Black History Month Titles: A first edition exploring one of America's first African-American novelists.

Harvard professor and PBS genealogy star Henry Louis Gates Jr. was born in Keyser, West Virginia (1950). He is a scholar, a literary critic, a historian, and a television host. “When I was a kid growing up,” he said, “my friends wanted to be Hank Aaron or Willie Mays. I wanted to be a Rhodes scholar. I didn’t know why. I just wanted to go to Harvard or Yale and I wanted to go to Oxford or to Cambridge.”

He studied history at Yale, and was the first African American to receive a Mellon Fellowship, which took him to Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. While he was in England, he fell in love with the study of literature.

In the 1980s, he became co-director of the Black Periodical Literature Project, collecting overlooked or ignored 19th-century manuscripts. In 1983, he republished what at that time was believed to be the first novel by an African American in the United States: a book called Our Nig, by Harriet E. Wilson (originally published in 1859).

Some years later, Gates heard of a story of a slave’s life written by a woman named Hannah Crafts. Crafts had escaped from slavery and took with her the makings of a novel based on her own life. She wrote about the distinctions slaves made among themselves based on skin color, house-versus-field jobs, and class.

She wrote about sex but argued against slaves marrying and having children on the grounds that slavery is hereditary and can’t be escaped. She portrayed the relationship of a white mistress and black slave as full of mutual intimacy.

As with Harriet Wilson’s book, people assumed that the novel was really written by a white author who was adopting the persona of a slave. Gates didn’t believe that white authors would pretend to be black in the mid-19th century.

He was convinced the manuscript had been written sometime between 1853 and 1861, and that it may have predated Wilson’s book, which would make it the first novel by an African-American woman. He won the manuscript at a New York auction for $8,500; it was recently valued at $350,000. Gates gave Crafts’ manuscript the title The Bondwoman’s Narrative and published it in 2002. It quickly became a national best-seller.

To celebrate, Henry has a copy of a collateral volume of important scholarly studies:

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Robbins, Hollis, editors, In Search of Hannah Crofts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Basic Civitas Books, 1st ed., 1st printing, 2004). ISBN 0-465-02714-8. Essays by 22 scholars on the then-newly discovered mss of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the first known novel by an African-American. Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket, very good condition. HBB price: $25.


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