When the Crafts established Woodville in 1873, they were working in this environment. The school’s success depended not just on the funding it received and the education it provided but on the continued willingness of the local political environment to tolerate its existence. That tolerance was always contingent and always under pressure. The night riders who attacked schools associated with Black education were not fringe actors; they were part of a sustained effort that was, by the late 1870s and 1880s, succeeding in rolling back the gains of Reconstruction.
By the time the Crafts lost the farm in the mid-1880s, the Reconstruction era was effectively over. The Compromise of 1877 had ended federal enforcement of Reconstruction in exchange for Hayes’s presidency. The Supreme Court had gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in 1883. The system of Jim Crow laws that would formalize racial segregation across the South was being assembled state by state. The world the Crafts returned to in 1870 had looked, briefly, like it might become genuinely different. By 1890, when they moved to Charleston, it was clear that it would not.
## What the Slave Narrative Genre Required and What It Obscured
The slave narrative was not a spontaneous form. It was a genre with specific conventions, shaped by the abolitionist movement’s understanding of what Northern audiences needed to hear and how they needed to hear it. Those conventions shaped what got into the narratives and what didn’t.
The genre required: a first-person narrator, ideally a male narrator whose masculinity could invoke sympathy without threatening the white male audience; concrete detail about conditions under slavery; evidence of literacy and the acquisition of literacy; a clear narrative of escape, preferably dramatic; a happy resolution in freedom; and a message that slavery was wrong, addressed to an audience that included people on the fence about this question.