Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Master Slave Husband Wife with Ilyon Woo

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

You may not be familiar with their names, but William and Ellen Craft were a determined enslaved couple who made their escape through disguise and performance, and in their success, defied the limitations of gender and race. Sharon talks with Ilyon Woo, author of “Master Slave Husband Wife,” which beautifully depicts their epic journey from slavery to freedom. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello friends. Welcome and delighted to have you with me today. My guest is the incomparable Il-Yon Wu, who has written a book that the New York Times says was one of the 10 best books of the year. I mean, that is saying something. It is called Master Slave Husband Wife. And this is a story you want to hear about. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am really excited to be chatting with author Ilian Wu today. Thank you for being here.

I am thrilled to be here with you. Thank you for having me. Truly a pleasure. I was really excited to see you this morning. I think people are going to absolutely love this conversation about your new book. And I would love to hear more about Master Slave Husband Wife, an epic journey from slavery to freedom. First of all, I love the title. It's very evocative.

It makes you feel like I wanna know more about what is happening in this book. So give us like a very brief high level synopsis about what this is about. Well, I will first say that the original title for the book was Master Slave, Husband Wife, and American Love Story. And that was changed at the very end. And I'm still a little bit attached to that original subtitle, because I think in many ways it says it all. It's a love story about William and Ellen Kraft, this incredible couple from Macon, Georgia

who escaped bondage in 1848. It's about the love that they inherited from those who loved them before they fled bondage. It's about the love that propelled them on this just unbelievable escape. And it's the love that they carried into the world, into the world as they fought for justice, as they fought to create a family on their own terms, and really the love that led them

through life, that they carried through life to the very end of their days. So this is an American love story. I love that. A lot of times people don't realize how little control sometimes authors have over some things related to their books. Did you feel like, okay, I'm going to let go of the subtitle because it's for the greater good, but I still really like it the most? Is that how you felt about it?

I kind of threw the subtitle under the bus because I really wanted the title so badly, because the language that we're using to talk about this history is changing moment by moment. And so we're not using the word slave, right? We don't talk about slaves. We talk about enslaved people. You put the verb into it rather than objectifying people with a noun. But of course, master, slave, husband, wife, precisely the usage of these terms is to sort of knock these terms down.

Nevertheless, the title has the word slave in it. At one point, you know, the publishing people were like, wait a second, we have the word slave in here. Is this okay? Should we maybe change it? Master and slave people has been what? No, that's not going to work. Doesn't work in this title. No, no, it does not. I mean, then you have to like redo the whole thing. So I really wanted the title. I mean, then you have to redo the whole thing. So I really wanted the title. I got it.

Yes. You have to stand for the things that are the most important to you. And sometimes other things have to be compromised because that's literally how it works. How did you discover this story? What made you feel like this is calling my name? I need to write a book about it. Well, there are two pieces to that question. The first is how I encountered the story. And oh, my goodness, thank you, Robert O'Mealy of Columbia University for assigning

this incredible text as required reading in a graduate seminar I was taking on the literature passing. This is an incredible course, an incredible teacher. We read, you know, lots of different works, but this one is the one that, I mean, I was sitting in the quiet of a library and I just felt these voices like in my ear at telling the story and it was such a rollicking adventure. And at the same time, there was so much pain, like so much pathos and so many unanswered questions about those love story elements

that we began with. And I really just wanted to know more. And at that time, I wasn't thinking about writing a book. I was thinking about how I was going to finish my doctoral career, and I mean, this was the farthest thing from my mind. But I knew I wanted to tell stories in a different way. I knew I didn't want to be in academia. I knew there were certain stories that called me, and this one just kept coming back, and again, and again, over the years. LESLIE KENDRICK How many years elapsed between the time that you first encountered this story of the crafts until you really started thinking, I need to write a book proposal. Like I have a book

in me about these people. I would say almost 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. It was that long. What really sort of started it was these questions. You know, the Crest tell a lot about their adventures on the road. That part of the story is really gripping, really detailed. But they say very little, Ellen especially, about their family members. And you get just enough that, I mean,

one of the first lines that they say in their 1860 narrative, and this is in William's voice because the narrative was attributed at that time to him. He speaks, my wife's first master was her father and her mother his slave and the latter is still the slave of his widow. So I mean it's just so much to get your head wrapped around that. Talk about categories of master, slave, husband, wife, all collapsing in on one another. Yes. Those were the kind of questions like who were these people? Who was the master?

Who was the mother? Who were the people in this world? And when I started looking into these questions, especially what were their lives like? Who did they know before they embarked on this escape? It's like opening one Matryoshka box after another. It was just a crazy sort of journey through the archives. If it's okay with you, I'd love to read the couple opening paragraphs from your book, because I think it really helps to sort of set the stage for exactly what we're talking about. Your book opens with, in 1848, William and Ellen Craft,

an enslaved couple in Georgia, embarked upon a 5,000 mile journey of mutual self-emancipation across the world. Theirs is a love story that begins in a time of revolution, a revolution unfinished in the American War for Independence, a revolution that endures. The story opens in that year of global democratic revolt, when in wave upon wave, Sicily, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and all across Europe, the people rose up against tyranny, monarchy, the powers that be.

News of these uprisings ricocheted, carried across the seas by high-speed clipper ships, overland by rail and in defiance of time and space by the marvelous electromagnetic telegraph. From New York down to New Orleans, Americans raised torches in celebration, sure that these revolutions rhymed with their own. Americans watched Europe while the ground shifted beneath their own feet. So beautiful.

Well, thank you for that beautiful reading. My goodness. Thank you. It's beautiful. It really is. And it really sets the stage, not just for what is happening in the United States, which we tend to think of during this time in the lead up to the civil war. We tend to think of in a very isolated sense that conflict was only happening in the United States. And I love the phrase, Americans watched Europe while the ground shifted beneath their own feet. I don't wanna give away too much from this book

because I want people to read it, but I think we need to talk a little bit more about the craft's escape from enslavement because it's never a simple thing, right? So tell us a little bit more about this plan and how it's carried out. Well, the plan came to them, as they tell it, within four days of their escape.

So four days before they are actually going to try this, they decide upon this plan. And over four days, William goes to different parts of Macon to pick up different parts of the costume, because the plan is for them, husband and wife, to disguise themselves as master and slave. And it's not William who's wearing the disguise as master.

It's Ellen who crosses the lines of race, gender, class and ability, passing as a wealthy, white, disabled man. So they have to be really careful. All the roads are watched. They're not allowed to go to these stores to pick up things for themselves. So William is going to different stores here and there to try and pick up different

elements of the costume. And he picks up a hat and a shirt and a vest and a jacket and boots. And it is just a pair of pants that Ellen sews for herself. Now this is in four days, and they are practicing over four days. They are not sleeping, they are preparing and they are terrified. The journey itself takes another crazy four days. It is such a condensed period of time with unbelievable twists and turns that had me, even though I knew the outcome, at the edge of my own seat. Well it makes them think, you know, what we should try is why don't you try posing as a disabled white man?

How do they concoct this idea? Because it is certainly not how we generally picture enslaved people escaping, right? We think about, like, under the cover of night, someone's looking the other way, you're sent on an errand and you never return. Like this is not how most Americans would ever picture this going down.

How did they get this idea? Yeah, they are not hiding. They are going on the railroads, they're going on steamboats, they are going on buses. I mean, they're riding the transportation revolution to freedom. So there's so many different strands and this is what I wanted to know because you know in the book they attribute the escape idea to William and I wanted to

know more about that, right? Because actually if you look at the storytelling they do later, that's a whole nother part of the story, but when they talk about this later it's not so clear that it was Williams' idea. And I thought, hmm, was it his idea? What were the motivating factors? And there were so many. So I don't think I can really sum that up because what led them to that point was so entwined with their childhoods, with their backgrounds. But I will say about the transportation piece that Ellen's enslaver, Robert Collins, was an entrepreneur and a railroad entrepreneur, and he was actually responsible

for overseeing the construction of this railroad in Tamekin. I mean, they were both really connected. They had access to different kinds of information that most people didn't. And William worked at a hotel. Ellen was a favorite enslaved person within her biological half-sisters household.

So they had these kinds of privileges, as they call them, that gave them inside information. Risk is the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. This 420, Risk features stories both hilarious and cautionary. Storytellers telling the unfiltered truth about their mishaps and their haps? It's the best of drug stories from RISC on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And so then in some ways, this inside information, this connection to the railroad

was exactly what was used against their enslaver, so to speak. You know, like the railroad came here and we're going to turn it around and use it against you. What you meant for one purpose, we're going to use as a tool for our own liberation. I loved that. I'm not going to blow too much of this story, but I will say that the railroad comes back, well, first of all, it comes again and again and again, but one of the most poignant experiences with the railroad in the story will come at the end when Ellen has a reunion with her mother. People don't realize how important the railroad was. Of course, we're like, oh yeah, trains, oh, it made it so much faster. You could get where you were going, et cetera. But the difference between pre-railroad

and post-railroad, it's really, really difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was to American society. Oh yeah, I mean, people were marveling. Can you believe being one place and another state, like by the end of the day, it was just unfathomable. And you know what it also did? Is it transformed the end of the day, it was just unfathomable. And you know what it also did? Is it transformed the flow of information. So you've got the railroads and right next to those tracks,

you've got the telegraph. And that is like the information highway of the 19th century. So people are just blown away that news can travel that fast, right? And they're using telegraphic Morse code. I mean, this is actually what is so exciting and also what was so terrifying for the crafts as they ride this information revolution, because as they're going on the railroad, they know that the telegraph could beat them there. The telegraph news from Bacon could get to Charleston before

they even get there. And guess who could be waiting when they arrive at that station? It's so fast. It's so scary. It's so exhilarating. It's all these different things at once, just like our new information technologies are for us today. Yes, it was a newfound fear. In many ways, we have fear of technology in similar ways. And when you think about how long it used to take for information to travel, when you think about how much literal human effort it took to ride information on a horse from one place to another, a lot of information was not even worth transmitting. Is it worth putting a guy on a horse for?

I don't know. You know what I mean? And this is part of, of course, our information revolution, information ages. Everything is easily transmittable where it used to let a dude on a horse. It has to be worth the journey. That is so interesting to think about how differently they experienced the world. Then obviously what we are accustomed to,

telegraphs and trains. I am very curious about how one goes about researching this story. Tell us about all of the different elements that you had to pull together. Where you find things, how you decide what's worth including, what you can support, what you just have a hypothesis about. This process is very different for every writer and I would love to hear yours.

I could talk about this forever because for me it was thrilling and there were so many different components of the research. One just kind of related to what we were talking about just now, is looking at newspapers, looking at the news. Because just as the Crafts were traveling, as this news was traveling, news of them was ricocheting all over the country, almost as soon as they landed in Philadelphia.

People were eating up their story. So I was following them through newspaper reports. I actually also did a lot of the early research, especially on William Craft's enslaver through the newspapers. That was like a big eureka moment for me because the Crafts, they talk about a Mr. Craft who enslaved William and his family members, and who sold each of these family members off one by one, especially when he

was having financial difficulty. It's a huge moment in the book and I won't try to cover too much of that right now, but I will say that when you know that somebody has financial trouble, somebody who has a lot of money, there's going to be a paper trail. So one of the first things I did was to look at newspapers and to see, was there a man named Kraft who was having money trouble? Yes, there was. There was an H. Kraft.

And that was sort of the first thread that I pulled that pulled me through the newspapers, pulled me to the archives where I found a Hugh Kraft in Macon. And from Hugh Kraft, I mean, it was just like a door blew open. And from Hugh Kraft, I was actually able to get glimpses of William's actual family members, people who had been sold, because the crafts kept correspondences. And this is a really challenging thing about doing research on enslaved people, is because they didn't leave the kind of written records. They didn't have the literacy, they didn't have the power,

they didn't have the time, they didn't have the legal ability. They had no way of keeping these kinds of records. So you really have to kind of read between the lines and search through first the enslavers records and you know get creative. So I was able to sort of use all these different types of media and then actually see William's father, his mother, and his siblings on the page. Are you somebody who compiles all of your research in advance and you're like, okay, here are my eight boxes of papers and now I'm gonna go through and start organizing.

There's not a correct way to do this. There's not a like, well, you didn't follow protocol. You know, like it's really like what makes sense in your own mind. So what makes sense in your mind when you are compiling this kind of like carefully researched, very complicated narrative? I love this question.

I am as a researcher full on Hermione Granger. I mean, I am like, I love that character because she is so obsessive and so thorough and she wants to get it right. I've got my end note software. I am taking notes on everything. I have every single newspaper, all the different articles, all the books in there. And the thing that's so great about this, because

I'm reading like hundreds of newspaper articles or whatever it is, and I know somewhere somebody mentioned a red hat. And don't you hate that feeling? It's just as much fun as where did I put my phone? It's like my nightmare game. I hate it. So if you type these obsessive notes and they're saved easily digitally, you just type in red hat and there's your red hat. I mean, it's unbelievable. So the dark side of this Hermione Granger tendency is, I guess, a pack rat tendency, which is fine that because all of this can be saved on your computer and not in physical boxes. But when it comes time to writing, I have to invite Hermione to take a seat elsewhere

because otherwise I will not get anything done. She will be in my ear trying to throw in so many different amazing wonderful tidbits. And that definitely happened, but that got me into a lot of trouble. So actually what this book did was it forced me to really upend my writing process and separate it into two pieces. The research where Hermione gets to have like all the fun that she wants and the writing where something entirely different kicks in.

Are you somebody who's like today, I'm writing two pages and it's two pages a day? Until the work is done. Or are you somebody who goes with the flow or do you set aside a certain number of hours? What is your, how do you make sense of the writing process? So I again, I used to be like super type A about this. Herbani was in the seat. Somebody gave me a tip for writing a dissertation in a year. I didn't actually do it in a year, but the tip was you

either write three pages or four hours, but whichever way you're done. So if you're done with your three pages in two hours, you get the rest of the day to do whatever it is that you want to do or you need to do. And the joy of having that extra time is so great. The reward to that is so great. And it's promised that it's really motivating. I use these kind of like very organized systematic tricks to increase my productivity in grad school and afterwards.

Again, this book, I mean, it made it so that all the different kinds of order that I tried to impose, all the kind of structure, it really went out the window. I wrote a disastrous first draft that was just stuffed with all kinds of history, but that was not readable as a story. And my first editor was saying,

you know, they always come with the good stuff in the beginning. So the good stuff in the comment was, you've clearly done a staggering amount of research, but I was letting the details get in the way of the story. And I didn't know how to write the story without the details. So I really kind of put everything aside, put all my habits aside, and I started writing in a much more improvisational, less structured way. In fact, I started writing in verse and I started really writing more like I make music. I was listening to a lot of music. I read a lot of novels to figure out how do you make the narrative take the lead and really start it again.

That's such a huge undertaking to start again. Well, it obviously, obviously it was worth it. At least, at least in my mind, Iliad, it was worth it. It was worth it to me. It was worth it for me too, you know. I mean, I do everything differently now. I cook differently now. I used to be a recipe person too, and now I can leave recipes behind.

It's just been a much more liberating way to write. When you were doing this research, writing this book, what surprised you? What have you been surprised by learning about this story, learning about this couple, learning about America? What really just sort of gave you a little mind blown moment? The reason why that's such a hard question is because my mind was continually blown. I mean, my mind is blown from the writing process, from the research, these discoveries that I made about the people behind the crafts, the people who love the crafts. My mind is blown in even like just a tiny moments of just seeing names on a page. I mean, you go through so many

of these documents and so many newspapers where, for example, people are listed for sale. And that never became not shocking for me. So every time I picked up a paper and I saw people, especially children, I felt a reaction in my body. So from those reading moments to the writing moments where I tried to puzzle out how to represent people on the page, how to evoke the scale of it, I mean my mind is still opened by the story.

What do you think the crafts would want us to know? I don't know that I could enter into their minds, you know, I mean, as much time as I've spent with them. I think that's something that was really important to me in the writing of this book is evoking them and try to represent the fullness of who they were, but never speaking for them. So I don't know that I can actually say

what they would want. What I hope that they would find if they write my version of their story is an orchestra that supported them, that they were singing their song throughout and that there was a chorus of other voices meeting them and that I was a worthy conductor. That's what I would hope. That's really beautifully said that they're still singing their own melodies, and these are the supporting instruments with

you conducting the entire symphony. I love that. Yeah. That's why I loved your reading of the opening, which is called an overture for a reason. You go to, let's say, the Broadway musical Annie, and you hear in the overture little a reason. You go to, let's say, the Broadway musical, Annie, and you hear in the overture little bits of what you're going to hear throughout the musical. So that actually, when you come to those bits,

there's a slight ring of familiarity. And there's a feeling of scale. You're getting the breadth of the story. And that's what I wanted to achieve in the very beginning, is the sense of scale and that these are the melodies that you're going to hear. And they're not just limited to individuals. We're following these individuals,

but you're going to get a national score. And I love returning to these different parts of the conversation, but, you know, we were talking in the very beginning about the title and how the publisher wanted the title to change and How I sort of went with that, you know Sometimes your parents are like this is gonna be better for you and you'll know this later and you're like, yeah, right But then it turns out that yes, actually they were right

I think the subtitle I see now that it did its job That as much as I love the idea of a love story, that it did its job. Why I'm talking about all this is that the second big battle that I had at the last minute, one that I really did feel like I had to stick to my guns with this one, was there was a last minute question over whether the book should open with the overture as it does, or whether it should open with the cottage scene,

which is much more dramatic. But this is the moment where it's 4 AM, and the crafts are in this cottage, as they call it, behind their enslaver's house. Ellen's putting on the elements of her costume, and William's cutting her hair. It's very, very dramatic. And so there was a move towards the very end to start there

and to cut out the introduction. And I really did not want to do that for the reasons that we discussed, because I wanted to establish that epic scope in tribute to the new subtitle. It tells you that your mind should connect this to something that happened in the past, connect this to something that previously occurred, and now that thing is going to change. Yes, yes. What do you hope as the conductor of this symphony? What do you hope the reader takes away from this story? I hope the reader tunes in to the crafts. reader tunes in to the crafts, the story succeeds in situating them in this much bigger context. And that we can appreciate really this American love

story as one in which William and Ellen Kraft are American heroes. There are so many debates right now about American history. And history is sort of like divided up into all these little pieces. But what I really want to do is to show this unifying thing, all these different strands, sometimes dissonant, sometimes harmonic, working together really

in this song about America and also about the world. This is a story that opens out into the United Kingdom, into other parts of the world that are connected via trade and via ideas and via news in so many different ways. I want readers to walk away with a fullness of that feeling of the 19th century and be inspired by the crafts as I have. I mean, there's so much sadness in this history, but I find the story itself to be resonantly hopeful.

I mean, I'm just sort of tuning into that idea of focusing because there's this issue of foreground and background, right, when we're trying to create a big picture. And that's one of the things I wanted to sort of play with here is that in standard American histories, we learn about Henry Clay, we learn about John C. Calhoun. Sometimes we learn about Frederick Douglass, we learn about Daniel Webster. These are all, as you say, shared spaces. And what I wanted, if you have like a history textbook, there's a lot of Henry Clay. And somebody like the crafts, they might be just like a little footnote

if they're there at all. I wanted Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun and the President of the United States to be the walk-ons in the Crafts story. So to change that focus, to reverse that focus, and at the same time, show how they share the same space. I love that. It's not to say, as you're saying, yeah, Henry Clay was an

important figure. Nobody is saying otherwise, right? Like he tried to be president like 25 years. You know what I mean? Nobody is like, oh, Henry Clay doesn't matter. That's not what you're saying. What you are doing by telling a story in the way that you did was allowing the crafts to be the main characters and these other people to be the sidekicks, to be the person where they like walk through in the background. And you're like, oh, is that? Oh, he was there, okay.

Which for so long, the opposite has been true. We have acted as though Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, et cetera, are the only important people. And I love the idea that you are giving us the chance to see American history in a different way. When I think about, for example, Daniel Webster, and, you know, we see portraits of him. He looks very grim and very serious. And he is pretty grim and pretty serious. But he also had a pretty wild side to him. And I wanted people to see him as a person, and not just as a flat, slightly balding, two-dimensional flat

guy. He roared in real life, you know? And he was a man of serious appetites, you know? I mean, like every kind of appetite, you name it. He had his own drinking room in the Capitol and he was notorious for his relationships with women and all this kind of stuff. And I try to paint a vivid picture of the man

as well as of the politician. I feel like we need to start approaching these figures as a people that they were. As humans. And not a portrait on the wall. Right? Like, that's how we kind of think of George Washington as like a portrait in a military uniform. Maybe he's crossing the Delaware.

You know what I mean? He does seem very two-dimensional, but I love how successful you are in really bringing these characters, who were real people, in bringing the fullness of their humanity to bear. Uh, because they were fascinating and flawed. And there's almost nobody who isn't. I was just gonna say, that's all of us, fascinating and flawed. And there's almost nobody who isn't.

I was just going to say that's all of us, fascinating and flawed. Well, we could probably keep talking about this for many hours, but we will wrap it up here for today. And I will highly encourage people who are listening to this to read Ilyen Wu's new book, which I absolutely loved. It's so beautifully written and I love hearing more about your extensive research process. I have been in the process of writing a book for a long time now and I know it just have a little taste of exactly how much work it is. So I loved reading Master Slave Husband Wife, an epic journey from slavery to freedom.

Thank you so much for being here today. Oh, thank you. It's been a great pleasure. You can find Ilyon's book wherever you like to buy books. Of course, we love supporting independent bookstores. The book again is called Master Slave Husband Wife. You can also visit Ilyon Wu's website at Ilyonwu.com, I-L-Y-O-N-W-O-O.com. And you can follow her on social media at ilyeonwooauthor.

Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show? That helps podcasters out so much. I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.