Hannah Crafts

(c. 1830 - c. 1880)

Stored in an attic in New Jersey for decades, the manuscript for Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative—which follows a slave and her companion’s escape from a North Carolina plantation—was first published in 2002. A decade later a scholar found that the story mirrored that of Hannah Bond, a self-educated woman who around 1857 disguised herself as a boy and fled to the North. “I’m totally convinced,” said another scholar, “to the extent that anything historical can be documented without an iPhone picture of her writing the novel.”