The Bondwoman's Narrative -- Who is Hannah Crafts? -- Blog Post Two

Tracing the Lineage of the Narrative

The Bondwoman’s Narrative went up for auction in 2001 at Swann Galleries’ annual auction of “Printed and Manuscript African-Americana” (Gates IX). According to Gates (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) the catalogue description of the narrative reads:

"Unpublished Original Manuscript. Offered by Emily Driscoll in her 1948 catalogue, with her description reading in part, ‘a fictionalized biography, written in effusive style, purporting to be the story, or the early life and escape of one Hannah Crafts, a mulatto, born in Virginia.’ The manuscript consists of 21 chapters, each headed by an epigraph. The narrative is not only that of the mulatto Hannah, but also of her mistress who turns out to be a light-skinned woman passing for white. It is uncertain that this work is written by a “negro.” The work is written by someone intimately familiar with the areas in the South where the narrative takes place. Her escape route is one sometimes used by run-aways” (Gates, XI).

Gates also adds that the narrative was thought to have been written around the 1850s. It was being sold from Dorothy Porter Wesley’s library. Dorothy Porter Wesley (1905-1995) had a long and illustrious career as a librarian and historian at Howard University’s Moorland Spingarn Research Center. According to Gates, “Porter Wesley was one of the most famous black librarians and bibliophiles of the twentieth century....” (Gates XII).

Gates was particularly enthused that the narrative was from Porter Wesley’s collection because he believed that “her notes about the manuscript, if she had left any, would be crucial in establishing the racial identity of the author of [the] text” (Gates XII). Establishing the author’s race was especially important because if the author was a black woman, then the “autobiographical novel” could possibly be “the first novel written by a black woman…who had been a slave” (Gates XII). Although Gates poured through multiple sets of census records and even hired a historian to authenticate the text, he could not locate a record of Hannah Crafts. However, he does use his introduction to the text to describe the novel’s numerous characteristics that support the assertion that it was written by a black woman. A selection of these characteristics is discussed below.

Literary Racial Ventriloquism
Gates asserts that one of the reasons he believed that the narrative was written by a black woman was because of “Craft’s claim to authorship as a ‘fugitive slave’…fewer than a dozen white authors in the nineteenth century engaged in literary racial ventriloquism” (Gates XIII). According to Gates, “Literary Racial Ventriloquism,” in this case, would be a white author “adopting a black persona and claiming to be black” (Gates XIII). He argues that white authors dropped the trend of racial ventriloquism in the 19th century after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852.

According to Gates, “Beecher Stowe redefined the function—and economic and political potential—of the entire genre … by retaining her own identity and writing about blacks, rather than as a black” (Gates XIII). He furthers, arguing that “there was no commercial advantage to be gained by a white author writing as a black one; Stowe sold hundreds of thousands more copies…than all of the black-authored slave narratives together” (Gates XIV).

Craft’s Approach to Other African Americans
Dorothy Porter Wesley argues that “there is no doubt that she [the author] was a Negro because her approach to other Negroes is that they are people first of all” (Gates XIX). This has a dual meaning. First, it means that the author did not express any subconscious racism as many white authors did when describing blacks. The expression of subconscious racism ran rampant throughout many novels written by whites about blacks. The Bondwoman’s narrative, however, does not share this same tendency.

More importantly, and much more telling of the author’s race, is the fact that in her descriptions of people in the narrative, her “default racial baseline” is black. “Whereas black writers assumed the humanity of black characters as the default…white writers…used whiteness. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to take one example, white characters receive virtually no racial identification...Blackness, by contrast, is almost always marked” (Gates XIX). In this text however, the reverse is true and “only as the story unfolds, in most instances, does it become apparent that they are Negroes” (Gates XIX). Essentially, Craft’s treatment of black characters in her text strongly indicates that she was black.

Craft’s Emphasis on Literacy

As we’ve learned in class, one of the conventions of the slave narrative genre is the author’s focus on the importance of literacy. This text follows that convention and Crafts “is at pains to explain to her readers how she became literate” (Gates XXII). Craft’s places great emphasis on her yearning for literacy, asserting that she “had from the first an instinctive desire for knowledge and the means of mental improvement” (Crafts 6). She also describes occasions when she “would steal away…to ponder of the pages of some old book or newspaper…though I [Crafts] knew not the meaning of a single letter…” (Crafts 7). I would contend that this is one of the weaker points of Gate’s analysis because this convention could have easily been mimicked by a white writer.

Craft’s Depiction of the “Tension Between House Slaves and Field Slaves”
According to Gates, “rarely have African American class or color tensions…been represented so openly and honestly as in this novel” (Gates XXIII). One example of the depiction of this tension in the narrative is Craft’s horror at being sent to live “among the vile, foul, filthy inhabitants of the huts” (Crafts 205). Gates also contends that although authors such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs discuss “class distinctions” in their narratives, they don’t talk about them as freely as Crafts does.

This supports Gates and Porter Wesley’s assumption that Crafts was, in fact, black. Gates argues that a white writer would most likely not have been aware of these tensions and would not have been able to describe them as precisely as Crafts does.

Furthermore, if the narrative had been written by an abolitionist, working towards ending slavery, they would not place an emphasis on these tensions, as they might have detracted from their purpose for writing the narrative

The Editor: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is also the chair of Afro-American Studies Department and heads the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, also at Harvard.

Gates has published numerous texts about slave narratives and has also served as editor for a number of slave narrative anthologies. His introduction to the Bondwoman’s presents the research that he did to determine the identity of Hannah Crafts.

After purchasing the manuscript in 2001, he had the novel published in 2002. There have been six editions of the narrative.

Works Cited

Crafts, Hannah. The Bondwoman’s Narrative. New York: Warner Brothers, Inc., 2002. Print.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Introduction. The Bondwoman’s Narrative. By Hannah Crafts. New
                 York: Warner Brothers, Inc., 2002. IX-LXXIV. Print.