From experience to eloquence

New Crisis, The, May/Jun 2002 by Asim, Jabari

From Experience To Eloquence

The Bondwoman's Narrative

By Hannah Crafts

Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

(Warner Books, $24.95) In an essay in richard Wright's Black Boy, scholar Charles T. Davis identified the book's ultimate triumph as its author's "ability to face [his] dreadful experience in the south and to record it." Davis referredto Wright's journey as a progression "from experience to eloquence," a wonderful phrase that applies just as well to The Bondwoman's Narrative, a fictionalized slave narrative by Hannah Crafts. Written just prior to the Civil War, the novel went unpublished for more than a cantry, occasionally passing through the hands of collectors but most languishing in dusty obscurity. Unearthed and edited by Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., this slim account of a woman's experiences as a slave in Virginia and North Carolina is both a fascinating historical document and a well-told tale. Nearly as interesting in the story of the narrative's recent rediscovery, which Gates describes in his introduction.

Gates bought the 300-page manuscript - "faded brown ink on fragile, crumbling paper" - at Swann Galleries' annual auction of African American artifacts in New York. Gates' retelling is informative, engaging and often witty, somewhat reminiscent of a high-brow detective story. He likens the effort to verify and publish Crafts' manuscript to an excavation (indeed, some variation of the phrase "depths of the black past" appears three times within a three-page span). His consultations with various experts introduce several terms significant to such enterprises. We learn about the chemical properties of iron-gall ink, the difference between a composing copy (first draft) and a fair copy (second or third draft), and the significance of a holograph (or handwritten) document. Because there are no holograph versions of works by Frederick Douglass, Ellen Watkins Harper and other pioneers of Black writing, Crafts' narrative will enable readers to, as Gates notes, "encounter the unadulterated 'voice' of the fugitive slave herself, exactly as she wrote and edited it." Gates makes clear that he had a lot of help attempting to authenticate his find.

He pays tribute to the late Dorothy Porter Wesley, a noted African American bibliophile and previous owner of the manuscript. Building on Porter Wesley's work and helped by scholars such as William L. Andrews and John Blassingame, Gates constructs a case for Crafts' blackness. He distinguishes fictionalized slave narratives from the genuine article and white-written efforts from those created by Blacks. He argues that even novels written by abolition-minded whites bore the scars of "popular nineteenth-century racist views about the nature and capacities of their Black characters that few Black authors could possibly have shared.

In her assessment of the manuscript, Porter Wesley noted the author's "approach to other Negroes is that they are people first of all. Only as the story unfolds, in most instances, does it become apparent they are Negroes."

Gates contrasts Crafts' handling of Black characters with that of whites writing during the same period.

"Even for a well-meaning abolitionist author such as Harriet Beecher Stowe," he notes, "the sign of blackness or race predetermined the limited range of characteristics even possible for a black person to possess."

As for Crafts' novel itself, Gates calls it "an unusual amalgam of conventions from gothic novels, sentimental novels and the slave narratives," which is exactly right. The eventful plot includes ghost stories, curses that condemn generations of thoughtless sinners, star-crossed lovers, melodramatic suicides and subplots involving Blacks passing as white. It begins in Virginia, at the ancient mansion of Lindendale, where as a young slave Hannah is secretly taught to read by a pair of kindly white neighbors. In his notes, Gates suggests that Hannah, a pale-- skinned house slave, "is a prototype of the tragic mulatto figure" that would become "a stock character in turn-of-the-century black literature." She also exhibits attitudes toward herself and other Blacks that reflect the influence of racial stereotyping. For example, she confides, "I am superstitious, I confess it; people of my race and color usually are."

Gates points out the irony of such remarks, but it is not clear that the irony is intentional on the part of the author.

Even so, as the following passage shows, Crafts' talent is obvious:

"The clear cold sunshine glancing down the long avenue of elms saw nothing but moving shadows of the leafless branches, and heard nothing but the roaring wind as it passed among the trees."

After an initial ill-fated escape

attempt, Hannah endures a succession of adventures and indignities made bearable by the occasional intervention of a kindly Christian white character. The heroine's most affecting observations seem to result from the author's firsthand knowledge of slavery. For instance, Hannah asserts, "those who think that the greatest evils of slavery are connected with physical suffering possess no just or rational ideas of human nature. The soul, the immortal soul must ever long and yearn for a thousand things inseperable to liberty. Then, too, the fear, the apprehension, the dread, and deep anxiety always attending that condition in a greater or less degree. There can be no certainty, no abiding confidence in the possession of any good thing."