The Bondwoman's Narrative

by Hannah Crafts

  From Mrs. Wheeler’s comment, it is clear that Colonel Johnston’s action against the Mormons had not yet begun, which would be consistent with John Hill Wheeler’s diary entry of March 21, 1857, reporting that he and his family were leaving Washington for a visit to North Carolina. See note to p. 198.

  p. 198: “Mr Wheeler’s fine plantation was situated near Wilmington” Wheeler’s plantation was actually in Lincolnton, North Carolina, which is approximately 220 miles from Wilmington. Crafts situated the plantation here most probably to mask the Wheelers’ true identity, in accordance with her initial representation of the Wheelers as the “Wh——r” family in her text.

  p. 198: The Wheelers’ 1857 trip to North Carolina lasted six weeks, from March 21 to May 4, as follows:

  Diary for 1857 [p. 16]:

  At 3 1/2 left for North Carolina in cars via [?] Baltimore. At 6 left Balt. On steamer Georgia …

  [p. 20]:

  Thursday 2 [April]

  Went to Sully and Woodbury [Wheeler’s sons].

  Weather very cool.

  Went to Cousin Mollie Mebane[’s?]

  Bertie County—Ellen in company

  Also Esther and John & James

  Mr. Ferguson and Williams Allan [part of this name cut off in photocopy] … lanching [?: beginning of this word cut off in photocopy] the Seine Thomas Ganet & others there.

  [p. 30]:

  Sunday, May 3

  Visited with my dear Brother, the gi[graves?] of our Father and Mother [in Murfreesboro, N.C.].

  [p. 31]:

  Monday, May 4

  At 12 left and reached Boykin’s [Landing] and reached Ports.o[Portsmouth, Va.]

  At 7—left in steamer Herald for Balt.

  The place described by Hannah as “Mr. Wheeler’s fine plantation” and “situated near Wilmington” could, in fact, refer to one of two plantations. One possibly is the estate near Murfreesboro of Mr. Wheeler’s relative Dr. Moore. Dr. Moore married Wheeler’s sister. Boykin’s Landing, Virginia, which exists today as Boykins, was the last stop toward Murfreesboro, the nearest large town to Dr. Moore’s plantation. The Wheelers’ own plantation, as is made clear elsewhere in his diary, was located a considerable distance away, near Lincolnton in the southwest central area of North Carolina. While Lincolnton, near Charlotte, is approximately 220 miles from Wilmington, Murfreesboro is 150 miles from Wilmington. Crafts probably placed the plantation near Wilmington because it was the largest port in the state and was the site of a large slave market, one well known in abolitionist circles.

  pp. 198–199: “lime-tree walks,” “orange trees,” “peach trees,” “grapes,” “figs,” “pomegranates” Writing her narrative ostensibly from the safe haven of New Jersey, Crafts is recollecting the types of fruits that she saw growing in North Carolina. Figs, peaches, and grapes flourished there; pomegranates could be cultivated privately, within the homes of wealthy plantation owners. Although limes and oranges did not thrive there—efforts to introduce citrus fruits to North Carolina in the colonial period proved unsuccessful—linden trees, commonly nicknamed “limes,” and osage oranges did. Crafts is most probably using a shorthand for these two plants. The linden tree is a leitmotif throughout the novel. Cherries, apricots, pears, plums, pecans, quinces, damsons, and nectarines also flourished in North Carolina. I am indebted to Sharon Adams, a garden designer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Brian Sinche, for this information. See also Cornelius Oliver Cathey’s Agricultural Developments in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956).

  p. 199: “a cotton field … a large plantation of rice” Cotton and rice were both grown on North Carolina plantations.

  p. 199: “The huts of these people” Crafts consistently refers to the slaves as full members of the human community. The casual use of the phrase “these people” is meant to remind the reader almost subconsciously of that fact.

  p. 199: “by night they contained a swarm of misery, that crowds of foul existence crawled in out of gaps” Crafts’s description of living conditions in the slave quarters is one of the most vivid in black literature.

  p. 200: “that false system which bestows on position, wealth, or power the consideration only due to a man” Crafts’s critique of the social system of the antebellum South is quite consistent with abolitionist and Protestant Christian rhetoric of the period.

  p. 200: “to a lower link in the chain of being than that occupied by a horse” Crafts is referring to the slaves, held to be subhuman by many pro-slavery advocates, and therefore occupying a lower order on the Great Chain of Being.

  p. 201: “To be made to feel that you have no business here … you are scarcely human” Crafts in this passage moves—in a series of rhetorical questions asked of “Doctors of Divinity”—back and forth between referring to herself as a member of the class of slaves (“you have no business here”) and the third person “It must be … strange,” a phrase she repeats for effect. James Baldwin often used a similar rhetorical device, identifying himself for effect with the “us” or “we” of the non-black American population.

  p. 201: “to fear that their opinion is more than half right” Crafts’s catalogue of the degrading effects of slavery upon the slave is astonishingly honest and frank. Rarely do we find in the slave narratives a more compelling statement of slavery’s debilitating effects upon the sense of self-worth that slaves struggled to maintain. By framing her questions in the form of “it must be,” Crafts is also distinguishing herself from her fellow slaves who ostensibly have been crushed by the system of slavery. Both Douglass and Jacobs also draw distinctions of class and individual merit, intelligence, and worth between themselves and other slaves.

  p. 202: “Of course the family residence was stocked with slaves of a higher and nobler order than those belonging to the fields.” The traditional class (and often color) distinctions between house slaves and field slaves was commonly remarked upon by slave narrators and white writers alike, but Crafts’s descriptions are especially stark.

  p. 203: “I had to deal with a wary, powerful, and unscrupulous enemy. She was a dark mulatto, very quick motioned with black snaky eyes” One of Crafts’s tendencies as a narrator is to draw distinctions—to individuate—effortlessly between black characters rather than treating them in a blanket or an undifferentiated manner. When the librarian and bibliophile Dorothy Porter refers to the natural manner in which Crafts treats black characters, it is this sort of description of the slave Maria that I believe she had in mind, as well as her frank account of the degrading living conditions of life in the slave quarters.

  p. 205: “Retreating to the loneliest garret in the house” Harriet Jacobs hides in a garret in her grandmother’s home in North Carolina for seven years. See Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, especially the chapter “The Loop Hole of Retreat.”

  p. 205: “and 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 my soul actually revolted with horror unspeakable” Crafts’s “horror” is based in part upon her perception of the extreme gap in class— breeding, education, sensibility, and cleanliness—between herself as a mulatto house servant and the lack of these virtues and characteristics among the “degraded” field hands. The severity of her characterizations here are unusually extreme, compared with similar distinctions drawn in the slave narratives. A large part of her revulsion arises from being forced to marry someone not “voluntarily assumed,” as she writes in her next sentence. Protecting herself from rape is Crafts’s motivation for fleeing. See the first paragraph in chapter 17. In comparison, Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, describes Legree’s slave huts as being “mere rude shells, destitute of any species of furniture, except a heap of straw, foul with dirt, spread confusedly over the floor, which was merely the bare ground, trodden hard by the tramping of innumerable feet.”

  Chapter 17

  p. 206: The Psalm cited here is 141, verse 8. The full biblic
al quotation is as follows:

  But mine eyes are unto thee, O God the Lord: in thee is my trust; leave not my soul destitute.

  The four lines of poetry are from Richard Ticknell’s (1751–93) “Colin and Lucy.” In this part of Ticknell’s poem, a brokenhearted maiden is being called to her death.

  p. 206: “a man whom I could only hate and despise” See note for p. 203 above. When Crafts writes that “it seemed that rebellion would be a virtue, that duty to myself and my God actually required it,” she is referring to the protection of her virginity as a moral principle worth risking her life for. Crafts goes on to repeat her belief that “marriage” was “something that all the victims of slavery should avoid as tending essentially to perpetuate that system.” “[N]othing but this,” she writes on p. 207, “would have impelled me to flight.”

  p. 207: “where Jacob fled from his brother Esau” The narrator opens the Bible and finds the passage in Genesis, chapter 28, where Jacob flees his brother’s wrath after cheating Esau out of his birthright and Isaac’s blessing. Crafts is invoking divine authority for her own flight.

  pp. 207–208: “but I remembered the Hebrew Children and Daniel in the Lion’s den, and felt that God could protect and preserve me through all” In the sixth chapter of the Book of Daniel, King Darius’s exaltation of Daniel leads to jealousy from the other, non-Hebrew ministers. Daniel must choose between prayer to his God and avoiding the den of lions. Choosing God, Daniel survives the lions with God’s help and lives to see his accusers devoured.

  p. 208: “The overseer came up” Crafts’s description of the overseer seems quite realistic, as is her description of Bill’s hut “reeking with filth and impurity.” Crafts is especially gifted at evoking the physicality of the field slaves and their habitations.

  p. 210: “Here was a suit of male apparel exactly corresponding to my size and figure” This sort of coincidence is commonly found in sentimental novels. Hannah’s use of a disguise as a male echoes that of Ellen Craft in 1848, Clarissa Davis in 1854, Anna Maria Weems (alias Joe Wright) in 1855. Crafts escaped as a white male; John Wesley Gibson also escaped as a white male. (See William Still’s The Underground Railroad for accounts of these cases of cross-dressing.)

  Chapter 18

  p. 211: In both Matthew 8:20 and Luke 9:58, Jesus warns a potential follower:

  The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

  That Crafts wished to emphasize her own homelessness during her flight from slavery is reflected in the fact that she considered giving this chapter three titles: “The Wandering,” “Trials and Difficulties,” and “Strange Company.” The first two titles were rejected for the third, “Strange Company.”

  p. 211: The “window of opportunity” for Hannah’s escape from the Wheeler plantation in Wilmington, North Carolina, is established in John Hill Wheeler’s diary by the earlier escape of Jane in July 1855, referred to in her first meeting with Mrs. Wheeler, and the onset of the Civil War in 1861. Judging from the relevant information contained in Wheeler’s diary, Hannah’s escape would most likely have occurred between March 21 and May 4, 1857. This period corresponds not only with the Wheelers’ recorded trip to the plantation from Washington but with several other unique circumstances in their lives during this time, such as Wheeler’s recent dismissal from his government post. Negative evidence supporting the year 1857 for the escape is provided by the lack of known visits by the Wheelers to the plantation during the years 1855, 1856 (only the first half of the diary is extant, but Mr. Wheeler was still in Nicaragua until November of that year), and 1858 (only the last half of this diary survives). Trips were made by the Wheelers to North Carolina in 1859 (with President Buchanan in early June), 1860 (in the latter half of December), and 1861 (about July, from which point Wheeler stayed in North Carolina), but Mr. Wheeler’s continual employment as clerk of the Interior Department in Washington from 1857 would not have occasioned Hannah’s reference to his recent dismissal from office during any of these years. Furthermore, the relative proximity in time between the departure of Jane, a much-valued personal servant of Mrs. Wheeler, and the acquisition of Hannah as a competent replacement (less than two years) logically supports the year 1856 as the date of Hannah’s involvement with the Wheelers and her subsequent escape in early 1857.

  p. 212: “guided at night by the North Star” The use of the North Star by fugitive slaves as a natural compass was a common feature of the slave narratives.

  p. 212: “I thought of Elijah and ravens” Crafts here recalls 1 Kings 17:6, in which the prophet Elijah is fed “bread and flesh” by ravens in the morning and evening while following God’s command to live in the wilderness.

  p. 212: “I cannot describe my journey” Despite their dogged use of verisimilitude—of listing in painstaking detail the who, what, and where of their experiences as slaves—it was a common feature of most slave narrators to remain silent or sketchy about their mode of escape, in order to protect the secrecy of their routes and methods from slave catchers. This was especially the case after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Frederick Douglass severely criticized Henry “Box” Brown for publishing a book in which he detailed his unusual mode of escape: he was shipped in a crate from Richmond to freedom in Philadelphia. Douglass argued that other slaves could have utilized this method of escape had Brown only kept it a secret.

  p. 214: “as the Catholic devotee calls over the names of his favorite saints while counting his beads” Crafts is referring to the rosary. Roman Catholicism was a relatively rare form of Christianity in North Carolina and Virginia in the nineteenth century.

  p. 215: “This will be my last resting place” Crafts uses standard English for some slaves, especially house servants, to distinguish them from uneducated field slaves, who usually she depicts speaking dialect. Crafts writes, “This he said in broken incoherent expressions to which I have given suitable language.” (p. 216)

  p. 218: “and more than all the minister … striving to elicit something of which to make capital for his next sermon” Crafts’s critique of organized religion is somewhat reminiscent of Frederick Douglass’s critique of the hypocrisy of Christianity vis-à-vis slavery. For a person so expressly devout, Crafts’s critique of the funeral practices of her time is quite refreshing and perceptive.

  p. 220: “They mostly prayed that we the slaves might be good and obedient” See note immediately above.

  Chapter 19

  p. 224: The full text of this verse, Psalm 37:25, is as follows:

  I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.

  p. 224: “but strange to say he had not penetrated my disguise. He learned to love me, however, as a younger brother” Crafts is reassuring her readers that her virtue remained intact, despite her intimacy with Jacob as they fled the South. No doubt her pun on penetrate was quite unintentional.

  p. 224: “though when compelled by necessity to approach the habitations of men it devolved on me as his color made him obnoxious to suspicion” Obnoxious was commonly used to mean “subject, liable, exposed, or open to,” as Webster’s reports. Crafts’s use of a disguise as a white man traveling with a black man replicates the method of escape used by Ellen and William Craft in 1848. (See note to p. 82 above)

  pp. 224–225: Despite her confessed reticence to divulge details of this escape route, Crafts provides fascinating details about how Hannah and Jacob traveled together.

  p. 227: “I knew the voice, though I had not recognised the countenance. It was that of my old friend, Aunt Hetty.” Coincidences such as this were a common feature of sentimental novels. Crafts reminds us of the source of her literacy training by describing herself as “the Hannah whom she had taught to read.”

  p. 228: “the statute that forbade the instruction of slaves” It was illegal in most antebellum southern states to teach slaves to read and write.

  p. 228: “li
ke Paul and Silas of old” Both Paul and Silas escaped from prison while evangelizing the new faith of Christianity, in Philippi. See Acts, Chapter 16.

  p. 229: “a small village of miners” Crafts could be referring to a village in the coal fields of western Virginia, or the state of West Virginia today. West Virginia became a state in 1863.

  p. 230: “I should find refuge among the colored inhabitants of New Jersey” Crafts’s manuscript was recovered from New Jersey by a “book scout” in 1948. New Jersey “became a haven for slaves escaping the South,” according to Giles R. Wright’s Afro-Americans in New Jersey (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1988), p. 39.

  p. 230: “the good old woman supplied me with female apparel” Crafts is now traveling disguised as a white woman.

  Chapter 20

  p. 231: In the book of Isaiah, the prophet warns:

  Woe unto the wicked! It shall be ill with him: for the reward of his hands shall be given him.

  Crafts gives her chapter of “just rewards” the title “Retribution.”

  p. 231: “Farther down the river was a steamboat landing” Several navigable rivers flowed through, or near, coal fields in West and western Virginia, including the Kanawha, the Guyandotte, the Shenandoah, and the Ohio.

  p. 232: “but the mother was, or had been a slave, though she enjoyed all the perquisites and priviledges [sic] of a wife” Examples of romantic intimacy and faithfulness between masters and slaves were to be found even in the antebellum South. Perhaps the most famous is that of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. Trappe’s death—the demise of the villain, hoist with his own petard—was a common feature of sentimental novels.