When you spend your time studying literature more than a century old, it’s not everyday you receive breaking news from within your field.
But that’s what happened when Winthrop University professor and UNC graduate Gregg Hecimovich made news last week claiming Hannah Bond, a North Carolina slave, was the first African American female novelist.
The finding comes after years of research using government records and private documents to verify Bond wrote the novel “The Bondwoman’s Narrative.”
“For 10 years we’ve been wondering if the identity of the author of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative” would ever be verified,” Andrew Williams, a UNC English professor, said in an email. “It’s been quite a tantalizing mystery. Now it’s solved.”
“The Bondwoman’s Narrative” depicts a slave’s escape from a North Carolina plantation while revealing mid-1850s Southern life from a house servant’s perspective.
The manuscript was unearthed by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2001 and became a bestseller in 2002.
The story received attention for its content, but questions about the author’s identity lingered.
Williams, who helped compile a digital collection of slave biographies and autobiographies, was one of the first scholars with whom Gates shared the manuscript.
Many signs indicated the novel’s author, who used the pseudonym “Hannah Crafts,” was an African American woman and fugitive slave, but no one could prove who wrote it, Williams said.
Previously, 19th century African American women’s fiction was thought to have been authored by women who never experienced slavery. But Hecimovich’s findings indicate Bond is likely the first formerly enslaved African American woman to write a novel, he said.
“Now we have good reason to think the earliest known African American woman novelist was a fugitive slave,” Andrews said. “The first two African American novels by men were written by fugitive slaves — Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown. Now we can say that the first African American novel by a woman was also authored by a fugitive slave.”
Bond was the slave of John Hill Wheeler, a lawyer and diplomat who delivered the commencement address at UNC in 1870. She escaped Wheeler’s plantation in eastern North Carolina plantation in May 1857 and eventually became a schoolteacher in New Jersey.
Bond’s story and the effort to identify her work will appear in Hecimovich’s upcoming book, “The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts,” which is set to be published in 2015.
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