, Clotel. Parody of the sort that Crafts uses here is dependent for its effect on intimate knowledge of the original. See also Jo’s argument with the other servants about whether ghosts can eat! Not all of the slaves speak in black vernacular English. See pp. 140–143 for Charlotte’s and William’s discourse about escape.
p. 136: “How could I acquit my conscience of cruelty and wrong” Hannah, seemingly obsessed with conformity to duty, here chooses loyalty to her fellow slave Charlotte over an inner obligation to be a consistently truthful person.
p. 137: “In attending these religious exercises” The religious practices of the slaves, “earnest and fervid,” as Crafts puts it, were frequently commented upon in slave narratives. Though obviously conservative in her manners, beliefs, and practices, Crafts nevertheless found these services “an agre[e]able diversion for my thoughts.”
p. 138: “a very pleasant walk among the negro lodges” Crafts is demonstrating in this paragraph the inherent love of beauty, order, and industry among slaves who are respected, nourished, and well cared for.
p. 138: Crafts states that the “ludicrous countenances” of the fearful slaves could have “provoked a smile on the lip of Heraclitus.” The author consistently distances herself from other slaves by her lack of fear and superstition. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535 B.C.–475 B.C.) was often contrasted with “the laughing philosopher,” Democritus, because of his “melancholy philosophy.”
p. 139: “a withered smoke-dried face, black as ebony” Black authors in the nineteenth century often strove to differentiate among the variety of colors of the slaves, both to chart their individuality and to testify to the master’s or overseer’s penchant for sexual relations with female slaves, leading to the birth of mulattos. Over subsequent generations, the colors of members of the black community became quite variegated.
p. 139: Despite her initial decision to remain discreet, Hannah here shares Charlotte’s secret with Mrs. Henry. She seems to have done so to enlist Mrs. Henry as Charlotte’s ally rather than to betray her, judging from Mrs. Henry’s calm and circumspect reaction. The entire scene, as it unfolds over the next four pages, is designed to specify the cruelties of slavery through the severing of the marriage bond, one of the holiest institutions of Christianity.
p. 142: “Duty, gratitude and honor forbid it.” Throughout her text, Crafts seeks to chart her inner nobility of spirit in such a way as to justify—at last— her own inevitable need to flee slavery, ultimately, to protect her virtue and virginity, contrary to stereotypes of black women as licentious and hyper-sexualized. This was a clever rhetorical and, implicitly, ideological strategy, but one not without its risks. Crafts often comes across as the metaphorical grandmother—a prototype—of the tragic mulatto commonly found in black fiction at the turn of the century who renders herself noble against the ignobility of lower-class, or darker, African Americans. She can also be taken as an antecedent of the light-complexioned members of the middle class whose aristocratic pretensions are bitterly critiqued in E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957). While often masked or muted, in other words, class divisions in the black community have a long and consistent history, and arose within the institution of slavery.
p. 142: “With me it is liberty or death” William uses the rebellion of the American Revolution and its famous orator Patrick Henry (1736–99) to authorize his flight to freedom.
p. 143: “Thy desire shall be thy husband” In Genesis 3:16, God rules that because of Eve’s involvement in eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, women shall desire and be ruled by their husbands. Moreover, God says, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shall bring forth children.” The actual quotation from Genesis is “thy desire shall be to thy husband.”
p. 145: “and with these hounds real Cuban” Bloodhounds were used to track fugitive slaves. The three principal breeds of bloodhound are English, Cuban, and African. Cuban bloodhounds are thought to be a variety of the mastiff.
Chapter 12
p. 147: From Psalm 69, verse 29:
But I am poor and sorrowful: let thy salvation, O God, set me up on high.
p. 147: “death-damps” Crafts refers to the perspiration, the clammy skin, which indicates physiological shock and impending death.
p. 148: “Mrs Wheeler came on her summer visit” At this point in the text, Crafts is drawing upon an actual historical event—the escape of a female slave named Jane Johnson from John Hill Wheeler in 1855—to develop her plot. Her decision to do so and to use the real names of Jane and the Wheelers greatly facilitated the authentication of her narrative. The most likely time of Mrs. Ellen Wheeler’s visit to the Henrys, as suggested by a scrutiny of Mr. Wheeler’s diary, was mid-1856. She was in Nicaragua when Jane escaped, having moved there with her husband in 1854. At this date he still held the post of Resident Minister to Nicaragua and was therefore absent from the United States. The latter half of Wheeler’s diary for 1856 is lost (last entry: May 23), but his return in November 1857 is recorded in his diary for the following year. If Mrs. Wheeler visited the Henrys in summer 1856, then she must have returned to the United States from Nicaragua some time between late 1855 and early 1856.
John Hill Wheeler diary, 1857 [p. 97]:
Sunday, November 15
This day a year ago I landed at New York from Central America in bad health and spirits. Today I am well and contented, thanks to kind Providence.
Wed, 18 [July 1855]
Left Washington City at 6 o’clock with Jane Daniel and Isaiah (my servants) for New York. D. Webster Esq. 6th Street Phila. in Co. Reached Phila. [a]t 1 1/2—went to Mr. Sully’s to get Ellen’s [i.e., Wheeler’s wife] things—and hurried to the Warf [sic]. The Boat had just left—so we remained until 5 o’clock—took dinner at Blood-good’s Hotel foot of Walnut Street. At 4 1/2 went on board of the Steamer Washington, and a few minutes before the boat started a gang of Negroes led on by Passmore Williamson an Abolitionist came up to us, and told Jane that [i]f she would go ashore she was free—On my remonstrating they seized me by the collar, threatened to cut my throat if I resisted, took the servants by force, they remonstrating and crying murder. Hurried them on shore—to a carriage which was waiting, and drove [stricken: “off”] them off.
p. 149: “Jane was very handy at almost everything.” Mrs. Wheeler is referring to Jane Johnson.
p. 149: “He wanted me to come, and I couldn’t think of doing without her in my feeble health.” Crafts is fictionalizing an actual event here: Wheeler was bringing Jane from Washington to Nicaragua, to serve his wife, Ellen. When Mrs. Wheeler remarks that “I didn’t much like the idea of bringing her to Washington,” Crafts is echoing warnings that Wheeler had received about attempting to transport a slave from Washington through Philadelphia—a hotbed of anti-slavery sentiment. Slavery was legal in Washington. It was in Philadelphia that Jane Johnson escaped.