slauderdale’s Reviews > The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman's Narrative – LA Times Prize-Winning Biography of Hannah Bond, the First Black Female Novelist and Enslaved Writer > Status Update

“Stowe made explicit the Christian vision behind her novel: “There is a ladder to heaven…through which the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she goes…” [Each] of her characters occupies a different rung of the ladder, with Black characters like Topsy and Tom at the bottom.” Balderdash. Topsy, sure, but Tom is a freaking saint. Stowe would absolutely have put him at the top of the ladder.

Looks like a straight up error back on page 67. Catherine Turner was not the mother, she was the WIFE of Thomas Turner, whom she had married in 1810. I was puzzling over that forever. Like, were there two Catherine Turners, the mother-in-law, and the daughter by marriage, or was the “she“ in the passage enslaved Hannah Sr. who had somehow married the white Thomas Turner without any comment from the biographer?!

I mean, presumably Thomas Turner's mother Catherine Turner did not marry her own son. So is it saying *Hannah Sr.* married Thomas Turner and then Thomas Turner died? Because how would *that* have gone down? And admitting for a moment the absurdity of the peculiar institution, what would Catherine Turner's legal reasoning have even been? "I get to keep my dead son's slave wife"?

"The neighboring Turner family brought a property suit, seeking to possess Hannah Sr. as a captive claimed by Catherine Turner, the mother of Thomas Turner, whom she had married in 1810. Turner died just days after the marriage, but that did not keep the mother-in-law from claiming Hannah Sr., whose light skin and dignified bearing must have attracted John and Lewis Bond." Confused no matter how many times I reread.