THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANNAH CRAFTS

A resurrection of the life of the first African American female novelist.

“The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina.” So reads the title page of a 19th-century manuscript that was not published until 2002. The novel tells the story of a captive, also named Hannah, who escaped from slavery, and scholars have worked for two decades to disentangle its facts from fiction. If Hannah Crafts really was the fugitive slave she claimed to be, The Bondwoman’s Narrative would be the earliest known novel written by an African American woman. In 2013, Hecimovich, an English professor, made a case that Crafts was exactly that, identifying her as a captive who escaped from the prominent Wheeler family of North Carolina in 1857. Here, the author presents his full version of Hannah’s story, tightly woven out of her novel’s clues about her life and his own copious archival research. Hecimovich traces the woman who called herself Hannah Crafts, following her from North Carolina to New Jersey, where she settled in freedom. Along the way, he explores how Crafts may have built her autobiographical novel, drawing on her experiences of slavery’s violence and loss and shaping composite characters based on other captives and their captors. However, as Hecimovich shows, carrying her fellow captives to freedom was not the only way that Crafts practiced rebellion through her art. In her novel, she also rewrote and “blackened” stories from white novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens, a practice of sampling and appropriation that Hecimovich fascinatingly details. “Writing The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” notes Hecimovich, “represented a quest for the author to wrest back a life otherwise stolen from her…to control her world, escape it, and then rewrite it with a happy ending.” Henry Louis Gates Jr., who first authenticated the manuscript, provides the preface.

An absorbing work of historical and literary excavation.