In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement from a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in the North. While in hiding, she wrote a powerful manuscript, the only one ultimately published by a formerly enslaved, fugitive female. 150 years later, it made her famous.
In 2001, historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. made one of the most extraordinary discoveries in contemporary literary history. He announced that he had uncovered the first-known manuscript written by an African American woman who escaped enslavement in the late 1850s, named Hannah Crafts.
Already well known for certifying and republishing Harriet Wilson’s 1859 autobiographical novel, Our Nig, then the earliest known publication authored by an African-American woman (Wilson was a free woman, born in the North), Gates purchased Crafts’ tattered, 301-page document titled The Bondwoman’s Narrative from an auction at New York’s Swann Galleries. After painstaking verification and authentication (forensic analysts examined nearly every aspect of the manuscript, down to the type of ink and paper most widely used before 1860; it also helped to timestamp the novel’s writing), the manuscript was later published in 2003 by Warner Books. The critically acclaimed novel is an agonizing, biographical story of sexual abuse and violence, layered with elements of mystery, plot twists and connections to Victorian novels so incredibly sensational and thrilling that experts questioned Crafts’ true identity and if the work was actually that of an enslaved woman.
It wasn’t until 2013 that skeptics began to withdraw their doubts. Gregg Hecimovich, an unfamiliar literary scholar at the time, had publicly declared that he was able to track down the real-life novelist. He asserted that “Hannah Crafts” was, in fact, the pen name of Hannah Bond, an enslaved housekeeper who, in 1857, while disguised as a man, escaped from a Murfreesboro, North Carolina plantation owned by John Hill Wheeler, shortly after her 30th birthday.
Although Hecimovich’s discovery and detailed research made headlines, it hardly began to scratch the surface of the next decade of deep exploration that uncovered more of Craft’s captivating story.
Out now, a new publication, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of ‘The Bondwoman’s Narrative,’ an extensively researched biographical novel by Hecimovich (it was sanctioned by Gates; he wrote the forward), begins with the arrival of Crafts’ ancestors in 1779 North Carolina and ends with her death at around 1905 in New Jersey. It also reveals Crafts’ meticulous descriptions of the lives of those in her circle, providing fearless, full-scale perspectives into the inhumane cruelty of enslavement. What makes Craft’s work so fascinating is that not only is The Bondwoman’s Narrative just one of two documented novels by enslaved or formerly enslaved Americans (they were rarely written by enslaved women at all), but it is an extremely out-of-the-ordinary narration by a subjugated person, imaginary or factual, because it is completely authored in her very own handwriting. Her penmanship and language are intact, surprisingly unmarked by the white editors who typically rewrote most works by African Americans before the Civil War. The publication also clears Gates of the suspicion surrounding the legitimacy of his discovery more than 150 years after Crafts began writing it.
The book follows the journey of a young, light-skinned Black woman who escapes enslavement and discovers freedom in the North. Although the story is fiction, Crafts’ unfiltered, conscious storytelling candidly incorporates events, people and places (the details scrupulously corroborated) from her own life. As illustrated in the story, she was also inspired by popular novels of her time, books she had access to at the Wheeler House. This evidence is yet another of many reasons why her story so boldly stands out: Crafts wrote the novel during an extremely critical time in American history.
In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dredd Scott v. Sanford that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States and could not expect any protection from the federal government or the courts. It also stated that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from a federal territory. This was also during the time of mounting anti-literacy laws, where in 1818, North Carolina had initially prohibited anyone from teaching slaves to read or write and had reinforced the legislation in 1830. Crafts’ breaking those laws to pursue an education was an incredibly enormous act of resistance and sovereignty.
Riché Richardson, a professor of African American literature and Africana Studies at Cornell University explains. “Coming into literacy, the ability to write, was a very revolutionary thing in the antebellum era because there were laws designed to forbid black people from even reading and writing,” she describes in an interview with WTEB Public Radio for Eastern North Carolina. “To even be able to read and write was a testament to one’s humanity, and it was also a way of claiming freedom. So, books were never just books, but they were always symbolic of a larger freedom, so to come to a place where one can assume authorship is a very radical thing.”
Although the novel is receiving a great deal of attention, as compared to her peers, Crafts herself remains an obscure author. In Edenton, Harriet Jacobs, an abolitionist and fugitive slave writer, is recognized with a walking trail and historical markers, but Crafts has yet to receive the same acknowledgment. While no known images of Crafts exist, the success of the book and how it pieces together her life (the way she bravely uses literacy to snatch back her humanity, the inspiration for her pen name—it was adopted from a New York farmer who housed her during her escape, and the accounts surrounding her settling down in New Jersey as a married, free woman, just to start) is inadvertently pushing the Murfreesboro Historical Association to change that.
Crafts’ story is immensely important, but it lives among many that are still hidden and deserve to be told. Gates remains committed to their discovery.
“There’s so much more about the experience of the African American people still buried in archives, remaining to be discovered,” he tells The New York Times. “I hope this contributes to a renaissance.”
