Hannah Crafts, as a narrator, is at pains to explain to her readers how she became literate. This is a signal feature of the slave narratives, and of Wilson’s Our Nig. She also establishes herself as blessed with the key characteristics of a writer, as someone possessing “a silent unobtrusive way of observing things and events, and wishing to understand them better than I could.”9 “Instead of books,” she continues modestly, “I studied faces and characters, and arrived at conclusions by a sort of sagacity” similar to “the unerring certainty of animal instinct.” She then reveals how she was taught to read and write by the elderly white couple who ran afoul of the law because of their actions. Early in her novel, Crafts remembers that, even as a child, “while the other children of the house were amusing themselves I would quietly steal away from their company to ponder over the pages of some old book or newspaper that chance had thrown in [my] way. . . . I loved to look at them and think that some day I should probably understand them all.”
Crafts is also remarkably open about her feelings toward other slaves. Her horror and disgust at moving from the Wheeler home to the “miserable” huts of the field slaves, whose lives are “vile, foul, filthy,” her anger at her betrayal by the “dark mulatto” slave Maria with “black snaky eyes,” and her description of Jo, are among the sort of observations, you will recall, that Dorothy Porter felt underscore the author’s ethnic identity as an African American—that is, the very normality and ordinariness of her reactions, say, to the wretched conditions of slave life or to being betrayed by another black person. Rarely have African American class or color tensions—the tensions between house slaves and field slaves—been represented so openly and honestly as in this novel, foreshadowing similar comments made by writers such as Nella Larsen in the 1920s and 1930s, in another novel about a mulatto and passing:
Here the inscrutability of the dozen or more brown faces, all cast from the same indefinite mold, and so like her own, seemed pressed forward against her. Abruptly it flashed upon her that the harrowing invitation of the past few weeks was a smoldering hatred. Then she was overcome by another, so actual, so sharp, so horribly painful, that forever afterwards she preferred to forget it. It was as if she were shut up, boxed up, with hundreds of her race, closed up with that something in the racial character which had always been, to her, inexplicable, alien. Why, she demanded in fierce rebellion, should she be yoked to these despised black people? (Quicksand, chapter 10)
Often when reading black authors in the nineteenth century, one feels that the authors are censoring themselves. But Hannah Crafts writes the way we can imagine black people talked to—and about—one another when white auditors were not around, and not the way abolitionists thought they talked, or black authors thought they should talk or wanted white readers to believe they talked. This is a voice that we have rarely, if ever, heard before. Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, for example, all drew these sort of class distinctions in their slave narratives and fictions (in the case of Douglass and Brown)—even contrasting slaves speaking dialect with those speaking standard English—but toned down, or edited, compared with Hannah Crafts’s more raw version. This is the sort of thing Porter observed that led her initially to posit a black identity for Hannah Crafts.
Crafts, as Porter noted, tends to treat the blackness of her characters as the default, even on occasion signaling the whiteness of her characters, such as little Anna’s “white beautiful arms.” Often we realize the racial identity of her black characters only by context, in direct contrast to Stowe’s direct method of accounting for race as the primary indication of a black character’s identity. When the maid Lizzy is introduced in the novel, we learn that she was “much better educated than” Hannah was, that she was well traveled, and that she had “a great memory for dates and names” before we learn that she was “a Quadroon.” When near the novel’s end we meet Jacob and his sister, two fugitive slaves, Crafts describes them in the following manner: “Directly crossing . . . were the figures of two people. They were speaking, and the voices were those of a man and a woman.” Only later does she reveal Jacob’s race by reporting that “I opened my eyes to encounter those of a black man fixed on me,” a description necessary to resolve the mystery of the identity of these two people who, it turns out, are fugitive slaves like Hannah. Crafts, a visual narrator who loves to use language to paint landscapes and portraits of her characters, in the most vivid manner, does distinguish among the colors and characteristics, the habits and foibles, of the black people in her novel—one woman, she tells us, has “a withered smoke-dried face, black as ebony”—but she tends to do so descriptively, as a keen if opinionated observer from within. Crafts even describes her fellow slave Charlotte as “one every way my equal, perhaps my superior,” which would have been a remarkable leap for a white writer to make.
When she describes the wedding of Mrs. Henry’s “favorite slave,” she tells us about “[q]ueer looking old men,” then adds a description of their “withered and puckered” black faces that “contrasted strangely with their white beards.” Similarly, we see “fat portly dames” and then learn of their “ebony complexions” only as contrast to their “turbans of flaming red” and “gay clothes of rainbow colors.” The color of her characters here is called upon to paint a picture; Stowe, by contrast, almost never uses a black character’s color in this way. For Stowe, it is their defining marker of identity. For Crafts, slaves are always, first and last, human beings, “people” as she frequently puts it. Similarly, Crafts tells us that she was betrayed by a slave named Maria, “a wary, powerful, and unscrupulous enemy.” It is only after describing Maria’s attributes as an antagonist that Crafts thinks to tell us that she was “a dark mulatto, very quick motioned with black snaky eyes,” physical characteristics rendered here as outward reflections of her inner personality. Even for a well-meaning abolitionist author such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the reverse was often true: the sign of blackness or race predetermined the limited range of characteristics even possible for a black person to possess. The difference is a subtle one, but crucial. Occasionally, Crafts does not disclose the color or physical features of her black characters at all, as in her depiction of her mother and her husband in the final chapter of her novel. Few, if any, white novelists demonstrated this degree of ease or comfort with race in antebellum American literature.
As the scholar Augusta Rohrbach pointed out to me, Crafts’s novel manifests a surprisingly sophisticated storytelling technique—such as the way she relinquishes her tale on two occasions to the character, Lizzy, only to reinsert herself after Lizzy’s tale (which “made the blood run cold to hear”) has finished.10 But the novel also contains “all the clumsy plot structures, changing tenses, impossible coincidences and heterogeneous elements of the best” of the sentimental novels, as the critic Ann Fabian noted when I showed her the manuscript.11 It is the combination, the unfinished blend of its clashing styles, that points to the untutored and self-educated level of the author’s writing abilities, reflected in her vocabulary, in her spelling errors, in her uneven use of punctuation, in her narrative techniques, and in the clash of rhetorical devices borrowed from gothic and sentimental novels and the slave narratives.
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. 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.) Sh
e 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 secret.” Mr. Trappe, the rival keeper of secrets, is undone. By the end of the story, it’s really the Bondwoman 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. 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 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.
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 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 reference 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. 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 peculiarities 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 ex-slave author, published his 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.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 12