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Conclusion: Reading Hannah Crafts in the Twenty-First Century
- University of Illinois Press
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Conclusion Reading Hannah Crafts in the Twenty-First Century The uneasy connection between race and marriage Chesnutt develops in his fiction is drawn, as I argue in chapter 5, upon his attempt to grapple with the intimate dimension of the history of slavery. Writing well after the end of legal slavery in the United States, Chesnutt remains fascinated and troubled by its lingering social effects during his lifetime. Whether to erase slavery’s effects or preserve them for the sake of posterity and community was a problem that Chesnutt, at least in his published works, could not resolve. Coming to terms with the logic of the slave-marriage and its peculiar nonlegal status does not, as Chesnutt shows in his fiction, disappear with the Emancipation Proclamation, nor does it end, as Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Edward P. Jones, and a number of writers of later slave fictions insist, with the passage of legislation legalizing unions between previously nonlegal and illegal unions. Writing about slave-marriages in the late-twentieth century, Morrison’s Nobel Prize–winning fiction exemplifies the possibility of imagining a form of racial intimacy that transcends the law. As we see in the case of her novel Beloved, such intimacy has a destructive potential that needs somehow to be checked by those who are held by its power. Unlike Morrison’s and other more recent critically acclaimed slave fictions, the ones I examine in this book were written in a context in which the importance of legal marriage to the constitution of freedom was largely taken for granted. Slave law mandated marriage as a contract into which slaves could not legally enter. By calling into question this legal fact, these fictions offer us a way of thinking and writing about marriage outside of legal discourse. i-x_1-150_Chakk.indd 107 5/20/11 2:05 PM To conclude, then, I would like to turn to a new, yet old, slave fiction: Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative. The first edition of The Bondwoman ’s Narrative was published in the spring of 2002. According to its editor, Henry Louis Gates, the novel was written by a female fugitive slave in the 1850s, though it was never published during the author’s lifetime. The book’s gripping, visceral depictions of slave life and an escape to the North are familiar to readers of the slave narratives. It is no wonder that Gates—among others—elides the autobiographical and fictional elements of the text. Calling it “an autobiographical novel written between 1853 and 1860,” Gates and his co-editor, Hollis Robbins, encourage readers to read the work as “historical fact.” Gates and Robbins build “a strong case” through their research “that she is who she says she is—that she is female, that she is of African descent, that she is a slave who grew up in Virginia.”1 Yet not everyone is convinced that Crafts is who she says she is. While admitting to being “almost persuaded,” Eric Gardner contends that “we do not definitively know who Hannah Crafts was.”2 The stakes of not knowing the facts of Crafts’s biography are higher than one might expect. Without these facts, Gardner states, we cannot “fully place her within African American letters.” What, then, are we to do with Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative? To conclude, I would like to return to the tension between history and fiction that I raised in the introduction. By doing so, I read Crafts’s novel not as historical fact but as a slave fiction, a form that presents experience through the eyes of a slave. This perspective, fictional though it may be, offers readers today insights into the past that was not, for various reasons, contained by historical accounts of slavery. Although they arrive at very different conclusions about Crafts’s novel, both Gates and Gardner are troubled by how to understand and classify the fictional elements of Crafts’s slave story in relation to its depiction of slavery. Crafts’s novel is told from the singular perspective of a female slave. But because this narrative is explicitly fiction, as several of its recent readers note, it does not participate in the abolitionist discourse of nineteenth-century political thought. So, what is the point of this singular slave fiction, and why read it in the twenty-first century when it had no impact at the time it was first written in the mid-nineteenth century? As I have been...