In 2002 a newly published and soon-to-be best-selling novel made front-page headlines—and no wonder. Acerbic and witty, nuanced and astute, The Bondwoman’s Narrative by “Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina,” was evidently the first novel by a Black woman to provide a chronicle of slavery from the inside.
Years earlier the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. had learned of the existence of this remarkable manuscript, written in longhand and undated, from his friend Dorothy Porter Wesley, a well-known Howard University librarian and bibliophile. She had purchased it from a book dealer in 1951 but was too busy to research the identity of its author. Then, in 2001, while recovering from hip replacement surgeries, Gates discovered that the manuscript had been listed among other papers from Wesley’s estate in the Swann Auction Galleries catalog, and he purchased it for $8,500.
The Bondwoman’s Narrative had been written by a Black woman, probably between 1853 and 1861, Gates concluded, and he copiously annotated and published it. He also included a splendid, lengthy introduction detailing how he had authenticated the manuscript: how the battery of forensic techniques devised by the document investigator Joe Nickell helped date it; how he then searched for information about Hannah Crafts, the woman who claimed to have written it; and how he learned the whereabouts of the people and places named in it. One of them, for instance, the proslavery planter John Hill Wheeler, had been ambassador to Nicaragua under the feckless President Franklin Pierce. And according to the apparently autobiographical novel, Hannah Crafts, if that was her real name, had managed to escape from Wheeler in 1857.
The light-skinned, formerly enslaved young Black woman who wrote The Bondwoman’s Narrative had learned early on “what a curse was attached to my race” because of the “African blood in my veins.” But she refused to stay cursed or to see herself that way: with confidence and evident pleasure she concocted a twisty tale about the meaning of servitude and the complexity of flight. Blending the gothic, the sensational, the domestic, the satiric, and the supernatural, she also wrote with the abiding solace she found in her faith: “We could not be utterly forsaken, and hopeless and helpless when God was near.” Later she exclaims, “Oh, the blessedness of such heavenly trust—how it comforts and sustains the soul in moments of doubt and despondency—how it alleviates misery and even subdues pain.” Nature too offers comfort:
The sharp frosty air was clear and bracing, and the sunshine had a warm summer time look, really delightful. Then, too, the country through which we passed had such a cheerful appearance with rickyards, milestones, farm houses, wagons, swinging signs, horse troughs, trees, fields, fences, and the thousand other things that make a country landscape.
Hannah’s story initially revolves around her relationship to the newly married mistress of Lindendale, the fictional plantation where she is enslaved. This mistress is of mixed race, a fact that is unknown to her husband but has been uncovered by the Dickensian villain Mr. Trappe, “dressed in seedy black,” who now ruthlessly threatens to reveal her secret. Having become the confidante of her mistress, Hannah advises her to run away. She does, and Hannah of course goes with her, though they’re soon apprehended. Trappe reappears, planning to sell them both; the mistress dies (conveniently for the plot)—her “white blood” has done her no favors—while Hannah is delivered into the hands of an outwardly benevolent, pious, and putatively antislavery owner without a moral spine. With signal obtuseness, rather than free Hannah, this new mistress sells her to John Hill Wheeler and his vain, selfish wife, Ellen.
The moral failure of the kindly woman who sells Hannah plainly shows how the barbaric institution of slavery was maintained and perpetuated by a myriad of self-serving rationalizations. Exposing mixed-race women when and where he can, Trappe spends his life “hunting, delving, and digging into family secrets, and when he has found them out he becomes ravenous for gold.” In a brilliantly satiric passage, Crafts quotes Trappe justifying slavery in repulsively transcendentalist terms:
We are all slaves to something or somebody. A man perfectly free would be an anomaly, and a free woman yet more so. Freedom and slavery are only names attached surreptitiously and often improperly to certain conditions…. They are mere shadows[,] the very reverse of realities, and being so, if rightly considered, they have only a trifling effect on individual happiness.
The slave trader Saddler doesn’t bother with such convenient excuses. As he explains, since women without children are more marketable, he sells off their “brats.” One despairing woman jumped into the river, he nonchalantly says. Another, hoping to find her son, was chased by bloodhounds that “tore her dreadfully, spoiled all her beauty, and so I sold her for a song.” Someone like Saddler, of course, regards Hannah as nothing more than a commodity and a sexual object: “You won’t find a nicer bit of woman’s flesh to be bought for that money in old Virginia,” Trappe tells him.
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Crafts’s narrative is firsthand, keenly perceptive, and hair-raising. Yet her voice is level and matter-of-fact. “We thought our master must be a very great man to have so much wealth at his command,” Hannah wryly remembers of her girlhood. “It never occurred to us to inquire whose sweat and blood and unpaid labor had contributed to produce it.” In one of her many narrative asides, she coolly observes, when speaking of a plantation’s garden, “Alas that fruits and flowers should claim more consideration than human souls.”
Hannah’s encounters with other enslaved men and women also demonstrate that despite the horrific circumstances they endure, they are not monolithic in status or outlook. There is a pecking order, with field hands at the bottom. And there are different points of view about fleeing one’s master. Hannah refuses to go with William, an enslaved man who plans to run away with his wife, Charlotte, saying she prefers to stay put. “Well, you can hug the chain if you please,” William tells her. “With me it is liberty or death.”
While living as a captive of John Hill and Ellen Wheeler in Washington, D.C., Hannah is sent to purchase a popular white face powder for Mrs. Wheeler. Hannah knows, but Mrs. Wheeler doesn’t, that when mingled with the fumes from a certain kind of “smelling-bottle” (smelling salts), the white powder will “blacken the whitest skin.” The situation is mordantly sardonic: Mrs. Wheeler uses the powder, which turns her face black, and ignorantly swans around Washington in blackface while trying to help her husband snag a new government appointment. “Even kitchens and cellars grew merry and chatty over it,” Hannah notes with suppressed humor. “Faces black by nature were…puckered with excessive exultation that one had become so by artificial means.”
A mortified Mrs. Wheeler blames Hannah, and when the Wheelers are back in North Carolina, she is demoted from house servant to the far lowlier position of field hand. Worse yet, Hannah will now be forced to marry a field hand whom she regards as a filthy and loathsome creep. The prospect is so unthinkable that she plots an escape: “Whatever accidents or misfortunes might attend my flight nothing could be worse than what threatened my stay.”
Two years after the publication of the astonishing Bondwoman’s Narrative, Gates and the scholar Hollis Robbins edited In Search of Hannah Crafts, twenty-two excellent essays by such distinguished academics as Lawrence Buell, Rudolph P. Byrd, Ann Fabian, and Karen Sánchez-Eppler, alongside four reviews of the novel and an account of how Nickell forensically dated the manuscript. The contributors discuss such topics as the antebellum literary marketplace and Crafts’s likely literary sources. Obviously she had carefully read the Bible as well as Dickens and, undoubtedly, such novelists as Charlotte Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walter Scott. But essential questions about Crafts remained. Who was she? How exactly did she escape captivity? Or was she perhaps a free Black woman and not a fugitive? Did she want to publish her novel? Did she try and fail?
Some of these questions have now been answered by Gregg Hecimovich, a professor of English at Furman University in South Carolina. More than a decade ago Hecimovich concluded that the author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative had to be Hannah Bond, born in 1826 in Bertie County, North Carolina, and likely the daughter of her enslaver Lewis Bond. Hecimovich then spent the next ten years learning more, and his ambitious biography, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, documents the means and methods—and coincidences—he used to establish Crafts’s real identity.
Before that, Hecimovich had specialized in Victorian literature, particularly Dickens, and riddles in nineteenth-century British literature. So it comes as no surprise that he approached the mystery of the bondwoman as a kind of puzzle, pieces of which were strewn from North Carolina to New Jersey, and diligently tried to fit them together. But while his research is painstaking, it’s also much more than that; in these days of Google searches, every page of his book brims over with a sincere and passionate commitment to digging through archives, reading census reports, and tracking down ledgers and shipping records that detail the sale of men and women and children to slave traders. For Hecimovich has a mission: to shed light on those Black people who had been forced to live and labor in the shadows of others and had died unknown, their stories not just unwritten but unremembered.
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Tirelessly Hecimovich scavenges for old letters, diaries, wills, and property records. He meets a couple, Mack and Clara Bell, who share what they know of their ancestors and their family tree, which is related to the Bond family that held Hannah in captivity. Through the Bells, Hecimovich finds a Wheeler family descendant who supplies him with old almanacs containing handwritten memoranda in the margins that remind him of the almanacs of John Hill Wheeler at the Library of Congress, which he had passed over. When he returns to the library to investigate further, he finds unrecorded information about Wheeler’s personal response to Nat Turner’s uprising in 1831. Then some descendants of the Black educator Maria Cherry Newsome show Hecimovich the notebook in which Newsome recorded her family history, which he uses to assemble Hannah’s story. Taken together, these fragile papers, newspapers, and genealogies provide Hecimovich and thus the contemporary reader with a powerful sense of what once existed, what the enslaved suffered, and what and who have been lost to history.
Though Hannah Bond was trained as a domestic servant in the home of Lewis Bond, as Hecimovich discovers, it’s not clear how she learned to read or write. Hecimovich infers that she may have had the help of a nearby Quaker couple: “The fact that Crafts’s novel attributes Hannah’s religious instruction to the influence of Quakers matches the larger social forces that shaped religious practice in the region.” She also may have had access to Lewis Bond’s evidently extensive library. When in 1852 she became the servant of his daughter, Lucinda Bond Wheeler, the wife of Samuel Wheeler, she presumably could have absorbed quite a lot from the young students of the Chowan Baptist Female Institute who boarded with the Wheeler family. (Lucinda Wheeler had married Samuel Wheeler, the brother of John Hill Wheeler. In 1856, to settle some of the debt owed his brother, Samuel Wheeler transferred Hannah to John Hill Wheeler.) And since the girls boarding with the Wheelers had to memorize parts of Bleak House, Hecimovich speculates that Bond could easily have overheard their recitations, and he devotes an entire chapter to her borrowings from Dickens.
This, Hecimovich comments, was possibly “the most influential change that set her on the path to becoming a novelist.” He further speculates that perhaps the students could have been discussing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (He devotes another chapter to tracking resemblances between The Bondwoman’s Narrative and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, broadly contending that “the influence of Stowe’s narrative is deep in the way Crafts seems to have shaped her autobiographical novel.”) “The balm of imaginative engagement that Crafts encountered as part of this Wheeler household seems to have nourished her soul and encouraged her to record her inner life,” Hecimovich presumptively and prosily writes, “including exercising the freedom of imagining and creating an autobiographical novel ambitious enough to engage works like Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dickens’ Bleak House.” Bond may also have encountered the narratives of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown when she became the property of Lucinda and Samuel Wheeler, who had a huge collection of books, even antislavery ones. We’ll never know for sure, and Hecimovich does not know either, though he has amassed a great deal of circumstantial evidence.
Basing many of his suppositions on his interpretation of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Hecimovich decides that as a teenager Hannah was probably raped by Thomas Bond Jr., the nephew of her captor Lewis Bond. “Crafts turned to autobiographical fiction to share the mental and physical torment,” Hecimovich claims, converting literary criticism into biographical hypothesis. Hecimovich also asserts that since the characters in The Bondwoman’s Narrative are often composites, as fictional characters frequently are, their courage and faith “match the qualities that animate Crafts’s life story and her autobiographical novel.” By looking for a one-to-one correspondence in the sparse records detailing the lives of Hannah Bond and other enslaved women, the places they may have lived or been sent, and the horrors, humiliations, and violence they no doubt suffered, Hecimovich weaves together a series of likely situations (“congruent experiences,” he calls them) based on both what he could find and what is already known about slavery. He therefore depicts the lives and circumstances of other enslaved women Bond knew, such as Milly and Martha Murfree, Eliza Morgan, and Mary Burton, whose childhoods, he declares, “would be lost to the coercive demands of male enslavers, sometimes involving sexual torment and subjugation.”
Hecimovich laudably wants to retrieve their history, and yet this loving research almost becomes an end in itself, as if it could restore what was robbed from these women. It does afford them dignity, to be sure, but there are times when the research loses focus on its ostensible subject. Hecimovich narrates such tangential events as the building of the new US Capitol dome and Thomas Crawford’s huge and ironically named statue Freedom, which was to be placed atop it. When Crawford suddenly died, the sculptor and slaveholder Clark Mills was asked to complete the statue. Hecimovich then links the Crawford/Mills statue with Crafts’s story of the enslaved man who sought refuge under Mills’s statue of Andrew Jackson (“that lover of freedom,” Crafts dryly writes) and points out that Mills finished the Capitol dome with the assistance of the enslaved artisan Philip Reid.
Perhaps Hannah Bond met Reid or Mills’s other captives while living in Washington, Hecimovich further proposes; perhaps she met Levi Thomas, who might have helped with Mills’s earlier works and was “likely” injured while casting molten metals. “Like Reid and Thomas, Crafts understood the challenges Black artists faced working within the strictures and designs of their white captors,” he concludes. “Still, the two Black artisans plied their skills…as best they could in bondage.” Presumably these characters also further shed light on the “congruent experiences” of Hannah Bond, but paradoxically, in these digressive and speculative passages, she and the novelist Hannah Crafts both seem to vanish.
Hecimovich is far more effective when outlining the importance of evangelical Christianity in Virginia and North Carolina during the first part of the nineteenth century. Here he suggestively creates a background for Crafts’s religiosity by discussing the numerous Black men who preached to Black congregations in the antebellum South and what their spirituality provided. For Crafts found in religion not proslavery justification but solace in the idea of the Promised Land. “Freedom without God and religion would be a barren possession,” she writes.
Narrating a series of melodramatic events and coincidences on the road to freedom, Crafts does not divulge the exact details of her flight, much as Frederick Douglass doesn’t explain the means of his escape. But Hecimovich does. He has uncovered a set of provocative coincidences: he argues that Bond, a religious woman, may have encountered people like the fascinating Paul Jennings, a free Black man formerly enslaved by Senator Daniel Webster who worked in the federal Bureau of Pension and was an active member of the First Colored Baptist Church community, where she may have met him. Hecimovich proposes, with good reason, that as an antislavery activist, Jennings “quite possibly” sheltered fugitives and that when Bond fled John Hill Wheeler’s plantation in North Carolina, she took refuge in the Jennings home.
Through Jennings, Bond would have come to know William L. Chaplin, who worked with the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, a benefactor of New York Central College, which operated as a way station for fugitives, and with the assistance of these men she would eventually have landed in the home of the Quaker farmer and abolitionist Horace Craft—hence her adoption of “Crafts” as a pen name, to honor the family that kept her safe. And as luck would have it, while Hecimovich pursued this trail, two of his colleagues put him in touch with a woman who happened to have a letter warning Horace Craft that John Hill Wheeler, in pursuit of an unnamed escaped slave, was in the area and getting closer. Using Crafts’s novel as a guide, Hecimovich suggests that Bond eventually landed in a Black community in Burlington, New Jersey, where she seems to have married Thomas Vincent of the Bethlehem AME Church. Hannah Vincent then became a teacher in a community school. Hecimovich thinks she formed a strong relationship with her stepson, Samuel Vincent, who continued to live with her and offer “support and care,” which afforded her, he assumes, “the loving family she always sought.” One hopes so.
But by treating The Bondwoman’s Narrative as Hannah Crafts’s life written in code, Hecimovich unfortunately misses the real power in the book’s voice, which is to say in Crafts herself. There are striking descriptions of what she sees (“moonbeams sometimes checkered our floor”) and of whom she sees (“a withered smoke-dried face”) and even of her own sense of who she is. When the horse pulling the wagon carrying Hannah breaks into a run, Crafts writes:
Up hill and down, along hedges, over bridges, on, on, we flew. At first the horse kept the road admirably; then as we neared a bridge with a high embankment some of the fastenings broke and he began to plunge and rear. I have an indistinct remembrance of boards flying about in every direction, of a loud noise, a spinning whirling motion, and then all was darkness. When I came to myself the scene was changed, and I almost doubted my identity.
The genealogies and suppositions and digressions that enlarge the story of slavery and that deepen any historical inquiry into the stunningly inhuman practice can, alas, muffle the voice of this unusual novelist.
For clearly Bond wanted to write. According to Hecimovich, through writing she wrested back “a life otherwise stolen from her.” And when Hannah is reunited with her mother in the novel, Hecimovich somewhat dramatically declares, “both daughter and mother, so frequently separated by slavery, were forever free and ready to be united in Hannah Crafts’s art.” Or, as he earlier asserts, she “divined justice with her pen, just as [Nat] Turner hewed it with an axe.”
But why didn’t she continue to write? It’s hard to know. Certainly there’s an energy and a love of language—and of books—in the novel that far exceed any mere transcription of the horrors of slavery, though that is portrayed with courage and complexity, without polemic or apology, and with a particular emphasis on what it was like to be both chattel and woman. Hecimovich surmises that Bond probably had no contact with the publishing world, and even if she had, before the Civil War she might have given away her whereabouts, and after it, the publishing market had closed to Black writers. Then again, maybe she did keep writing, and we just don’t know it yet.
For she had a great deal to say. Hecimovich refers to the grim story of Bond’s grandmother Rosea Pope, who was tortured and murdered by her enslaver, Jacob Pope. He tied her to a tree trunk so her feet wouldn’t touch the ground, beat her, and then left her suspended there. Noting that the story of Rosea Pope’s brutal death was likely passed down to Bond, Hecimovich reckons that “by pressing quill to paper and reimagining Rosea’s life, Crafts immortalized a woman with whom she held kinship.”
This seems Hecimovich’s method too. His ample research skills are as undeniable as they are valiant, and his retrieval of the voices of the enslaved necessary and long overdue. For to him, researching and imagining Hannah Crafts and all the enslaved women near her is to say what can never be said enough. “Those who think that the greatest evils of slavery are connected with physical suffering possess no just or rational ideas of human nature,” Crafts writes. “There can be no certainty, no abiding confidence in the possession of any good thing.”
