Will I love Master Slave Husband Wife?

I loved this historical work about the real-life story of Ellen Craft, a young slave with a light complexion who escapes from the South with her partner, William, a slave of a darker complexion. The difficult voyage on a boat going north in which Ellen, who is impersonating a young white master traveling with his male slave, must converse with the white men on board as though she were one of them kept me in a state of high anxiety.

I prayed that she would succeed, agonizing over every difficult moment that could have aroused suspicions, internalizing the heroine’s terror… show more.

I was skeptical! I know the Crafts’ history and have read all the scholarship out there. What could be new? But once I started reading, I was IN IT. The author does a marvelous job depicting minute-by-minute decisions this enslaved husband and wife had to make as they carefully and desperately escaped from Georgia, with the wife disguised as a young white man accompanied by “his” enslaved manservant.

How to speak with conductors? How to avoid inquisitive travelers? These kinds of terrifying problems made up their escape, and Woo walks us through them with tight but helpful context to explain… show more.

I loved this book because of the power of the story and the beautifully rendered characters. Though not a World War 2 book but a love story set in the American South, it covers many of the same themes, like oppression and resistance.

The central characters, Ellen and William Craft, were powerfully realized. I followed their journey from slavery to freedom with breathless anticipation as Ellen disguised herself as a wealthy white woman and William as her slave.

I cheered at the end when the Crafts fled to Canada en route to Liverpool, England, where they toured on the lecture… show more.

I had read about the protest that Ellen and William Craft staged along with other abolitionists at the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition of 1851 and wanted to know more, which is what led me to this book.

Woo expertly brings attention to the international networks of abolitionist activism and to the intersections of gender, race, and class, starting with Ellen Craft’s escape from slavery dressed as an elite white man.

I also appreciate that Woo models how to write about complex theoretical ideas and histories with clarity and precision while telling a powerful story. The book is a page-turner!

At heart this book is a love story about an enslaved couple who escaped the South and lived to write about it.

Risking their lives to be free, in 1848 Helen and William Craft began a dangerous 5,000 mile journey from Macon, Georgia to England. Helen who passed for white, disguised herself as a man and was accompanied by her husband who pretended to be her black slave.

Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, this account of their courage, and what they endured from white enslavers is both a story of tragedy and triumph. I need books such as this to… show more.

This well-researched true story reads like a suspense novel.

Ellen and William Craft uniquely escape their enslavement in Georgia: she passes as a white male Southern aristocrat, and he as her personal slave. After their harrowing journey north, they reach free Philadelphia, but as fugitive slaves, they are still in danger. Nonetheless, they join a lecture tour to support the Abolitionist cause.

Through their personal story, we learn the intimate complexities of slavery, the varying groups who oppose it and help fugitives, as well as those set on returning them to the South, and the difficulties that come to Blacks… show more.

Years ago, I published an article on the Craft's escape and their antislavery work.

Woo’s passionate account of their escape taught me how much I still needed to know about this amazing couple and their flight to freedom and their struggle to build a life for themselves and their family in England and back in the US during Reconstruction.