Had it not been for Henry Louis Gates’s dodgy hip, we would probably never have known the story of Hannah Crafts. Gates, a professor of humanities at Harvard University and one of America’s leading black scholars and writers, was laid up at home last February following a hip replacement when he came across the catalogue to a sale of African-Americana in a New York gallery. This collection of fragmentary documents and ephemera had survived, some of it miraculously, from early black American history.
Gates, a noted collector of rare African-American texts, was fascinated by several items on the list, offering tantalising glimpses of the lives of slaves and former slaves. But one item in particular caught his eye: lot 30 — an unpublished manuscript entitled The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a Fugitive Slave, recently Escaped from North Carolina.
The catalogue described it as the autobiographical story of a slave woman who had fled her master and escaped to freedom. It was highly possible, Gates knew, that the manuscript was a fake or that the author was not who the story claimed, but he was intrigued. He took a chance and asked a friend to buy it on his behalf. Fourteen months later, the $8 500 that Gates paid for a fragile, yellowing bundle of 300 handwritten pages, much scribbled over and revised, has proved a canny bet. The Bondwoman’s Narrative was finally published in the United States this week by AOL Time Warner, amid considerable excitement.
The full, extraordinary story of how Gates discovered an obscure, lost manuscript and turned it into a literary phenomenon, detailed in the book’s introduction and in an article he wrote for the New Yorker magazine, is the stuff of publishing legend. But more significantly, the document has indeed proved to be the real thing: an authentic fictionalised narrative, written by a slave woman in the 1850s, and loosely based on her own escape from slavery. As such, it is likely to be the earliest novel ever written by a black woman — and therefore a historical document of startling importance.
“My feeling was, here’s one more piece of evidence that not only were there African-Americans who could read and write, but African-Americans who had some sense of how to put narrative together to make a story,” says Nellie McKay, professor of African-American and American literature at the University of Madison in Wisconsin, who was involved in authenticating the manuscript. “But this one is special, in that we have a handwritten narrative — everything else that has been discovered so far was printed at the time it existed.”
Gates himself was no less effusive: “This is the first glimpse we have had of the pre-edited, unmediated consciousness of a slave,” he said in November. “This is major.”
The story itself is no less compelling. The author begins her tale on a plantation near a town called Milton in Virginia, where she was a “house slave” — engaged in domestic duties rather than working in the fields — for a family named Vincent. When her mistress — an apparently white woman living in upper-class society — is revealed to have had a slave mother, she and Crafts escape together, only to be imprisoned and sold again.
Eventually she ends up in Washington DC, where she is employed by a Mrs Wheeler, the wealthy wife of a politician, before the family relocates to North Carolina.
Crafts’s style clearly owes much to other writings of the time. She borrows heavily from Gothic and sentimental novels, and adopts many of the characteristics of other contemporary slave narratives, but her prose nevertheless speaks powerfully of the degradations a slave in her position would have endured: “I never felt so poor, so weak, so utterly subjected to the authority of another,” she writes of her time with the Wheelers, “as when that woman with her soft voice and suavity of manner, yet withal stern and inflexible, told me that I was hers body and soul, and that she did and would exact obedience in all cases and under all circumstances.”
The Wheelers are particularly hard taskmasters, it turns out; two of their slaves have already run away, and they are determined not to be so careless with a third. But when Mrs Wheeler proposes forcibly marrying Crafts to a field slave, whom Crafts considers to be a social rung below her, she determines that she must flee. The marriage, she considers, would be equivalent to rape.
The details of her escape are sketchy — not surprisingly if she wanted to avoid recapture. But her own sexual vulnerability is a theme Crafts returns to throughout the novel, at one point describing being scrutinised by two slave owners, one of whom proposes selling her to the other. The buyer comments that she is not very attractive, to which the salesman remarks: “You won’t find a nicer bit of woman’s flesh to be bought for that money in old Virginia.”
The prospective buyer, who she learns is called Saddler, remarks that he has had trouble in the past with female slaves: one, he says, jumped in the river when he got rid of her “brats”, another tried to escape to the place where she thought her son had been taken but was set on by bloodhounds. “They tore her dreadfully, spoiled all her beauty, rendering her utterly unfit for my traffic; and so I sold her for a song.”
The story is unquestionably, as Gates has commented, “a remarkably good read”, if a very disturbing one. But can we be sure that this is really the testimony of a female slave named Hannah Crafts writing in the 1850s?
Gates knew he had to answer this question beyond doubt if he was to prove the historical importance of the manuscript.
Enlisting the help of an expert in historical documents, he established that the ink with which the text was written was iron gallotanate, a mixture of oak gallnuts, iron sulphate and gum, which was widely used in the mid-19th century (as the iron in the ink oxidises, it fades to a rusty, sepia brown). The author had also used a goose quill, dipping it into a well at intervals — a form of writing that had almost disappeared by the end of the American civil war in 1865 — and one of the sheets bore a characteristic embossed mark which also helped in dating. All of the experts placed the date between 1853 and 1861 (Our Nig by Harriet E Wilson — the earliest known novel by a black woman prior to this, and also, incidentally, found and authenticated by Gates — was written in 1859). So the date, at least, appeared right.
But what of Crafts? Slave testimonies were not unusual at the time, but it was not unheard of for white writers to “ventriloquise”, adopting the voices of black slaves as the narrators of their stories. Gates believed the fact that the manuscript was handwritten, and clearly a working copy (since the author frequently scores out phrases or sticks in revisions), lent credence to its provenance. It is written in a looping, uncertain hand, consistent, a hand-writing expert confirmed, with “someone who has struggled to learn”.
The internal evidence also suggests a woman who had intimate knowledge of slavery from the rough end, and one who was black — unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose landmark novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852, Crafts’s black characters are not at all caricatured. In his New Yorker piece, Gates quotes Dorothy Porter Wesley, the (black) librarian who had previously owned the manuscript: “There is no doubt that she is a Negro because her approach to other Negroes is that they are people first of all. Only as the story unfolds, in most instances, does it become apparent that they are Negroes.”
Most remarkably of all, Gates succeeded in tracking down a slave owner named Wheeler, who had lived in North Carolina until 1854, and had been involved in a celebrated dispute with one of his runaway slaves, Jane Johnston. Crafts, describing the difficult time she had had with Mrs Wheeler, says her predecessor, who had run away, had been called Jane.
There are those who argue that the truth or otherwise of the narrative is not necessarily the most crucial point. Ann Fabian, professor of American Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, advised Gates on the manuscript and applauds his work — but stresses that it would have value even if it were fiction. “If you say to African-American writers, or any writers coming from an outside position, that their only cultural authority comes from the literal truth, you are barring them from a whole imaginative universe.”
Gates, though, is determined to discover exactly who Crafts was — but despite extensive searches, he is still looking. It may be that she took another name (her master had proved himself to be assiduous in tracking down runaway slaves), or that her pen name was a pseudonym. But in the end, after an indeterminate period on the run facing various perils and adventures, the novel describes her taking a ship to New Jersey, and to freedom. There she married a minister, she says, and started a school for “coloured” children. For Crafts at least, there seems to have been a happy ending. “There is a hush on my spirit in these days,” she writes in conclusion from her new home, “a deep repose, a blest and holy quietude. I found a life of freedom all my fancy had pictured it to be.”
The Bondwoman’s Narrative is published in the United States by Warner Books