Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Hollis Robbins, eds. In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative

African American Review, Summer, 2006 by Lauren Hauptman

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Hollis Robbins, eds. In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative. New York: BasicCivitas, 2004. 458 pp. $27.50 cloth/ $17.50 paper.

In search of Hannah Crafts concerns itself with a resumed slave narrative for which Gates was the sole bidder at an auction of African Americana. The volume lay for nearly a century in a New Jersey attic until its discovery by the African American bibliophile Dorothy Porter Wesley. It proved a dazzling find. Believed to be the "first known novel by a black woman" (215), the book is a gold mine for literary critics, scholars, historians, and anyone interested in the black experience in America. Unpublished, and therefore untouched by white editors who probably would have skewed the content to advance abolitionist goals, the volume promises to give the first truly authentic account of African American life on the eve of the Civil War.

Confounding the issue, however, is the genre: the narrative is clearly a piece of fiction. No one is quite sure what to make of this author who promises to deliver a true account of her life as a runaway slave, but writes a piece filled with gothic cliches, sentimental phrasings, and a heady mix of styles cobbled from different genres. Portraits crash to the floor, trees creak portentously, longlost mothers appear in a suspiciously utopian New Jersey, and people have names like Trappe and Wright that reflect their personalities in groaningly obvious ways (a character named Mr. Saddler dies by falling off his horse).

Crafts lifts an astonishing amount of material from other sources, often barely altering the language. Bleak House, Jane Eyre, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Escape, or, A Leap for Freedom (the first play published by a black man, William Wells Brown), and more obscure texts including, puzzlingly, proslavery novels, all feed into her work, often with the change of only a few words. Some essayists consider Crafts a "genius" performing "literary alchemy" (82) or the more strained "double-voiced discourse" (78). Others deride the clumsy writing and impossible coincidences, calling the novel a "dull, sometimes tedious read" (439) filled with "leaden prose" (440). However one takes The Bondwoman's Narrative, it is well worth considering that Crafts apparently never tried to get it published, never officially passing off the many passages taken from other sources as her own.

One issue troubling many critics is the main character's snobbery over members of her own race. Nearly white, the house slave Hannah exhibits disdain for those beneath her in the plantation system. She rejects the chance to run away until threatened with a marriage to one of "the vile, foul filthy inhabitants of the huts." During the course of the novel Hannah begs a kindly white woman to buy her, rejects her friends' escape plans, and even betrays her friends to the woman in question, who magnanimously turns a blind eye to the plot. As Bryan Sinche notes in his essay, "Hannah appears to gain the reward of freedom by being a model slave" (175). Paradoxically, however, this outcome all but verifies the novel as the product of a black author. Many essayists point out that no white abolitionist writer would have allowed a slave to enjoy her servitude or to subvert the plans of other slaves.

In fact, as Ann Fabian notes in her fascinating history of abolitionist literature, "Abolitionists and fugitives from slavery worked hard to establish former slaves as reliable narrators" (44). Fugitive slaves were viewed by many as suspicious storytellers because of the very skills that enabled them to escape from the system--the ability to dissemble and to manipulate reality. When the first slave narrative published by abolitionists turned out to be false (the author fled to England with the money from the story), white editors had to be extremely careful with the works they published. This care often meant conforming to a script that did not allow for ambiguity. Hannah's acceptance of her condition as a slave and her sycophantic devotion to her white mistresses would have disqualified the work as genuine in the eyes of the public.

In many ways, however, Crafts subverts the master-slave relationship. In a scene redolent of vaudeville, a vain mistress orders Hannah to buy an Italian face powder. The mistress applies the powder, which immediately turns pitch black, and is disgraced forever when she trounces off to meet with an important government official. Juvenile as this humor seems, critics adore this scene for the comeuppance Hannah gives her mistress. Most essayists, however, take on a passage with much more subtle, yet profound, implications. Sent to close the windows in a distant wing of her master's mansion, Hannah shakes off an eerie feeling and enters a room full of portraits. Priscilla Wald notes in her essay that "The setup of the incident makes us expect a ghost story and a punishment." However, neither happens. Hannah watches the light of the linden tree outside play on the portraits, feeling suddenly free as she observes that the portraits cannot enchain her. As the light bounces around the various faces, they take on milder or more ferocious expressions at random. Wald suggests, along with other authors, that this scene "enfranchises speculation" (219), enabling Hannah imaginatively to "write" the personalities of these figures, who, themselves, cannot act. According to Wald, Crafts subverts gothic conventions by introducing no ghosts or supernatural calamity. All the misfortunes that occur in the novel result from the plantation system itself--including the eventual sale of the portraits, a witty reversal of the slave experience. "Slavery needs no actual ghosts" (227), Wald states, and, indeed, gothic catastrophes would even "risk blunting the reader's sensibility to the crimes enabled by the institution of slavery" (221).