The 2002 publication includes a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of African-American literature and history at Harvard University, describing his buying the manuscript, verifying it, and research to identify the author.[1] Crafts was believed to be a pseudonym of an enslaved woman who had escaped from the plantation of John Hill Wheeler.
In September 2013, Gregg Hecimovich, a professor of English at Winthrop University, documented the novelist as Hannah Bond, who later adopted her pen name, Crafts, an African-American slave who escaped about 1857 from the plantation of Wheeler in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. She reached the North and settled in New Jersey.[2]
Crafts explores the experiences of Hannah, a house slave in North Carolina. In the preface, Crafts writes that she hopes "to show how slavery blights the lives of whites as well as the black race."
The novel opens by narrating how Hannah grew up on a plantation in Virginia, where she was taught as a child to read and write by Aunt Hetty, a kind old white woman, who was subsequently discovered and reprimanded, as the education of slaves was supposed to be limited. This establishes her literacy, which is important in grounding her right and ability to tell her story. She describes herself as of a "complexion almost white." After a carriage accident, she recovers with the Henrys, who then sell her to the Wheelers, ending up in North Carolina with the latter family.
As a young woman, Hannah serves as a lady's maid at Lindendale plantation. Her master and mistress host a large wedding. During the party, Hannah notices an unattractive old man following her new mistress. Hannah concludes that "each one was conscious of some great and important secret on the part of the other." In the coming weeks, after observing her new mistress lock herself away most of the day, Hannah comes to learn that the old man is Mr. Trappe, a crooked lawyer who has discovered that the mistress is a fair-skinned mulatto who is passing for white.
Hannah and the mistress flee the plantation in the middle of the night, become lost, and stay the night in a gloomy shack in the forest. The shack was recently the scene of a murder, and is strewn with bloodstained weapons and clothes. Under these conditions, Hannah's mistress starts to go insane.
Months later, the women are found by a group of hunters who escort them to prison. One of them, Horace, informs Hannah that her master slit his throat after their escape. The women are taken to prison, where they meet Mrs. Wright, a senile woman imprisoned for trying to help an enslaved girl escape. The mistress' insanity worsens. After several months, the women are moved to a house, where conditions are much better, but they are unable to leave or know the identity of their captor. After a lengthy imprisonment, it is revealed that their captor is Mr. Trappe. The mistress, upon learning this, suffers a brain aneurysm and dies.
Hannah is sold to a slave trader. As she is being transported, the cart horse bolts and runs the cart off a ledge. The slave trader is killed instantly. Hannah wakes up in the home of her new mistress, Mrs. Henry, a kindly woman who treats her well. As Hannah recuperates, Mrs. Henry is told that Hannah's previous owner wishes to claim her.
Despite Hannah's pleas, the young woman is returned to the status of house slave, but she is sold to the Wheelers. She describes Mrs. Wheeler as a vain, self-centered woman. At one time, her husband serves as the United States Minister to Nicaragua. (This was one of the details that led to tracing Crafts as a slave held by John Hill Wheeler.)
One day, when sent to town for facial powder, Hannah hears news of Mr. Trappe's death. After Mrs. Wheeler uses the new facial powder, she discovers that it reacts with her perfume or smelling salts, causing a blackening effect on her skin.[3][4] Mrs. Wheeler realizes she had blackface in an encounter with a prominent woman, causing her much emotional discomfort.[3] After the family moves to North Carolina and she replaces Hannah as her maid with another house slave, Mrs. Wheeler suspects Hannah of telling others about the blackface incident. As punishment, she orders Hannah to the fields for labor, and plans for her to be raped. Hannah escapes and flees to the North.[3]
Along the way, Hannah comes under the care again of Mrs. Hetty, the kind white woman who originally taught her to read and write. Mrs. Hetty facilitates Hannah's escape to the North, where the young woman rejoins her mother. There she marries a Methodist minister and lives in New Jersey.
Characters
Hannah—The narrator of the story. She is a young slave woman of mixed race who twice runs away. The character is believed to be analogous to Hannah Crafts, the author of the book, although the name was most likely a pseudonym.
The Mistress— The Mistress at Lindendale (who remains unnamed throughout the novel) is a fair-skinned mulatto who was switched with another baby at birth and raised as a wealthy aristocrat. After her secret is discovered by Mr. Trappe, she is manipulated until she succumbs to the pressure and dies.
Aunt Hetty— the kindly white woman who originally teaches Hannah to read and write. After running away a second time, Hannah is aided by Aunt Hetty in her escape to the North. It is not known if this character is based on someone in the author's life.
Mr. Trappe— The main antagonist of the story. A crooked lawyer, Mr. Trappe discovers and exploits the secrets of rich families. The character may be modeled after Mr. Tulkinghorn from Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House.[3]
Mrs. Wheeler—A woman who buys Hannah after her accident. She has little respect for Hannah. After being humiliated in a blackface incident, she orders Hannah to be given to a slave overseer to use as his wife. Hannah flees before this can occur.
The novel shows that Hannah Crafts was aware of and influenced by the popular literary trends of the day and major works by British novelists. Henry Louis Gates Jr. found that her master John Hill Wheeler's library was filled with works of contemporary fiction. Compared to the 100 autobiographical works by Blacks published before 1865, Crafts exceeded them in the number of quotes from other texts, demonstrating her wide reading.[3] Literacy for slaves was an act of resistance, and scholars are interested in evidence of what they were reading.
Literary scholar Hollis Robbins first observed that Crafts must have read Charles Dickens' Bleak House[5] (although this was not included on Wheeler's library list), Walter Scott's Rob Roy, and Scientific American. Robbins has written that Crafts may have read a serialized version of Dickens' novel in Frederick Douglass's Paper, which had a high circulation among fugitive slaves. Scholar Catherine Keyser has noted influences from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in Crafts' writing.
In total, Gates and Robbins document that Crafts
echoes or lifts passages from a remarkably impressive range of English and American literature, including Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Walter Scott's Rob Roy and Redgauntlet, Thomas Campbell's Life and Letters, Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop and Bleak House,Felicia Heman's poetry, John Gauden's Discourse on Artificial Beauty, William Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry,Shakespeare's Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, Michel Chevalier's Society, Manners and Politics in the United States and Phillis Wheatley's To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband, as well as Douglass's Narrative and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Each of these -- except for Bleak House -- appears in the 1882 catalog listing the books that her master owned (and Wheeler owned four other works by Dickens).[3]
Gregg Hecimovich of Winthrop University, who in 2013 documented the author as Hannah Bond, learned that girls from a nearby school often boarded at the Murfreesboro plantation where she worked as a lady's maid for Ellen Wheeler. Part of the girls' curriculum required them to read and memorize Dickens' Bleak House. Bond borrowed some of its elements for her novel, and may have heard the girls reading aloud or read from one of their copies of the book.[2]
Scholarly response
The initial scholarly response to the book appeared in a collection of essays entitled In Search of Hannah Crafts, featuring literary scholars Nina Baym, Lawrence Buell, William Andrews, John Stauffer, William Gleason, and many others.[6] Scholar Anne Fabian, for example, argued that Crafts is a literary iconoclast and rule breaker, breaking the rules that governed texts previously written and published by slaves.[7]Jean Fagan Yellin examined the influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin on Crafts and Shelley Fisher Fishkin examined the influence of William Wells Brown's well-known play The Escape, or, A Leap for Freedom, casting light on Crafts's class and race consciousness.[8] William Gleason argued that The Bondwoman's Narrative is deeply invested in the politics of architectural form and reveals a sophisticated sense of the relationship between race and architecture.[9] In addition to Hollis Robbins's work on the borrowings from Charles Dickens and Walter Scott, Catherine Keyser focuses on Crafts's borrowings from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, making a thorough textual-critical case for her literary transformations.[10]
Important scholarly work published after In Search of Hannah Crafts includes:
Gill Ballinger, Tim Lustig and Dale Townshend (2005), "Missing Intertexts: Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative and African American Literary History."[11]
R. J. Ellis (2007), "'Whatever the law permits': Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative."[12]
Daniel Hack (2008), "Close Reading at a Distance: The African Americanization of Bleak House."[13]
R. J. Ellis (2009), "'So amiable and good': Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative and its Lineages."[14]
Rachel Teukolsky (2009), "Pictures in Bleak Houses: Slavery and the Aesthetics of Transatlantic Reform."[15]
Rebecca Soares (2011), "2010 VanArsdel Prize Essay: Literary Graftings: Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative and the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reader."[16]
Vicent Cucharilla-Ramon (2015), "The black female slave takes literary revenge: Female gothic motifs against slavery in Hannah Crafts’s 'The Bondwoman’s Narrative.'"[17]
Other recent scholarship builds upon existing findings. Richard J. Gray, for example, re-emphasizes that Crafts creates a heroine who is a young orphan woman, and who is literate and refined, as found in novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë.[18]
Background of manuscript
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. acquired the manuscript in 2001 in an annual auction by Swann Galleries. The catalogue described the novel as an "Unpublished Original Manuscript; a fictionalized biography, written in an effusive style, purporting to be the story, of the early life and escape of one Hannah Crafts." Its history could be traced to the 1940s, when it was owned by African-American scholar Dorothy Porter.[19][pageneeded]
Gates bought the historic manuscript at a relatively low price of $8,500.[2] He proceeded to verify the text as an historical artifact, and drew on expertise by a variety of scholars. Wyatt Houston Day, a bookseller and authenticator, wrote: "I can say unequivocally that the manuscript was written before 1861, because had it been written afterward, it would have most certainly contained some mention of the war or at least secession."[19]Kenneth W. Rendell identified the original ink as iron gall ink, most widely used up until 1860. Joe Nickell, Ph.D., the author of numerous books on literary assessment, used a variety of techniques to evaluate the manuscript, studying the paper, ink, provenance, writing style, etc.[19] As a result of his review, Gates agreed with others who concluded that Crafts was most likely black because she portrays her black characters first as people, and demonstrates knowledge of the slave caste system.[20] In addition, she demonstrates insider knowledge of specifics regarding slave escape routes; and makes numerous conventional mistakes in language.[19]
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. noted that Crafts referred to historical figures and actual places in her novel; among those were the Cosgroves, found in the Virginia census; Mr. Henry, a Presbyterian minister in Stafford County, Virginia; and Jane Johnson, a slave from John H. Wheeler's Washington, DC household, who gained freedom in 1855 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (a free state). Wheeler was taking her and her two young sons along with his family en route to his posting as US Minister in Nicaragua. The case received national coverage because abolitionist Passmore Williamson was jailed for contempt of court by a federal district judge, and because of conflicts between state and federal laws related to slavery.[19][21][22]
After verification and editing, Gates arranged for publication of the novel by Time-Warner in 2002, as The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts (Author), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor) (it includes material about his authentication and attempts to identify the author.) Due to the intense interest in such an early work, the only known novel by a fugitive slave and likely the first by an African-American woman, its publication was followed closely.[20] The book quickly became a bestseller.[23]
Identifying Hannah Crafts
Efforts continued to identify the author, and the book attracted widespread attention. Learning that Jane Johnson lived in Boston, Katherine E. Flynn, a scientist and skilled genealogist, began to research her life. In addition to being able to document major life events for Johnson after she reached Boston, Flynn concluded that she might have been Hannah Crafts, as her novel appeared to have been written by someone close to the John Hill Wheeler household. Flynn published an article on this in 2002 in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.[24]
In 2003, Gates and Hollis Robbins published In Search of Hannah Crafts about their research on this topic, as well as more on the literary influences found in the novel.[25] No conclusions were reached as to Crafts' identity, though Gates and Robbins note the promise of Gregg Hecimovich's research.
In 2013, Gregg Hecimovich of Winthrop University in South Carolina, announced having documented Crafts' identity as Hannah Bond, an enslaved African-American woman on the plantation of John H. Wheeler and his wife Ellen in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Bond served there as a lady's maid to Ellen Wheeler, and escaped about 1857, settling finally in New Jersey. In his documentation of Hannah Bond's life, Hecimovich found that the paper in her manuscript was a distinctive one used by the Wheeler family and kept in their library. It had already been established that Crafts/Bond had read widely among the books of the library, as she quoted these in her work.[2]
Further reading
Hecimovich, Gregg A. (2023), The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: the true story of The Bondwoman's Narrative (Firsted.), New York, NY: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, ISBN978-0-06-233473-2 .
The slave narrative is a type of literary genre involving the (written) autobiographical accounts of enslaved persons, particularly Africans enslaved in the Americas, though many other examples exist. Over six thousand such narratives are estimated to exist; about 150 narratives were published as separate books or pamphlets. In the United States during the Great Depression (1930s), more than 2,300 additional oral histories on life during slavery were collected by writers sponsored and published by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program. Most of the 26 audio-recorded interviews are held by the Library of Congress.
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in two volumes in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S., and is said to have "helped lay the groundwork for the [American] Civil War".
Murfreesboro is a town in Hertford County, North Carolina, United States. The population was 2,835 at the 2010 census. The town is home to Chowan University.
Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, also known as James Albert, was an enslaved African man who is considered the first published African in Britain. Gronniosaw is known for his 1772 narrative autobiography A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself, which was the first slave narrative published in England. His autobiography recounted his early life in present-day Nigeria, his enslavement, and his eventual emancipation.
Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode serial between 12 March 1852 and 12 September 1853. The novel has many characters and several subplots, and is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At the centre of Bleak House is a long-running legal case in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which comes about because a testator has written several conflicting wills. In a preface to the 1853 first edition, Dickens said there were many actual precedents for his fictional case. One such was probably Thellusson v Woodford, in which a will read in 1797 was contested and not determined until 1859. Though many in the legal profession criticised Dickens's satire as exaggerated, Bleak House helped support a judicial reform movement that culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s.
Our Mutual Friend, written in 1864–1865, is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining savage satire with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, quoting the book's character Bella Wilfer, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life".
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself is an autobiography by Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive slave, published in 1861 by L. Maria Child, who edited the book for its author. Jacobs used the pseudonym Linda Brent. The book documents Jacobs's life as a slave and how she gained freedom for herself and for her children. Jacobs contributed to the genre of slave narrative by using the techniques of sentimental novels "to address race and gender issues." She explores the struggles and sexual abuse that female slaves faced as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and protect their children when their children might be sold away.
Harriet E. Wilson was an African-American novelist. She was the first African American to publish a novel in North America.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. Olaudah Equiano was an African man who wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, an autobiography published in 1789 that became one of the first influential works about the transatlantic slave trade and the experiences of enslaved Africans. His work was published sixteen years after Phillis Wheatley's work. She was an enslaved African woman who became the first African American to publish a book of poetry, which was published in 1773. Her collection, was titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is an 1853 novel by United States author and playwright William Wells Brown about Clotel and her sister, fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson. Brown, who escaped from slavery in 1834 at the age of 20, published the book in London. He was staying after a lecture tour to evade possible recapture due to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Set in the early nineteenth century, it is considered the first novel published by an African American and is set in the United States. Three additional versions were published through 1867.
William Wells Brown was an American abolitionist, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery near Mount Sterling, Kentucky, Brown escaped to Ohio in 1834 at the age of 19. He settled in Boston, Massachusetts, where he worked for abolitionist causes and became a prolific writer. While working for abolition, Brown also supported causes including: temperance, women's suffrage, pacifism, prison reform, and an anti-tobacco movement. His novel Clotel (1853), considered the first novel written by an African American, was published in London, England, where he resided at the time. It was later published in the United States.
Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, an 1892 novel by Frances E. W. Harper, is one of the first novels published by an African-American woman. While following what has been termed the "sentimental" conventions of late nineteenth-century writing about women, it also deals with serious social issues of education for women, passing, miscegenation, abolition, reconstruction, temperance, and social responsibility.
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th- and 19th-century literary genre which presents and celebrates the concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. Sentimentalism, which is to be distinguished from sensibility, was a fashion in both poetry and prose fiction beginning in the eighteenth century in reaction to the rationalism of the Augustan Age.
Jane Johnson was an African-American slave who gained freedom on July 18, 1855, with her two young sons while in Philadelphia with her slaver and his family. She was aided by William Still and Passmore Williamson, abolitionists of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and its Vigilance Committee.
Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously in 1798 by her husband, William Godwin, and is often considered her most radical feminist work.
John Hill Wheeler (1806–1882) was an American attorney, politician, historian, planter and slaveowner. He served as North Carolina State Treasurer (1843–1845), and as United States Minister to Nicaragua (1855–1856).
Hollis Robbins is an American academic and essayist. Robbins currently serves as dean of humanities at University of Utah. Her scholarship focuses on African-American literature.
Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is an autobiographical novel by Harriet E. Wilson. First published in 1859, it was rediscovered in 1981 by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and was subsequently reissued with an introduction by Gates. Our Nig has since been republished in several other editions. It was long considered the first novel published by an African-American woman in North America, though that record is now contested by another manuscript found by Gates, The Bondwoman's Narrative, which may have been written a few years earlier.
Hannah Bond, also known by her pen name Hannah Crafts, was an American writer who escaped from slavery in North Carolina about 1857 and went to the North. Bond settled in New Jersey, likely married Thomas Vincent, and became a teacher. She wrote The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts after gaining freedom. It is the only known novel by an enslaved woman.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
References
1 2 Hannah Crafts (Author), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor), The Bondwoman's Narrative, New York: Time-Warner Books, 2002.
↑ Scholar Hollis Robbins found that Wheeler's library contained copies of Scientific American with articles related to two products that could cause this reaction, dated February 22, 1851 and June 11, 1853.
↑ In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative, eds Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Hollis Robbins. Basic/Civitas, 2004.
↑ Anne Fabian, "Hannah Crafts, novelist, or, How a silent observer became a dabster at invention", in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Hollis Robbins (eds), In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on the Bondwoman's Narrative, Basic/Civitas, 2004.
↑ Jean Fagan Yellin, "The Bondwoman's Narrative and Uncle Tom's Cabin", and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "The Bondwoman's Escape: Hannah Crafts Rewrites the First Play Published by an African American" in Gates and Robbins (eds), In Search of Hannah Crafts, 2004.
↑ William Gleason, "'I Dwell Now in a Neat Little Cottage': Architecture, Race, and Desire in The Bondwoman's Narrative", in Gates and Robbins (eds), In Search of Hannah Crafts, 2004.
↑ Hollis Robbins, "Blackening Bleak House: Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative", and Catherine Keyser, "Jane Eyre, Bondwoman:Hannah Crafts' Rethinking of Charlotte Brontë", in Gates and Robbins (eds),In Search of Hannah Crafts, 2004.
↑ Journal of American Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, Nineteenth-Century Literature (August 2005), pp. 207–237.
↑ Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in Europe – Europe in the American South, Wien: Verlag de Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenscahften, 377–398.
↑ "The Liberation of Jane Johnson", One Book, One Philadelphia, story behind The Price of a Child, The Library Company of Philadelphia, accessed 2 March 2014.
↑ Flynn, Katherine E. "Jane Johnson Found! But Is She 'Hannah Crafts'? The Search for the Author of The Bondswoman's Narrative", National Genealogical Society Quarterly, September 2002.
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