Ellen and William Craft endured a 1,000-mile journey to escape slavery in Georgia and find freedom in the North, and author Ilyon Woon followed that journey – oftentimes physically – to capture their biography in her Pulitzer-winning biography “Master Slave Husband Wife.”
Woo shared her journey in writing this book at the Port Washington Friends of the Library luncheon Friday as its honored guest. The luncheon is the main fund-raiser to aid in supporting Port Washington Public Library programs.
Kelly McMasters – a local best-selling author – interviewed Woo in a one-on-one Q&A on the stage, then asked a few audience questions at the end of the interview.
“Master Slave Husband Wife” is a biography about the young black Craft couple, following the two from before they escaped their enslavement in 1848 in Macon, Ga., to seek freedom in the North and where their lives led afterward.
Ellen Craft passed as white woman due to her mixed race heritage. Her biological father was her enslaver.
In order to evade capture, Ellen Craft posed as a disabled, white man traveling with his slave – who was her husband William Craft. The two disguised themselves as this pair to travel via steamboat, carriage and train and find solace in Philadelphia.
McMasters said that while this is a true story, she praised the book for its details and storytelling that make it read more like fiction.
Woo won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, which was announced just days before the luncheon. She said she is still reeling from her Pulitzer award, which has not fully set in yet.
Woo said she learned of the Crafts’ story while in graduate school at Columbia University in the 1990s. But it wasn’t until 2011 that she began writing the book and again in 2016 when she revisited the story after a brief period of discouragement.
She recalled a moment while in graduate school sitting in the library listening to a course reader on the Crafts with a voice that compelled her to continue listening.
“It was really immediately in the ear for me,” Woo said. “It was sometimes heartbreakingly sad, it was at other times beautiful and moving. It pitched this incredible adventure story and love story. It also just had an irony and purposeful use of humor that just knocks the wind out of you.”
But in listening to this audio story, Woo said information was purposefully left out that ignited her curiosity.
Woo said her approach in writing this story was to capture all the intermingling stories of the Crafts and the world around them to tear down the walls separating the true and holistic story from being told, encompassing various characters to aid in the storytelling.
“I wanted them to share that stage, but I wanted the Crafts to be the main singers,” Woo said.
She described her book through the analogy of a tightrope – comparing the story of the Crafts’ journey escaping slavery to that of the tightrope, which in this case was their 1,000-mile journey from Georgia to Philadelphia. But that was all that the course readers covered and Woo had previously studied.
But Woo also sought to capture what existed before the tightrope began while they were still enslaved and after the tightrope ended, when they reached freedom in Philadelphia. What also exists is below the tightrope, which is the context of what was going on in the South around the Crafts as they embarked on their dangerous journey.
“I think it’s only in seeing that full picture of the before, the below and the after that we really get the fullest sense of what incredible years they were,” Woo said.
Woo’s research took her on the route of the Crafts. She talked of finding herself in cramped attic spaces of an old Georgia courthouse looking through 19th-century deeds, and a Charleston custom house where the Crafts had a tense moment as they found themselves next to one of the largest open-air slave markets.
“If I hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have known to point the camera that way,” Woo said.
She said without libraries, her book would not exist.
The most challenging aspect in writing this book for Woo was what she called representing the unrepresentable.
Woo cited Williams Wells Brown – a character in her biography who was a self-emancipated man and revered abolitionist – who said that there is no way to actually encapsulate what slavery was.
She said to face this challenge she had to constantly return to the South to gather what information she could.
“These are people who ate and breathed and savored and were scared and had all these emotions like you and I do right now and that’s what I wanted to conjure,” Woo said.