Hannah Crafts is the first Black female novelist in the U.S. She began writing her novel in 1851 as a slave in northeastern North Carolina and finished it after escaping to the North, but little was known about her until a new biography was published in October.
Perhaps that's because her novel – The Bondwoman’s Narrative – wasn’t published until 2003, more than 150 years after she began writing it. The book was written under the name Hannah Crafts, but the author’s identity wasn’t confirmed. Nonetheless, the novel made waves for its vivid scenes and epic-like story line.
Margeret Bauer, a professor at East Carolina University, just finished teaching the novel for the second time in her survey of Southern Literature.
“It's an excellent example of both a slave narrative and a novel, and how fiction and fact come together," Bauer said. "It's the story of a woman in slavery and escaping, but it also has elements of Romantic fiction, Gothic fiction and the sentimental novel. All of those genres were kind of popular of the day.”
Gregg Hecimovich is an English professor at Furman University. He said one scene caught readers' attention: the protagonist Hannah is doing the makeup for Mrs. Wheeler, her slaveowner, just before she's about to go off and beg that her husband receive a government appointment. Hannah applies whitening powder and passes a smelling bottle, perfume, under her face.
“Mrs. Wheeler's face turns black, and Hannah says, 'I've never seen you look so good and then sends her off,” Hecimovich said.
Hecimovich is also the author of the recently published biography The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts. He’s spent two decades researching the novel and its author, and in 2013, he confirmed the author’s identity as Hannah Bond, a house slave for the Wheelers, a prominent family in Murfreesboro, N.C.
Hecimovich says there’s nothing in the record that the scene from the book happened, but in researching his biography, he found the Wheelers enjoyed watching blackface minstrels perform and that Hannah was in the balcony with them for one of those performances. He says that fact adds to his understanding of Crafts’ novel.
“She takes that and flips the script. She finds this beautiful way to take the racism of that minstrel and completely reshape it by performing it in her own imaginative work," Hecimovich said. "It's stunning.”
The Bondwoman’s Narrative is heavily influenced by the popular novels at the time of its writing – most of which could be found on the Wheeler’s bookshelf. Hecimovich says parts of Crafts’ novel quote Bleak House, a Dickens novel, which was being taught at a nearby women’s boarding school, some students of the school stayed with the Wheeler’s. In the new biography, we learn how Hannah Crafts became such a keen writer and – as Hecimovich puts it – stole literacy.
“Hannah was serving college students at the Wheeler House and those college students . . . Many of the young women who went there, there were records of their school. All the notes exist. I was able to find the kinds of composition exercises that they were bringing into the household, and they match elements of the way she learned to write this novel. So it's really it's a wonderful case study of the inventiveness, the, the. Brilliance and the desire for literacy.”
And that’s what sticks out for Riche Richardson, a professor of African American literature and Africana Studies at Cornell University.
“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," Richardson said. "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.”
Though the novel has received much attention, Crafts herself remains a relatively lesser known author compared to her contemporaries. In Edenton, there are historical markers and a walking trail to recognize Harriet Jacobs, an abolitionist and fugitive slave author, but Crafts hasn’t received the same recognition. The Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City has a video that does talk about Crafts and her novel, but in Murfreesboro there’s not much. James Moore is the president of the Murfreesboro Historical Association.
“Before, we knew very little about her. We only knew about the Wheelers. Now, I think we have a fuller portrait of her.”
Hecimovich’s biography pieces together Crafts’s life. It shares how she gained literacy and how she chose her pen name – adopted from a New York farmer who housed her during her escape. It also lays out her life after the novel. Crafts married a Methodist pastor and settled down in New Jersey as a free woman.
Moore says the biography has pushed the historical association to begin efforts to incorporate Crafts into the town’s history.
