Bob Cox alerted us to History meets mystery, where they wonder Was \’The Bondwoman\’s Narrative\’ written by a female former slave in the 1850s? Henry Louis Gates Jr. thinks it was.
\’\’I concluded,\’\’ says Andrews, whose books include \’\’To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography,\’\’ \’\’that either this person is the most unusual white writer I have ever seen from the mid-19th century or a black narrator who had not yet turned her writing into something that would be sufficiently conventional to be published. I think that there is a lot of evidence that the author was a black woman. But it\’s not an open-and-shut case.\’\’
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