The Bondwoman's Narrative
First edition
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| Editor | Henry Louis Gates, Jr. |
|---|---|
| Author | Hannah Crafts |
| Cover artist | Giorgetta B. McRee |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English language |
| Publisher | Warner Books |
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Publication date
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2002 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback& Hardback) |
| Pages | 365 |
| ISBN | (Paperback), (Hardback) |
| OCLC | 52082864 |
The Bondwoman's Narrative is a best-selling novel by Hannah Crafts, a self-proclaimed slave who escaped from North Carolina. She likely wrote the novel in the mid-19th century. The manuscript was authenticated and published in 2002. Scholars believe that the novel, possibly the first written by an African-American woman, was created between 1853 and 1861. It is the only known novel by a fugitive slave woman, and it may precede the novel Our Nig by Harriet Wilson, published in 1859.
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. 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, 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.
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 telling that Hannah grew up on a plantation in Virginia owned by the Cosgroves, 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, important in grounding her right and ability to tell her story. She describes herself as of a "complexion almost white." Later she is sold to the Henrys and the Wheelers, ending up in North Carolina with the last family.
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