Barack Obama made his name by telling us that there aren't two separate Americas, black and white, but just one United States. Still, knowing the color of a voter's skin offers a fair amount of information about how that voter feels about the president. Among white voters, it's been dropping since this spring. Joan Walsh discusses some of the likely reasons, and some of the possible inflection points, in her blog; here, we're simply going to look at the numbers, and then look at what was happening in the political world while those numbers were being collected. Using Gallup polling data, the following charts show how President Obama's approval rating broke down among white, nonwhite, black and Hispanic poll respondents, and how those figures changed as specific key events occurred.
Jan 20: Barack Obama is inaugurated as president.
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| Jan 19-25 | 63 | 78 | 86 | 74 |
| Jan 26-Feb 1 | 61 | 80 | 90 | 75 |
| Feb 2-8 | 59 | 79 | 92 | 73 |
| Feb 9-15 | 58 | 81 | 91 | 77 |
Feb 17: The president signs the stimulus package into law.
Feb 18: President Obama proposes his mortgage relief plan.
Feb 19: Rick Santelli delivers his rant on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| Feb 16-22 | 56 | 78 | 91 | 76 |
Feb 26: The White House releases its bold budget proposal.
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| Feb 23-Mar 1 | 58 | 79 | 94 | 73 |
| Mar 2-8 | 55 | 80 | 96 | 77 |
| Mar 9-15 | 55 | 79 | 90 | 74 |
| Mar 16-22 | 58 | 77 | 92 | 70 |
| Mar 23-29 | 54 | 79 | 95 | 74 |
| Mar 30-Apr 5 | 57 | 75 | 91 | 70 |
| Apr 6-12 | 54 | 79 | 92 | 75 |
Apr 15: Protesters mark Tax Day by attending Tea Party events around the country.
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| Apr 13-19 | 55 | 82 | 94 | 79 |
| Apr 20-26 | 57 | 85 | 96 | 85 |
| Apr 27-May 3 | 58 | 84 | 92 | 84 |
| May 4-10 | 58 | 84 | 92 | 84 |
| May 11-17 | 56 | 83 | 91 | 85 |
| May 18-24 | 57 | 82 | 91 | 78 |
May 26: Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.
May 27: Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comments emerge.
May 27: Newt Gingrich attacks Sotomayor as "racist."
May 28: The president calls criticisms of Sotomayor "nonsense," but adds, "I'm sure she would have restated it."
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| May 25-31 | 56 | 81 | 90 | 79 |
June 2: Sen. Pat Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, calls attacks on Sotomayor "unbelievable" and "vicious."
June 4: The president delivers his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo.
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| June 1-7 | 55 | 83 | 95 | 82 |
| June 8-14 | 54 | 79 | 94 | 75 |
| June 15-21 | 54 | 79 | 94 | 75 |
| June 22-28 | 52 | 83 | 94 | 81 |
July 1: Unemployment reaches 9.5 percent.
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| June 29-July 5 | 52 | 82 | 96 | 81 |
| July 6-12 | 51 | 78 | 91 | 75 |
July 13: The Senate Judiciary Committee begins confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor.
July 15: Sen. Tom Coburn tells Judge Sotomayor, "You've got some 'splainin' to do."
|
Date |
White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| July 13-19 | 51 | 81 | 94 | 79 |
July 20: The first notable disruption of a congressional home district meeting occurs, when a Birther hijacks Delaware Rep. Mike Castle's attempt to discuss healthcare with constituents.
July 20: The arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his Cambridge, Mass. home becomes public.
July 21: The president comments on the arrest in a press conference, saying the police acted "stupidly" in arresting Gates.
July 22: Liz Cheney attempts to justify Birtherism on CNN, saying, "People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas."
July 24: Obama says of his comments on the Gates arrest, "I could've calibrated those words differently."
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| July 20-26 | 47 | 79 | 95 | 72 |
July 28: Birther frenzy reaches an approximate peak.
July 28: The Senate Judiciary Committee votes to confirm Sonia Sotomayor.
July 29: Obama redoubles his healthcare sales pitch, holding public meetings in Raleigh, N.C., and Bristol, Va.
July 30: Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. Joseph Crowley go to the White House for a beer with the president and vice president.
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| July 27-Aug 2 | 46 | 76 | 94 | 68 |
Aug 3: Members of Congress on recess find hostile, combative crowds at town halls.
Aug 6: The full Senate votes to confirm Sonia Sotomayor.
Aug 7: Sarah Palin worries, in public, about "death panel" measures in the healthcare reform proposals.
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| Aug 3-9 | 47 | 79 | 96 | 77 |
Aug 11: William Kostric brings his 9 mm pistol to the president's town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H. He carries a sign saying, "It is time to water the tree of liberty" and seems to touch off a trend of bearing arms to town halls.
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| Aug 10-16 | 46 | 73 | 92 | 69 |
Aug 22: Obama denounces "outrageous myths" about healthcare reform.
| Date | White | Nonwhite | Black | Hispanic |
| Aug 17-23 | 45 | 72 | 91 | 67 |
| Aug 24-30 | 43 | 71 | 86 | 67 |
| Aug 31-Sept 6 | 45 | 74 | 91 | 68 |
Only in America: Now that the dust and feathers have settled from the nation's latest interracial pecking party, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s daughter reveals that she thinks the wicked racist cop Sgt. James Crowley is, like, really hot. Writing in the Daily Beast, Elizabeth Gates, her distinguished father's confidante and amanuensis during the recent unpleasantries, confides that when they met at the White House "Beer Summit," the Cambridge cop's 13-year-old daughter said she'd found aspects of her father's sudden celebrity unsettling.
"I read an article where they called my father, 'sexy cop.' It was embarrassing," [Crowley's] daughter said as we sat down for cookies and Coke. 'Yeah,' I replied. 'He's pretty cute.' We laughed as Crowley's wife rubbed her daughter's back and reminded her son to mind the gift they had brought for the president."
The lad gave Obama a Red Sox jersey, a suitable gift for any occasion. In other news, Ms. Gates, mind-reading like so many since this public sitcom began, scrutinized Crowley's brood and opined, "This wasn't a family raised on hate." Professor Gates himself announced, "When he's not arresting you, Sgt. Crowley is a really likable guy."
Back in Cambridge, Gates sent flowers to 911 caller Lucia Whalen, whose attorney told Greta van Susteren on Fox News that taking the obstreperous Harvard scholar into custody struck Whalen as justifiable. After getting trashed as a bigot on national television, Whalen herself turned out to be what academicians call "a person of color." Oops.
In short, Gates, marveling about President Obama's brilliant plan to get himself off the political hotplate by hosting the beer party (actually, Crowley suggested it), has walked the incident back as far as possible without explaining what combination of circumstances caused him to act so oddly on July 16. That, we're evidently never going to get.
En route to the White House, Gates somewhat grandiosely told his daughter, "There are approximately 800,000 black men in prison, and on July 16, 2009, I simply became one of them." Now he's back at his summer home on Martha's Vineyard, pedaling his custom-made 24-speed tricycle to the beach. And more power to him.
Certain members of Gates' journalistic supporters urge a false-arrest suit. A prediction: That won't happen, either. Only fools file impulsive lawsuits; the cost is prohibitive, the discovery process unpleasant.
Did Crowley maybe improve minor facts in his much-scrutinized report? Could be. Put it this way: If you'd seen a falling-down drunk skate on a DUI because a 3 a.m. police report called a dark-blue vehicle black (I have), you might edit creatively, too.
It ain't right, but it's the way of the world.
One can only hope that Edward Burns ("Sidewalks of New York," "The Brothers McMullen") has locked up the movie rights. Not only does Crowley look like his cousin, but wry social farce is what Burns does best. Alternatively, Spike Lee could have wicked fun with yet another racial comedy of errors.
Meanwhile, and here's the thing, the incident cost the Obama White House almost two weeks in its efforts to pass medical-insurance reform, the most significant social legislation in a generation, while Americans entertained themselves screaming insults at one another.
"It is this vast and militant ignorance," H. L. Mencken wrote, "this wide-spread and fathomless prejudice against intelligence, that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar, and so generally disreputable." The Sage of Baltimore, as he was known, wrote long before the invention of 24/7 satellite news organizations and the Internet.
Here at the sprawling rural campus of Unsolicited Opinions Inc., the one-man, six-dog think tank where this column originates, we experienced a rare sorehead supernova. On the same day the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette printed a signed letter describing your humble, obedient servant here as a hater of Christians and an enemy of God for pointing out that Sarah Palin's kind of a ditz, anonymous e-mails began to arrive from the professor's supporters.
"Look you (bleep)ing racist moron," one fellow suggested, "die in your (bleep)hole called Arkansas." Someone posting at Salon.com took a similar tack. "You really this ignorant?" one fellow asked. "Or just an ignorant, right-wing, crazy, motherfrolickin' bastard? KMA Mr. Lyons. Your Southern bias is too lacking in intelligence to bother with a response. This time you have truly revealed your Arkansas roots."
Not much of a conversation-starter, would you say? As a New Jersey native, where scatological insult's an art form, I've rarely lost a name-calling contest.
But why bother? Argument's one thing. I thrive on it. But this imbecilic contumely, much encouraged by Internet anonymity, appears to be dividing the nation into feuding cultural tribes too busy feeling sorry for themselves and shrieking insults to comprehend the nation's gravest problems, much less to solve them.
Oh, and another thing: Woo Pig, Sooie!
Today, President Obama is scheduled to engage in a little beer diplomacy. Cambridge, Massachusetts police Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. will join the President at the White House for a beer in order to extinguish the firestorm of controversy that has engulfed all three men since Crowley arrested Gates in front of his own home -- and Obama commented that the police "acted stupidly."
It's not the first time that the most formal home in America has been the backdrop for a casual meeting of the minds. Here's a quick trip through a list of our favorites:
So a Harvard professor who reportedly played the "you don't know who you're messing with" card to a cop got an unscheduled ride downtown. Boo hoo hoo. Maybe he learned something. Or would. If he'd get over himself, which appears unlikely. Anyway, when the police come to your door, always step outside. It puts everybody more at ease.
Also, be a regular Joe. They don't know how many awards you've won, and, frankly, they don't care. Silly misunderstandings are their favorite kind of domestic call. So just answer their questions and they'll go away. Furthermore, people get arrested in their homes every day. It's usually the easiest place to find them. If you've no experience of the law enforcement world, watch a few episodes of "COPS." (Programming note: It's not on PBS.)
Alas, the average professor can be awfully hard to bring down off his high horse. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was just back from a trip to China. So he probably hadn't heard a story that moved on the wires that morning about five Jersey City cops gunned down by a perp who'd hidden a shotgun under his bathrobe. One died, along with the shooter and his girlfriend.
Chances are that Crowley, who answered a possible burglary-in-progress call at Gates' home in Cambridge, Mass., that afternoon, knew about it. Cops notice stories like the Jersey City shooting. They're a reminder that even small, seemingly inoffensive fellows can shoot you graveyard dead.
"We don't know precisely what was going through Crowley's mind," concedes New York Times columnist Judith Warner. "But his report and later statements seem to attest to a greatly outsized sense of vulnerability and victimization."
Where do they find them, I wonder? Whether Crowley knew about the Jersey City incident, he was alone and responding to a 911 call of a possible crime in progress. There had been recent burglaries in that area. The woman who reported it met him outside. She'd seen two men break in the front door and enter the house.
So, yeah, of course Crowley asked Gates to step outside. He didn't know who was inside, or what was going on. Fictionalizing, Warner surmises that even a white man might have "bristled at the cold officiousness of the officer's tone."
Here's how Gates described the incident to his own magazine, the Root. Having forced a jammed lock, he was on the phone with Harvard University. "I'm saying, 'You need to send someone to fix my lock.' All of a sudden, there was a policeman on my porch. And I thought, 'This is strange.' So I went over to the front porch still holding the phone, and I said, 'Officer, can I help you?' And he said, 'Would you step outside onto the porch.'... All the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I realized that I was in danger. And I said to him no, out of instinct. I said, 'No, I will not.'
"My lawyers later told me that that was a good move and had I walked out onto the porch he could have arrested me for breaking and entering. He said 'I'm here to investigate a 911 call for breaking and entering into this house.' And I said 'That's ridiculous because this happens to be my house. And I'm a Harvard professor.'"
Three things: Gates needs new lawyers. Second, no he wasn't in danger, as subsequent events proved. Third, assuming sobriety, why would somebody who'd just broken his door open in broad daylight find it "strange" and "ridiculous" that a cop would ask him to explain?
Mind-reading like many in the (forgive me) liberal media, Gates even supplied Sgt. Crowley with a motive. "It's clear that he had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone's house, probably a white person's house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me."
Nothing about Crowley's fine record makes that credible. On CNN, Gates waxed indignant that the officer followed him inside without being asked. It's called "probable cause." He's not going to let a suspect out of his sight until he's satisfied there's an innocent explanation. At which point Gates apparently began yelling about racism. He says Crowley refused to identify himself; Crowley says he did, but the professor wouldn't shut up long enough to hear him.
Was it necessary to arrest Gates? Well, it's not a crime to act like a jackass, but cops can't have crowds seeing them cowered by a loudmouth. Everybody with any sense understands about black men and white cops. But racism's a two-way street. Being a Harvard professor ought to imply a degree of self-control. Had he not acted, yes, so "stupidly," Gates could have avoided embarrassment.
Meanwhile, President Obama should learn to finesse touchy questions when he doesn't know what he's talking about.
© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association
First, credit where it's due: A few lonely Republican leaders are belatedly trying to clean up the party's mess of crazy, from the racially tinged character attacks on Sonia Sotomayor to the unhinged rhetoric of the Birthers to the overall vicious and fact-free spew of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. It's not working yet -- Beck's claiming Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" on Tuesday might be a new low -- but at least someone's trying.
Sen. Lindsey Graham tried to kick off a new GOP flirtation with decency when he announced his vote to confirm Sotomayor last week. (Yet Graham wound up the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee to support her, with even supposed judicial moderates like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch voting against her.) Then, after Birther madness reached a new high, a few mid-level GOP names -- Mike Huckabee, Michael Steele and even fact-averse propagandists Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly -- began distancing themselves from their party's anti-Obama fringe. “Chairman Steele believes that this is an unnecessary distraction and believes that the president is a U.S. citizen," a spokeswoman for Steele told the Plum Line's Greg Sargent. Better late than never.
Still, Limbaugh and Beck continue to ratchet up their alarming and increasingly racist hatred for the president. Both of them have taken to insisting that the first president with a black father and white mother, mostly raised by his white grandparents, is a racist who hates white people. And look for this kind of crazy to escalate with the party base.
Limbaugh's been on this beat for a long time, but the complicated Gates case inspired him to a whole new level of fiction. "Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman," the radio bully told his audience last Friday, the day Obama expressed regret over his quick judgment in the matter and invited Skip Gates and Officer James Crowley to the White House for a beer. On Monday he insisted, "I do believe [Obama is] an angry black guy!"
Weepy Glenn Beck has been even more hysterical, flatly declaring Obama a "racist" on Fox News and elaborating: "This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture." Watch Beck blather below; listen to his response to the ensuing criticism here.
There's a psychological term for this kind of unhinged behavior, and it's called "projection." These two racists are projecting their own racial feelings onto Obama. Increasingly, the ranks of the racially blinkered (and I include MSNBC's Pat Buchanan here) are playing victim, insisting Obama's modest moves -- appointing a Latina justice, using the Gates case to speak out against racial profiling -- are reversing the racial order wholesale, and putting white men on the bottom of the pile.
One look at Congress, the Supreme Court, Fortune 500 CEOs -- or conversely, at prison cells across America -- tells you how delusional the Beck-Limbaugh-Buchanan view is, but that doesn't make it irrelevant. It's likely to get worse, as persistent economic hardship plus a spike in right-wing racist rhetoric increases the appeal of scapegoat strategies.
It's time for more decent Republicans to take a stand against the vicious anti-Obama racism of the party fringe and their broadcast fuhrers. On Monday Ohio Sen. George Voinovich blasted the dominance of his party's Southern fringe, and its outdated Southern Strategy with its emphasis on racial division. Like Voinovich, I think GOP racism and race-baiting will consign the party to a long time in the political minority. But it could claim a lot of other victims along the way.
If you can stand to watch more right-wing crazy, this Media Matters video sums it all up:
If Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is correct, his recent literary find, a manuscript called "The Bondwoman's Narrative," recently published by Warner Books, isn't just the only known novel written by a fugitive slave; it's also the first novel ever penned by an African-American woman. Much is unknown about the book, including where and when it was written. However, the biggest mystery is the author herself.
After having hip-replacement surgery in early 2001, Gates, the W.E.B. Du Bois professor of the humanities and chair of Afro-American studies at Harvard University, was suddenly faced with an abundance of time on his hands. On sabbatical, he spent most of his days reading. Gates had begun receiving catalogs from New York's Swann Galleries, one of the foremost auction houses for African-Americana. One day, while perusing their catalog, he noticed a handwritten manuscript for sale, one purported to be an authentic "fictionalized biography," thought to date from the 1850s, signed by an escaped slave calling herself Hannah Crafts. Its history could be traced back to the 1940s, when it was owned by Dorothy Porter, the African-American scholar.
Gates was immediately excited. He had become well-known for authenticating and republishing Harriet Wilson's 1859 book "Our Nig," then the earliest known novel by an African-American woman (Wilson was a free woman, having been born in the North), and he felt that this particular auction lot might offer an even bigger discovery.
First, however, he had to figure out how to afford it. Most publishers Gates talked to weren't interested in providing financial resources unless the manuscript could be authenticated. Could Gates prove, for example, that the manuscript was as old as Porter believed? Could he be sure that it was indeed the work of an African-American and a fugitive slave? Authors of the period frequently published novels under false names and identities -- women authors publishing as men, and vice versa, and white authors occasionally writing fiction told from the perspective of blacks. However, Gates wouldn't be able to convincingly authenticate the book without first purchasing it.
"It was enough for me, as I say in the introduction, that Dorothy Porter thought [Crafts] was black. Dorothy Porter, as we say, 'did not play,'" Gates says. "She was a great scholar, and a bibliophile. To me, if Dorothy Porter thought [Crafts] was black, then she probably was black. There is absolutely no reason to pretend you are black today if you're white. No financial reason, no professional reason. If that's true, why would someone do it in the mid-19th century? The number of fictional slave narratives [written by whites] is tiny, and each of them was quickly outed. If a woman said she was black in the 19th century, then nine out of ten times she was black."
Finding no help from publishing circles, Gates decided to go it alone, even though he feared the book might fetch $50,000 to $100,000. Well, almost alone.
"A friend of mine, Richard Newman, went and bid," Gates laughs. "I was still house-bound at the time. I waited and waited and waited and waited. Finally he calls late at night, after I had lost like five pounds. I said, 'Dick, did we get it?'
"'Did we get it?' He goes, 'Oh yeah, we got it. First bid! I just decided to wait until it was over.'
"I wanted to kill him!"
In the end, Gates purchased the tattered manuscript for the bargain-basement price of $8,500 plus commission. Reading it, Gates felt an overwhelming sense of certainty as to its authenticity. "The Bondwoman's Narrative" tells the first-person story of a female slave named Hannah Crafts, like the novel's author, who escapes plantation life in Virginia and North Carolina, travels to Washington and ultimately winds up married to a minister and working as a schoolteacher in a free black community in New Jersey. Like Porter, Gates was struck by how, unlike white writers of the period, Crafts introduces her characters as human beings first. "Only," Porter wrote, "as the story unfolds, in most instances, does it become apparent that they are Negroes."
"You 'have to go there to know there,' as Zora Neale Hurston says," Gates recalls. "The evidence was overwhelming that [Crafts] was who she says she was. Just the thing about introducing characters as human beings and then telling you later they were black. Nobody did that. No white writer did that."
After purchasing the book, Gates found an interested -- if wary -- potential publisher in Warner Books. "Time Warner said, 'We have to date this,'" Gates says. "They had been burned by the Jack the Ripper diary fraud and then the Hitler diary fraud."
After carefully copying the book onto microfilm, Gates first visited with rare-manuscript dealer Kenneth Rendell, who helped expose both the Hitler and Ripper frauds. Rendell too believed the book to be an authentic work and recommended that Gates contact Joe Nickell, Ph.D. Nickell is the author of numerous books on literary sleuthery and is a senior research fellow at CSICOP -- the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal -- where he has successfully debunked thousands of claims of paranormal activity, weeping icons of the Virgin Mary, and all manner of Mulder/Scully material. Nickell was also another key figure in exposing the Jack the Ripper diary fraud, and a recommendation from Rendell was more than enough to inspire Gates' full confidence.
Gates had the manuscript hand-delivered by a courier to Nickell, who began an exhaustive weeks-long examination of the book. Gates, meanwhile, set about examining census records from the Library of Congress and the Family History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and others. The story began to slowly piece itself together.
The first major break came when Nickell called Gates with a seemingly minor textual tendency he'd found that he believed might hold a store of information. In her manuscript, Crafts would refer to the slaveholder as "Wh----r." Later in the book, Nickell noticed Crafts would fill in the missing letters and use the full name (Wheeler) outright, which he felt indicated the author's increasing confidence about using her slaveholder's real name. Soon, Gates found out that that a slaveholder named John Hill Wheeler owned land in Murfreesboro and Lincoln County, N.C., where the beginning of Crafts' narrative is set.
Meanwhile, Nickell sequestered himself with the fragile book.
"My first impression of 'The Bondwoman's Narrative' was that it looked good as gold," says Joe Nickell. "But I've seen forgeries that looked equally as authentic. A forgery was unlikely here in some ways. The provenance traced back to the 1940s, where it was known to exist and sell for $85. When you consider that it had been around for quite some time and was sold in an era when it wouldn't go for much money, it wouldn't seem cost-effective. I wasn't over-suspicious of it, but I certainly pursued it [as if it might be a forgery]."
Nickell approached the authentication process using the multifaceted techniques he describes in his groundbreaking forensic book, "Pen, Ink and Evidence: A Study of Writing and Writing Materials for the Penman, Collector, and Document Detective."
"You take the approach that you need to clear your head of any preconceived notions or biases and just go at it in as complete a way -- and in as many directions -- as possible. You look at provenance, the ink, the paper, the internal evidence -- were these words in use at this time? Sometimes a forger may be very skillful with penmanship. However, such a talent may not have a scholar's knowledge of the language of a period, or he may get careless and use the wrong paper.
"You want to see that the handwriting looked like natural handwriting. The Jack the Ripper Diaries were filled with all sorts of curlicues and things to try and make it look sort of 'Ye Olde-ish,' to coin a phrase," Nickell laughs. "This looked like a natural, period handwriting. The ink had oxidized and browned with age, which is typical of an iron gall ink. There was a stationer's crest in the corner of some of the pages. Of course, the good forgers would give you that. So, I went at this with a fine-toothed comb. Actually, I went finer than that. I used a microscope."
Turning out the lights in his lab, and using an oblique light and a magnifier, Nickell was able to find an embossment of the Southworth Paper Company, which he was able to date thanks to documents he had records of from 1856 and 1860.
"Obviously, someone could find a piece of it today and use it, but to see such a quantity of it gave me a sense of the date," Nickell says. "I back-lit the pages with a fluorescent light and looked for watermarks, which there were none of. In the process, I found what was called an accidental watermark. It was a row of what looked like suture marks across the page. That's caused by the seam of the belt of early paper machines. I now know this is machine-made paper. I could also see, under ultraviolet light, mirror images of pages of that script glowing on the adjacent page.
"This kind of 'ghost writing' happens because the ink is quite acidic and degraded the cellulose of the paper touching it," Nickell says. "I consider it a good sign of age in a document."
The paper checked out as authentic. Nickell then turned his skeptical eye toward solving the puzzle of just who this "Hannah Crafts" was.
"I could see it was written with a quill pen by the brushstrokes," Nickell continues. "You can see the effect of the bluntness of her quill pen wearing down, and then being sharpened with a quill knife. I found evidence of writing sand in tiny little ink smears where she brushed it off the page. All sorts of little human elements that would add up. Her clearing excess ink off the page with her little finger, which was common of the era. Thomas Jefferson did it, for instance. She sealed pasted corrections with what appears to be a thimble ... all these little mundane human touches over and over again, on the right materials for the time."
Gradually, the different elements Nickell studied began to form an outline of the author in his head.
"I noticed she had poked pinholes through and sewn the paper in an amateurish binding attempt. I noticed that she had used what appeared to be small sewing scissors to cut the paper for her [paste-over] corrections. I'm putting all this together and thinking sewing materials. I recalled then that women of that period often had combined writing/sewing kits and writing/sewing desks. It was considered women's work in those days. I found a rather suggestive indication that this was probably a woman."
One day, Nickell phoned Gates with one of his frequent updates -- and a revelation.
"At one place in the book, [the narrator] mentions being in Washington with her slave owners, and she mentions seeing the equestrian statue of Jackson. That sort of leapt off the page at me, because I realized that might have very significant information as to date. That statue was erected in 1853, so the manuscript could not have been written before that. I then dated it as no later than 1861, again confirmed by the writing materials, due to the absence of any mention of the Civil War or secession. Gates found in Wheeler's diary an identical mention of the statue."
Nickell soon sent his findings back to Gates and Time Warner Books, both of whom were satisfied with the expert's findings. Gates in particular was overjoyed.
"We really went together like a double helix -- like parallel universes," Gates says. "Without that report, I would have found facts, but it wouldn't have as complete by far as it is now. My debt to him is enormous. I'm a big fan of that guy. That's why I insisted on printing the whole [of Nickell's report in the book] rather than summarizing it. It's like a work of poetry."
After Gates sent the book to various scholars, many signed on to help in the quest to find a historical record of Hannah Crafts. One, William Andrews, the E. Maynard Adams professor of English at the University of North Carolina, pointed out John Hill Wheeler's involvement in the Passmore Williamson case, in which Wheeler's slave Jane Johnson was aided by Williamson, an abolitionist, in her escape from the slave owner. Imagine Gates' surprise, then, to learn that Crafts mentions Johnson in her manuscript.
The discoveries kept coming. Through Andrews, Gates was also introduced to Bryan Sinche, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina who went on to discover Wheeler's library list.
"What's fascinating is that Wheeler's library contained about 10 slave narratives," Gates says. "There was not only Dickens and 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' but also two different editions of Frederick Douglass, as well as slave narratives and 'A Key To Uncle Tom's Cabin.' This is the first time that we have an idea that a slave owner could give a hoot about the slave narratives published by the fugitive slaves. It was like a Cold Warrior reading 'Memoirs from the Bolshevik Revolution.' Maybe it was to keep up with what the opposition was doing, and maybe to discredit them.
"You notice when I talk about the gothic elements [in the novel], I say, this package echoes Horace Walpole's 'Castle of Otranto?' That book's in [Wheeler's] library. I say this passage or that one echoes Frederick Douglass? That book's in his library."
It's discoveries like these that kept excitement about "The Bondwoman's Narrative" steadily growing until Gates finally signed off on the finished galleys in time for the book to come out at the beginning of April 2002. Gates is confident that evidence of Hannah Crafts' existence lies somewhere in the shady folds of history, in census records, perhaps, or in someone's attic in New Jersey, the state Crafts' narrator lives in at the end of the book.
"'The Bondwoman's Narrative' is a unique, perhaps paradigm-changing text, unprecedented in 19th century American literature," says Andrews, one of the world's leading authorities on 19th century African-American literature. "Skip Gates' research provides compelling evidence that 'Hannah Crafts' was the first known African-American novelist. The discovery of the text in its unedited form is very important, because nothing like it exists in African-American literature from the mid 19th century. Manuscript versions of writing by major early African-American writers are extremely rare." Many works written by African-Americans of the time were heavily edited by white abolitionists before publication.
"My prime reason for publishing it now as opposed to later was that I had reached a dead end," Gates says. "I wanted to release it now so that scholars both independent and professional could have a go at it. If this book exists, if 'Our Nig' exists, then other things exist. It's just the way it has to be. They keep finding Mayan cities and tombs of pharaohs. They've got to find more manuscripts from black people in the 19th century. I'm confident of it. It's just the way it has to be."
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