A new biography sheds light on the nation’s first-known Black female novelist – Hannah Crafts. Crafts was born into slavery in Bertie County and was a house slave to a powerful family in Murfreesboro before escaping North. For two decades, Gregg Hecimovich has consulted archives, spoke with descendants of enslaved people, and tracked down oral histories to piece together Crafts’ life.
Hannah Crafts is the author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, a novel written in the mid-1800s about an enslaved woman’s experiences and escape to the North. The novel made waves in 2003 when it was first published – 150 years after it was written – and it soon became a New York Times Bestseller.
When the novel was published, there remained a looming question: What is the author’s identity? At the time, the novel was only “purportedly written by a fugitive slave” and some questioned if it was even written by an enslaved woman. Hannah Crafts was a pen name and tracking her down was a quest decades in the making. In 2013, Gregg Hecimovich, an English professor at Furman University, confirmed the author’s identity. Now a decade later, his biography The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts pieces together the loose threads.
Who is Hannah Crafts?
Hannah Crafts is the first-known Black female novelist. Born into slavery in the 1830s in Bertie County, Crafts was a house slave to the prominent Wheeler family of Murfreesboro, N.C., before escaping North to freedom dressed as a man in the late 1850s. It was in the Wheeler home she began writing her novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, which she finished as a free woman around 1861. After escaping slavery, Bond settled in New Jersey, married a Methodist pastor and became a teacher.
The Bondwoman’s Narrative tells the story of a young light-skinned Black woman who escapes slavery and finds freedom in the North. It’s fiction, but like many authors, it incorporates people, places and events from Crafts’ own life. It’s also influenced by popular novels of her time — Jane Eyre, Bleak House and Rob Roy, among others — books she had access to at the Wheeler House. The novel, however, wasn’t published until 2003, roughly 150 years after it was written. At the time of its publishing, it was not yet confirmed to have been written by a fugitive slave.
Nonetheless, the novel made waves for its epic-like story line and keen writing. It became a New York Times Bestseller, though the author’s identity remained a mystery for another decade.
The Bondwoman's Narrative
The Bondwoman’s Narrative opens with how the main character, a light-skinned young woman named Hannah, grew up on a plantation in Virginia, where she was taught how to read and write by an older white woman called Aunt Hetty. Hetty was discovered and reprimanded for violating the state’s anti-literacy laws.
Hannah is then sold to the Wheeler family and taken to North Carolina, where she was a lady’s maid. There she makes her first attempt at escape, alongside a Black woman who had up until recently passed as white. Months later, the two women are found by a group of hunters, taken to prison, and Hannah is sold back to the Wheelers.
The Wheelers are a powerful family, with many plantations underpinning their wealth. The family goes to Washington, bringing Hannah with them, as Mr. Wheeler seeks a government appointment.
In one scene, Hannah is preparing Mrs. Wheeler for a meeting with a group of powerful politicians, where she'll beg on her husband's behalf for the government appointment. After using a new facial powder on Mrs. Wheeler, Hannah applies a perfume that reacts with the powder and turns Mrs. Wheeler’s face black. Mrs. Wheeler asks about her appearance, to which Hannah replies, “I’ve never seen you look so good,” and sends her off.
The event is humiliating for Mrs. Wheeler. Upon returning to North Carolina, Hannah is replaced by another house slave, and Mrs. Wheeler punishes Hannah by ordering her to work in the fields and be raped by a fellow slave and bear a child. This is when Hannah makes her second escape, during which she reunites with Aunt Hetty, who aids in her escape to the North. This time, she successfully makes it to freedom and reunites with her long-lost mother.
#########################
The novel is part autobiography, part fiction. Some of the people, places and events in Crafts life are incorporated into the novel. Crafts was enslaved by the Wheeler family and forcibly separated from her mother. In the novel and in real life, Mr. Wheeler served as the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua.
Other events are fictional. Unlike the novel, Crafts never reunites with her mother, who died in 1858.
“This is the beauty of novels,” Hecimovich said. “Novels are acts of hope, and what she was doing was imagining what could be and the happy family that she's starting to picture in her mind once she's free.”
The Bondwoman’s Narrative belongs to many genres. It’s a mix of the slave narrative, Romantic fiction, Gothic fiction, and sentimental novel, says Bauer, an East Carolina professor who just finished teaching Crafts’ novel in her course surveying Southern literature.
“All of those genres were popular of the day,” Bauer said. “It’s an excellent example of both a slave narrative and a novel, and how fiction and fact come together.”
Slave narratives are works of nonfiction that share the experience of enslaved Americans. They tell of severe living conditions, as well as tales of escape, resistance and ingenuity. Their very existence countered the idyllic pictures of slavery purported by pro-slavery arguments. Slave narratives are among the earliest works in African American literature, says Riche Richardson, professor of African American literature and Africana Studies at Cornell University.
“The slave narrative is the one genre that is indigenous to African American literature. We can't say that about the short story. We can’t say that about the novel or any other genre,” Richardson said.
Crafts began writing her novel while enslaved in Murfreesboro, N.C. In much of the manuscript, she left her captors unnamed, writing “Wh____r” instead. It was later, while on the run in New York, that she takes her pen and fills in their name — "Wheeler."
Written in the 1850s, The Bondwoman’s Narrative was drafted during a critical period in American history and for African American literature. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme court ruled in Dredd Scott v. Sanford that enslaved people were not U.S. citizens and, therefore, could not expect protections from the federal government or the courts. The opinion also held that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in a federal territory.
Anti-literacy laws proliferated in the 1800s, too. North Carolina first prohibited anyone teaching slaves to read or write in 1818 and strengthened the law in 1830. Richardson says for authors like Hannah Crafts, breaking the law to pursue literacy is a form of resistance and freedom.
“Books were never just books,” Richardson said. “To come to a place where one can assume authorship is a very radical thing.”
The Bondwoman’s Narrative is unique, in that it reached a mass audience largely unedited, strikethroughs and spelling quirks included. Some other works by Black authors of the time were either dictated, edited or distributed by white publishers for a Northern audience. The unfiltered consciousness of Crafts’ writing is one reason why the novel stands out, says Bauer.
“It’s so rare to have the original manuscript with the marked-up edits as opposed to other writers where a white editor came in and said ‘Okay, this is what we’re going to publish,” Bauer said.
Uncovering Crafts
Efforts to authenticate the novel and find its author began in earnest shortly after Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard University historian and literary critic, acquired the manuscript.
Forensic analysts examined nearly every aspect of the book. The type of ink used was found to be most widely used before 1860, helping to timestamp the novel’s writing. A look at the paper helped to locate its origins in North Carolina. Hecimovich found that much of the paper used in Crafts’ manuscript is the same paper used in John Wheeler’s draft history of Nicaragua – where John Wheeler served as the U.S. ambassador for a time.
“The call is coming from inside the house,” Hecimovich said.
An analysis of the handwriting reveals a connection to Murfreesboro, where the Wheeler’s lived. Hecimovich, in his deep dive, obtained composition exercises from a nearby women’s college, some students of which stayed with the Wheelers. Hecimovich says Crafts served these students and that parts of Crafts handwriting match elements of the exercises.
“It’s a wonderful case study of the inventiveness and desire for literacy and how it can be used in an accomplished way,” Hecimovich said about Crafts work.
A look at the women’s college’s curriculum found that Bleak House, a Dickens novel quoted often in The Bondwoman’s Narrative, was taught at the women’s college. A record of the Wheeler’s extensive in-home library finds many of the books that influenced The Bondwoman’s Narrative were also on the bookshelf.
Hollis Robbins, a scholar of 19th-century American literature, writes that Crafts may have read a serialized version of Bleak House, released over 18 months in Frederick Douglass’ Paper.
Hecimovich spent days digging though archives at East Carolina University and the Library of Congress in his search for Hannah Crafts. His biography is a lengthy tome that spans Crafts ancestors’ being brought to North Carolina from Jamaica in 1779 and ends with her settling down in freedom in New Jersey. Such an expansive account of a slave’s life is rare.
“We don’t have a lot of biographies of people who were enslaved,” Hecimovich said. “It’s only a handful because the records just aren’t there.”
To find Crafts, Hecimovich employed similar techniques to genealogists tracing Black families’ histories. Many Black families hit a wall around 1870 – the first census year to provide detailed information on America’s Black population. The difficulty is going back further.
A starting point is to examine the documents of the enslavers, who kept slave inventories and other property records. As a wealthy and influential family, some of the Wheelers’ documents are archived at the Library of Congress and at ECU. There, Hecimovich sifted through probate records and personal notes for anecdotal evidence. These documents helped produce a list of potential authors, but they did not pinpoint Hannah Crafts.
“There was a lot of circumstantial evidence,” Hecimovich said. “But it was the beginning of the threads of what brought me to Bertie County.”
We know today that Hannah Crafts was born into slavery in Bertie County and some of the county’s plantations were owned by the Wheelers. To fill in the details of her life, Hecimovich turned to oral histories and diaries of those who were enslaved and records from the enslavers. Hecimovich incorporated the oral histories and written accounts of those who were enslaved into his novel to piece together the conditions and setting of Crafts’ early life.
Hecimovich was in contact with two men in Bertie County whose great grandmother was enslaved on a neighboring plantation to Crafts. From that connection, Hecimovich reviewed a notebook from their grandmother that details her and her husband’s life. The diary had been rediscovered after a group of vagrants broke in to the home and threw it out onto the lawn. To Hecimovich, the chance nature of the diary’s reappearance shows how Black voices persist.
“This history, which the enslavers and their descendants wanted to erase and didn’t want in our history books, still couldn’t be erased,” Hecimovich said, adding the notebook revealed a community of enslaved people who gained literacy.
Hecimovich also spoke with descendants of the Wheelers. While visiting one descendant in Wilmington, he found clues in another unusual source – the almanac of Samuel Jordan Wheeler and his brother, who both left dated entries in the margins. These scrawlings helped to confirm some keys events behind The Bondwoman’s Narrative.
These research methods, Hecimovich acknowledged, were pioneered by Black scholars decades before.
“They had to go into their communities,” Hecimovich said. “They developed the tools that allow us to keep uncovering this other half of history.”
Though the novel has received much attention, Crafts herself has remained 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.
“Before, we knew very little about her. We only knew about the Wheelers,” James Moore, president of the Murfreesboro Historical Association, said. “Now, I think we have a fuller portrait of her.”
Hecimovich’s biography pieces together Crafts’ 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.
The biography is an opportunity to expand an understanding of history to include more voices. Moore says the historical association will soon begin efforts to incorporate Crafts into the town’s history.
