“HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT”
Caroline and I were blessed to have lunch recently with Catherine Meeks in downtown Decatur. We talked about many things, including my new book “She Made A Way: Mother and Me in a Deep South World.” She also asked us if we knew any videographers, because one of her continuing projects was to get a documentary made about the lives of William and Ellen Craft, who were natives of Macon, Georgia (where Catherine had taught for many years). They were enslaved people, who escaped slavery by hiding in plain sight.
I noted that I had preached on them in the 1990’s in our Black History Series at Oakhurst. I first encountered them in Dorothy Sterling’s so-fine book called “Black Foremothers,” in which she gave short biographies of Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Ellen Craft. It was in that book that I first discovered Ida B in 1985, but the story of Ellen and William Craft stuck with me. They escaped slavery in 1848 by posing as a white master and “his” Black slave. Ellen Craft was very light skinned, and she could easily pass as a white person.
In late December of 1848, they came up with the plan to escape slavery by self-emancipation, by using their wits and steely courage to use the Southern system of slavery against itself to escape that very slavery. They dressed Ellen as a wealthy white male planter, sickly and injured, traveling north with her slave to seek a medical cure for her illness that no Southern doctor had yet provided. Ellen’s husband William would be her “slave” on this trip, and she had to switch from the protective turtle shell of being an enslaved woman to being an assertive white man who commanded the world. They walked out of slavery in the pre-dawn hours, going to the train station in Macon, taking it to Savannah. Ellen bought a ticket in the white man’s section, while William was confined to the designated “Negro slave” car. They left Macon on the 7 AM train to Savannah. From somewhere, they had obtained a pistol – they did not intend to return to slavery if they were caught. They would fight for their freedom or die trying. They left on December 20, 1848. Ellen, traveling as “Mr. Johnson,” could not read or write. In order to keep from having to sign any documents, she had her arm in a bandage and a sling, hoping to avoid the confrontation over her lack of literacy.
They had many trials and close calls and delays, but they sailed to Charleston on a ship from Savannah. They did not know when the bounty hunters would be sent to capture them, so they were always on edge. In Charleston, they got bad news – the steamer to Philadelphia had stopped running for the season. They had to take a ship to Wilmington, NC, and from there they hoped to take a train to Philadelphia in the land of freedom. They took ships and trains to Washington, DC, then finally to Philadelphia, all the time posing as wealthy white master and dark skinned personal slave. Along the way, several white enslavers urged “Mr. Johnson” to be more forceful with his slave, and they warned him of going to Philadelphia, because they indicated that many Black people held as slaves had escaped their slavery in the city of brotherly love. At their last stop in the South – in Baltimore – a white station master argued with “Mr. Johnson” that he had to have proof that the enslaved man belonged to her, and the station master indicated that he would refuse to let them board the train to Philly unless Mr. Johnson demonstrated such proof. Ellen – as Mr. Johnson – put on her haughtiest and most entitled face, and she demanded that the tickets for the “slave” and for herself be honored. The station master relented, and off they went on the train to Philadelphia.
In the pre-dawn hours of Christmas Eve, the train pulled into Philadelphia. As one older Black person put it to William: “Wake up, old horse, we are in Philadelphia.” As they crossed into the streets of Philly, William remembered that he felt “as if the straps that bound the heavy burden of slavery began to pop, and the load to run off.” Harriet Tubman had a similar feeling when she discovered that she had made it to Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, Ellen and William Craft made their way to the office of William Still, the great Black conductor on the Underground Railroad. Still was astonished at their story and congratulated them on their ingenuity, skill, and courage in carrying this escape out. Still connected them with other conductors and urged them to go farther North because the bounty hunters would be after them soon.
In their segregated rooming house, the Crafts later described the change that happened when they arrived on free soil: “Scarcely had we arrived on free soil when the rheumatism departed – the right arm was unslung; the toothache was gone; the beardless face was unmuffled; the deaf heard and spoke; the blind saw; and the lame leaped as a hart, and in the presence of a few astonished friends of the slave, the facts of this unparalleled Underground RailRoad feat were established by most unquestionable evidence.” They were funded to go on up into England, especially Boston, and they encountered and toured with Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Robert Purvis, Henry “Box” Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, and many others. Many people classified as “white” were astonished to learn their story, but they were even more astonished to see a “white” woman named Ellen Craft standing before them, learning that someone who looked like them could also be held in slavery.
The Crafts also helped to change the narrative not only about slavery but about the agency of those held as slaves. Theirs was not a story of courageous white people who saved dark people held in slavery. Theirs was the story of the agency of those classified as “slaves” to plan and escape and to use their wits and courage against the very people who sought to tell them that they were too stupid and primitive to be anything but slaves.
The Crafts would have to escape the bounty hunters several more times, going to Canada and then to England, where they lived for many years. After the Civil War, they would return to Georgia to found the Woodville School to teach Black people reading and writing – the school was so successful that it attracted many students, as well as the attention of the KKK. They were under constant threat, but remained powerful and vital witnesses. Ellen died sometime in 1891, but her burial place (like Clarence Jordan’s) remains unknown. William died at the beginning of the 20th century and is buried in Charleston, SC. For more info, you can see the Crafts’ book “Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom,” first published to great success in 1860, or the more recent NYT best-selling biography by Ilyon Woo called “Master, Slave, Husband, Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom.” If you don’t know about this extraordinary couple, learn about them! And, if you know some documentary folk, contact Catherine Meeks!
