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CHAPTER 1

Sacred Femininity in Search of a Black Female Aesthetic

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

Maya Angelou

Blackening the Bible: Conjuring Spirituality in African American Women’s Religion

David W. Wills appropriately asserts that the most common way of considering United States’ religious past, attesting its pivotal role for the national idiosyncrasy of the country, is to link its nature “toward some kind of American triumphalism” (9). Rightly so, the alleged religious liberty was established when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The resultant blending of the religious and political ideals of Puritan leaders such as John Winthrop, John Cotton or Thomas Shepard paved the path to establish United States’ “deepest religious and cultural roots” (Wills 13). This supposed tolerance and pluralism that the religious creed proclaimed soon unveiled the ethnic homogeneity of such endeavor and revealed that the American religion manifested difficulties to the embrace of diversity in the attempt to impose religious beliefs in their effort to create a New Jerusalem. An act that resulted in the annihilation of Native Americans and the infamous chapter of African enslavement.

Indeed, the involuntary implantation of Africans in the country altered, at their expense, not only the social reality of North America but also the cultivated image of tolerance and respect that the aspiring nation was thriving to underscore. The slave system steadily broke down both the linguistic and the cultural patterns that Africans had traditionally nurtured. But as Charles H. Long explains, “(t)he persistence of elements of what some anthropologists have called ‘soft culture’ means that given even the systematic breakdown of African cultural forms in the history of North America slavery, the slaves did not confront America with a religious tabula rasa” (25). Certainly, black slaves, although defined in terms of property and drained of their right to express themselves, found in religion the perfect asset to produce new cultural forms.

Even though the Africans were forcibly brought to a land where literacy was greatly valued, the use of Africanisms, the cultural forms they could arrogate as their own, were unrelentingly frowned upon by white Americans. Blacks were also prohibited from learning to read and write since this could prove to be dangerous for the nation’s status quo. Accordingly, the suffocating atmosphere in which black people had to survive in North America led them to fight in order to create an expressible mode of existence. As Thomas Hoyt Jr. puts it, “(e)ven though influenced by oppressive psychological, social, economic, and political forces, blacks…displayed a tremendous transcendent spirit that has enabled them to confront the biblical text creatively” (27).

Creativity, then, is a concept thoroughly linked to the reevaluation of religion meanings that black Americans have been molding with since their arrival in “the land of milk and honey”. Revolving against the blotting out of the African cultural matrix from the mind and practice of the transplanted slave, African Americans started to meet secretly, be it on the woods or elsewhere from that visual spots of the plantation, to enact a new and black hermeneutic process that could pervade the master’s religion. This tradition, akin to the spirituality that Mircea Eliade conceives, was called by the slaves themselves ‘conjuring’ and attests to create an aesthetic culled from Africa and America alike that could uphold a religious apprehension of the land and, eventually, embark upon the authentication of the black self in North America. Such a move transformed the role of black people in the country we know nowadays as United States and displayed conjuring as a national “healing practice” (Smith 5) that oozes therapeutic readings of the black American experience.

For African American women the act of conjuring, or else getting together to re-envision and revitalize black American culture through spiritual musings, became inextricably linked to how black women relate to one another. Foregrounding thus the seminal The Woman’s Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, published in the 19th-century fin de siècle, African American women resisted to assess the Bible’s portrait as authoritative and restrictive, especially so for black women, and fostered a feminist version of it that was deeply infused by the conjuring exercise understood as a “metaphor that circumscribes black people’s ritual, figural, and therapeutic transformations of culture” (Smith 4). African American women have sought to demonstrate that, as R. Stephen Warner explains, “(r)eligion in the United States has typically expressed not the culture of the society as a whole but the subcultures of its many constituents; therefore . . . it should not be thought of as either the Parsonian conscience of the whole or the Bergerian refuge of the periphery, but as a vital expression of groups” (qtd. in Vásquez and Marquardt 21).

In this way, black women dismissed the exclusionary power that the Bible conceded to white culture but also overcame the crippling discourse in which black men hijacked the Bible’s authority as an act of political and cultural resistance intending to create an aspiring black nationalism rooted in religious grounds. Rather, African American women’s reading upheld the Bible as a tool to create a black feminine aesthetic to could retell their vision of life through the Bible as a hermeneutical strategy towards a process of national healing. This process of conjuring is credited upon black women’s spirituality which, ultimately, sustains the mechanism of transformation through a rehabilitated set of narratives that originally read North America as a place of inclusion than connects cultural and spiritual components as “elusive but identifiable” (342) aspects of a same culture, as Toni Morrison argues in “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation”. As Renita J. Weems explains, “the African American woman…must agree to renounce her experience of reality, suspend her understanding of life, and waive her right to her own values, so that she may without encumbrances surrender herself to the experiences, world view, values, and assumptions embedded in the work” (65).

In other words, African American women have historically defied reductive analysis from the Eurocentric and androcentric perspectives of those, inside and outside the black community, who have manipulated religion as a cultural token only to impose a specific (patriarchal) ideology. African American women have therein counteracted a doctrinal way of reading and interpret religion conceiving a sacred femininity that has been utilized not only to facilitate an ontological shift towards a unique intersection of race-ethnicity, class and gender as a motive force for social change but it has also proved to create a sacred feminist aesthetics that, in Julia Kristeva’s words, links “the feminine, the sacred, and the various fates of Africanness” (21).

By conjuring up a feminist interpretation of the sacredness of the biblical musings, black women have made benefit from their role in religious and cultural participation within the community to find their way as spiritual guides. However, contrary to the individuality that conformed the religious strategies used by black men to emerge as leaders, African American women confided in the affective bonds that united the whole community to avoid confrontation and, at the same time, to create a web of solidarity that eventually turned their sacred vision of religion as a healing tenet for black Americans. That is to say, “the emotional, psychological, and religious health of African American women has been directly related to their refusal to hear the Bible uncritically and their insistence upon applying what one might call an ‘aural hermeneutic’” (Weems 66).

According to Judylyn S. Ryan, spirituality, as depicted in African American women’s literature is recognizably African/Black but rarely conforms to any single traditional African religion. Instead, its contours are shaped by the core ethical and philosophical values around which several traditions cohere within the African cultural domain. Black women artists depict this African-centered spirituality in varying configurations along a syncretistic range (23).

Thus, through this ‘aural hermeneutic’, which stands as the starting point of black women’s aesthetics of the sacred femininity and despite an unwarranted disregard of an autonomous endeavor on the part of black culture to unweld black literature from the taxonomy race/culture, African American women signified upon spirituality as an epistemological means which assists cultural objectives that “withstand various ideological assaults and develop their own liberating ideologies” (23), according to Judilyn S. Ryan. Certainly, black women’s narrative engagement with spiritual agency propelled Afro-Christianity as an asset that could “collectively perpetuate community-culture and…an ideology of freedom” (Ryan 33) for Christianity was used as a vehicle for their own empowerment. In short, parallel to the family tradition that black women propelled as a network that could enable African Americans to cope and to survive, they also built a religious tradition both to blot out the effects of racism and sexism but also to legitimize a black feminine aesthetic that could single out their own experience.

In their attempt to get over the isolation and tokenism within the black community, or the “deformed equality” to borrow from Angela Davis, a feminist reading of the sacredness of Afro-Christianity became black women’s cultural ally to insist that they were also “persons for whom Christ died”. Indeed, as Townsend Gilkes contends, “‘Afro-Christian’ recognizes that our African ancestors constructed a complex and dynamic tradition not only from the materials provided by the missionaries and other Europeans confronted in the nighttime of slavery, but also from the cultural imaginations of their African backgrounds, in which women were essential to cultural and religious practice” (126). Re-reading the Bible through an Africa-centered spirituality has, Ryan reminds us, “an important epistemological function” (24). Blackening the Bible to serve a spiritual and feminist reading that can voice black women’s cultural concern is minted by Toni Morrison as a work of ‘literary archaeology’ through which, alongside the ensuing affective turn, African American women “characteristically acknowledge the interconnectedness of aspects of self/being” (Ryan 25). This link will be explored in the new section to contextualize my further analysis of the three proposed novels.

The Politics of Affect and the Sacred Black Female Self

God is unlike religion, which corrupts that process with its own power structure. And finally, God is not a woman.

Michèle Roberts

African American culture is patterned to a large extent by a unique sense of spirituality and religion. Yet, despite the communal efforts of black women since slavery times to create a model of unity and wholeness among women, the linkage between spirituality and affect has been overlooked. In this chapter I intend to bring together the three proposed African American women writers’ undertaking to weave a feminine spirituality with affect based on the aesthetics principles of the African American culture. Since, as Silvia Pilar Castro-Borrego points out, “African American cultural modes of being seek constantly a basic harmony of connectedness” (3), Crafts, Hurston and Morrison establish spirituality and sacredness vis-à-vis affect to propose a concept of unity that consents to rehabilitate the black female self. Although spirituality and affect seem to evolve concurrently in Crafts’s and Hurston’s novels, Toni Morrison’s fiction privileges affective bonds and unity before religious modes of representation. The outcome is that any glimpse of bigotry—whether it is spiritual, political or both— winds up breaking away with affect and a sense of union, making the act of wholeness a hopeless endeavor.

Jeannette King points out that if “(w)oman, like history, has been a text to be written and interpreted by man” (29), women also had the opportunity to reframe social reality and invent a new language to define themselves and shape their definition in their own words. This is so because “language itself… offers an arena in which such definitions may be challenged” (King 29). Growing apart from the patriarchal vision of society and religion women reinterpreted the biblical scriptures to go against the radicalism of the Christian message. As Frances Devlin-Glass Lyn McCredden asseverate, for women, their relationships to the institutions and traditions of religious faith are constructed on shifting ground. While some place themselves “outside” the institution, and often outside any orthodox understandings of their faith, others identify themselves to varying degrees as “inside”. This metaphor—inside/outside—may be used as a means of self-definition that begins from a critical, discriminating acknowledgment of the power of religion and its institutions (3). Thus, women engaged in the ‘destructive genesis’ (Kristeva) of the Bible to walk the path of the Bakhtinian carnival theory, that is to say, to breed a “spontaneous, irreverent, bawdy and counter-authoritative” (King 31) reading of the spiritual message.

For African American women, Christianity became an epistemological tool to overcome the discourses that relegated them as women, and thus, essentially inferior to men, as well as black subjects, and consequently outside the creeds that defined womanhood under highly repressive slavery times. Nonetheless, King acutely notes how for black women “to challenge biblical constructions of women… requires a different strategy from those adopted by many of their white contemporaries” (153). This is so because, contrarily to the experience of white women, black women had historically been associated and written as a body. Therefore, “any attempt to define woman in terms of the body can only be an essentializing project which evades the fact that the body is clearly not experienced in the same way by women of all races” (King 154). Accordingly, for African American women the only way to restore, and redefine, female spirituality is to invoke its healing powers just to “deconstruct the body/mind tradition” (King 155). The trope of the body is to be translated into the power of the word, namely, a new definition and interpretation of spiritual musings that can create a sense of unity and prosperity resulting into a rehabilitated image of that black female self. Black women promoted new and feminist readings of Christology considering that it is “grounded in the particular experience of the oppressed” (Grant 11).

This Christology—or else the capacity to stand in Christ’s shoes by means of an analogy that bespeaks a similar suffering—represented a good opportunity for black women to create a story of their own. The specific use of this theology, or the theology of the (socially) oppressed, might as well serve as the cultural weapon to liberate black women from the “Patriarchal Demon” (Grant 13). The feminist Christology to which African American women got attached is upheld in an overt context of “radical struggles in the process toward the liberation of women from social and political and ecclesiastical oppression” (Grant 18). Hence, black women’s conception of the sacred message that created a cultural web of feminine solidarity arises in the midst of in-between-ness: oscillating among resistance and a unique conception of a black feminine mode of atonement. What shimmers under these two cultural outlets and what eventually brings them together into a unique black feminine aesthetic, I propose, is the affective readings that African American women have historically impinged on Christianity aiming to counteract its primordial message.

The concept of affect began to gain momentum in the 1950s when Silvan Tomkins tried to separate what he called affect from emotion. Delving into the opening debates that led to new approaches to psychology and therapy, Tomkins afforded affect with a nuanced contrast to emotion because the latter contains memories and certain habit patterns. Thus, and taking the concept of affect as an axiom, “other emotion-related terms can be fitted into a solid theoretical framework and thereby given precise meaning” (Ostrofsky 4). The affect can be expanded to embrace ontological experiences not necessarily linked to a fixed understanding of the self. Brian Massumi posits affect as “what escapes our attention, as what haunts the representational realm rather than merely infusing it with emotive presence” and regards affect in terms of “ontological emergence that is released from cognition” (puar 2017). The politics of affect are characterized for creating an autonomous mode of self-representation, a motif aptly used by battered subjectivities to bring together a collective sense of community and being.

So, if affects “are transient” (Ostrofsky 4) but can be also attached to a functional aesthetic efficiency, their usage can be easily connected to a personal mode of spirituality. As Tomkins scholar Brendan I. McGroarty explains, according to the politics of affect theory, “the affects ultimately mold the interrelated process of perception, imagination, memory storage and retrieval, and consciousness. Because the affect system lays such a heavy claim on the human psyche, there are parallels between intense affective experience and religious experience” (57). Therefore, the politics of affect are suitable for women to link their quest for recognition with a spirituality that could give them enough room to both represent and heal themselves. This is so because, as Tomkins proposes, the “affect theory…accounts more fully for the role of perception and a wider use of imagination in motivation, recognizing the affects as its initial and primary source” (McGroarty 61).

There is a considerable amount of material written about the use of a personalized version of the Christian creed—unveiling a precise feminine spirituality—-on the hands of black women to uphold a new and rehabilitated version of themselves. This is the case of pioneering works such as Pat Crutchfield Exum’s Keeping the Faith: Writings by Contemporary Black Women (1974), Jeanne Noble’s Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters: A History of the Black Woman in America (1978) or more recently Emily Townes’ edition A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering (1993) and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes’ If It Wasn’t for the Women (2001). However, nothing has been said about the merging ethos through which spirituality and affect interplay in the lives of African American women.

In my reading, Crafts, Hurston and Morrison display an array of female characters that revolve around their spiritual ethos understood only through bonds of emotional sharing and affective imports. Hence, through the use of affect, these authors try to recompose a healing sense of unity by bridging its effects with their specific construction of a religious creed. In this sense, they have used the politics of affect intermeshed in their own vision of spirituality to defend their own aesthetics in their writings. Suffice it to say, this has been a disharmonious matter because of the role that black women specifically have played within the religious cultural discourse. Infusing their writings with a spiritual vision and the politics of affect made Crafts, Hurston and Morrison create a black feminine aesthetic that served a twofold purpose: they reinvented themselves in the North American context and it helped them unite black women’s experience to foster global healing overcoming “the imposition of a strategy of identity” (1982: 94), as argued by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.

Crafts, Hurston and Morrison use affect to complement their vision of the Christian creed although in different ways. However, they do converge in their usage of affect as an autonomous cultural outlet that renders a feminist reading of their novels. As stated earlier, affect fits within the conflicting message of Christianity since it allows black women to develop an autonomous ethos that allows them to make a sociocultural move forward while giving them a possibility to envision alternative ways of self-representation. On such an autonomous characteristic of affect Brian Massumi writes:

Affect is synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other: the measure of a living thing’s potential interactions is its ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into those of another… If there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. Actually existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect (qtd. in puar 207).

This autonomous character of the affect theory resonates—albeit in various modes of representation—in The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Moses, Man of the Mountain and A Mercy. The three novels develop a ‘grammar of affect’ directly linked to spirituality. This grammar of affect, coined by feminist affect theorist Barbara Tomlinson, surfaces as an important term in the three analyzed novels. Tomlinson follows Tomkins and other affect theorists but adds the feminist perspective in an era of global interconnectedness. In this light, Tomlinson defines the grammars of affect in the allure of a feminist aesthetic by declaring that “(a)ffect is part of the authority of a text as it is constructed within a complex matrix of institutional norms, authorial statuses, privileges, and textual features that work together” (56). Or briefly put, “(a)ffect is deeply entwined with creation of textual authority” (56). The ethics of the affective turn, as Barbara Tomlinson additionally notes, transform “the terms of reading to foreground inflections of politics and power”, and “allows us to consider how specific norms of propriety, politeness, civility, and proper affect carry into academic arenas conceptions that are racialized, gendered, and profoundly classed” (56, emphasis added).

The merging of religion and affect allowed these writers to rethink the configuration of new forms of black cultural appropriation in the US. This is so because, as Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg remind us, affect “can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension” (1). In this sense, Crafts, Hurston and Morrison transform affect into an “ethical, aesthetic, and political task all at once” (Seigworth & Gregg 3).

If a sociopolitical reading of the politics of affect can easily bridge the distance between reason and emotions, the use of affect in the hands of these black women writers brings to the fore another interpretation to spirituality that goes beyond the supposed gulf between emotion and reason and, eventually, proposes to read it as an optional type of rational belief. Affect, then, appears as a concept practiced by black women also in their constant help for self-assertion. The affective turn that they apply either to or against their sacred reading of Christianity points out to autonomy and self-representation through creativity. As Lloyd further proclaims,

The most important upshot of the feminist critique of rationality has perhaps not been the emergence of – or even the aspiration to – a thought-style that is distinctively ‘female’. Perhaps it has been rather a sharper articulation of the different strands – intellectual, imaginative, and affective – involved in human ways of thinking; a resistance to their polarization; and a greater appreciation of the strength and limitations of different ways of bringing them together. Different kinds of unity between intellect, imagination and emotion are appropriate. (172)

Hence, and despite its manifold manifestations and the “sweeping assortment of philosophical/psychological/physiological underpinnings…and ontological pathways”, the concept of affect is used by these black women writers in “all manner of political/pragmatic/performative ends” (Seigworth & Gregg 5, emphasis added). Such a performative mode of the affective reading of the sacred message manifests an interest in a powerful alternative to the social and cultural injustice African American women had to confront.

This is all the more revealed if we take into account how, according to Virginia Held, “the ethics of care … characteristically sees persons as relational and interdependence, morally and epistemologically” (Held 13). Thomas B. Lawrence and Sally Maitlis explain that “feminist writing sees care as an ongoing central dimension of relationships, regardless of the suffering or the flourishing being experienced” (642). Thus, these writers create an ‘ontology of possibility’ (Bloch) that links religion and affect to foster an overarching feminist mode of representing spirituality as an act of healing and growth.

The result is the creation of a sacred black female self that is positioned at the intersection of resistance, counterattack and progress. A position that takes as its central field the cultivation of affect between African American women and their encompassing social reality. The modulation of these bonds into a textual affect turns out to be a “rich site for considering how argumentative rhetorics create authority” (19), as Barbara Tomilson rightly notes. I consider the use of the word rhetoric altogether propitious because if rhetoric “refers to the use of speech or writing to persuade” (Tomilson 21), the textual affect that these three authors advance in their writings unavoidably tries to inform readers of their own cosmology.

In such a way, Crafts, Hurston and Morrison attain authoritative voice which, in their work, ceases to be regarded as a teleological process, in Foucault’s vision, and instead it comes forth as “the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked ‘other’” (Foucault 154-155). In other words, and following the Foucaultian theory, these authors’s readings disclaim the traditional conception of history. Rather, they fictionalize their own conception of spirituality with the grammar of affect to showcase the capacity of African American women to create and offer their own herstory. Or else, to give evidence of their aforementioned (cultural) power. Moreover, through the use of the affective mode in which these black writers model the religious discourse, Crafts, Hurston and Morrison fully embrace the import of communities of belonging. Thus, they not only aestheticize religion but they also make it appear infused with affect to prove their power and capacity to “elaborate different and alternative modalities of belonging, connectivity, and intimacy” (puar 208). In so doing, as José Esteban Muñoz asserts, affect, appears always within signification, within narrative, functioning as a form of critical resistance to dominant modes of being and becoming (2000, 67-79).

In tune with that idea, Anthony B. Pinn claims that, for black women, the creation of a genuine “(a)esthetics became a source of dominance without betraying anything of its illusionary disinterestedness. Rather, it formed and justified a particular experience of the world” (6). African American women’s aesthetics takes as a starting point the construction of a disruptive history as a resource for the present. Yet, and veering away from reductive analysis that can only read black women’s effort to evolve as a social and/or class fight, these writers have drawn on spirituality not only to reconstruct their identity in North America but also to set the pace for a feminist African American aesthetic canon. The search for a spiritual wholeness that can grant them a personal growth understood in terms of a collective achievement is a major cultural feat that black women have willingly accomplished. As Silvia Castro-Borrego rightly contends, for African American women “Ancestral Spiritualism consists of the connection among the past, present and future, and the life force that makes it possible for the physical and the spiritual worlds to be done” (9). To these words I would add that such a life force is based on the use of the Christian religion that Crafts, Hurston and Morrison have tried to recast as a sign of their own cultural outlet. Thus, their spirituality is directly linked to a certain idea of religion that black women got together as a central site for the creation of a unique aesthetic.

For these three writers affect is an inclusionary attempt towards national healing and, since it builds upon spirituality, it echoes in the Levinasian idea of the essence, through which they aestheticize their subjectivity, thus linking affective bonds and self-assertion. According to the French philosopher, “(t)he responsibility for the other is the locus in which is situated the null-site of subjectivity” (10). Hence, the essence of the sacredness that these black women enact is based on feminist and feminine concepts such as vulnerability, sensibility but also resilience. The sacred self that they reshape is thereby inclusive, and serves as a national expiation for the infamous outcomes of slavery. The subjectivity that these African American women writers conceive follow, thus, Levinas’ own words:

Vulnerability, exposure to outrage, to wounding…passivity of the accusative form… implicating the identity of the hostage who substitutes himself for the others: all this is the self, a defecting or defeat of the ego’s identity. And this, pushed to the limit, is sensibility, sensibility as the subjectivity of the subject. It is a substitution for another, one in the place of another, expiation. (15)

The ethics and aesthetics that revolve around the essence of this sacred femininity created by Crafts, Hurston and Morrison, are envisioned to resist essentialist notions of black feminism—or womanism, as coined by Alice Walker in the 20th century—and are crucial to understand their literary production. However, the evolution of the African American jeremiad as the central tenet for the unfolding of such spirituality—explained above—is to little avail for Toni Morrison in A Mercy.

Hence, the black female self that emerges from this affective sacred imagery unpicks a different conception of religion as an asset of social and racial resistance for Crafts and Hurston. Nonetheless, Morrison’s novel demystifies the cultural value of Christianity and only aestheticizes its impact to suffuse another type of national, and nationalist, experience for African American women.

From the nineteenth century until the twentieth century, African American women’s creative gifts to heal divergence and difference along the thrusting lines of gender, politics and spirituality debunk national approaches due to their double oppression. Consequently, they follow affective “ideologies of style”, to borrow from Barbara Tomlinson, to construct alternative rhetorics of authority and self-representation. In spite of this, Morrison turns to the value of the Christian creed as a redemptory and healing outlet, and showcases a sort of Christian apocalypse in which the aesthetics of religion preclude any possible way of a national healing. Besides, A Mercy exemplifies how the crippling discourse of Christianity breaks away the affective bonds that separate women for the bigotry that accompanies religions seems to be stronger that the ontological moves that unite them. Yet, the novels by Crafts, Hurston and Morrison prove and exemplify, as Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden contend in Feminist Poetics of the Sacred, that “there continue to be many questions raised by feminists, and religious feminists, about ways of thinking and being beyond or in spite of, or after patriarchal religion, and in full recognition of the (hopefully moveable) limitations of the symbolic order” (6).

Following this theoretical framework in which spirituality and affect intermesh to present a distinctive and alternative way for African American women to envision a healed and rehabilitated black female subjectivity, I will analyze the three novels by Crafts, Hurston and Morrison to show how these writers have shaped Christianity and the politics of affect for their own purposes, and how, in so doing, they exemplify the alluring potential of sacredness applied to black women. By using novels from three different centuries, I aim to demonstrate how these three writers use the same tradition but with different purposes and outcomes.

I begin my analysis with Hannah Crafts’s novel The Bondwoman’s Narrative, recently claimed to be the first piece of fiction ever written by an African American woman.