Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft
There are many slavery narratives, many tales of escape from slavery, but this is justly one of the most famous. William and Ellen Craft, a married black couple who were enslaved and lived in the American South, contrived together to escape their captivity. The planning may have been extensive, although readers of this very short book do not get to hear much about it. Instead, what we get is something simpler, something purer, in a sense.
We read how the two of them got away – and got away with it.
It all began in asking for a small amount of time off. This is something slaves, if they were favoured by someone on the family, or by their ‘employer’ in one of the making and mending crafts to which slaves were often assigned, could get – if someone might be made to offer it. Little did those who acquiesced know that this small holiday – around the Christmas time – would be the beginning of a break for freedom.
Here the Crafts say that one of them, Ellen, was of mixed ancestry, and pale, and could pass for white. But the plan required her to pass for more than that: to be taken to be a man – so that her husband could do as a slave companion and not elicit any suspicion or comment.
This transformation produced its normal litany of problems. Not only needing to change race and sex, but to change in social class. How would she conceal her features? Through the application of poultices and bandages. How would she make up for the fact that neither she nor her husband could read or write – and they may be asked or required to sign their names, or to understand documents? She would claim to be a true invalid, whose right arm would be covered in dressings, whose weakness would necessitate other people reading and writing for her – and which would have the happy side effect of making the close proximity of a slave more and more reasonable to onlookers.
The break for freedom began. They embarked on the train: she in a carriage for other gentlemen and their families. He in a less exulted place. By and large, the train journey went well. There were moments of tension, some which might – had things gone unluckily – have made discovery and apprehension possible, even likely. But things ever seemed to go the Crafts’ way. The lady who claimed to be a gentlemen avoided difficult questions by feigning deafness. When her husband was needled about attempting to escape by vulgar members of the overseer class, he was able to say he hadn’t an idea what they meant.
When someone in a transport office said that Ellen, the gentleman, could not take ‘his’ slave across the border into the free states unless he could have someone else attest to the fact he owned the man in question, another gentleman practically appeared out of nowhere to stand a kind of surety, despite essentially knowing neither the supposed gentleman nor his slave from Adam. As it turned out, of course, that man got lightly swindled for doing what he thought was a good deed on the spur of the moment.
At another moment, the need for the gentleman to write down name and address is side-stepped because it is considered poor form to make a man suffering so plainly from terrible rheumatism (or something similarly visible and dreadful) go through those formalities.
Other problems were not far behind. Having arrived in a free state, crossed the rivers and travelled along the train tracks, the two Crafts are then sent, via ship, to Boston, where it is thought free slaves might take full part in society and live essentially liberated lives. But then came the law that permitted the hunting down of fugitive slaves – and the bloodhounds, with the drunk hunters of fellow men, as the authors describe them – and so it is finally decided that they must quit the United States entirely and go – not to Canada, as was first their plan, but to Britain, where this narrative was written.
The joy the authors describe upon first setting foot in Liverpool – and knowing they could no longer, ever be returned to slavery – is a joy very few in history have ever felt.
This book might be a good primer. It is short; it is easy to read; it is filled with moral indignation, contemporary quotes from poetry, from sermons, from newspapers and letters. Children might learn a lot from it; adults less so, although it might keep their store of historical condemnation – such a useful commodity in the second quarter of the twenty-first century – helpfully stocked. So many people want to believe that, had they lived then, they would have done the right thing – and the first time, without question, no matter their station in life or context. This simple book will not convince them otherwise.