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“The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts” won the 2024 L.A. Times Book Award for biography.<\/p><\/div>\n
Hecimovich spent 20 years discovering who Crafts was: the first known Black woman novelist, who wrote \u201cThe Bondwoman\u2019s Narrative\u201d as an enslaved woman in North Carolina.<\/p>\n
Hecimovich\u2019s book was named one of the \u201c10 Best Books of the Year\u201d by The Washington Post<\/em>, and received a glowing review in The New York Times<\/em>, Kirkus Review and others<\/a>. His interviews with CBS Saturday Morning<\/a> and Tavis Smiley found national audiences. The work was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award<\/a> for best biography.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a stellar example of our first-rate faculty in action,\u201d said Jeremy Cass, dean of faculty at Furman. \u201cWe are exceptionally proud of Professor Hecimovich\u2019s work on \u2018Hannah Crafts,\u2019 and we are grateful for the many ways in which this project has impacted the student experience, through guided research and travel opportunities. This work comes at a crucial time, when Furman and the country continue the good but hard work of re-evaluating and reconciling with our past for the good of our collective future.\u201d<\/p>\n Below is a Q&A with Hecimovich, who spent this academic year as a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. It has been edited for clarity and space.<\/p>\n Q: When did you first engage the mystery about Hannah Crafts\u2019 identity?<\/p>\n GH: Amazingly, 20 years ago. I was approached by the brilliant 19th<\/sup>-Century scholar Hollis Robbins (now dean of humanities at the University of Utah). We began collaborating on research in the archive collections at East Carolina University, where I was a professor.<\/p>\n Hollis and Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (the Harvard professor who first uncovered Crafts\u2019 manuscript) were so impressed with what I was discovering in the archives and in small communities related to the novel, they both were like, you take this, this is your project now.<\/p>\n Q: At what point were you sure you identified her?<\/p>\n GH: The moment when I really knew things were set was Nov. 11, 2011. I was out in the field doing research in Bertie County (North Carolina) among the descendent communities. I was at a little caf\u00e9 in Windsor and I was handed a satchel of papers from descendents of the Wheeler family. That set of papers helped me uncover the beginning of the escape story of Hannah Bond (the author\u2019s birthname). I talk about it a little bit in the book. Among the papers were records of this nephew, this young man that Hannah Crafts happened to be living among in 1852 to 1856 when she was serving at the Wheeler House, and when he was also nearby in Washington D.C. as a student at Columbia College, which is now George Washington University. Among those papers was his college notebook and an abolitionist sermon that he had copied from memory. Such details linked the nephew to other parts of my research that helped me discover Hannah\u2019s \u00a0path to freedom. I used the information in that satchel to help uncover, conclusively, the author\u2019s identity. On that particular day a lot of threads came together. It was a day I\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n Q: What surprised you?<\/p>\n GH: What surprised me first was the level of free-floating literacy available within the Wheeler household (where Crafts was enslaved). Early on in my research I discovered that some of the Wheeler children were exchanging letters with one of their enslaved people. His name was Moses Bond. He came from the same background.<\/p>\n Hannah Crafts\u2019s book is very literary. It borrows from Charles Dickens. It riffs on Harriet Beecher Stowe, and I found some great stuff about that and some of the other literary references that shaped Crafts\u2019s autobiographical novel.<\/p>\n The other things that were surprising to me were how alive descendent histories are in communities. There\u2019s so much to learn from people who aren\u2019t professors. Descendent communities preserved this story. They let me into their homes, they shared their histories. Those are the people who preserved and helped write this biography.<\/p>\n If you go and you\u2019re humble and spend time sitting in people\u2019s kitchens or their wood-paneled basements as they gather, you can learn a history not yet in the history books. This happened a lot during my research. I would get invited on a Saturday morning and three or four generations of a family connected to enslaved people would tell their family histories. Stories that are not in books, or in movies.<\/p>\n So much of the research behind Crafts\u2019 biography had to do with those moments.<\/p>\n Q: What makes you listen?<\/p>\n GH: I am fascinated by history. This sounds boring, but as an undergraduate student I began to develop a powerful sense of historical consciousness. Everywhere I lived in North Carolina, I began to feel and see the spirit of the place. You see it with the names on signs. You understand the geography, the landscape. If you dig into the spirit of a locale, you start understanding the ghostly past that is all around us.<\/p>\n Then when you go into archival collections you begin to hear the past speak again. When I was an undergraduate at (the University of North Carolina at) Chapel Hill, all my friends would go to the football games, and I would peel off and go to the Southern Historical Collection, just to poke around old letters and diaries to understand the communities I was living in. So, when I was approached by Hollis Robbins and Dr. Gates about researching Hannah Crafts\u2019 life, I realized I had the perfect subject for what I had already trained myself to see.<\/p>\n Q: Were you surprised by the attention the book has received?<\/p>\n GH: I was anticipating a lot of attention for this book because Hannah Crafts\u2019 life story is important and the book was published by a major trade press. Ecco\/HarperCollins has really \u00a0good publicists, and I got to work with Cordelia Calvert, who has a great record of placing works into the public. But there are no guarantees for how a book will land.<\/p>\n Some of the success of the book is owed to passionate readers and book reviewers like Jenny Schuessler at The New York Times. She is an absolutely brilliant journalist of intellectual history, and she is fascinated by the same ghostly presences that I am. Just before my book was published, she interviewed me for hours on Zoom and it was like talking to other collaborators on the project. She knows the terrain of what I was trying to accomplish. And then she wrote this great piece titled \u201cSearching for America\u2019s First Black Woman Novelist.\u201d<\/a> That was huge to how my book ended up landing.<\/p>\n