The Bondwoman's Narrative Read Free Page A

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     of estate life in Virginia,” unlike even those sentimental novels written about the South. Despite this autobiographical element,
     this text is a novel, replete with the conventions of the sentimental: “the best of the writer’s mind was religious and emotional
     and in her handling of plot the long arm of coincidence is nowhere spared,” Porter concludes with considerable understatement.
    Most important of all, Porter strongly stresses to Driscoll that she is firmly convinced that Hannah Crafts was an African
     American woman:
    The most important thing about this fictionalized personal narrative is that, from internal evidence, it appears to be the
     work of a Negro and the time of composition was before the Civil War in the late forties and fifties.
    Porter arrived at this conclusion not only because of Crafts’s intimate knowledge of plantation life in Virginia but also—and
     this comment was the most striking of all—because of the subtle, “natural” manner in which she draws black characters.
    There is no doubt that she was a Negro because her approach to other Negroes is that they are people first of all. Only as
     the story unfolds, in most instances, does it become apparent that they are Negroes.
    I was particularly intrigued by this observation. Although I had not thought much about it before, white writers of the 1850s
     (and well beyond) did tend to introduce Negro characters in their works in an awkward manner. Whereas black writers assumed
     the humanity of black characters as the default, as the baseline of characterization in their texts, white writers, operating
     on the reverse principle, used whiteness as the default for humanity, introducing even one-dimensional characters with the
     metaphorical equivalent of a bugle and drum. In
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
to take one example, white characters receive virtually no racial identification. Mr. Haley is described as “a short, thick-set
     man.” Solomon is “a man in a leather apron.” Tom Loker is “a muscular man.” Whiteness is the default for Stowe. Blackness,
     by contrast, is almost always marked. For example, Mose and Pete, Uncle Tom’s and Aunt Chloe’s sons, are “a couple of wooly
     headed boys,” similar in description to “wooly headed Mandy.” Aunt Chloe surfaces in the text with a “round black shining
     face.” Uncle Tom is “a full glossy black,” possessing “a face [with] truly African features.” At one point in the novel “little
     black Jake” appears. Black characters are almost always marked by their color or features when introduced into Stowe’s novel.
     Thinking about Stowe’s use of color when introducing black characters forced me to wonder what Porter had meant about Crafts’s
     handling of the characterization of black people. Porter’s observation was both acute and original.
    In response to Porter’s undated letter, Emily Driscoll wrote back on September 27, 1951. After saying she was “delighted”
     that Porter was keeping the manuscript for her personal collection, Driscoll reveals how she came upon it:
    I bought it from a scout in the trade (a man who wanders around with consignment goods from other dealers). Because of my
     own deep interest in the item as well as the price I paid him I often tried to find out from him where he bought it and all
     that I could learn was that he came upon it in Jersey!
    “It’s my belief,” Driscoll concludes, “that it is based on a substratum of fact, considerably embroidered by a romantic imagination
     fed by reading those 19th Century novels it so much resembles.” Driscoll, like Porter, believed the book to be an autobiographical
     novel based on the actual life of a female fugitive slave.
    It is difficult to explain how excited I became as I read this exchange of letters. Dorothy Porter was one of the most sophisticated
     scholars of antebellum black writing; indeed, her work in this area, including both subtle critical commentary and