166 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865because I loved him,” she tells her father. “Why should the white man be esteemed as
better than the black? I find no difference in men on account of their complexion. One
of the cardinal principles of Christianity and freedom is the equality and brotherhood
of man.” Clotel is a romantic novel but it is also a powerful assault on the slave system
and, in particular, the fundamental betrayal it represented of humanity and the
American dream. It was Brown’s only long work of fiction. Brown continued, however,
to write and explore other forms. A historical study, The Black Man, His Antecedents,
His Genius, and His Achievements appeared in 1862; a second, but first of its kind, The
Negro in the American Rebellion, followed in 1867, and a third, The Rising Son; or, The
Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race, in 1873. His final work, My Southern
Home, an account of a trip to the South, was published in 1880. Brown was a firm
believer in assimilation, his race becoming part of the promise and project of America;
and he was inclined, in his fiction, to appeal to the sentimentalism and moralism of
the day. But he mapped out much of the geography of the later African-American
narrative – the flight to freedom, the bitter fate of denied and mixed identities – and,
in the portrait of Clotel, he created a heroine who was not just a victimized tragic
mulatta but a combative spokesperson for her race.
For all the trials and tribulations of their careers, writers like Wells and Harper at
least saw their work into print. Others were not so fortunate. Among the many
African-Americans of the period whose work remained unpublished and unread
during their lifetime was a woman now known as Hannah Crafts. A manuscript titled
The Bondswoman’s Narrative “by Hannah Crafts A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped
from North Carolina” lay unpublished for 150 years after it was written some time
between 1855 and 1860; it eventually appeared in print in 2002. The identity of the
author has not yet been firmly established. “Hannah” is the name she chose for her-
self as the protagonist of the novels; “Crafts” may be a tribute to Ellen and William
Craft, who in 1848 made a daring escape from slavery with the fair-skinned Ellen
disguised as an invalid white man and William posing as “his” servant. Still, the evi-
dence suggests that Hannah Crafts, or whatever her name was, was one of a multi-
tude of African-Americans, slaves or free, whose voices remained unheard during
their lifetime. The Bondswoman’s Narrative is, to that extent, representative of many
other documents by and about individual, literate African-Americans of this time –
stories, memoirs, autobiographies, fictional or nonfictional recollections – that prob-
ably survive, waiting to be published. And if, as seems likely, its author bears a close
resemblance to its protagonist, in terms of race and condition, then it has a pioneer-
ing as well as an exemplary status. For it is, in that case, the first known novel by an
escaped female slave and possibly the first one ever written by a black woman.
“I am aware of my deficiencies,” Hannah Crafts confesses toward the beginning of
The Bondswoman’s Narrative. “I am neither clever, nor learned, nor talented.” This, as
it turns out, is excessively modest. Hannah “knew nothing,” we learn, of her father
and mother; she has, however, enjoyed the tutelage of a kindly old white woman
called Aunt Hetty, who has taught her to read and write. Her narrative is scattered
with evidence of her reading. There are literary allusions, quotations from the Bible
prefacing each chapter, and sometimes unacknowledged borrowings. EstablishingGGray_c02.indd 166ray_c 02 .indd 166 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM