Hannah Crafts

Hannah Bond was born into enslavement in Virginia. A light-skinned, mixed-race woman, she was a house servant. Sold by her first enslavers to the Bond family, her services were subsequently transferred to Lucinda Bond Wheeler of North Carolina, who then transferred Bond to John Wheeler and his wife Ellen as payment for her husband’s debts. At some point in her youth, Bond learned to read and appears to have read a wide array of books from the Wheeler family library, many of which exert an obvious influence on the text of The Bondwoman’s Narrative. Internal textual evidence suggests that she wrote the novel—which is both accepted as semi-autobiographical and as deeply influenced by gothic and sentimental fiction popular in the mid-19th century—between 1855 and 1859. In 1857, likely disguised as a man, Bond ran away from the Wheelers and escaped, via New York, to New Jersey, where she settled, married, and became a schoolteacher. Bond wrote the entire story out by hand but does not appear to have attempted to publish it during her lifetime. It came to public attention in 2001 after Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. purchased it in an auction, authenticated, and published it.