The Bondwoman's Narrative Read Free Page B

the editing
     of an anthology that had defined the canon of antebellum black writing, was without peer in her generation of scholars. Because
     she thought Hannah Crafts to have been black, I wanted to learn more. But Dorothy Porter had apparently not attempted to locate
     the historical Hannah Crafts; she had, however, located a Wheeler family living in North Carolina “both before and after the
     war,” the Wheelers being Hannah Crafts’s masters. And, almost in passing, she mentioned to Driscoll that she had come across
     “one John Hill Wheeler (1806–1882)” who “held some government positions,” presumably in Washington, D.C.
    Curious about Dorothy Porter’s report of her instincts, and filing away her observation about the Wheeler who had held government
     positions, I finally read the manuscript before embarking upon the arduous, detailed search through nineteenth-century U.S.
     census records for the characters in Crafts’s novel and, indeed, for Crafts herself.
    What I read is a fascinating novel about passing, set on plantations in Virginia and North Carolina and in a government official’s
     residence in Washington, D.C. The novel is an unusual amalgam of conventions from gothic novels, sentimental novels, and the
     slave narratives. After several aborted attempts to escape, the heroine ends her journey in New Jersey, where she marries
     a Methodist minister and teaches schoolchildren in a free black community.
    I found
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
a captivating novel for several reasons. If indeed Hannah Crafts turned out to be black, this would be the first novel written
     by a female fugitive slave, and perhaps the first novel written by any black woman at all. Hannah Crafts’s novel ends with
     the classic conclusion of a sentimental novel, which can be summarized as “and they lived happily ever after,” unlike Wilson’s
     novel, which ends with her direct appeal to the reader to purchase her book so that she can retrieve her son, who is in the
     care of a foster home. Crafts also uses the story of a fugitive slave’s captivity and escape for the elements of her plot,
     as well as a subplot about passing, two other “firsts” for a black female author in the African American literary tradition.
    The Bondwoman’s Narrative
contains one of the earliest examples of the topos of babies switched at birth—one black, one white—in African American literature. 6 The novel begins with the story of the mulatto mistress of the Lindendale plantation, who tries to pass but is trapped—appropriately
     enough—by one Mr. Trappe. Her story unfolds in chapter four, “A Mystery Unraveled.” On page 44, Crafts tells us that a nurse
     had placed her mistress “in her lady’s bed, and by her lady’s side, when that Lady was to[o] weak and sick and delirious to
     notice[, and] the dead was exchanged for the living.” The natural mother is sold south, the child is reared as white, and
     Mr. Trappe, who eventually uncovers the truth through his position as the family’s lawyer, uses his knowledge to blackmail
     Hannah’s mulatto mistress. Mark Twain, among others, would employ a similar plot device in his novel
Pudd’nhead Wilson
(1894).
    The costuming, or cross-dressing, of the character Ellen as a boy (pp. 81–84) foreshadows Hannah’s own method of escape and
     echoes the method of escape used in real life by the slave couple Ellen and William Craft in December 1848. The sensational
     story of Ellen’s use of a disguise as a white male was first reported in Frederick Douglass’s newspaper,
The North Star,
on July 20, 1849. 7 William Wells Brown’s novel,
Clotel
(1853), employed this device, and William Still, in his book,
The Underground Railroad
(1872), reports similar uses of “male attire” by female slaves Clarissa Davis (in 1854) and Anna Maria Weems (alias Joe Wright)
     in 1855. 8 I wondered if Hannah’s selection of the surname Crafts for her own name could possibly have been an