The Bondwoman's Narrative (8 page)

Wheeler’s diary for 1858 is severely damaged, and entries are missing between January and June, when he could have reported
a slave escaping. The remainder of the diary is of interest to us indirectly for his anticipation of and anxieties about the
impending dissolution of the Union and the prospect of civil war. (On September 18, 1858, he reports seeing John Wilkes Booth
in
The Robbers,
having seen him four days earlier in the role of Shylock: “a very promising actor,” he writes.) Wheeler occasionally mentions
his case against Williamson throughout 1858, hoping to receive compensation for Jane—or the return of Jane herself. (February
18, 1859, March 31, 1859, and January 5, 1860) Along the way, he praises the hanging of John Brown:

John Brown hung today at 11 o’clock at Charleston Va. For treason, murder & insurrection—large military force present— He
died as he lived
game.
May such be the end of all traitors! (December 2, 1859)

As late as January 10, 1860, he wrote that he “engaged in preparations of memorial to the Legislature of Pennsylvania as to
the forcible taking away of my Negroes at Philadelphia on 18 July 1855 by a mob for which I hope to be indemnified by the
State.” “This question [of slavery],” he had written on December 13, 1859, “is shaking the Union to the center.” As Wheeler
lamented in his own “Diary of Events,” Jane Johnson and her sons got away: “the servants were never reclaimed.”

On February 8, 1860, Wheeler reports that “one of our girls,” Kate Dorsey, “took it into her head to commit matrimony last
night,” leaving “only one servant, Nora—which rather deranges matters.” Wheeler’s slaves have somehow disappeared, replaced
by a series of white servants named Nora, Rosa Clark, and Mary Dorsey.

In terms of the search for Hannah Crafts, the most important fact that I learned from reading Wheeler’s diary—other than that
he loved minstrel shows almost as much as he loved slavery—was gleaned from his diary entry for November 28, 1857. It reads
as follows:

Visited Clark Mills, saw his equestrian Statue of Washington— on which he will be immortalized—as it is equal or superior
to his Jackson.

When I read this, I remembered Dr. Joe Nickell’s use of Crafts’s reference to the construction of the equestrian statue of
Jackson (on p. 196) as a date before which
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
could not have been written. It is a curious overlapping of references, suggesting perhaps Wheeler household discussions
about Mills or Jackson’s statue, which if true, underscore Crafts’s proximity to the Wheelers as a house servant.

We do not know, however, from reading Wheeler’s diary when Hannah Crafts escaped or whether she fled from the Wheeler home
in Washington, or, like Jane, during one of Wheeler’s trips, perhaps back home to North Carolina. If indeed she escaped from
the Wheeler plantation, we can use Wheeler’s diary to arrive at a reasonable date during which this could have occurred. The
“window of opportunity” for Hannah’s escape from the Wheeler plantation is established in John Hill Wheeler’s diary by the
earlier escape of Jane in July 1855, referred to by Hannah in her first meeting with Mrs. Wheeler, and the onset of the Civil
War in 1861. Judging from the relevant information contained in Wheeler’s diary, Hannah’s escape would most likely have occurred
betweenMarch 21 and May 4, 1857. This period corresponds not only with the Wheelers’ recorded trip to the plantation from
Washington but with several other unique events and circumstances in their lives during this time, such as Wheeler’s recent
dismissal from his government post. Negative evidence supporting the year 1857 for the escape is provided by the lack of known
visits by the Wheelers to the plantation during the years 1855, 1856 (only the first half of the diary is extant, but Mr.
Wheeler was still in Nicaragua until November of that year), and 1858 (only the last half of his diary survives). Trips were
made by the Wheelers to North Carolina in 1859 (with President James Buchanan in early June), 1860 (in the latter half of
December), and 1861 (about July, from which point Wheeler stayed in North Carolina). But Mr. Wheeler’s continual employment
as clerk of the Interior Department in Washington from 1857 would not have occasioned Hannah’s reference to his recent dismissal
from office during any of these years. Further, the relative proximity in time between the departure of Jane, a much-valued
servant of Mrs. Wheeler, and the acquisition of Hannah as a competent replacement (less than two years) logically supports
the year 1856 as the date of Hannah’s service with the Wheelers and her subsequent escape in the spring of 1857. Quite tellingly,
Crafts writes that the Wheelers took her to North Carolina from Washington by boat. Wheeler’s diary confirms that he did in
fact travel to North Carolina by boat early in 1857.

What is clear is that the portrait Crafts draws of Wheeler and the portrait that Wheeler unwittingly sketches of himself are
remarkably similar. In other words, there can be little doubt that the author of
The Bondwoman’s Narrative,
as Dr. Nickell argues in his authentication report, was intimately familiar with Mr. and Mrs. John Hill Wheeler.

In the U.S. census of 1860 for Washington, D.C., John Hill Wheeler is listed as the head of household, occupation “clerk.”
Wheeler has no slaves. What this means in our search for Hannah Crafts is that sometime between 1855, when Jane Johnson liberated
herself in Philadelphia, and the taking of this census in Washington in 1860, the slave the Wheelers purchased after Jane
escaped, like Jane, escaped to the North and wrote an autobiographical novel about her bondage and her freedom. Judging from
evidence in Wheeler’s diary, it seems reasonable to conclude that her escape occurred between March 21 and May 4, 1857. If
these assumptions are correct, as I believe the manuscript and documentary evidence suggest, then Hannah Crafts was living
in the gravest danger of being discovered by Wheeler and returned to her enslavement under the Fugitive Slave Act. Under this
act, as David Brion Davis writes, “any citizen could be drafted into a posse and any free black person seized without a jury
trial.”
²⁶

Wheeler had sued to recover Jane, Daniel, and Isaiah Johnson under this act, which entitled slaveholders to retrieve fugitive
slaves even in the North. The passage of the act led several well-known fugitive slaves—William and Ellen Craft, and Henry
“Box” Brown, among them—to flee to Canada or England. (The Crafts went to both.) The Fugitive Slave Act effectively sought
to cancel the states north of the Mason-Dixon Line as a sanctuary against human bondage; it meant that privileged fugitive
slaves, such as Harriet Jacobs, were forced to allow friends to purchase their freedom from their former masters. But for
most of the slaves who had managed to make their way by foot to the North, it meant a life of anxiety, fear, disguise, altered
identity, changes of name, and fabricated pasts. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made life in the northern free states—like
freedom itself—a necessary tabula rasa for many fugitive slaves, and a state of being fundamentally imperiled.

I began this search for Hannah Crafts because I was intrigued by the notes left by the scholar and librarian Dorothy Porter
concerning her belief that Crafts was both a black woman and a fugitive slave, all of which made me want to learn more. Although
Porter purchased the manuscript in 1948 from a rare-book dealer in New York City, the manuscript had been located by a “book
scout” in New Jersey. Since Crafts claims at the end of the tale to be living in a free colored community in New Jersey, it
seemed reasonable to continue my search for her there.

The obvious name for which to search, as you might expect, was Hannah Crafts. But no Hannah Craftses are listed in the entire
U.S. federal census between 1860 and 1880. Several women named Hannah Craft, however, are listed in the 1860 census index.
As I would learn as my research progressed, much to my chagrin, Hannah Craft was a remarkably popular name by the middle of
the nineteenth century. All of these Hannah Crafts were white, and none had lived in the South. But one Hannah Craft was indeed
living in New Jersey in 1860. I eagerly searched for her in the census records. She was living in the town of Hills-borough,
in Somerset County. She was thirty-four years of age and was married to Richard Craft. Both were white. This Hannah Craft
was not living in New Jersey before 1860. And her entry listed no birthplace, the sole entry on this page of the census in
which this information was lacking. I could not help but wonder if this Hannah Craft could be passing for white, “incognegro,”
as it were, given her imperiled and vulnerable status as a fugitive slave.

While I was trying to determine if the Hannah Craft living in New Jersey in 1860 could be passing, it suddenly occurred to
me to broaden my search to 1880. After all, if Hannah Crafts had been in her mid to late twenties when she wrote her novel
(Frederick Douglass was twenty-seven when he published his 1845 slave narrative), then she would be between fifty-five or
so and sixty in 1880, assuming that she had survived. Perhaps I would find her there, living openly under her own name, now
that slavery—and the Fugitive Slave Act—was long dead.

To my astonishment, one Hannah Kraft (spelled with a
k
) was listed as living in Baltimore County, Maryland, in 1880. She was married to Wesley Kraft. (How clever, I thought, to
have rendered her husband, Wesley, metaphorically as a Methodist minister— after John Wesley—in her novel!) Both Wesley and
Hannah were listed as black. What’s more, Hannah claimed to have been born in Virginia, just as the author of
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
had been! This had to be Hannah Crafts herself, at last. I was so ecstatic that I took my wife, Sharon Adams, and my best
friend and colleague, Anthony Appiah, out to celebrate over a bit too much champagne shortly after ordering a copy of the
actual census record for this long-lost author. We had a glorious celebration.

Three days later, the photocopy of the page in the 1880 census arrived from the Mormon Family History Library in Salt Lake
City. I stared at the document in disbelief: not only was Hannah said to be thirty years of age—born in 1850, while the novel
had been written between 1855 and 1861—but the record noted that this Hannah Kraft could neither read nor write! Despite all
of the reasons that census data were chock full of errors, there were far too many discrepancies to explain away to be able
to salvage this Hannah Kraft as the possible author of
The Bondwoman’s Narrative.
My hangover returned.

In the midst of my growing frustration, I examined the Freedman’s Bank records, made newly available on CD-ROM by the Mormon
Family History Library. The Freedman’s Bank was chartered by Congress on March 3, 1865. Founded by white abolitionists and
businessmen, it absorbed black military banks and sought to provide a mutual savings bank for freed people. By 1874 there
were 72,000 depositors with over $3 million. The bank’s white trustees amended the charter to speculate in stocks, bonds,
real estate, and unsecured loans. In the financial panic of 1873, the bank struggled to survive, and Frederick Douglass was
named president in a futile attempt to maintain confidence. The bank collapsed on June 2, 1874, with most depositors losing
their entire savings.

While no Hannah Craft or Crafts appears in the index of the bank’s depositors, a Maria H. Crafts does. Her application, dated
March 30, 1874, lists her as opening an account in a bank in New Orleans. Her birthplace is listed as either Massachusetts
or Mississippi (the handwriting is not clear), and she identified herself as a schoolteacher. Her complexion is listed as
“white,” a designation meaning, as an official at the Mormon Library explained to me, that she could possibly have been white,
but this was unlikely, given the fact that Freedman’s was a bank for blacks.
²⁷
A far more likely possibility is that she could have been a mulatto, perhaps an especially fair mulatto. Most interesting
of all, she has signed the document herself.

I immediately sent a copy of this document to Dr. Joe Nickell for a comparison with the handwriting of the author of
The Bond-woman’s Narrative.
Dr. Nickell reported that the results were inconclusive. According to Nickell, “the handwriting is a similar type, with some
specific differences, notably the lack of the hook on the ending of the
s,
and a missing up-stroke on the capital
c.
But the matter is complicated by the fact that we don’t actually have a signature for Hannah Crafts, we only have an instance
of her name written in her handwriting on the novel’s title page.” “For some people,” Nickell continued, “there is a marked
difference. Because of the lapse of twenty years, during which time her handwriting may have changed, and because we are not
comparing signature to signature, we cannot rule out the possibility that this is the handwriting of the same person.”

With this cautiously promising assessment, I returned to the census records in search of Maria H. Crafts. Although twenty-three
Mary H. Craftses are listed as “black” in the 1880 national index to the federal census, and six Mary Craftses are listed
as mulatto, no Maria Craftses are listed. (Of these Mary Craftses, only one, listed as having been born in Virginia in 1840,
could possibly be our author.) And in the case of Mary H. Crafts we have no record of what the initial
H
stands for. Still, the handwriting similarities are intriguing, as is the fact that this Maria H. Crafts was a schoolteacher,
and hence a potential author.

I now decided to return to an early lead that had once seemed extremely promising. While typing the manuscript, my research
assistant, Nina Kollars, suggested that I look for Hannah under the name of Vincent, since she was a slave of the Vincents’
in Virginia, and could have taken Vincent as her surname. (My surname is Gates, I happen to know, because a farmer named Brady
living in western Maryland purchased a small group of slaves from Horatio Gates in Berkeley Springs, Virginia, now West Virginia.)
So I began to search for Hannah Vincent in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. To my great pleasure, I found Hannah Ann Vincent, age
twenty-two, single, living in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1850 in a household that included another woman, named Mary Roberts.
Vincent was twenty-two; Roberts, forty-seven. Roberts was black; Vincent was a mulatto, birthplace unknown. I was convinced
that this Hannah Vincent was the author of
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
—that is, until I received Dr. Nickell’s conclusive report. I shelved this theory, since the author of the novel was a slave
of the Wheelers’ who had been purchased in 1855 or so because Jane Johnson had run away. Besides, no Hannah Vincent appears
in the 1860 New Jersey census.