Master Slave Husband Wife Quotes

“How much are you willing to give up, sacrifice personally, for what you believe in, for events in another part of the country, for souls on the other side of the world?”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“Her success exposed both the hypocrisy of her world and the possibility: of one person’s power to help another; of civilization’s ability to break down what it wrongly put up—that is, when blinded to its own constructs.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“I have seen slaves tortured in every conceivable manner. I have seen them hunted down and torn by bloodhounds. I have seen them shamefully beaten, and branded with hot irons. I have seen them hunted, and even burned alive at the stake, frequently for offenses that would be applauded if committed by white persons for similar purposes.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“Ellen’s ultimate test of mastery was also a moment of surrender, or an act of radical faith, where her trust in the moment, and an invisible grace, empowered her transcendence.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“Meanwhile, the destruction of an enslaved family, such as William’s, might be represented by a number—if recorded at all.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“As scholars have discussed, the traditional historical archives are an unstable preserve, particularly where the histories of Black and enslaved people are concerned: full of “scandal and excess,” as Saidiya Hartman has described, while also “abysmally thin,” to quote Tiya Miles.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“soul driver” (as slave traders were called),”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“Webster was the only Senator who had his own drinking room inside the Capitol, and he carried among his possessions an exquisitely painted miniature of a woman’s glowing breasts—a self-portrait by the painter Sarah Goodridge, who presented the gift when Webster was newly widowed, and between his first and second wives.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“draw”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“coverture.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“manumission”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“became”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“belied”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“the northern part of the city, where a women’s college stood upon a hill, its windows dark. Claimed to be the first in the world to grant a degree to a woman, the future Wesleyan College had its roots in Ellen’s father’s work, too, in a female seminary he had helped found. At the school’s first baccalaureate address, its president—a preacher well known to Ellen’s enslaving family—was exultant as he exhorted, “Woman can do more! It is her province, her right, her duty.… “Come forth and live!” he urged. “Let your understandings swell out to the fullness of their native dimensions, and walk abroad majestic in thought.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“A final note on language: I have endeavored to follow the guidelines recommended by P. Gabrielle Foreman and other senior scholars in “Writing About Slavery,” using the terms “enslaved people” and “enslaver” whenever possible, with the purposeful exception of the title and other situations where the point of using terms such as master or mistress, slave or planter, was precisely to contest the ideologies they represent.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“I have also chosen to write this book as narrative nonfiction, as opposed to a purely academic work, with the goal of evoking, as viscerally as possible, the texture of life in the Crafts’ day and age—the places and times through which they moved and lived—while also rendering the epic scope of their enterprise and activism, and finally, as tribute to the couple’s own genre-defiant presentation.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“the Crafts’ note about their book—that it is “not intended as a full history” of their lives—also applies to this one. I have chosen to focus on the story of their mutual self-emancipation against a backdrop of transformation in the United States,”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“They offer little coverage of their experiences before, after, or in between these stories of escape. They make no mention of their travels on the lecture circuit in America and abroad; neither do they describe their experiences in Boston or England. And, though they do name a few friends, such as Robert Purvis and the Estlins, others are entirely omitted—among them, William Wells Brown. This book covers all these gaps and more.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“This exposure is particularly important for those sections of the story that the Crafts chose not to detail, material comprising more than two-thirds of this book. Their narrative, as they state in the preface to their narrative, is “not a full history” of their lives, but “merely an account of our escape.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“In the absence of contradicting evidence, I opted to maintain some representation of each event as the Crafts’ described it—first, because this is how they chose to tell their story, and then because, whether or not the episodes unfolded exactly as described (a question that may be asked of any autobiography or historical source), they are emblematic of larger, or what scholars have called “symbolic,” truths. In every case, the episode either depicted or typified real dangers particular to that stage of their travel.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“Their book contains a high level of verifiable historical detail, including a few key names—though, notably, not those of Ellen’s enslavers, the Smiths and the Collinses, or William’s last enslaver, Ira Taylor. While other self-emancipated authors might omit such information in order to protect themselves, their loved ones, any abettors, and escape routes, the Crafts’ escape seemed so beyond belief that they were required to prove their “authenticity” to an even greater degree than most, almost as soon as they arrived in the North.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“They ran for each other, with each other, and as they did, they pushed not only themselves and each other, but also the nation—and the world—to reach for better. In this sense, the lack of a definitive happy ending to their story represents not so much a gap or absence, as, potentially, a space or an opening in the story of America, whose reckonings with the past have the power to transform present and future. This space is ours to enter.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“The absence of a happy ending may partly explain why the Crafts are not better known. Their story eludes easy celebration, resists closure. Yet it is precisely this complexity that remains the source of their enduring power—and why their story needs to be studied and celebrated. Through their audacious escape and daring lives, their restless improvisation, persistent innovation, inventive narration, for themselves and for others, the Crafts continually wrote and revised their own American love story.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“It might be said that America failed the Crafts. Time and again, they pushed toward some realization of their dreams, only to be cut off, or rather to see the finish line moved.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“In 1859 Butler’s mounting debts would lead to one of the biggest slave sales in American history, originally set to take place in Savannah’s Johnson Square, where the Crafts had passed through: the square of heartache with the great live oaks, where Spanish moss refused to grow. The sale was eventually held at a racetrack. The rain did not stop for days, as 436 men, women, and children were sold in an event remembered as “The Weeping Time.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“What is known is that Ellen spoke forcefully offstage when she wished. One journalist would remember a dinner party, soon after the Crafts’ arrival overseas, where Ellen was asked “if the slaves generally were intelligent enough to take care of themselves if they were emancipated.” Her reply: “At present, they take care of themselves and their master, too; if they were free, I think they would be able to take care of themselves.” This impromptu wit would prove essential, as the petty politics that they had thus avoided soon threatened to engulf them all.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“Yet, whatever her feelings or her rights, in the end, Eliza Collins did not insist on the action that was legally hers to take—and which her father, if not her husband, might have pursued on her behalf. She would not force the return of the half sister she enslaved.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“As Calhoun first articulated, the rights of Southern slaveholders were protected by no less than the Constitution itself: Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, which promised that those “held to service or labor in one state,” who escaped to another, would be “delivered up.” Without this promise, the South’s forefathers would never have signed the compact that drew them into the Union. Without the guaranteed rights to slave ownership, in other words, the United States of America would not exist. And yet, these promised rights were under siege daily, as fugitives disappeared into the North. This was the first grievance stated in the Address, and it spoke loudly for Southerners like Collins.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

“In the face of all uncertainty, however, Brown set a model of what being a public American fugitive could be. Legally, he was as vulnerable as the Crafts, but he had refused to hide, going so far as to send a copy of his narrative to the man who had once enslaved him. Brown felt strongly within himself that he “owed a duty to the cause of humanity.” There were three million still in bondage, including loved ones, who shared his scars.”
― Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom