The Bondwoman's Narrative Read Online Free PDF

books, including
Pen, Ink & Evidence: A Study of Writing and Writing Materials for the Penman, Collector, and Document Detective
(1990) and
Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents
(1996). He is an investigative writer for the
Skeptical Inquirer
magazine, based in Amherst, New York, where he is also Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry. Nickell also characterizes
     himself as an investigator of “fringe-science claims” and as an expert on “myths and mysteries, frauds, forgeries, and hoaxes.”
     Nickell gained international notoriety when he exposed the fraud of the diary of Jack the Ripper. Picture John Steed in a
     bowler hat, driving Mrs. Peel in his Morgan to a grand estate in the English countryside: that was my image of Dr. Nickell.
    Two paragraphs struck me in Nickell’s report:
    Considerable evidence indicates that
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
is an authentic manuscript of circa 1853–1861. A specific mention of “the equestrian statue of Jackson” in Washington demonstrates
     that the work could not have been completed before 1853, and the omission of any reference to secession or the Civil War makes
     no logical sense unless it was written prior to those events. Other references in the text as well as indications from the
     language are also consistent with this period. No anachronisms were found to point to a later time of composition.
    It was apparently written by a relatively young, African-American woman who was deeply religious and had obvious literary
     skills, although eccentric punctuation and occasional misspellings suggest someone who struggled to become educated. Her handwriting
     is a serviceable rendering of period-style script known as modified round hand (the fashion of ca. 1840–1865). She wrote more
     for legibility than speed, and was right handed. 18
    This summary fails to do justice to the elegance of Nickell’s proof, so I have appended it in its entirety to this book. Let
     me summarize his most telling observations. Nickell established that the author of the manuscript was probably a young woman
     who lacked a formal education, judging from her “serviceable” handwriting, her “relative slowness” in writing, and her “eccentric”
     punctuation, to say the least. Crafts never uses periods; she uses semicolons idiosyncratically, and she places both apostrophes
     and quotation marks “at the baseline (like commas).” All in all, these pecularities amount to “a measure of unsophistication
     on the part of the writer,” as we might expect of a self-educated former slave, whose encounters with reading and writing
     would be informal, interrupted, intermittent, and furtive. Nickell also draws attention to Crafts’s style of handwriting,
     which is quite unlike “the minuscule script that was sometimes affected by Victorian ladies as an expression of femininity.” 19
    By contrast, Crafts’s handwriting, he concludes, was “serviceable.”
    The fact that Crafts used a thimble to make “moistened paste wafers” bond more strongly to the page when she pasted over revisions,
     he concludes, argues persuasively that the author was a woman. Had Crafts been a white middle-class woman, he implies, her
     style of handwriting would quite possibly have been “elegant” and “diminutive.”
    Nickell pays close attention to Crafts’s level of diction, the scope of her vocabulary, and, by implication, the degree of
     familiarity with other texts, or literacy, that she reflects in word choice, metaphors, analogies, epigraphs, and allusions
     to other words, concluding that she had the equivalent, by today’s standards, of an eleventh-grade education. Slave authorship
     has been a vexed and contentious matter in American letters, one virtually as old as the slave narrative genre itself, which
     dates to 1760 but thrived as a weapon in the abolitionist movement between 1831 and 1865. Pro-slavery advocates—given the
     enormous popularity of the