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:
