Of Human Bondage and Literary Triumphs: Hannah Crafts and the Morphology of the Slave Narrative

The Bondwoman's Narrative, by Hannah Crafts. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Warner, 2002. ¹

The discovery and subsequent publication of this "fictionalized autobiography" solves one perplexing literary riddle but replaces it with a more profound cultural conundrum. First, the good news. The publication of the much-storied, handwritten manuscript by Hannah Crafts, or somebody assuming that name, confirms, without any doubt, the existence of what the novelist Ralph Ellison characterized as an unsecured, "free-floating literacy," or a paraliterate culture at the very least, among black slaves in antebellum America. This inchoate and emergent culture, disarticulated from the dominant cultural matrix, was nevertheless strong enough to power a nascent literary tradition.

Among scholars, cultural critics, and literary historians, the existence of such a culture has been the subject of much scholarly speculations and controversies. Being an arena of fierce ideological contentions, the history of black writing is riddled with faking and allegations of faking. Nobody could be sure of who was doing what, and for what purpose. There were white writers who pretended to be black slaves, the most outlandish being the case of Mattie Griffith who published the memoir of a black slave in 1856 only to be "outed" as a white person. Former owners of slaves did not help matters, often scornfully dismissing the possibility of literacy among their former possessions. There was also the little problem of authorial authenticity. For example, on a book-signing tour, the former slave Fredrick Douglass was advised by his Abolitionists handlers not to sound too posh and learned, lest people began to doubt the veracity of his story. The Bondwoman's Narrative should substantially lay to rest the ghost of that controversy.

But if the cultural and ideological provenance of this tradition is no longer in doubt, thanks to Henry Louis Gates's energetic sleuthing and remarkable resourcefulness, The Bondwoman's Narrative raises new questions as to the generic and genetic typology of the emergent tradition. In other words, must this tradition, and its literary offspring—African-American literature—seek forcible but insecure accommodation by loosening the existing canon of Anglo-American literature as valiantly championed by Gates and other prominent African-American scholars in the last three decades? Or must it, in the light of contemporary realities and imminent further discoveries and recoveries, come up with an independent taxonomy of its own literary productions, plot its own trajectory, and map its own significant territorial and sociocultural space? Finally, and in the light of what must now be regarded as the Cornel West affair, how well will this foundational project sit within the discursive formation of the "managing" academe, with its vigilantes and patrolmen, even as the hysteria over hybridity finally runs its inglorious course?

The Harlem Renaissance between 1920 and 1940 is now canonized as the first formative period of African-American literature. Yet with the Hannah Crafts holograph and other extant manuscripts, it can now be seen that well before then, and contrary to the propaganda about the untutored and untutorable black savages, a literary culture flourished among slaves that was quite remarkable for the time and circumstances. From their hidden quill pens flowed religious tracts based on the Bible, poetry modeled on what they had read and memorized, short stories, novels, fictionalized biographies, and the odd social criticism. What made all this even more remarkable and a tribute to indomitable will in the face of cultural, psychic, and historical adversity was that it was being pioneered by people who were forbidden by the law of the land from writing or receiving reading instructions.

Yet despite this proliferation of forms and effusion of genres, there is a critical consensus that the "autobiographical slave narrative" is the founding form and paradigmatic primate of black literature, not just in the United States of America...