Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 167the literacy of the narrator, and by implication the immediacy and authenticity of his
or her recorded experience, was standard practice in the slave narrative, but here it is
more than that. It is part of a strategy of self-portraiture that makes Hannah resemble,
among many others, the heroine of a sentimental novel. Hannah is an orphan, a
dispossessed princess, with, she says, “a silent unobtrusive way of observing things
and events” and a desire “to understand them better than I could,” that makes her an
ideal storyteller. She is already aware, even as a child, that she has, as she puts it,
“African blood in my veins,” which condemns her to a life of “unremitted unpaid
toil.” Intolerable in any circumstances, this is additionally unbearable for her because,
Hannah tells us, “my complexion was almost white.” So, this heroine is not only a
princess in exile, she is a blueprint for a central figure in fiction by and about African-
Americans, the tragic mulatta. Not only that, the tale she has to tell wastes no time in
bringing into play another classic trope in later stories and novels concerned with the
intolerable burden of slavery and racism: that of passing, adopting the fictive role of
white so as to avoid the problems and pain attendant on being classed as black.
It is not Hannah herself who passes as white; her condition as a slave is unavoidable
despite her fair complexion. It is her mistress. At the beginning of The Bondswoman’s
Narrative, Hannah is a house slave at Lindendale, a place of “stately majesty” that
nevertheless seems haunted by a curse. And, like the nervous, trembling, acutely
sensitive female observer of classic Gothic fiction, Hannah suffers “the foreboding of
some great calamity”: a feeling that grows even more acute with the arrival of a new
mistress who herself seems “haunted by a shadow or phantom.” The mistress also has
a more tangible phantom shadowing her: an old gentleman in black whose name,
Mr. Trappe, suggests his dread function. For Mr. Trappe brings with him the secret
that threatens to entrap and destroy the new mistress. Her mother was a slave, the
property of her father; it was only because she was switched in the cradle, exchanged
for the dead baby of her father’s lawful – and, of course, white – wife, that she now
passes for white. “Call me mistress no longer, thenceforth you shall be to me as a very
dear sister,” her mistress tells Hannah, after she has revealed the truth of her origins;
“Oh; to be free, to be free.” Eventually, the “sisters” seek freedom in flight: into the
woods, where they live in a log cabin that seems as haunted as Lindendale, marked by
signs of some “fearful crime” – bloodstains, a skeleton, a hatchet with “hair sticking to
the heft.” But their refuge is temporary. They are found by “a party of hunters,” agents
of the sinister Mr. Trappe, and then imprisoned in the “Egyptian” darkness of a
dungeon where Hannah finds solace only in a “blessed dream” of her “angel mother.”
The mistress soon dies, when she learns that she is to be sold by Mr. Trappe, privately,
to “a gentleman.” Later, we learn that her husband, the master of Lindendale, commits
suicide when he learns from the ubiquitous Mr. Trappe the truth about the parentage
of his wife. So the curse that haunted Lindendale seems to have run its fearful course.
Characteristically, this opening movement in The Bondswoman’s Narrative weaves
together several different narrative strands and tendencies. Classic Gothic tropes –
the haunted mansion, the feverish heroine, the curse – are enriched by what might
be called Wilderness Gothic, of the kind favored by Charles Brockden Brown and,
occasionally, Poe: the log cabin that inspires a “superstitious horror” in the minds ofGGray_c02.indd 167ray_c 02 .indd 167 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM