Free The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts

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