The Bondwoman's Narrative

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses enslavement.

Gates bought the manuscript of The Bondwoman’s Narrative at an auction in 2001. It was previously owned by Dorothy Porter Wesley, an eminent African American librarian, biographer, and curator. While Gates believed that the text was “possibly the first novel written by a black woman and definitely the first novel written by a woman who had been a slave” (10), he had to verify its authenticity. Before the narrative even begins, a lengthy introduction recounts the lengths to which Gates went to ensure the manuscript was authentic; many of the accounts and reports he finds are provided in the appendix. A companion text, In Search of Hannah Crafts (2004), details the opinions of many scholars who were consulted on areas such as the manuscript’s ink, writing style, content accuracy, and paper type. For example, Craft’s descriptions of self-emancipation routes and the social structures within communities of enslaved people reflect scholars’ current understanding of the era. They reached a consensus that the text is an authentic narrative written between 1850 and 1860.

The manuscript, when found, had not been through any editing or printing process. This adds an additional layer of authenticity to the work: The words are exactly as Hannah Crafts wrote them. Since she wrote without the influence of any editors, proofreaders, or printers, it is evident that Crafts received an education, though not one of the highest quality. The style of writing in the manuscript fits comfortably with Crafts’s educational background. Thus, every spelling error or erroneous tense is a validation of the work’s authenticity. This informs Gates’s decision to leave the mistakes as he found them.

Although the text was authenticated before publication, scholars were unsure of the identity of the writer—who almost certainly used a pseudonym; Gates describes it as “one of the most exciting mysteries of African-American literature” (58). However, in 2013, Victorian literature scholar Professor Gregg Hecimovich used textual and metatextual clues to identify the writer as a woman named Hannah Bond who was enslaved by a North Carolina plantation owner named John Hill Wheeler, whom Gates previously identified as the inspiration for Mr. Wheeler in the novel. Hecimovich found evidence that Bond, like Hannah in the novel, worked as a maid to Wheeler’s wife, and in 1857 disguised herself as a boy to liberate herself from slavery and move to New Jersey.

One of the key mysteries of identifying the writer was that the novel contains quotations from and allusions to novels like Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and other works like Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Anthony and Cleopatra, to which few enslaved people had access. All the referenced texts were found in Wheeler’s library except for Bleak House, but Hecimovich discovered that a plantation on which Bond briefly lived kept boarders from a school that required its students to memorize and recite passages of Bleak House (Bosman, Julie. “Professor Says He Has Solved a Mystery Over a Slave’s Novel.” New York Times, 18 Sept. 2013). Gates has verified Hecimovich’s findings. Their authentication efforts have altered the contemporary understanding of African American literature, particularly by women.