The Bondwoman's Narrative Read Online Free PDF Page B

genre—scrutinized the writings of fugitive slaves in sustained attempts to find errors and thereby
     discredit the author’s depictions of the horrors and abuses of slavery itself. Abolitionist amanuenses were sometimes accused
     of having written a slave’s entire tale, as happened when Frederick Douglass, without question the most famous exslave author,
     published his famous classic 1845
Narrative of the Life.
(His master wrote that he had known Douglass as a slave and that Douglass lacked the intelligence and ability to have written
     such a sophisticated narrative.) Occasionally, a slave’s narrative was recalled when southerners questioned his veracity,
     as in the case of James Williams in 1838, who had dictated the powerful story of his bondage and escape to no less an auditor
     than John Greenleaf Whittier. Other slave authors, such as Harriet Jacobs (who used the pseudonym Linda Brent in her 1861
     autobiography), were accepted as authors by their contemporaries, only to be discredited, erroneously, by historians a century
     later. Jacobs was rehabilitated by the careful research of Jean Fagan Yellin. To avoid the sort of profound embarrassment
     that the case of Williams’s text generated within the abolitionist movement, slave authors were encouraged to be as precise
     and exact as possible, to name names and to embrace verisimilitude as a dominant mode of narrative development.
    Considering that virtually none of these authors received a formal education, the degree of literacy found in the slave narratives
     is quite remarkable. It is little wonder that questions of authorship arose. Nevertheless, as scholars such as John W. Blassingame,
     Jean Fagan Yellin, and William L. Andrews have shown in great detail, the fugitive slaves were by and large the authors of
     their own tales,even if the editorial hand of an abolitionist corrected grammar or reshaped the flow of the narrative.
    This is why Hannah Crafts’s narrative, if authenticated, would have such great historical importance: to be able to study
     a manuscript written by a black woman or man, unedited, unaffected, un-glossed, unaided by even the most well-intentioned
     or unobtrusive editorial hand, would help a new generation of scholars to gain access to the mind of a slave in an unmediated
     fashion heretofore not possible. Between us and them, between a twenty-first-century readership and the pre-edited consciousness
     of even
one
fugitive slave, often stands an editorial apparatus reflective of an abolitionist ideology, to some degree or another; here,
     on the other hand, perhaps for the first time, we could experience a pristine encounter. This is not to imply that the “written
     by himself” or “herself” subtitles to so many of the slave narratives should be questioned: it is only to say that never before
     have we been absolutely certain that we have enjoyed the pleasure of reading a text in the
exact
order of wording in which a fugitive slave constructed it.
    Nickell points to Crafts’s use of polysyllables—words such as
magnanimity, obsequious,
and
vicissitudes
—as proof that Crafts was not “an unread person.” Simultaneously, he continues, Crafts’s misspellings are legion: “incumber”
     for
encumber,
“benumed” for
benumbed,
“meloncholy” for
melancholy,
“your” for
you’re.
The curious combination of these two tendencies, moreover, is still another sign of the auto-didact, “consistent with someone
     who struggled to learn.” Crafts’s progress from slavery to freedom overlaps precisely with her progress from “illiterate slave
     girl to keeper of ‘a school for colored children.’” Her references to Byron, to “the law of the Medes and Persians,” and the
     “lip of Heraclitus”—as well as her biblical epigraphs and other allusions—suggest the eclectic reading habits of a highly
     motivated person devouring the arbitrary selections in a small library in a middle-class, mid-century American