The Bondwoman's Narrative Read online

  Ann Fabian, the author of The Unvarnished Truth, a study of women’s and blacks’ narrative strategies in the nineteenth century, shared several telling observations with me about Crafts’s mode of narration. The novel’s plot elements, she writes,

  have subsets that she works in interesting ways. Her evangelical Protestantism gives the reader a glimpse of her own spiritual narrative, but she uses it as well to point out the hypocrisy of the slave-owning minister and the curious inconsistency of the absurd deathbed oath of the wife. She works her abolitionist politics into a series of direct rhetorical appeals [pp. 94, 178, 201]. She works pieces of travelogue into her forced migration to North Carolina. What was the city of Washington like in winter? (Gloom more symbolic than literal, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless.) She also uses her gothic scenes to play the role of detective. And her passing narratives run from the venal blackmailer to the Washington farce.12

  Fabian also was struck by the way that Crafts establishes her authenticity as a storyteller:

  She is “a repository of secrets.” Mr. Trappe, the rival keeper of secrets, is undone. By the end of the story, it’s really the Bond-woman who could be the blackmailer. She knows the gossip, the secrets, the sins and sexual histories, the humiliations of everyone. (“A northern woman would have recoiled at the idea of communicating a private history to one of my race.”) But she is, of course, too good a Christian to deploy those weapons of the weak she possesses. A false accusation of gossip, of course, precipitates her escape from unwanted sex.13

  Could Hannah Crafts, I wondered, be an example of what the novelist Ralph Ellison, describing the recovery of Our Nig, called the surprising degree of “free-floating literacy” among the black slaves of the nineteenth century? I decided to attempt to find out.

  Authenticating the Text

  Now that I had read the manuscript, I began to wonder if Dorothy Porter could have been correct: Could the person who had written this story have been a slave, judging by her text’s intimacy of detail about her enslavement, especially her tracing of the complex power dynamics between master and slave? Was Porter correct that even the sharp distinctions that Crafts drew among black slaves, as Douglass and Jacobs had, rather than generalizing about them as a class or a group, reinforced the possibility of the author’s identity as an African American female? Essentially, then, I decided to embark tentatively upon a slow and careful quest to examine Dorothy Porter’s suspicions and claims, made a full half century before I obtained the manuscript and made with only a modicum of research.

  How does one go about authenticating the racial identity of an author, and how does one date the composition of a manuscript? These two complex tasks stood in the way of verifying Dorothy Porter’s thesis. I embarked on both simultaneously. But establishing the date of authorship, as precisely as possible, would, for reasons that shall become apparent below, make the search for the author and her ethnicity much simpler than would have casting about wildly through census records and other documents of the 1840s and 1850s. So I decided to consult with an array of experts to determine if we could date the manuscript and, if we could, what other facts might be uncovered in the process.

  I have to confess that this aspect of my pursuit of Hannah Crafts proved to be the most illuminating. While I was quite familiar with the procedure for tracing historical figures using censuses and indices such as those created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which I had used to authenticate Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig almost two decades ago, I had no experience with the depth of detail that a scientist could glean from what, to a layman at least, appeared to be faded brown ink on fragile, crumbling paper. Nothing prepared me for the subtlety or the depth of analysis that a historical-document examiner can force a holograph manuscript to yield.

  I began the process of authentication by sharing the manuscript with Leslie A. Morris, the Curator of Manuscripts in the Harvard College Library. Ms. Morris concluded that “in its physical form, the manuscript is typically mid-nineteenth century, perhaps dating from 1850s or 1860s.” A “date of 1855–1860,” she concluded, “was certainly possible.”14 She encouraged me to approach a paper conservator.

  I turned to Craigen W. Bowen, the Philip and Lynn Strauss Conservator of Works of Art on Paper and Deputy Director of Conservation at the Harvard University Art Museums. Bowen concurred with Ms. Morris’s dating: “the characteristics of the paper, binding and ink,” she wrote, “are commensurate with a mid-nineteenth-century date of origin.”15

  Next I asked Wyatt Houston Day, the bookseller and appraiser who had authenticated the manuscript for the Swann Galleries, to share his thoughts with me. Day, considering “the style of writing, the paper and the ink,” concluded that the manuscript had been written “in the 1850s.” Although he said that he could not be more precise about the date of origin, he was certain that it had been written before the start of the Civil War:

  I can say unequivocally that the manuscript was written before 1861, because had it been written afterward, it would have most certainly contained some mention of the war or at least secession.

  Moreover, Day concluded, “given the style of the narrative, the handwriting and most important, the tone of the ink and type of paper,” it was “probably [written in] the first half of the decade” of the 1850s.16

  Laurence Kirshbaum, a friend and the chairman and CEO of AOL Time Warner Book Group, suggested that I have the manuscript examined by Kenneth W. Rendell, a well-known dealer in historical documents, to date the ink that Crafts had used to write her text. If, indeed, the manuscript had been written before the start of the Civil War, the author had to have used iron-gall ink. I drove the manuscript to Rendell’s splendid offices, a converted Victorian mansion in South Natick, Massachusetts. If this manuscript was the first novel written by a female slave—and possibly the first novel written by a black woman—then identifying the kind of ink that she had used would be pivotal.

  Rendell invited me to peer down the lens of his microscope before sharing his verdict with me. “What you are looking at, young man,” he intoned, “is iron-gall ink,” widely in use until 1860. Rendell thought it likely that the manuscript had been created as early as 1855. Rendell also demonstrated that this was Crafts’s “composing copy” and not “a fair copy” (meaning a second or third draft). He also concluded that the manuscript had been bound much later than it had been written, possibly as late as 1880.17 Rendell suggested that the services of Dr. Joe Nickell should be engaged to establish definitively the date of the manuscript. Kirshbaum agreed.

  As I said, nothing in my experience as a graduate student of English literature or a professor of literature for the past twenty-five years had prepared me for the depth of detail of the results of Nickell’s examination, nor for the sheer beauty of the rigors of his procedures and the subtleties of his conclusions.

  Dr. Nickell describes himself as “an investigator and historical-document examiner.” He has written seventeen books, including Pen, Ink & Evidence: A Study of Writing and Writing Materials for the Penman, Collector, and Document Detective (1990) and Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents (1996). He is an investigative writer for the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, based in Amherst, New York, where he is also Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry. Nickell also characterizes himself as an investigator of “fringe-science claims” and as an expert on “myths and mysteries, frauds, forgeries, and hoaxes.” Nickell gained international notoriety when he exposed the fraud of the diary of Jack the Ripper. Picture John Steed in a bowler hat, driving Mrs. Peel in his Morgan to a grand estate in the English countryside: that was my image of Dr. Nickell.

  Two paragraphs struck me in Nickell’s report:

  Considerable evidence indicates that The Bondwoman’s Narrative is an authentic manuscript of circa 1853–1861. A specific mention of “the equestrian statue of Jackson” in Washington demonstrates that the work could not have been completed before 1853, and the omission of any r
eference to secession or the Civil War makes no logical sense unless it was written prior to those events. Other references in the text as well as indications from the language are also consistent with this period. No anachronisms were found to point to a later time of composition.

  It was apparently written by a relatively young, African-American woman who was deeply religious and had obvious literary skills, although eccentric punctuation and occasional misspellings suggest someone who struggled to become educated. Her handwriting is a serviceable rendering of period-style script known as modified round hand (the fashion of ca. 1840–1865). She wrote more for legibility than speed, and was right handed.18

  This summary fails to do justice to the elegance of Nickell’s proof, so I have appended it in its entirety to this book. Let me summarize his most telling observations. Nickell established that the author of the manuscript was probably a young woman who lacked a formal education, judging from her “serviceable” handwriting, her “relative slowness” in writing, and her “eccentric” punctuation, to say the least. Crafts never uses periods; she uses semicolons idiosyncratically, and she places both apostrophes and quotation marks “at the baseline (like commas).” All in all, these pecularities amount to “a measure of unsophistication on the part of the writer,” as we might expect of a self-educated former slave, whose encounters with reading and writing would be informal, interrupted, intermittent, and furtive. Nickell also draws attention to Crafts’s style of handwriting, which is quite unlike “the minuscule script that was sometimes affected by Victorian ladies as an expression of femininity.”19

  By contrast, Crafts’s handwriting, he concludes, was “serviceable.”

  The fact that Crafts used a thimble to make “moistened paste wafers” bond more strongly to the page when she pasted over revisions, he concludes, argues persuasively that the author was a woman. Had Crafts been a white middle-class woman, he implies, her style of handwriting would quite possibly have been “elegant” and “diminutive.”

  Nickell pays close attention to Crafts’s level of diction, the scope of her vocabulary, and, by implication, the degree of familiarity with other texts, or literacy, that she reflects in word choice, metaphors, analogies, epigraphs, and allusions to other words, concluding that she had the equivalent, by today’s standards, of an eleventh-grade education. Slave authorship has been a vexed and contentious matter in American letters, one virtually as old as the slave narrative genre itself, which dates to 1760 but thrived as a weapon in the abolitionist movement between 1831 and 1865. Pro-slavery advocates—given the enormous popularity of the genre—scrutinized the writings of fugitive slaves in sustained attempts to find errors and thereby discredit the author’s depictions of the horrors and abuses of slavery itself. Abolitionist amanuenses were sometimes accused of having written a slave’s entire tale, as happened when Frederick Douglass, without question the most famous exslave author, published his famous classic 1845 Narrative of the Life. (His master wrote that he had known Douglass as a slave and that Douglass lacked the intelligence and ability to have written such a sophisticated narrative.) Occasionally, a slave’s narrative was recalled when southerners questioned his veracity, as in the case of James Williams in 1838, who had dictated the powerful story of his bondage and escape to no less an auditor than John Greenleaf Whittier. Other slave authors, such as Harriet Jacobs (who used the pseudonym Linda Brent in her 1861 autobiography), were accepted as authors by their contemporaries, only to be discredited, erroneously, by historians a century later. Jacobs was rehabilitated by the careful research of Jean Fagan Yellin. To avoid the sort of profound embarrassment that the case of Williams’s text generated within the abolitionist movement, slave authors were encouraged to be as precise and exact as possible, to name names and to embrace verisimilitude as a dominant mode of narrative development.

  Considering that virtually none of these authors received a formal education, the degree of literacy found in the slave narratives is quite remarkable. It is little wonder that questions of authorship arose. Nevertheless, as scholars such as John W. Blassingame, Jean Fagan Yellin, and William L. Andrews have shown in great detail, the fugitive slaves were by and large the authors of their own tales,even if the editorial hand of an abolitionist corrected grammar or reshaped the flow of the narrative.

  This is why Hannah Crafts’s narrative, if authenticated, would have such great historical importance: to be able to study a manuscript written by a black woman or man, unedited, unaffected, un-glossed, unaided by even the most well-intentioned or unobtrusive editorial hand, would help a new generation of scholars to gain access to the mind of a slave in an unmediated fashion heretofore not possible. Between us and them, between a twenty-first-century readership and the pre-edited consciousness of even one fugitive slave, often stands an editorial apparatus reflective of an abolitionist ideology, to some degree or another; here, on the other hand, perhaps for the first time, we could experience a pristine encounter. This is not to imply that the “written by himself” or “herself” subtitles to so many of the slave narratives should be questioned: it is only to say that never before have we been absolutely certain that we have enjoyed the pleasure of reading a text in the exact order of wording in which a fugitive slave constructed it.

  Nickell points to Crafts’s use of polysyllables—words such as magnanimity, obsequious, and vicissitudes—as proof that Crafts was not “an unread person.” Simultaneously, he continues, Crafts’s misspellings are legion: “incumber” for encumber, “benumed” for benumbed, “meloncholy” for melancholy, “your” for you’re. The curious combination of these two tendencies, moreover, is still another sign of the auto-didact, “consistent with someone who struggled to learn.” Crafts’s progress from slavery to freedom overlaps precisely with her progress from “illiterate slave girl to keeper of ‘a school for colored children.’” Her references to Byron, to “the law of the Medes and Persians,” and the “lip of Heraclitus”—as well as her biblical epigraphs and other allusions—suggest the eclectic reading habits of a highly motivated person devouring the arbitrary selections in a small library in a middle-class, mid-century American home. Remarkably, Wheeler left a listing of the books in his private library, to which Crafts ostensibly would have had access. A list of these titles, compiled by Bryan Sinche, appears in Appendix C. In other words, Hannah Crafts wrote what she read, as is abundantly obvious from her uses of conventions from gothic and sentimental novels. In fact, no similar blend of genres exists in the antebellum tradition of African American writing.

  Dorothy Porter’s letter to Emily Driscoll in 1951 had referred to Crafts’s text as a “manuscript novel” and as a “fictionalized personal narrative.” Even without researching Crafts’s life or any of the details of her narrative, it is obvious that, however true might have been the events upon which the episodes in her tale are based, Crafts sought to record her story squarely within the extremely popular tradition of the sentimental novel, replete with gothic elements.

  If all of this were true, however—and all of these fictional elements are to be found in The Bondwoman’s Narrative—then how could I ever find Hannah Crafts? That is to say, if her tale is a fiction, how could I verify that she had once been a slave, and was a fugitive, as her subtitle claims her to be, “recently escaped from North Carolina”? If I were lucky enough to find a black woman living in New Jersey (where she claims to be teaching “colored” children at novel’s end) named Hannah Crafts—which I had become increasingly skeptical about being able to do, because of the text’s references to Ellen Craft’s cross-dressing, possibly pointing to “Crafts” as a protective pseudonym—how could I ever verify her claim to be an escaped slave? In other words, it occurred to me as I read Dr. Joe Nickell’s amazingly detailed report that I possessed a manuscript that was written sometime between 1853 and 1861, that read like a novel despite its title and its internal claims to be a slave narrative, and that was in all probability written by a black woman who might not ever be f
ound, which seemed to be the way that Hannah Crafts had wanted it. Nevertheless, this quasi-gothic, sentimental slave narrative—no matter how fictionalized I found it to read—rang true at times, especially in her account of the master-slave power relation; her depictions of life in Virginia, North Carolina, and Washington; and, as Wyatt Houston Day had suggested, her various passages about routes and methods of escape adopted by fugitive slaves. How was I to proceed with the search for Hannah Crafts?

  As a rule, novels do not depict actual people by their real names. Slave narratives, by contrast, tend to depict all—or almost all—of their characters by their real names, to help to establish the veracity of the author’s experiences with and indictment of the brutal excess implicit in the life of a slave. I write “almost all” because of an occasional change of name to protect the narrator’s modesty or those who might be harmed back on the plantation by the revelation of the author’s identity. Harriet Jacobs became “Linda Brent” and altered the names of characters, in large part because of her revelations about selecting a white lover out of wedlock and bearing his children. And indeed, Dickensian names such as the overseer in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, aptly named Mr. Severe, seem a bit too good to be true. (Actually, the overseer’s name was Sevier, but Douglass’s tale is so chock full of detail that an occasional allegorically named character is a relief!) But as a rule, fictions of slavery—whether Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Mattie Griffith’s Autobiography—tend not to contain characters named after the author’s actual contemporaries, people who lived and breathed. (A historical novel like Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave is an obvious exception.) If I could find Crafts’s characters in historical records, then, the possibility existed that she had known them as a slave.