The Bondwoman's Narrative Read Free

of these authors confused
     their fictional narrators with real black people. Whereas numerous black people have been taken for white, including the extremely
     popular twentieth-century historical novelist Frank Yerby or the critic Anatole Broyard, in acts of literary ventriloquism,
     virtually no white nineteenth-century author successfully passed for black for very long. My fundamental operating principle
     when engaged in this sort of historical research is that if someone
claimed
to have been black, then they most probably were, since there was very little incentive (financial or otherwise) for doing
     so.
    Armed with these assumptions, I decided to attempt to obtain Hannah Crafts’s manuscript. At the time of the auction—February
     15, 2001—I was recovering from a series of hip-replacement surgeries and was forbidden to travel. I asked a colleague, Richard
     Newman, a well-known scholar, librarian, and bibliophile, and the Fellows Coordinator at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at
     Harvard, if he would go in my stead and bid on lot 30. He agreed. We discussed an upper limit on the bid.
    The next day I waited expectantly for Dick’s call, fearful that the bidding would far surpass my modest cap on the sale. When
     no phone call came by the end of office hours, I knew that we had failed to acquire the manuscript. Finally, late that night,
     Dick phoned. He had waited to call until the auction was complete. His first bid had been accepted, he reported, for far less
     than the floor proposed in the catalogue. No one else had bid on lot 30. I was astonished.
    Dick also told me that he had spoken about the authenticity of the manuscript with Wyatt Houston Day, the only person who
     had read it in half a century other than Dorothy Porter Wesley. Day had told Dick that he had found “internal evidence that
     it was written by an African American.” Moreover, he didn’t think that Wesley would have bought it, as it turned out, in 1948—“if
     she didn’t think it authentic.” He also promised to send me the correspondence between Dorothy and the bookseller from whom
     she had purchased the manuscript. My suspicion about the curious line in the Swann catalogue description had been confirmed:
     Dorothy Porter Wesley had indeed believed Hannah Crafts to be black, and so did Wyatt Houston Day. Accordingly, I was even
     more eager to read the manuscript than I had been initially, and just as eager to read Porter’s thoughts about its origins
     and her history of its provenance.
    It turned out that Porter had purchased the manuscript in 1948 for $85 from Emily Driscoll, a manuscript and autograph dealer
     who kept a shop on Fifth Avenue. In her catalogue (no. 6, 1948), item number 9 reads as follows:
    A fictionalized biography, written in an effusive style, purporting to be the story of the early life and escape of one Hannah
     Crafts, a mulatto, born in Virginia, who lived there, in Washington, D.C., and Wilmington, North Carolina. From internal evidence
     it is apparent that the work is that of a Negro who had a narrative gift. Interesting for its content and implications. Believed
     to be unpublished.
    Driscoll dated the manuscript’s origin as “before 1860.” (Wyatt Houston Day, judging from the appearance of the paper and
     ink as well as internal evidence, had dated it “circa 1850s.”)
    Dorothy Porter (she would marry the historian Charles Wesley later) wrote to Driscoll with her reactions to Hannah Crafts’s
     text. Porter perceptively directed Driscoll’s attention to two of the manuscript’s most distinctive features: first, that
     it is “written in a sentimental and effusive style” and was “strongly influenced by the sentimental fiction of the mid-Nineteenth
     Century.” At the same time, however, despite employing the standard conventions of the sentimental novel, which thrived in
     the 1850s as a genre dominated by women writers, this novel seems to be autobiographical, reflecting “first-hand