 The 2002 publication includes a preface by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., professor of African-American literature and history at Harvard University, describing his buying the manuscript, verifying it, and research to identify the author.Crafts was believed to be a pseudonym of an enslaved woman who had escaped from the plantation of John Hill Wheeler.In September 2013, Gregg Hecimovich, a professor of English at Winthrop University, documented the novelist as Hannah Bond, an African-American slave who escaped about 1857 from the plantation of Wheeler in Murfreesboro, North Carolina.