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The 2003 edition of Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative opens with editor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s story of literary intrigue, detailing the discovery, acquisition, and authentication of the text. Much of the evidence of the writer’s identity, however, derives from Gates’s gleaning of internal evidence that links Crafts’s story and narrative with actual historical personages , places, and events, as well as with much of what we already know about pre-Emancipation African American writing and textual practices. The debate about the racial identity of Crafts continues. While some reviewers surmise that Crafts is a white woman writing an “ethnic impersonator” narrative, others maintain that she is black. Adebayo Williams says, for example, “This novel could not have been conceived and written by a white person, except by a ventriloquist and sadomasochist of impossible genius” (10).1 Not only is authorship problematic in The Bondwoman’s Narrative, but genre is difficult as well. Like Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, first published anonymously in 1912 and later published as a novel by James Weldon Johnson, with The Bondwoman’s Narrative we may be dealing with a text that is passing on several levels.2 Indeed, Hannah’s craft as a writer is evident in the demands her narrative places on the reader to attend to the interweaving of the historical , tropological, and hermeneutical registers of its intertextuality. Crafts’s novel clearly functions outside the usual abolitionist formula for slave narratives or antislavery novels, as John Stauffer points out. As Adebayo Williams suggests, “There was no way the manuscript could have found accommodation in the literary politics of antebellum America” (3). Williams concludes: the black community and the abolitionists would have been scandalized by the brutal and frank portrayal of slave life and the social condescensions of the author. . . . At the other extreme of the political spectrum, the proslave lobby would have been taken aback by the shrill ferocity of the book’s denunciation of c h a p T e r ฀ f o u r hannah’s craft B i B l i c a l ฀ pa s s i n g ฀ i n฀ ฀ T h e ฀ B o n dWo m a n ’ s ฀ n a r r aT i v e 6 8 ฀ c h a p T e r ฀ f o u r slavery . . . as well as by the nettling social commentary. . . . Like all original artists , Hannah Crafts was true to herself. But the price for such unsettling originality and adamantine integrity is significant exclusion. (3) Lawrence Buell also comments on “the unabashed nature of the fictionalization ” of the narrative, in an era obsessed with African American truth-telling and authentication” (“Bondwoman Unbound” 19). From the beginning of the text, Crafts sounds a different note; the narrative demonstrates a spiritual authenticity that may account for our difficulties in affixing racial certainty to its narrative voice. While readers of the narrative have linked her use of the Bible to the narratives of Hagar in Genesis 16 and 21, Hannah in 1 Samuel, and Jacob and Esau (also in Genesis), scholars have missed the profound use of subtext and misdirection that the narrative encodes. It is a narrative predicated on making the reader expect the unexpected. Whether or not Hannah Crafts is ever identified beyond the shadow of a doubt, the narrative does bear certain signatures that link it with the lineage of black women’s textuality, especially black women’s biblicism and the development of an antislavery hermeneutic through narrative and fiction. Crafts’s consistent use of scriptural verses to begin each chapter and of internal soundings and biblical echoes is not merely decorative or pious but form part of a comprehensive Judeo-Christian worldview. Bryan Sinche argues that Crafts attempts to “construct a story that validates the God who presides over the peculiar institution, while still condemning the institution itself” (175–76). Moreover, he writes, “by adhering to a strict conception of Christian virtue that many slave authors would deem incompatible with resistance to slavery, Hannah follows a different path toward rebellion” (176). I would go so far as to say that the key to interpreting this text—and the most consistent element of The Bondwoman’s Narrative—is the certainty of a moral universe grounded in Crafts’s belief in the supernatural as an active agent in the lives of her characters . Beginning each chapter with a verse of scripture renders her text a literary pulpit, as she boldly “takes a...

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