Dislocating Race & Nation by Robert S. Levine

Author:Robert S. Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

However much Crafts might wish to attribute the “reeking” filth to the degradation forced upon enslaved blacks by whites, she seems to discern in the cabin something essentially repulsive about the character of the cabin’s inhabitants. But what is especially noteworthy here is that Hannah’s revulsion seems focused less on Bill than on the dozen or so black women who immediately want to pummel her. She fears that she will become like these women, and those fears are precisely what Mrs. Wheeler had played upon when she banished Hannah to the fields in the first place: “With all your pretty airs and your white face, you are nothing but a slave after all, no better than the blackest wench” (205).

That white can be revealed as black is, I have been arguing, central to the trope of haunting that informs Bondwoman’s and many other genealogical fictions of the 1850s, and that is what makes Trappe—the man who traffics in such revelations—such a central and frightening figure. The possibility of white being revealed as black is also one of Bondwoman’s informing anxieties, and I want to suggest the possibility that Crafts may be tapping into these anxieties not only to undermine the ideological premises of white supremacy but also because these are fears that she herself possesses. I am aware that this is a potentially troubling claim that cannot be easily supported, given that we can be certain about very little (actually, nothing) about the “black” Crafts. But the disgust at blackness near the end of the book, when compared to Hannah’s seeming obliviousness to the threat posed to her body by her white masters, seems out of proportion, as if she has discovered the nightmare of slavery in the slaves themselves and thus wants to resist the obvious fact that, as underscored by Mrs. Wheeler’s taunting, she is one of them.

To be sure, when Hannah undertakes her eventual escape from slavery (and the field slaves) by masquerading as a white man, she does offer sympathy and assistance along the way to two blacks, Jacob and his sister, who are attempting to escape from a South Carolina slave plantation. But before her relationship to these fugitive slaves is put to much of a test, the sister dies and Jacob is shot while trying to steal a boat. At which point Hannah’s former religious mentor, the white Aunt Hetty, takes her in and eventually sends her off to find refuge in a black community in New Jersey. In the happy final chapter, Hannah talks of how the “hand of providence” (237) also guided to the same community her mother and the former slaves she had once betrayed, Charlotte and William. Hannah has married an ordained Methodist preacher and has fulfilled her dreams in every way: “I found a life of freedom all my fancy had pictured it to be. I found the friends of the slave in the free state just as good as kind and hospitable as I had always heard they were.

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