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The Bondwoman's Narrative

Page 32

by Hannah Crafts


  p. 150: “My husband … occupies a high official position in the Federal City” Wheeler held a number of government jobs.

  Wheeler’s diary for 1854 [p. 19] reads as follows:

  Wed. 2 Aug. [1854]

  My Birthday—48 years of age—This day I received a commission from the President [Pierce] appointing me by and with the advice and consent of the Senate Minister Resident of the U.S. near the Republic of Nicaragua, Central America.

  Thurs. 10th [August 1854]

  Resigned my commission as Assistant Sec[retar]y to the President and Henry E. Baldwin of New Hampshire appointed my successor.

  p. 150: The “Federal City” was a commonly used nickname for Washington, D.C.

  p. 150: “swarming with the enemies of our domestic institution”: slavery.

  p. 150: “and if strangers called on her during my absence, or she received messages from them” Crafts here echoes Wheeler’s command to Jane Johnson not to speak with abolitionists or free colored people while they visited Philadelphia.

  p. 150: “Those who suppose that southern ladies keep their attendants at a distance, scarcely speaking to them” This is one of the several keen observations about slavery that Crafts makes throughout her text, reflecting her experience of slavery—and especially of the master- or mistress-slave relationship—from the inside, that is, as a slave. As William Andrews observes, Elizabeth Keckley, in her slave narrative, Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), states that such scenes between mistress and slave are not uncommon. Andrews, author of the definitive study of the slave narratives, finds this passage convincing proof of Crafts’s authenticity as an African American woman and a former slave. I quote Andrews’s argument at length:

  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.

  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.

  (Letter to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., October 26, 2001)

  p. 151: “Did you try to recover them? … he disliked making a hue and cry.” As is clear from Wheeler’s diary entries, a protracted attempt was made during the next few years to secure Jane Johnson’s return; failing in this, Wheeler attempted without success to obtain an indemnity for her value from the state of Pennsylvania. These overtures were made through legal channels, “making a hue and cry” of enormous proportions. Crafts here is mocking the Wheelers for their desperate efforts to retrieve Jane Johnson.

  Wed. 18 [July 1855]

  I went to the Marshal’s [sic] Office and with his Deputy, Mr. Mulloy, went to Judge Kane, who ordered a Habeas Corpus—returned to town about 10 o’clock, to Mr. J. C. Hazlitt the Dep[uty] Cl[er]k— took out the writ, then we went to the House of Williamson who had absconded. At 1 o’clock I left Phila. and arrived at New York at 6— and put up at the Washington House.

  p. 151: “The Senator from Ohio” is a thinly veiled reference to Passmore Williamson, the head of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, who facilitated Jane Johnson’s escape.

  p. 152: “while Mrs Wheeler requested me to read for her” Crafts is demonstrating her mastery of literacy at this point in her life, implicitly establishing her credentials as an author. This reversal of the topos of a white person reading to an illiterate slave is a very powerful rhetorical gesture, underscoring Crafts’s intellectual superiority over other slaves and her equality—or superiority—of intellect with her white mistress. Similarly, on p. 153, Crafts writes of how “that afternoon she [Mrs. Wheeler] dictated a letter for me to write.” Frederick Douglass equates learning to read and write with the desire to be free, to run away.

  p. 153: “you prefer the service of a lady to that of a gentleman, in which probably you would be compelled to sacrifise [sic] honor and virtue” Crafts foreshadows the event that will force her to escape—the sacrifice of her virginity to rape sanctioned by her master and mistress.

  Chapter 13

  p. 156: Although Ninevah is mentioned four times as a “great city” in the short Book of Jonah, it is never described as “full of people” in the Bible. However, in Jonah 4:11, Ninevah is said to have “sixscore thousand persons.” Crafts’s reliance on the oral tradition, while inaccurate, certainly conveys the meaning.

  p. 156: “perhaps a Python might be caught by another Apollo” According to legend, Delphi, home of the famous Greek oracle, was protected by a dragon or serpent (Python) in the pre-Hellenic period. Greek mythology states that the god Apollo slew the Python, ousted the deity (Mother Earth) it was guarding, and founded his oracle there.

  pp. 156–157: “where a negro slave was seen slipping and sliding but a moment before Alas; that mud and wet weather should have so little respect for aristocracy” Crafts is parodying the snobbery of white governmental officials in this passage.

  p. 158: The Italian medicated powder that turns Mrs. Wheeler black appears to be a product of Hannah Crafts’s wit and imagination.

  p. 159: “Report said that he [Mr. Wheeler] had actually quarreled with the President, and challenged a senator to fight a duel, besides laying a cowhide … over the broad shoulders of a member of Congress.” Wheeler states his difficulties in office at this time in entirely circumscribed terms, ignoring his indiscreet support of the self-styled General Walker’s exploits in Central America, which led to his dismissal from his position in Nicaragua.

  Diary for 1857 [p. 10]:

  Monday, March 2, [printed “February,” struck out, replaced by hand printed “March”]

  Went to President’s, heard him reply to a com[mittee?] from Texas—had a conference as to Nic[aragu]a. He resolved to have no diplomatic relations with Nic.a and of course no use for me—[I] resigned on this ground alone.

  Later in 1857, after the Wheelers’ visit to North Carolina and Hannah’s escape from the plantation there, Wheeler’s political fortunes changed for the better. At some point after his return, he was appointed clerk of the Department of the Interior. Later, he was selected for another post, as appears below, but he apparently did not accept it.

  Diary for 1857 [p. 109]:

  Tuesday, December 22 Met Mr. Craig who informed me that I had been selected by the Com.[mittee] for For.[eign] Aff
airs as their Clerk—

  There are references in this diary to Mr. Wheeler’s own pugnacious nature, as remarked by Crafts, but notices of other attacks occur later in his diary for 1860. Crafts is most probably referring to the attack of Preston Brooks of South Carolina with a cane on Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the Senate on May 22, 1856. This event is not recorded by Wheeler, though as it occurred a day before the last surviving entry in his diary of 1856, it may have been reported by him in a later, now lost, entry. Wheeler’s diary reports two other incidents of violence following Hannah’s escape:

  Diary for 1860 [p. 55]:

  Friday 13th [April]

  Went to Capitol; Pryor of Va. Challenged Potter of Missouri; accepted to fight with bowie knives—declined by Pryor as unseemly & so the matters end—Friends of both claim for each the triumph— which will produce other difficulties.

  Diary for 1860 [p. 102]:

  Sunday 8th [July]

  Lovely day but very cool for the time of year. Bathed and called to Gen[era]l Bowman, my opposite neighbour, who was attacked on yesterday morning by E. B. Schnabel, with a cane, and severely wounded. He made a speech at a Douglass [sic] meeting on Tuesday evening last, which the Constitution (Genl. Bowman’s paper) spoke of, and of Schnabel—hence [?] the attack.

  p. 160: “Riggs of the Naval Department” I have found no record of a Riggs working in the Naval Department at this time. Crafts could be referring to George Washington Riggs (1813–81), a prominent banker and co-owner of the Corcoran and Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., between 1837 and 1848, when Riggs resigned his partnership. In 1854 Riggs took over the bank, renaming it Riggs and Co., and expanded it considerably. Riggs, in other words, was a prominent name in Washington when Hannah Crafts lived there.

  p. 166: Mr. Wheeler points out that Mrs. Wheeler’s face is “black as Tophet.” Tophet is the Hebrew Bible’s name for hell, and Tophet is mentioned nine times in the Book of Jeremiah. In Isaiah 30:33, Tophet’s history is explained as follows:

  For Tophet is ordained of old; yea, for the king it is prepared; he hath made it deep and large: the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it.

  Obviously, Tophet’s “blackness” relates to the ash and burned wood present in large amounts.

  p. 168: “Why Cattell, and his clerks” “Cattell,” as spelled by Hannah Crafts, probably refers to Mr. Cotrell, a government officeholder and associate of John Hill Wheeler’s.

  Diary for 1855 [p. 106]:

  Thurs. 19 [July 1855]

  Friend Cotrell aided me with all his power.

  [p. 116]:

  Sat. 1 Sept. 1855

  Cotrell was selected as consul [to San Juan del Norte] and his commission ordered—

  [p. 117]:

  Wed. 5 [1855]

  Packing up and preparing to leave [for Nicaragua]—At 3 1/2 left New York in the steamer Star of the West, Capt. Turner in company with Dr. & Mrs. Van Dy[ke] Thos. V. Dandy—Cotrell.

  p. 169: “Mrs Wheeler like Byron” George Gordon, Lord Byron, the great Romantic poet, author of Don Juan. See note to Preface.

  p. 170: The Wheelers owned a substantial home in Washington at this time. In the first entry in the “Memoranda” section of his diary for 1857 (dated 1st January 1857), Wheeler lists a “Town House & Lot in Washington City,” valued at $6,000. Later, Wheeler owned at least two residential properties in the city, one of which was located on I Street and provided rental income.

  p. 170: “Mr Vincent” Several Vincents are listed as living in Dinwiddie County and Henrico County, Virginia, in the U.S. federal census between 1830 and 1850. Henrico County is twenty kilometers from Milton, while Dinwiddie County is thirty kilometers from Milton.

  p. 170: “Mr Cosgrove” The Cosgrove family lived in Henrico County from 1840 to 1860.

  Chapter 14

  p. 172: The passage used below is located rather generally as from the “Bible.” The citation is Psalm 74:20:

  Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.

  p. 172: “Our master … took a great fancy to beautiful female slaves” Lizzy’s tale of Mr. Cosgrove’s infidelity is an unusually explicit account of master-slave sexual relations on the plantation. In the slave narratives, these relations are usually referred to in veiled, or metaphoric, language.

  p. 175: “To think that she had been rivaled by slaves” Here, Crafts seems to be speaking as a person who had directly experienced or witnessed this tension over sexual rivalry.

  p. 177: “and with a motion so sudden that no one could prevent it, she snatched a sharp knife which a servant had carelessly left after cutting butcher’s meat, and stabbing the infant … she had run the knife into her own body” The most famous case of slave infanticide—the murdering of one’s child to prevent its sale as a slave—was that of Margaret Garner on January 28, 1856. Garner’s case became the basis of the plot of Toni Morrison’s magnificent novel Beloved (1987).

  Garner; her husband, Robert; their two children, Mary—age two—and Cilla, an infant; and Robert’s parents were escaping to freedom from a plantation in Kentucky. Pursued by her master, Archibald Gaines, Garner chose to slit her daughter Mary’s throat with a butcher knife rather than allow her to be returned to slavery. Gaines was thought to be the child’s father. Garner was returned to slavery and sold to another slave owner. She died in Mississippi in 1858. This story was widely discussed because of its sensational aspect and because of its implications in light of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Crafts most probably knew this story. Garner’s actions, of course, echo those of Medea, in the tragedy of Euripides. It is quite possible that Crafts knew both sources.

  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 Wh
eelers’ 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.)

 

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