Free The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts Page A

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.
    Because Hannah Crafts claims to be living in New Jersey at novel’s end, in a community of free blacks, married to a Methodist
     clergyman, teaching schoolchildren, I decided in a last-ditch effort to research the history of black Methodists in New Jersey,
     taking Crafts at her word. (The obvious problem with an autobiographical novel is determining where fact stops and fiction
     starts. Still, the New Jersey provenance of the manuscript in 1948 supported this line of inquiry.) What is especially curious
     about Crafts’s selection of New Jersey as her home in the North is that New Jersey “was the site of several Underground Railroad
     routes” and that “the region became a haven for slaves escaping the South,” as Giles R. Wright puts it in his
Afro-Americans in New Jersey.
28 Moreover “by 1870, New Jersey had several all-black communities,” including Skunk Hollow in Bergen County; Guineatown, Lawnside,
     and Saddlerstown in Camden County; Timbuctoo in Burlington County; and Gouldtown and Springton in Cumberland County. In addition,
     Camden, Newton, Center, Burlington, Deptford, Mannington, Pilesgrove, and Fairfield also “had a sizeable number of Afro-Americans.”
     (p. 38) It is, therefore, quite possible that Crafts was familiar with these communities and that she either lived in one
     or chose to end her novel there because of New Jersey’s curious attraction for fugitive slaves. Yet, few, if any, authors
     of the slave narratives end their flight to freedom in New Jersey, making it difficult to imagine how Crafts knew about these
     free black communities as a safe haven from slavery if she did not indeed live in or near one. She did not, in other words,
     select New Jersey from a reading of slave narratives or abolitionist novels. Slave narrators such as Douglass, Brown, and
     Jacobs end their flight to the North in places such as Rochester, New Bedford, Boston, or New York.
    Joseph H. Morgan’s book, titled
Morgan’s History of the New Jersey Conference of the A.M.E. Church,
published in Camden, New Jersey, in 1887, lists every pastor in each church within the conference since the church’s founding,
     as well as each congregation’s