Book Review: Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom. By Ilyon Woo. Simon and Schuster, 2023. Softcover, 416 pp. $19.99.

Reviewed by David T. Dixon

Memoirs of enslaved people are arresting testaments to the brutality and hypocrisy of an antebellum American economic system built largely on the backs of kidnapped human beings, flouting the Declaration of Independence’s promise of liberty and justice for all. Denied dignity and basic human rights, enslaved Americans were consigned to intergenerational bondage that only ceased following a civil war that claimed more than 750,000 lives.

Among these precious few autobiographical legacies, true stories of enslaved people escaping their fate via the Underground Railroad or by other means, make for exciting and inspirational reading. Most U.S. history enthusiasts are familiar with Frederick Douglass’s three autobiographies, but how many people have read the dramatic account of Henry “Box” Brown, who had himself transported to freedom in a wooden shipping crate three feet long and two feet wide?

Korean-American writer Ilyon Woo’s second book tells the story of an enslaved married couple, Ellen and William Craft of Macon, Georgia, who devised a daring escape to freedom by rail, steamship, and carriage in December 1848, in full view of white Southerners. Ellen’s light skin allowed her to pass disguised as an ill planter replete with silk top hat, cravat, and green shaded spectacles, while travelling with her husband, who posed as her chattel property. It was a bold and dangerous journey full of tense moments and hairbreadth evasions while in the intimate company of fellow travelers who might discover their secret and return them to involuntary servitude.

Like other masters of narrative nonfiction, Woo adroitly blends suspense and visual detail, creating cinematic images that recreate the Crafts’s mental exhaustion during their four-day journey when emotions of dread, fear, and doubt competed with feelings of hope, anticipation, and, ultimately relief, when they reached presumptive safety in the North.

But despite their triumphal escape, William and Ellen were hardly out of danger. Rather than immediately make their way to Canada or another permanent refuge, the Crafts risked their freedom by hitting the lecture circuit while being pursued by legal owners emboldened by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Hounded by slave catchers, they were eventually forced to emigrate to England, where they raised a family, learned to read, and published their own account of the escape, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, in 1860. Following the end of the Civil War, they returned to Georgia to help educate their newly freed brothers and sisters.

Woo’s masterful tale, which combines dramatic storytelling with historical context and sensitive perspective, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Her success in reviving popular interest in one of the most unusual stories in antebellum U.S. Black history, raises important questions in the fields of history and biography. How could this incredible story, so well-known in the mid-1850s, have been nearly forgotten by the twentieth century? What role does informed speculation or even imagination play in a narrative history?

Many slave narratives fell out of favor during Reconstruction, when most white Americans focused on reunion and reconciliation. Interest revived during the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s. By 1999, The University of Georgia Press and LSU Press had issued reprints including edited essays and commentary. Still, Crafts’s story remained largely inaccessible to a popular readership until Woo’s stunning achievement. But writing great narrative history can also create issues.

Woo did exhaustive research on her subjects and deftly weaved historical context into the narrative. On occasion, however, such references appear forced. She began her narrative by connecting the Craft’s odyssey to the European revolutions of 1848 and the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, both of which had little relevance to the illiterate couple or their world view, which was insular and limited (3-4).

In her desire to create reader empathy, Woo occasionally stretches the evidence to make informed, but speculative statements concerning the motivations and emotions of her characters. This is dangerous ground for historians. Woo asserts that Ellen “could not bear the idea of forming an intimate connection” in marriage with William until they escaped bondage and that “understanding her pain, and respecting her decision, William agreed, signifying the start of an unconventional, consensual, collaborative love.” (61). Her three pages of citations for this statement in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom do not support these claims. In fact, rather being a sympathetic husband, William denies Ellen co-authorship of the memoir and makes deprecating statements about her, belying Woo’s characterization of their marriage.

When Woo states (74) that “a memory flashed in Ellen’s mind,” she cites no evidence for this and purports to read her dead character’s thoughts. Is this sort of imagination acceptable in a work of history or biography? Does Woo cross the line into historical fiction, drawing reasonable, if not always supportable conclusions about her character’s thoughts and emotions? Does this practice enhance the narrative at the expense of truth, or simply fill gaps left by illiterate enslaved people who left little paper trail?

Master Slave Husband Wife is a wonderful read by a talented storyteller who brings the Crafts’s story to a wide audience. That is a great service to American history and something that few academic studies ever achieve.