Encrypted Citations: The Bondwoman's Narrative and the Case of Jane Johnson

I read Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative (2002) and its legal historical intertexts in order to nuance "fiction" as a literary category of antebellum African American writing. Specifically, I develop connections between The Bondwoman's Narrative and US laws of slavery by thinking about the novel's form in relation to legal citational practices. I argue that the novel encrypts and encodes legal narratives within its fictionalized accounts of verifiable "historical" events. By close reading Crafts's alterations of such events, I compare her use of encryption to the citational practices inherent in legal precedent. This comparison yields a stronger understanding of antebellum African American authorial practices as deploying legal rhetorical strategies that resisted dominant legal narratives and generated new literary forms. I problematize the tendency to redeem law as a possible or ideal site of black belonging and to underscore the ways that authors such as Crafts encrypted their writing with rejections of law and the nation-state. Her work does so even as it rehearses a facility and engagement with legal culture that might suggest an effort to inscribe African Americans into legal frameworks and the ongoing nineteenth-century project of US nation-building. Instead of reading this complex engagement with US law as evincing an attachment to it, I argue for reading it as the rejection and radical reimagining of existing logics of authority and community.