The Bondwoman’s Narrative: A Novel by Hannah Crafts; Edited By Henry Louis Gates, Jr.-338 pages

  I’ve never before encountered a book with an introduction that goes up to one unnumbered page beyond lxxiv . . . which means 75 pages (I know because I Googled Roman numerals to double check) that I actually read and then felt ended too abruptly. The story by Hannah Crafts is a good story and something that I would have been glad to read, but, thanks to the introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this is a book I want to keep on my shelves to read again.
  The story: fiction with action and suspense, told by a female slave about her life on a southern plantation and her attempted escape toward freedom in the northern U.S.
  The introduction: the true story of how Crafts’ unpublished manuscript made it into the hands of Gates and how he came to believe that “Hannah Crafts” was a real, pre-Civil War, literate female slave.
  The story itself is published as the manuscript was written, complete with some crossed-out words. A few publisher’s additions appear in brackets to help the reader. If the author of the story was, indeed, who Gates believes her to be, “The Bondwoman’s Narrative” is the earliest known novel to be written by an African American woman and the only known novel to be written by a female slave without having gone through the filter of white abolitionists. I expect to reread the story (and the long introduction) again one day.