They Posed As Master & Slave, The Saga of Ellen and Wm. Craft: Book Review, LAT
- 'They posed as master & slave: The dramatic escape story behind a pathbreaking book,' Los Angles Times, Jan. 16, 2023. - Ed. - 'Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom,' By Ilyon Woo. -
Frederick Douglass has been a household name for more than 170 years. Harriet Tubman’s relentless bravery has her headed for enshrinement on the $20 bill. Sojourner Truth is an icon for her work as both an abolitionist and a feminist. But beyond that trio of revered figures, the list of formerly enslaved Black people whose stories are remembered today is vanishingly small. Hollywood rescued Solomon Northup (“12 Years a Slave”) and Joseph Cinqué (“Amistad”) from relative oblivion.
And now Ilyon Woo shines the spotlight on the saga of Ellen and William Craft in her riveting book, “Master Slave Husband Wife.”
(Image: Ellen Craft c.1870. “Oh, how I should like my old mistress could see me now,” she was heard to say).
Ellen, whose father was a slaver, was white enough to pass, but as a woman she could not easily travel unaccompanied in 1848. So this skilled seamstress created an outfit that enabled her to pose as a wealthy but ailing young man who needed constant tending to by his slave — William. After they slipped away from their plantations, this fiction enabled the Crafts to travel more than 1,000 miles over land and water from Georgia to the North.
But instead of settling into the tranquility of freedom, they became nationally famous abolitionists, even as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 put a target on their backs.
Imani Perry, a Princeton University professor and author of the personal history “South to America,” says it’s important that Americans learn to think beyond Douglass, Tubman and Truth. “The more stories we have of successful emancipation, the more complex our picture is of American history,” she says. “The Crafts’ story shows the ingenuity and intellectual sophistication required to escape the clutches of slavery. And the idea that they became abolitionists at great risk is hugely important, showing the idea of linked fate.”
This dramatic episode has not been completely lost; the Crafts told much of it themselves in a memoir, “Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom,” and there have been academic works and even a children’s book. But Woo’s version, while rigorously researched, aims to make their journey accessible for a wider audience. In "South to America," Imani Perry traces a personal and national fixation on the South. Imani Perry on how the racial sins of the South belong to us all. “Their story has long been cherished and studied in academia,” says Woo, who first read their book in graduate school at Columbia University. “But I felt there was a lot more there either that they couldn’t say or wouldn’t say and that I wanted to know."... https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-01-16/they-posed-as-master-and-slave-the-dramatic-escape-story-behind-a-pathbreaking-book
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- (Wiki). Ellen Craft (1826–1891) and William Craft (Sept. 25, 1824 – Jan. 29, 1900) were American fugitives who were born & enslaved in Macon, Georgia. They escaped to the North in Dec. 1848 by traveling by train & steamboat, arriving in Philadelphia on Christmas Day. Ellen crossed the boundaries of race, class & gender by passing as a white male planter with William posing as her personal servant. Their daring escape was widely publicized, making them among the most famous of fugitives from slavery. Abolitionists featured them in public lectures to gain support in the struggle to end the institution.
As prominent fugitives, they were threatened by slave catchers in Boston after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, so the Crafts emigrated to England. They lived there for nearly 2 decades & raised 5 children.
The Crafts lectured publicly about their escape & challenged the Confederacy during the American Civil War. In 1860 they published a written account, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, The Escape of William & Ellen Craft from Slavery. One of the most compelling of the many slave narratives published before the American Civil War, their book reached wide audiences in the UK & the US. After their return to the US in 1868, the Crafts opened an agricultural school for freedmen's children in Georgia. They worked at the school & its farm until 1890. Their account was reprinted in the United States in 1999, with both the Crafts credited as authors...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_and_William_Craft
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-Also: Henry Box Brown (c. 1815 – June 15, 1897) was a 19th-century Virginia slave who escaped to freedom at the age of 33 by arranging to have himself mailed in a wooden crate in 1849 to abolitionists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
For a short time, Brown became a noted abolitionist speaker in the northeast United States.
As a public figure and fugitive slave, Brown felt extremely endangered by passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which increased pressure to capture escaped slaves. He moved to England and lived there for 25 years, touring with an anti-slavery panorama, becoming a magician and showman.
Brown married and started a family with an English woman, Jane Floyd. Brown's first wife, Nancy, remained in slavery. Brown returned to the United States with his English family in 1875, where he continued to earn a living as an entertainer. He toured and performed as a magician, speaker, and mesmerist until at least 1889. The last decade of his life (1886–97) was spent in Toronto, where he died in 1897....https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Box_Brown
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