Historian seeks to solve mystery of slave novel
By Bob Minzesheimer
USA Today
Having failed to crack a 150-year-old literary mystery, historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. is looking for some help.
He's searching for traces of a former slave named Hannah Crafts. He said he believes that she, or someone using that name, is the first black female former slave to write a novel.
After a year of scholarly detective work that has turned up much circumstantial evidence, Gates is publishing "The Bondwoman's Narrative: A Novel" by Hannah Crafts (Warner Books, $24.95) next week. It could be the first American novel written by a black woman.
And he said he's hoping someone knows something about the author: "Did some grandmother tell some child, 'Your great grandmother was a runaway slave and once wrote a novel?' "
Gates, chairman of Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department, bought the unpublished, handwritten manuscript for $8,500 last year after noticing a modest listing for it in an auction catalogue for African American artifacts.
The 300-page manuscript belonged to a Howard University librarian who bought it in 1948 for $85 from a New York book dealer who got it from a "book scout" who found it somewhere in New Jersey.
It's a melodramatic and sentimental autobiographical novel by a self-educated young woman describing her life as a house slave in North Carolina and her escape to freedom in New Jersey.
Gates calls it "a remarkably good read" and has sold the movie rights for a possible HBO production. He consulted experts who dated the age of the paper and ink ("iron-gall," used until 1860) and other scholars who helped authenticate the novel.
Among the clues is the narrator's final owner, the slave master Mr. Wheeler, whom Gates linked through census records to John Hill Wheeler, a North Carolina legislator.
Wheeler, an ardent defender of slavery, was involved in a celebrated 1855 court case in which he tried to regain a fugitive slave, Jane Johnson. In Crafts' novel, Mrs. Wheeler laments that a slave named Jane had run away.
