Nearly twenty decades now, I fancied myself a wannabe or soon-to-be scholar, and while my focus centered on South African literature, I liked to apply postcolonial theories and the concept of “the empire writes back” to African American literature and the use of canonical works in carving out stories. I was also a person who regularly reread Bleak House. For funsies. So, color me sold when a Victorian literature class taught by Gregg Hecimovich introduced me to The Bondwoman’s Narrative. The final I wrote for the class, “Tulkinghorn Reborn,” while not the greatest, detailed how Hannah Crafts used Dickens’s Tulkinghorn for her villain, Mr. Trappe. I was fascinated by the manuscript that could have been the first novel by an African American female, and a novel by a woman who had lived not only in North Carolina, but the Chowan away from the place I called home. A woman who was intimately familiar with Jane Eyre, Rob Roy and Bleak House, as well as with Biblical illusions when her very literacy was a crime. When Gregg told me he was going to find her, I knew I wanted to help. My investigation was short-lived, with an early theory involving John Wheeler Moore holding more significance. I graduated. I moved. And while I never forgot Hannah and thought of her and her stolen literacy every time I crossed the Chowan, I never looked for her again. But Gregg never stopped. Last year, he published his findings. The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Ecco) is part scholarship, part mystery, part resurrection, and part apology.
The Life and Times is really three different stories: the manuscript The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Gregg’s decades long search to identify the author and prove her to be an African American female who escaped slavery in North Carolina, and the stories unearthed during his search. To read this work, one must appreciate all three. To that end, I would strongly recommend reading Hannah Crafts’s novel.
The Life and Times is a bit piecemeal, a fragmented collection of following bread crumbs, circling back, and starting over to fit together broken pieces of stolen lives and stories and names. Because this isn’t just Hannah’s story. (I will call her Hannah. It was her mother’s name. The name she kept when she shed the shackles of slavery and fled North. A name passed down from forgotten and stolen matrilinear lines. And so, I call her Hannah. Still.) Gregg recognized early on that Hannah intentionally choose fiction as her storytelling mode and that she incorporated the stories that had been passed down, the faces kept alive only by the stories, and that she breathed a life into them, an immortality in her words that wasn’t just for her. And so, an entire community is given life in Gregg’s work. Hannah Crafts very likely was Hannah Bond and later Hannah Vincent and this is the story of who she was, how she managed to write a novel, and her escape to freedom. But it is also the story of northeastern North Carolina and the prominent Wheelers and the bodies they bought and sold and used at will; the story they refused to write in their histories.
“As writers, Wheeler and Moore must have seen themselves as the state’s chosen ‘sons.’ If so, Crafts was an illegitimate daughter.”
With the mind of a scholar and the heart of a poet, Gregg takes us on his journey to find the identity of an author. Because that is what Hannah is. An author.
Remember – reading is political. Literacy is resistance.
It always has been.
A Girl Named Tommi 