Ilyon Woo spoke to MorningEdition about her new book ‘Master Slave Husband Wife,’ which reconstructs the dramatic escape of a resourceful couple who fled slavery.
Simon & Schuster
Ellen and William Craft were considered the legal property of enslavers in Macon, Georgia. Their individual slave owners had at a much earlier point in their lives heartlessly separated them from their own loved ones.Ellen was a skilled seamstress. William was a talented cabinet maker. It was 800 miles to Philadelphia in the free state of Pennsylvania, but the Crafts managed to outwit all the forces that were against them and travel by train and boat in disguise.
"She dons the outfit of a wealthy white male enslaver who is disabled and thus is all the more dependent on the services of her slave. And that role of the slave is performed by her husband, William."and become icons of the abolitionist movement, speaking to sold-out crowds wherever they went. But the Fugitive Slave Act meant their lives were always at risk, so they eventually moved to England. When the emancipation proclamation passed, they decided to return to America.
Ilyon Woo first became interested in the Crafts when she was in graduate school. After reading their own narrative,, she was hooked:"Sometime you have that experience reading something that just seems to come off the page. And that happened for me in the quiet of the library, and I just haven't been able to stop thinking about it since."On what America was like in 1848
It was an incredibly tumultuous time. There are all these revolutions going on. I mean, even beyond America, there are democratic revolts going on all over the world in Europe, and America is celebrating that. And America's borders are expanding with the end of that Mexican-American war. There's a transportation revolution going on with trains and steamboats and people moving at pieces they couldn't have even imagined before. And with it there is an information revolution.
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