The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, by Gregg Hecimovich
- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts
by
by
This book is an account of the author's research of historical records to determine the identity of Hannah Crafts, the pen name for the authorship of The Bondwoman's Narrative , an autobiographic novel in the form of a slave narrative written prior to the Civil War but not published until 2002. Hecimovich identifies six different persons who could be possible authors because of their proximity to and experienced history similar to that described in the novel. This book describes what is known about these possible authors and then evaluates the likelihood of their being the author.
After an exhausting summary of what must be an incredible collection of historical sources, a convincing case is made for the author's identity to be a person identified by contemporanious records as Hannah Bond and later identified by the married name Hannah Vincent. Hannah Bond was a light skinned slave who lived within a highly literate household equipped with many books. From clues in her novel it is likely she learned to read at a young age.
Later, the home where she served provided housing for young women attending the Chowan Baptist Female Institute (forerunner of Chowan University) in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, so she may have picked up some of her literary abilities by listening to the recitations of these students. Also from the novel it is indicated that she had overseers who were tolerant of her spending time writing. The novel she wrote contains much evidence of borrowing from popular novels of the time, Dickens' novel Bleak House in particular. There's even a hint of possibly borrowing from an essay written by one of the student boarders.
Some of the paper of the original manuscript of the novel originated in the household of John Hill Wheeler of Murfreesboro, North Carolina, Hannah Bond's owner. It appears portions of the novel were written prior to her escape and finished after she was free in upstate New York. She eventually settled in New Jersey. The manuscript shows that she left blank spaces for references to the Wheeler family and filled in later which is indication of a precaution against premature discovery of the manuscript. Her references in her novel to the Wheeler family, and to Jane Johnson's gaining freedom in Philadelphia, provided details that helped establish Bond's identity. (In 2003 Louis Gates proposed that Jane Johnson might be the author of the novel.)
It is speculated that Hannah Bond/Crafts/Vincent didn't publish the book prior to the Civil War because as a fugitive slave it would have threatened her comfortable married life in New Jersey. She probably didn't publish after the Civil War because she didn't need the money. Furthermore, the appetite for slave narratives after the Civil War was not strong and some that were published were criticized. Hannah's novel described instances of forced sexual encounters between white men and their female slaves which would not have been well received by Victorian concepts of propriety.
The manuscript probably stayed in the possession of Hannah's stepson who died in the 1930s. His possessions passed on to his aunt who probably sold it to a collector. That collector then must have sold it to African-American scholar Dorothy Porter in the 1940s. It stayed in her collection until Henry Louis Gates Jr. acquired the manuscript in 2001 in an annual auction by Swann Galleries. It was published in 2002 and became a NY Times bestseller.
There was much speculation about the novel author's identity at the time it was published. I found it fascinating that reviewers were pretty sure that it had to have been written by an African American because as characters are introduced in the narrative their race becomes apparent only as the story unfolds. It was concluded that no white writer in the 1850s wrote that way. Also, there's a character in the novel passing as white who wants to flee north to live as a black—an unlikely creation from the imagination of a white author.
This book's accounting of stories and findings from a whole host of sources ("wills, diaries, handwritten almanacs and public records" plus interviews) provides the most complete picture of American racial slavery to which I've ever been exposed. The author of the novel was a literate house slave, so much of the history explored by this book did not explore the hard slave labor in the fields. Nevertheless, this book does make mention of the broader slave environment. The novel itself refers to stories of prior rebellions and punishments which Hecimovich in this book does expand upon.
Overall, I was impressed with the extent of research that had to go into the writing of this book
After an exhausting summary of what must be an incredible collection of historical sources, a convincing case is made for the author's identity to be a person identified by contemporanious records as Hannah Bond and later identified by the married name Hannah Vincent. Hannah Bond was a light skinned slave who lived within a highly literate household equipped with many books. From clues in her novel it is likely she learned to read at a young age.
Later, the home where she served provided housing for young women attending the Chowan Baptist Female Institute (forerunner of Chowan University) in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, so she may have picked up some of her literary abilities by listening to the recitations of these students. Also from the novel it is indicated that she had overseers who were tolerant of her spending time writing. The novel she wrote contains much evidence of borrowing from popular novels of the time, Dickens' novel Bleak House in particular. There's even a hint of possibly borrowing from an essay written by one of the student boarders.
Some of the paper of the original manuscript of the novel originated in the household of John Hill Wheeler of Murfreesboro, North Carolina, Hannah Bond's owner. It appears portions of the novel were written prior to her escape and finished after she was free in upstate New York. She eventually settled in New Jersey. The manuscript shows that she left blank spaces for references to the Wheeler family and filled in later which is indication of a precaution against premature discovery of the manuscript. Her references in her novel to the Wheeler family, and to Jane Johnson's gaining freedom in Philadelphia, provided details that helped establish Bond's identity. (In 2003 Louis Gates proposed that Jane Johnson might be the author of the novel.)
It is speculated that Hannah Bond/Crafts/Vincent didn't publish the book prior to the Civil War because as a fugitive slave it would have threatened her comfortable married life in New Jersey. She probably didn't publish after the Civil War because she didn't need the money. Furthermore, the appetite for slave narratives after the Civil War was not strong and some that were published were criticized. Hannah's novel described instances of forced sexual encounters between white men and their female slaves which would not have been well received by Victorian concepts of propriety.
The manuscript probably stayed in the possession of Hannah's stepson who died in the 1930s. His possessions passed on to his aunt who probably sold it to a collector. That collector then must have sold it to African-American scholar Dorothy Porter in the 1940s. It stayed in her collection until Henry Louis Gates Jr. acquired the manuscript in 2001 in an annual auction by Swann Galleries. It was published in 2002 and became a NY Times bestseller.
There was much speculation about the novel author's identity at the time it was published. I found it fascinating that reviewers were pretty sure that it had to have been written by an African American because as characters are introduced in the narrative their race becomes apparent only as the story unfolds. It was concluded that no white writer in the 1850s wrote that way. Also, there's a character in the novel passing as white who wants to flee north to live as a black—an unlikely creation from the imagination of a white author.
This book's accounting of stories and findings from a whole host of sources ("wills, diaries, handwritten almanacs and public records" plus interviews) provides the most complete picture of American racial slavery to which I've ever been exposed. The author of the novel was a literate house slave, so much of the history explored by this book did not explore the hard slave labor in the fields. Nevertheless, this book does make mention of the broader slave environment. The novel itself refers to stories of prior rebellions and punishments which Hecimovich in this book does expand upon.
Overall, I was impressed with the extent of research that had to go into the writing of this book
- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
Comments
Post a Comment