Free The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts Page B

trustees, stewards, stewardesses, exhorters, leaders, organists, local preachers, officers,
     and Sunday school teachers. 29
    Hannah Vincent was listed in the church at Burlington as a stewardess, church treasurer, and teacher. (The church was named
     the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, located on East Pearl Street in Burlington, and was founded in 1830.) Could
     this Hannah Vincent be the person who was living in Burlington in 1850? I presumed so, but checked anyway.
    I turned to the 1870 and 1880 federal census records from New Jersey. Hannah Vincent, age forty-six in 1870, was living in
     the household of Thomas Vincent, age forty-eight. He was listed as black, she as a mulatto. He was a porter in a liquor store,
     she was “keeping house.” Both were said to have been born in Pennsylvania. Since the Hannah Vincent I had found in 1850 had
     been listed as twenty-two, single, and a mulatto, I presumed this Hannah Vincent (age forty-six) to be the same person, living
     with her brother, twenty years later. But in the 1880 census, Hannah—now claiming that her age was still forty-eight!—is listed
     as Thomas’s wife, both now identified as having been born in New Jersey. Unless the 1850 Hannah Vincent had married a man
     also named Vincent, this Methodist Sunday school teacher was a different person from her 1850 namesake. To add to the confusion,
     a birth record for a Samuel Vincent, dated 1850, lists his parents as one Thomas and Hannah, despite the fact that our Hannah
     Vincent was single according to the 1850 census. Samuel Vincent’s race is not identified. Only her marriage certificate could
     reveal her maiden name. But a search of the New Jersey marriage licenses stored in Trenton failed to uncover a record of Thomas’s
     marriage to Hannah. Neither did a search of the tombstones at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Burlington found in the cemetery adjacent
     to the church uncover the graves of the Vincents. 30 Unless a marriage certificate, death records of their children, or some other document appears, we won’t be able to ascertain
     the maiden name of this Hannah Vincent. But given the Methodist and Vincent connections, this person remains a candidate as
     the author of
The Bondwoman’s Narrative.

    Why did Hannah Crafts fail to publish her novel? Publishing at any time is extraordinarily difficult, and was especially so
     for a woman in the nineteenth century. For an African American woman, publishing a book was virtually a miraculous event,
     as we learned from the case of Harriet Wilson. If Hannah Crafts had indeed passed for white and retained her own name once
     she arrived in New Jersey, then obviously she would not have wanted to reveal her identity or her whereabouts to John Hill
     Wheeler, who would have tried to track her down, just as he longed to do with Jane Johnson. Even if she changed her name and
     pretended to be simply writing a novel, the manuscript is so autobiographical that the copyright page would have revealed
     her new identity and would have led to her exposure.
    Ann Fabian speculates that “perhaps she composed her narrative in the late 1850s and by the time” she finished it, saw she
     had missed the market as she watched a white abolitionist readership and the cultural infrastructure it supported dissolve
     and turn elsewhere. By the time the war was over, maybe she too was doing other things and never returned to a story “she
     had written in and for a cultural world of the 1840s and 1850s.” The failure to publish is all the more puzzling, she continues,
     because the novel does not read as if she were “writing this for herself,” since “it is not an internal sort of story (she
     doesn’t grow or change) which makes me want to think of her imagining a public for it.” Crafts obviously wanted the story
     of her life preserved at least for a future readership, because she preserved the manuscript so carefully, as apparently did
     several generations of her