Hannah Crafts

Hannah Bond, pen name Hannah Crafts (b.ca.1830s), was an African-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, which may be the first novel by an African-American woman. It is the only known one by a fugitive slave woman.

Apparently written in the late 1850s, the novel was published in 2002 for the first time after Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard University professor of African-American literature and history, purchased the manuscript and had it authenticated. It rapidly became a bestseller.

Bond's identity was documented in 2013 by Gregg Hecimovich of Winthrop University, who found that she had been held by John Hill Wheeler of Murfreesboro, North Carolina. He had identified many details of her life. Gates and other major scholars have supported his conclusions.

Hannah Bond, according to Gregg Hecimovich of Winthrop University, was born into slavery. She may have been born in Virginia, as was the heroine of her novel: families and persons Crafts refers to have been documented in Virginia. Of mixed race and with light skin, as a young adult she was held on the plantation of John Hill Wheeler in Murfreesboro in Hertford County, near the border with Virginia. Bond worked for Wheeler's wife Ellen as a lady's maid, and learned to read and write. Her novel revealed close knowledge of the Wheeler household and his tenure as US Minister to Nicaragua. She quotes liberally from novels by prominent authors found to have been part of Wheeler's extensive library.

About 1857 Bond took on disguise with men's clothes, perhaps helped by someone in the Wheeler family, and escaped from the plantation, traveling as a white boy. She reached freedom in the North, living for a time in upstate New York with a couple named Crafts. She apparently took their surname as her pseudonym. Later she settled in New Jersey. There she married and became a school teacher.

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