The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  One other thing struck me about Hannah Crafts’s claim to authorship as “a fugitive slave,” as she puts it in the subtitle of her manuscript. Fewer than a dozen white authors in the nineteenth century engaged in literary racial ventriloquism, adopting a black persona and claiming to be black. Why should they? Harriet Beecher Stowe had redefined the function—and the economic and political potential—of the entire genre of the novel by retaining her own identity and writing about blacks, rather than as a black. While it is well known that Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold an unprecedented 300,000 copies between March 20, 1852, and the end of the year, even Stowe’s next anti-slavery novel, Dred, sold more than 100,000 copies in one month alone in 1856.1 There was no commercial advantage to be gained by a white author writing as a black one; Stowe sold hundreds of thousands more copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred than all of the black-authored slave narratives combined, despite the slave narrative’s enormous popularity, and had no need to disguise herself as a black author.

  The artistic challenge of creating a fictional slave narrative, purportedly narrated or edited by an amanuensis, did appeal to a few writers, however, as the scholars Jean Fagan Yellin and William L. Andrews have shown.2 As early as 1815, Legh Richmond published a novel in Boston titled The Negro Servant: An Authentic and Interesting Narrative, which, Richmond claims in the novel’s subtitle, had been “Communicated by a Clergyman of the Church of England.” Nevertheless, these fictionalized slave narratives were published with the identity of a white “editor’s” or printer’s presence signified on the title or copyright page, thereby undermining the ruse by drawing attention to the true author’s identity as a white person. And even the most successful of these novels, Richard Hildreth’s popular novel, The Slave: or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), was consistently questioned in reviews.3

  Similarly, in the case of the sole example of a female fictionalized slave narrative—Mattie Griffith’s Autobiography of a Female Slave, published anonymously in October 1856—“few readers seemed to credit the narrative voice as one that belonged to a former slave,” as the editor of a recent edition, Joe Lockard, concludes from a careful examination of contemporary reviews. Accordingly, Griffith revealed her identity as a white woman within weeks of the book’s publication, in part because reviews, such as one published in the Boston Evening Transcript on December 3, 1856, argued that the work could only be taken as the work of “some rabid abolitionist.”4

  Moreover, reading these ten slave narrative novels today reveals their authors often to be firmly in the grip of popular nineteenth-century racist views about the nature and capacities of their black characters that few black authors could possibly have shared, as in this example from Griffith’s novel:

  Young master, with his pale, intellectual face, his classic head, his sun-bright curls, and his earnest blue eyes, sat in a half-lounging attitude, making no inappropriate picture of an angel of light, whilst the two little black faces seemed emblems of fallen, degraded humanity. [p. 113]

  Griffith’s passage—as Jean Yellin notes—echoes one from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  There stood the two children, representatives of the two extremes of society. The fair, high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbor. They stood the representatives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, commands, education, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice. (Chapter 20)5

  Or this exchange purportedly between Griffith’s mulatto heroine and the slave Aunt Polly:

  “Oh child,” she begun [sic], “can you wid yer pretty yallow face kiss an old pitch-black nigger like me?”

  “Why, yes, Aunt Polly, and love you too; if your face is dark I am sure your heart is fair.” [p. 55]

  Whereas several black authors of the slave narratives drew sharp class and intellectual distinctions between house and field slaves, and sometimes indicated these differences by color and dialect (I am thinking here of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, among others), rarely did they allow themselves to be caught in the web of racist connotations associated with slaves, blackness, and the “natural capacities” of persons of African descent, as often did the handful of white authors in antebellum America attempting to adopt a black persona through a novel’s narrator.

  It occurred to me as I studied the Swann catalogue that another telling feature of this manuscript that would be essential to establishing the racial identity of its author would be the absence or presence of the names of real people—that is, people or characters who had actually existed and whom the author had known herself. Novels pretending to be actual autobiographical slave narratives rarely use anything but fictional names for their characters, just as Harriet Beecher Stowe does, even if Stowe had based her characters on historical sources, including authentic slave narratives, as she revealed in The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded (1853). In other words, no white author had written a fictionalized slave narrative that used as the names of characters the real names of people who had actually existed. Nor had a white author created a fiction of black slave life that either did not read “like a novel,” falling outside of the well-established conventions of the slave narrative as a genre, or did not unconsciously reflect racist assumptions about black people, flaws even more glaring because of the author’s hatred of the institution of slavery.

  Nor did a nineteenth-century white writer, attempting these acts of literary minstrelsy or ventriloquism, successfully “pass for black.” Just as the minstrels in the nineteenth century—or Al Jolson, Mae West, Elvis Presley, and Eminem in the twentieth century—undertook the imitation of blackness to one degree or another, few of the contemporaries 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 ea
ger 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 knowledge 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 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.” 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 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 homage to Ellen, as would have been the use of Ellen’s name for the character in her novel.