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Chapter 19: An Old Friend
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Bondwoman’s Narrative, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Cruelties of Slavery
The Virtuous Woman’s Life
Religion and Hypocrisy
Race as a Social Construct
Enslavement as Gothic Horror
Summary
Analysis
With many tears of fondness spilled at their parting, Aunt Hetty sees Hannah to the steamboat that will carry her north. Although she’s sad to leave her friend behind, Hannah soon recovers her natural curiosity and begins to look and listen to the merry crowd of travelers around her. From them, she hears the strange and sordid tale of Mr. Trappe’s downfall.
Earlier, Hannah and the mistress just so happened to meet someone who knew what had happened to the master (Horace), and now history repeats itself when somehow Hannah learns about Mr. Trappe’s downfall from a group of strangers.
Themes
According to the travelers’ gossip, Mr. Trappe met his demise after targeting the family of a wealthy planter. The planter’s wife was an enslaved woman whom the planter had allegedly freed. They had many beautiful children. When the planter died, his relatives hired Mr. Trappe to help them dispute his will. It’s widely believed that the planter did manumit his wife, but that Mr. Trappe found and destroyed the document so that he could legally purchase her and her daughters as part of his own trade in enslaved women. The planter’s sons, however, had disappeared before they could be sold. Everyone presumed they’d run away to the north.
As with other instances of sexual relationships between a White man and an enslaved Black woman, this story continues to suggest the porousness of the color line. All that decides whether the wife and her children are legally White and free or Black and enslaved is a piece of paperwork. Mr. Trappe gets his comeuppance when he gets too greedy—the storytellers intimate that the sheer value of the family should Mr. Trappe find them to be enslaved pushed him into cheating and destroying the evidence that would have prevented him from doing so.
Themes
One night, the old steward locked up the house as usual. In the morning, he discovered the planter’s wife and daughters missing from the chamber in which they were imprisoned. When he went to tell Mr. Trappe, he discovered Mr. Trappe dead—killed with a single gunshot to the head—in his study. A witness reported hearing a carriage passing by in the middle of the night at a rapid pace, presumably the planter’s sons taking their mother and sisters north with them to freedom. On hearing this, Hannah has a momentary and instinctive flash of pity for Mr. Trappe, who died with the full weight of his sins burdening his soul. But then she reminds herself that the Bible promises that people reap what they sow.
But Hannah’s (and the novel’s) belief in divine justice and retribution shows itself to be well-founded. The brave and loving sons and brothers didn’t run away to save themselves but returned to rescue their mother and sister and to mete out punishment on Mr. Trappe for years of misdeeds. Hannah hears this story with great satisfaction, satisfaction the novel invites readers to share, especially since Mr. Trappe turned out to be such a ubiquitous and unstoppable evil.
Themes
