168 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865Hannah and her companion in flight is, it turns out, a place where “it is said a beau-
tiful young girl was once murdered.” Sentimental conversations between “sisters” in
suffering are played off against tactics and conventions borrowed from the slave
narrative. In her preface, Hannah tells the reader that she hopes to show how slavery
“blights the happiness of the white as well as the black race.” She does so by exposing
the hypocrisies and cruelties and silences to which slavery condemns the oppressors.
The Bondswoman’s Narrative is, in particular, remarkably frank about the sexual
abuse of black women. It is equally frank about the intimacies that can occur between
white mistress and black maid. “Between the mistress and her slave a freedom exists
probably not to be found elsewhere,” Hannah avers, thanks to the similarities in
their plight as victims. Similarity is not sameness, though, and it does not guarantee
fellow feeling, since the weak can be cruel to those even weaker than themselves. So,
we read not only of the jealousy but also the brutality of some mistresses – like the
one who works three of her female slaves to death.
Gothic tropes continue to mix with the sentimental and the conventions of the
slave narrative while Hannah recalls how she had yet “other toils and trials to endure,
other scenes of suffering and anguish to pass through” before achieving her freedom.
She even enjoys a brief idyll on an estate called Forget-Me-Not that might have
sprung out of the pages of plantation romance. But the idyll soon gives way, once
again, to the “swarm of misery” that, Hannah reveals, is the common lot of the slave.
And the critical moment of choice comes for the bondswoman when, after being
removed to another plantation in North Carolina, she is told by her new mistress, a
Mrs. Wheeler, with whom she has fallen out of favor, that she must go and work in
the fields, marry a field hand, and live in his cabin. For Hannah, acutely conscious of
differences of color and caste within the salve community, this change of circum-
stance is a profound shock. She cannot, she protests, be married to anyone, let alone
someone “whose person, and speech, and manner could not fail to be ever regarded
by me with loathing and disgust.” In such a plight, “rebellion would be a virtue” and
she resolves to flee. The story of Hannah’s flight, like the account of her sojourn in
North Carolina, is less melodramatic, and less inflected with Gothic and sentimental
conventions, than previous episodes in the novel. Nevertheless, while Hannah is on
the run, disguised as a boy, touches of the sentimental, the Gothic, and melodramatic
remain. Hannah not only manages to conceal her true gender from her male com-
panion in flight, she also has the good fortune, eventually, to happen upon her
beloved Aunt Hetty. Coincidences of this kind are rife in the concluding chapters.
Bound north for freedom on a steamboat, she just chances to overhear a conversa-
tion between two gentlemen from which she learns that Mr. Trappe finally met his
retribution in a violent death. Settled finally as a free woman in New Jersey, where
she sets up “a school for colored children,” she is even reunited with the guardian
angel of her dreams, the mother whom up until that moment she never really knew.
So the novel ends with the heroine no longer a lost princess, having found her king-
dom: living happily ever after, we assume, “in a neat little Cottage” surrounded by
friends. Like this final chapter, appropriately titled “In Freedom,” The Bondswoman’s
Narrative as a whole is a highly colored fiction that is, nevertheless, founded inGGray_c02.indd 168ray_c 02 .indd 168 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM