{"id":41168,"date":"2026-02-24T14:47:23","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T19:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=41168"},"modified":"2026-03-27T16:13:33","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T20:13:33","slug":"hecimovich-speaks-at-unveiling-ceremony-for-marker-honoring-hannah-crafts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/hecimovich-speaks-at-unveiling-ceremony-for-marker-honoring-hannah-crafts\/","title":{"rendered":"Hecimovich speaks at unveiling ceremony for marker honoring Hannah Crafts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two historic markers unveiled in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, on Feb. 7 honor the lives of African Americans who hailed from the region and contributed much to their community and beyond. One of the markers commemorates Hannah Crafts, the earliest known Black woman novelist and the subject of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/people\/gregg-hecimovich\/\">Gregg Hecimovich&#8217;s<\/a> book, &#8220;The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman&#8217;s Narrative&#8221; (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.harpercollins.com\/products\/the-life-and-times-of-hannah-crafts-gregg-hecimovich?variant=40993004027938\">Ecco\/HarperCollins 2023<\/a>). Hecimovich attended the unveiling ceremony and offered remarks, which appeared in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.roanoke-chowannewsherald.com\/news\/telling-their-stories-e80237e2\">Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In 2013, Hecimovich, a Furman University English professor, discovered the authorship of &#8220;The Bondwoman&#8217;s Narrative&#8221; as Hannah Bond, who wrote part of her novel on stolen paper in Murfreesboro while she was enslaved at the John Wheeler plantation in the early 1850s. Escaping north to freedom, Crafts\/Bond finished her manuscript in 1861. It disappeared for a century, circulated among private collectors, then landed in a library&#8217;s special collection for a time until it was sold in a private auction to Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates who authenticated the text and published it in 2002.<\/p>\n<p>After years of research on the way to uncovering the author&#8217;s surname in 2013, Hecimovich spent the next 10 years piecing together plantation records, oral histories, forensic clues and other archival records to tell Hannah Crafts&#8217; life story.<\/p>\n<p class=\"txtStyle_body1 mb_$body1\" data-wisiwig-body1=\"true\">At an event following the unveiling, Chowan President Rosemary Thomas said, \u201cThink of the layers Dr. Hecimovich and Dr. Gates had to dig through to find not only a voice, but a truth that had been silenced, that had been buried, perhaps never to have been heard were it not for the courage of these gentlemen. We\u2019re grateful for historians and the work they do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>English Professor Gregg Hecimovich speaks at a ceremony in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, where a historic marker was unveiled that pays tribute to Hannah Crafts, the subject of his 2023 book about the earliest known Black female novelist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":257,"featured_media":28718,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,6,3514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","category-in-the-news","category-roanoke-chowan-news-herald"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/257"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41168"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41710,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41168\/revisions\/41710"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}