dswdiane

I have often read single-person biographies where the biographer is very obviously in love with their subject; I have also occasionally read have also read Couple Biographies where the biographer is really invested in the romance between their subjects plural. Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife is a really great, thoughtful, thorough exploration of a particular moment in the history of American slavery around the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the defiant abolitionist movement. It is also very definitively a love story that Woo believes in with her whole heart and is ready to champion all the way to the end, which I honestly think is quite charming even when I myself looking at the evidence was sometimes like "well, I too would like to believe that all through their many years together William and Ellen Craft were indeed fully and romantically on the same page and had each other's backs about everything, but I think it's possible there are other interpretations of some of these events and that in many cases we simply can't know for sure --"

The Big Headline about Ellen and William Craft, the story that made them famous and that the first part of this book recounts in detail, is their daring escape North from slavery in 1848: Ellen disguised herself as an extremely sickly white gentleman who needed her loyal slave with her at all times, and in this guise they managed to navigate 19th-century public transit all the way from Georgia to Philadelphia. They themselves wrote a book about this, which I do plan to read, because it sounds extremely cool and romantic and indeed everyone they met as they made their way from Philadelphia to Massachusetts was like "that's extremely cool and romantic!" and promptly pulled them onto the abolitionist lecture circuit to general wild applause. Ellen, in particular, had major abolitionist propaganda value for forcing empathy out of white people. She was often billed as the White Slave (a label that she did not enjoy.)

Being an escaped slave on the abolitionist lecture circuit was obviously pretty dangerous in 1848 but not as dangerous as it was about to become. In 1848, the Fugitive Slave Laws up north were pretty toothless and unenforceable. In 1850, in an attempt to staple the rapidly-fracturing country back together, significantly stronger laws were passed that essentially forced abolitionist states to cooperate with returning escaped slaves to their masters. Ellen and William Craft, who had so publicly escaped in a way that was very cool and also very embarrassing for the slave states through which they passed, inevitably became one of the first major test cases as to whether Massachusetts would indeed fulfill its Obligations to the South.

Woo writes a compelling narrative, but more importantly she does a really wonderful job balancing that narrative with the complexity of the broader context; from the opening chapter, where she ties the Craft's escape in 1848 with the 1848 revolutionary movement in Europe, I already knew I was in good hands. She does occasionally I think overuse the Ominous Foreshadowing Chapter Ending, but as nonfiction author sins go that's a minor one. She says that at one point in the text that as part of telling their full story she wants to complicate the idea of a happy ending, but it's very clear that in her heart she wants the Crafts to have been very in love and very married all throughout their long and interesting lives, and who can blame her for that?