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

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 Unpublished, and therefore untouched by white editors who probably would have skewed the content to advance abolitionist goals, the volume promises to give the first truly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).

Many essayists take their analyses of Crafts's intentions even further, scrutinizing her writing style for evidence of what an unfortunate number of authors refer to as Hannah's "craft." Some view the author's frequent tense changes as attempts to establish the main character as both perceiver and artist. Crafts also shifts from the first- to second-person perspective during her narrative, as when she speaks of the experience of walking in silent rooms: "A supernatural thrill pervades your frame, and you feel the presence of mysterious beings" (Crafts 15). Some essayists see her use of the word "you" as drawing the reader into her experience, "craftily" guiding the reader to identify with a black heroine. Lawrence Buell may be closest to the truth about Crafts's writing style when he speaks of her gothic flourishes as "created as much for the sheer relish of it--the artist indulging her medium--as for fulfilling a particular instrumental purpose" (20).

Some essayists impose agonizingly self-conscious motivations on Crafts. One suspects her of "queering" the genre for her heroine's lack of interest in marriage. Another sees her as responsible for "an early attack on the barriers between fiction and history, so that the term "lying book' becomes tautology, thus brushing the solution of Signification up against the problem of signification." It is doubtful that Crafts herself had any idea that she was leading such an attack; equally debatable is the assumption that novels pretending to be autobiographies have been scarce in the history of literature. One might look to Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, Crafts's own literary mentors, for examples of social criticism enfolded in first-person narratives. Crafts's critics do her the most justice when they approach her rebelliousness on its own terms, noting that she condemns slave marriage because of the burdens it would place on children, and citing her audacity in giving her narrative a blissful ending, unprecedented in the slave narratives of her (presumed) contemporaries, but prevalent in white "women's fiction." This collection has far too many worthy essays to mention here, but two deserving of notice are Nina Baym's bright, sensible account of Crafts's possible identity, and William Gleason's masterful consideration of Crafts's use of the cottage as symbol (complete with illustrations of period homes). Many essayists reference one another's work, which provides a pleasing sense of community.

About 300 pages into the collection, the reader is in for a treat. Having delved through the murk of cultural criticism, the reader arrives at a brisk series of essays illuminating the world of literary detective work. The reader vicariously examines the novel for handwriting and punctuation (the author was young, wrote with a "serviceable" hand, and had eccentric punctuation), writing materials (paper with rag content and a goose quill pen), a date range (1853-1861), and, most importantly, evidence of the possible author.

Many clues rest within the novel itself. In The Bondwoman's Narrative Hannah makes her escape from one John Wheeler, an actual North Carolina politician who suffered an embarrassing scandal when his slave, Jane Johnson, escaped. Thomas C. Parramore and others give us an account of Wheeler's life, debating whether or not Jane Johnson could have learned to read when she escaped, and how quickly she could have familiarized herself with the literary canon. They take us on a tour of Wheeler's library, where we see most of the books referenced by Crafts (as well as the mirth-inducing Whom to Marry and How to Get Married! Or, The Adventures of a Lady in Search of a Good Husband). Katherine E. Flynn shows us around Johnson's neighborhood in Boston and digs through multiple census documents to shed light on her whereabouts. Just as the reader believes Johnson wrote the text, however, another contender enters the fray--Hannah Vincent, a black New Jersey schoolteacher who shares the last name of a fictional slave owner in the novel a Mr. De Vincent. Hannah Vincent seems the obvious choice until other essayists denounce her qualifications and convince the reader of yet another candidate. Essayist Joe Nickell notes the impossibility of determining the true writer as of yet, lamenting that "one person's conviction is another's unlikely scenario."

Authorship and intent aside, The Bondwoman's Narrative and the critical essays collected by Gates and Robbins serve many purposes for the modern reader. First, they provide insight into an eloquent if unevenly written work by a writer agreed by many to have been an African American woman. Second, they provide a time capsule of our own beliefs and concerns as projected onto the essentially unknowable intent of the author. Third, they nudge into life the dream many of us have that, someday, sleuths will uncover some dusty volume we have written in an attic somewhere, and catapult us into the literary firmament. It is gratifying to know that this fame could come to a black woman who wrote before the Civil War, and especially to one who never intended to publish her work. It is also exciting to anticipate what students and scholars will make of her story. In Search of Hannah Crafts will prove an invaluable collection for teachers, both as a supplement to the novel and as a guide to the many forms literary interpretation can take.

Reviewed by

Lauren Hauptman

Silver Spring, MD