Poured Over: Ilyon Woo on Master Slave Husband Wife

Jenna Seery

“I think the question has to do with American memory and what, as a nation, we are prioritizing in that memory…”

Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo blends history and biography with the story of Ellen and William Craft, two remarkable people who escaped slavery, and through danger and constant challenges would become abolitionists and heroes in American history. Woo joins us to talk about her research process, the importance of preserving our past, the ever-changing notion of history and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                  

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.       

Featured Books (Episode):
Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo
The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Middlemarch by George Eliot

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and Ilyon Woo is, she’s done this very, very cool thing where she’s taken a true story and made it you know, this is a word that I shouldn’t love. But in this case, it’s really, really appropriate unputdownable. Master Slave Husband Wife, history is not supposed to be this exciting. I’ve got plenty of people in my life saying, Oh, I don’t really read nonfiction. I’m like, well, I have the book for you. So Ilyon, it’s so good to see you. Thank you for your touring for the paperback. You’re everywhere. And you’re grabbing a few minutes to talk to us. So I’m really excited about this. Thank you so much.

Ilyon Woo

I can’t tell you how excited I am. I mean, I just have to say I have been speaking a lot. But I am a little bit nervous, because actually, I’m pretty nervous. Very nervous, because this is like my favorite show. Ah, yeah, I’m such a fan. I’m really such a fan. I think it was a, I heard you for the first time at the LA Book Festival. And yeah, it was last year. And there were just been channels speaking with three other novelists. And I was like, How is this person going to pull all these four totally different novels together? And then outcomes swinging like this wisecracking, like, you know, Asian woman who is dissing Boston and speak like she has a martini in her hand, only she doesn’t. And I was like, Who is she? Who is she? And then I started listening to you. And now like, when I told my family that I was going on with me, while Messer my child was like, one of my children was like, like the MeiHua master. And I was like, yeah, like the one and only so you become like a household word.

Alright, I appreciate that. That’s also why we put the show on YouTube. Because the younger said, only watches the show on YouTube, like straight up. We know this. I’m delighted that your kids actually, you know, watch a podcast here and there. But that was a fun. I mean, when you can put a bunch of writers in a room, right? Like it is kind of the moderators job to find the thing, where you can bring everyone into the space, whether it’s the audience or the other writers and make sure no one gets left behind. We’ve all been to events where you’re like, What did I just see? Or what did I just hear? And like my job really, is to be curious and connect the dots, and also be vaguely entertaining. And I mean, you and I are both from Massachusetts, which endless source of bad driving jokes, parallel parking jokes, Dunkin Donuts, jokes cop and a horse joke. I mean, and we were talking about this before we started taping the accent. Oh, yeah, like the accent is gone. And I just that was so much a part of my childhood. And I am not going to attempt to do a Boston accent here because you know, it can’t. It’s not something you can mimic ask any actor like you just even if you think you’re doing it, you really aren’t.

You can ask a child actually the same child who recognized you her last name is Park. So I mean, like, right. And the car was outside, you know, I was waiting to pick her up. So you can imagine what happened. I won’t try it.

Oh, Boston does factor in your vote. And if this is your second book, I do want to point that out. And we have so much ground to cover. But Ellen and William Craft are pretty extraordinary. They did how they did it when they did it. And their story brings them through Boston, but I’m gonna ask you to set it up. You’ve been on all sorts of best of the year lists. The book is out in paperback. Now we’re totally stoked for a new audience to pick it up. You know, paperbacks infinitely portable, we love this. But I love the way you set up the opening of this book, and I read it in a single setting. I really like history. I really do like biography. But you do the snappy thing with short chapters. And the way you set up the craft. So would you do that here?

I’d be happy to, actually there are two beginnings, right, you’re talking about the overture? Which is interesting, because there were some editorial disagreements about whether it should start with the overture after all, or whether it should start with the cabin scene. So the overture which you love, which I love, which is how I definitely wanted to begin the book. It’s like, I mean, maybe, alright, 30 years before, here, the overture of 1812. Right? It’s like an orchestra, setting up the big beats and the big themes that you’re going to hear. So we’re not talking about a little tiny event. That is a footnote in history. We’re talking about giant, massive revolutions of 1848. We’re talking about a time of information revolution and transportation revolution. And people are shocked that news can travel from one spot to the other people can travel from one end of the country to the other across the world in such a short amount of time. I mean, it’s really like now if we think about like the web and information that comes through so quickly. That’s what I was happening then people were just marveling and that’s what the crafts I mean, their story intersects with all those revolutions into their own revolution.

I honestly didn’t know who they were, until I read your book. I’m a little embarrassed by that. But I do have some gaps. Like many of us, you know, we learn what we learn when we learn it. And they were even though they’d had their own book that they’d written after everything had happened. It was one of those, you know, left on a dusty shelf, you found it when you were in graduate school or undergrad, or graduate school. Okay. And yet, they kind of Yeah, you just set everything up with massive technological changes and social changes and whatnot. But they also because of what they did and how they did it. They changed the conversation around abolition, they changed the conversation around slavery, helped end slavery, to be honest, but also, we had some stuff about the State of the Union, and how divided we were that you put into context in a really excellent, smart way. So let’s start with them. We’re in Macon, Georgia. All right. They’re about to leave. Ellen and William, can we give a little bit of their backstory?

All right, So picture this big house. I mean, it’s still standing in Macon, Georgia today, this big house with these big four giant pillars. And behind that there’s a cabin. Now this is an untold privilege for somebody like Elon to have access to this private space, but she has it because she is a seamstress, a favorite house servant, and also the biological half sister of her legal enslaver. She has access to the space she has access to information. But she’s still of course in bondage, as is her husband, William. William is also what you know, they both describe themselves as having more privileges than most enslaved people at this period. So he is a skilled craftsperson. He’s made beautiful things, furniture, cabinets, and things like that. And he’s actually made a secret chest of drawers that they’ve kept in her space. And it locks and their door locks, and they store within it. The clothes that Ellen will wear when she transforms.

You had me on the edge of my seat. It takes him four days to go from Macon to Boston. And Boston is not really the first place I think of when I think of POC or Black people running for freedom.

They actually make into Philadelphia but eventually to Boston.

They make it into Philadelphia. Baltimore in between, right. So making Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, I keep coming back to Boston only because you and I both know Boston’s history, right?

You’re in a hurry to get to Boston.

I kind of am a little bit only because we’re gonna unroll it a little bit and work backwards. But it was a surprising choice to me that they were making. I mean, some people would go straight for Canada. Philadelphia had a reputation as being safe and not safe. It’s right there on the border. Yeah, right. Baltimore, I still think of sort of Maryland as being a little more southern than some might.

There’s still slavery in Baltimore, right? Even though it’s even though there’s the highest concentration of free black people. But yeah, they’re trying to get out of Baltimore.

So it’s clear they’ve got to get I mean, obviously, they’ve got to get out of Macon, right. They’ve got to emancipate themselves, essentially, as you as you describe it in the book. But there’s not a lot of great choices to move towards, the stakes are wildly high. They can’t stay because they know if they stay, they might be separated. If Ellen’s half sister decides to sell one or the other, or they can’t have children, because they know their children could be sold. It’s all really fraught, and very intimate, and very personal. And I think a lot of the conversations we’ve had about our history, our shared history, takes out a lot of the personalities, right? Like we’re given presidents, and we’re given senators and were given orators or preachers or whatever, you found a really intimate, personal story.

How are you filling in the gaps? Right? Like, obviously, you’re starting with their biography. Obviously, you’ve done a lot of first person research, you spent a lot of time in Georgia. And all of the different parts of this book, were you in the UK as well, because

really were they were You were exactly. But how do you put it all together in a way that respects the timeline and the details and the history and the people themselves? But also give us a story that does not stop it?

That’s a huge question. I mean, that’s like sort of the central question that I really wrestled with, especially around the character of Elon craft. because, you know we rely heavily on I relied heavily on the original narrative the 1860 narrative but not only does it not go into the before or the after, but the whole thing is written in William crafts voice so we now know that it’s it’s co authored because they’re describing moments and scenes that that Elon must have witnessed as well. But it’s still all in his voice. And she’s been sort of turned into this retiring you know, very lady like character who has to be was burst into tears repeatedly, and has to be convinced to to wear the disguise and convinced to do everything that she does. And I wanted to know more about her that personality. So I went looking for every possible shred of information I could about her anything that was written in her hand. Unfortunately, most of the things that she wrote most of the letters are not super personal. They’re absolutely beautifully scripted. But she’s not expressing a lot of her feelings. So then I kind of have to go get sneaky. And look at letters, where people were I mean, she was so closely watched because people were utterly fascinated by her. They were describing her visually, they were describing her emotions. One woman actually describes her in the UK, Ellen doesn’t see this woman. So it’s sort of a I feel, I really feel like we’re eavesdropping there. And she described Ellen as she’s working, and she’s things this line. And I was like, What is this line from? And I took that line, and I looked at it against an abolitionist songbook. And I found that song, and the song is called the fugitives triumph. So she’s this is sort of a very private moment, where she’s actually it’s like her Aria, where she’s singing of her fugitives triumph. And that’s an example of a sort of moment, that is not that sort of barely preserved. But when I feel like where we got a glimpse of who she was,

she’s dressed as a man, she’s dressed as a white man, when they escaped, her husband is her slave. She’s tied her hand up. So that she can’t be accused of illiteracy and not being able to write and whatnot. It’s extraordinary. The way you lay out the story, but it’s also extraordinary the choices that they make, right, they are absolutely everything they do is deliberate. There are some close calls that you and I are going to skirt around, obviously, because this as serious as the subject is, and as serious as the story is, this is a really exhilarating read, like it’s a real life, thriller. And there are some things that happen. There’s some folks who help them out without knowing that they’re helping them out. There are some folks would like to very much get in their way, and not help them. But we get a really clear sense of the crafts, and their world. And world building. You know, it’s it’s kind of been co opted a little bit where people are just like, oh, well, that’s for science fiction, and fantasy, and MIT really made up stuff. But you had to take us back to America, and England, in this very fraught moment, for both places.

So I just love that you brought up the science fiction, because that’s exactly what I was thinking of. I mean, I’m not a big science fiction reader myself. But I read I’m only almost only novels really, for pleasure, I was thinking about science fiction, because that’s one situation where you’re, you know, it’s not like from the page one they’re like, so we’re in this world where these creatures have these antennas. And they eat only such and such foods. And this is what their world, you know, they’re not explaining that to you, you’re like going straight into the world, right? You’re seeing those antennas, and you just have to kind of figure it out. And that’s what I wanted to do for the crafts is like, put the reader there, like, throw them down at that train station, and you just hit the ground running, and you have to figure it out with them.

I stumbled over something as I was researching for the show where you basically come out and say, Well, my editor sent me a note when I sent the first draft. And my editor said I had really just let the research take over. I’m paraphrasing

what was a very nice paraphrase very clear,

your editor really said the research had taken over and where were the people? Where were the stakes? Yeah. And it feels like, or at least that suggests to me that there’s been a whole rewrite from your original. Yeah,

absolutely. I mean, like the whole thing was turned inside out. Listen,

there are plenty of writers obviously who’d say that the writing is all in the rewriting, right. But you’ve spent how many years on this book? Seven? Something like that? Yeah. Okay. Seven years. Untold miles, US, UK. I don’t know how many archives how many miles of paper, how many, you know, pieces of the puzzle. You’re chasing down in all sorts of corners. But you did to kind of put the research ahead of the people, and now you’ve got a rewrite completely, like what is happening here, let’s Can we walk through that process? Because that’s not a small thing.

There were many, many tears, many, many Jelly Bellies, which is what I used to bribe myself to write especially footnotes. But yeah, it started with Don Davis sent me it was, I mean, you counted it, what did you call it a note, it was actually like six pages, or so. It was a very, very long note. And she really just kind of like tore, like, you know, that first paragraph where they say something nice. She said, I made the nice part was that I’d done a staggering amount of research. That was a nice line, and then it with the rest of it was just like, yeah, the basic problem was I lead with the research. I mean, I found so much stuff. That’s the thing. It’s like, I’m still finding stuff. And maybe I can tell you about that later. Like, I found stuff like last week, like history is a lie, right? It’s constantly changing and moving. And so it’s hard to know when to stop. So basically, kind of had to stop in terms of the writing and really lead with the people. And you know, what really helped me out of it. I mean, so I look to a lot of other disciplines. So I look to music, I look to theater, I look to painting, but the one maybe I’ll talk about right now is screenwriting, because I have I love movies. And I have studied screenwriting before, and screenwriting is so muscular every single moment has to matter. There can’t be any extraneous tidbit and there’s no such thing as a footnote in a film, right. So I started using the techniques from screenwriting that I had learned. And specifically, there are things called loglines. You know, the logline is a logline is like on such and such a day like so and so like the say the crafts, they encounter this horrible thing like the worst thing that ever happened to them, and so they must blank in otherwise they will blank. And it’s basically like one sentence. So I wrote a logline for the entire thing, the entire story from beginning to end, then I did it for sort of each act, then I did it for each section. And I did it really for each chapter. That’s what I used to try to make myself think about what the stakes are at every single moment.

As a reader, I really appreciate it. It was so propulsive. And I really did feel like I was in the room with them. And again, like there were some serious terror is not an inappropriate word for us to use. Like I mean, there was there’s a lot of terror in this narrative. But your chapters are like maybe five pages, like three to five pages. I mean, they fly. Yeah. And I thought that was an really interesting choice. And I did honestly, I didn’t notice it, because it was like, wait a minute, at the end of a new chapter already. I’m reading history, like the chapters are supposed to be a little longer. And I did love the experience, though of reading because I felt like four days was four days. Yeah, it wasn’t like and then three months later, it was a constant kind of, here we are galloping forward, always moving forward. Always puzzling through who was going to be helpful and who was not. How did you know though, who you were going to keep? Because there are I mean, there’s some minor characters that some appear more than I might have expected, and some appear less. So how do you balance that? How do you balance that with Ellen and Willie? Well,

there were many murdered darlings, I have to say, and there were many people who had entire chapters who were cut. So I mean, again, looking at the the film metaphor, there were characters, I’d bring in for like a whole 10 minutes. And then you know, they’re not even they don’t even get to walk on. So what you’re seeing is really the tip of that proverbial iceberg. But it’s part of what I wanted to do, you know, and it’s part of what I wanted to do in creating that epic scope, again, and going back to that idea of the overture and opening up the story. It’s about this couple, but it’s also about their world. And we tend to think about heroes or imagined heroes as being these like rugged individuals who go out alone. And the crabs were in many ways, but they also had a whole world around them and people who also stood up with them and made incredibly brave choices and supporting them. And I wanted to know more about those people too, and why and how they did what they did. Did you have any favorites?

I had some disappointments. Daniel Webster, I had a moment with him. And I was like, dude, really? When you grew up in New England, you’re taught certain things. And I was like, dude, really, this is the compromise you make. And I’m referring to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which I want to put the crafts in a slightly different context for a second because this is part of the narrative that you have delivered that really blew my mind that The enforcement of this Fugitive Slave Act was the thing that really kind of drove us much closer to the civil war than I think we’re classically taught. I mean, at least that’s how I felt. And I got a reasonably good education. And I just, I felt like there were so many gaps in what I knew, and I mean, I grew up in New England, you know, sort of famously abolitionist and all this other stuff. And I’m like, there’s still gap Slyke. big gaps. And Daniel Webster was part of that. So, you know, we’ve got Fillmore as president. Yep. There’s this whole timeline? And I didn’t quite know, I think, how close we were to cracking apart before we did. I mean, did you know that walking in? Or is that something you uncovered as you were working on the research?

I think it just became all the, like, bigger to me. You know, I mean, we all grew up and in for, I don’t know, like history, US history, you learn about the compromise of 1850 part and that there’s like all these different components to it. And you one of the things you have to memorize the future Slave Act, but I didn’t realize how wretched those steaks were, and why it was such a big deal for many, many years. And what it meant for Pete not just for people like William and on craft, but anybody who could, who could be mistaken for them, right? Any person. And by the terms of this act, this new act, really any person can be charged with being a fugitive, you can, you can just have like, two witnesses say this is a person I enslaved in Virginia or whatever. And the people who are accused have no way of fighting back. So every black person, anywhere in the country is intensely vulnerable. And what they’re to returning to, or where they’re taken to is just a level of, of terror in captivity, that it’s just hard to even summon,

but then how do we end up losing sight of the crafts? I mean, they were very, very famous. And they’re, they’re on the lecture circuit. They’re traveling. I mean, they’re on the lecture circuit. Like they’re genuinely famous. Yeah, they’re not hanging out hiding in a cabin somewhere, they are actually in front of the public. Speaking for women at the time, this was not necessarily something that was commonly done. So Ellen’s a bit more of a curiosity even, you know, nevermind, the wearing of the pants while they escaped, because Oh, yeah, this is a period where that just wasn’t done. Yeah, like it just wasn’t done. So the fact that she managed to pull off appearing as a white man in public, you know, and she’s covered her face with bandages so that no one can notice that she doesn’t have a beard, or, you know, she’s cut her hair, but she’s hiding under a hat, like all of these things that she’s got to do. In hopes that no one notices. And then

to think about the fact that I mean, they make a decision to go on the abolitionist lecture circuit, really days out of bondage. So if you think about it, they’ve had like this lifetime in bondage. They’ve gone on this harrowing journey. They are physically ill Elena’s like, physically ill after this, this whole thing. And then, in Santos, William Mills Brown, this incredible lecture, self man’s paid man, best selling author, I could imagine him on your show, you know, he would have liked he’s like, got the gift of gab, as his biographer says, and he’s like, come on, come on with me and tell the story. It’s so important. And their original plan was to go to Canada, and they might have just disappeared. But the fact is that they go again after this lifetime of trauma at this time of deep exhaustion. And they’re going in front of like, hundreds, sometimes 1000s of people in places like Boston spaniel Hall. And when they’re looking out, they’re looking at people, they have no idea who these people are. And abolitionist lectures, they routinely would get heckled and have things thrown at them. It was not going to necessarily be an inviting scene, as it turned out, people were respond to them to them really favorably, but they don’t know what they’re going to face when they’re gonna get on that stage. And

then they’re still lost to time. Right, like you found their collective autobiography on a shelf in a graduate school library. I mean, it’s not like you were sort of wandering around. And there it was, I mean, we didn’t grow up knowing Ellen and William crafts, names. Like how do we lose a story like,

I don’t know if I would call it lost. I think I quote, the crafts great, great granddaughter who has an oral historian and a poet and activist and freedom writer. Her name is Peggy Trotter, Devin priestly. And the way she said it to me was that whether or not people know the story depends on where they come thing from what kind of stories they’ve had exposure to, and the Kraft family. They’re actually on Instagram, you can follow, like their history telling you all kinds of things. They’ve been preserving this history incredibly well and also incredibly generously, really over the last 175 years. So it’s there. But I think the question has to do with American Memory and what as a nation, we are prioritizing and that memory. And that is where this question of why is it that this incredible couple isn’t more honored on a national scale? Why haven’t they received that kind of national attention that they deserve? I love

the fact that you’ve been doing events with their great, great, great, great granddaughter a great, great, great. Oh,

Miss Peggy is a great great granddaughter, but I’ve met great great grapes and great great great greats. In other times, I still get a text. I’m like, I’m texting with you the crash great, great granddaughter, it’s, it’s unreal. Yeah. All of

this is just another way for us to get grounded in the human part of the story, right? Like when when we encounter stories of the Civil War, or stories of slavery or stories of the future. I mean, the way it’s presented to us and, you know, for so long, it’s been sort of this straight up. Here’s a very depersonalized narrative, right? Like, it’s, here’s some statistics, here’s some stuff. Here’s some nameless people that things happen to. And it’s so important to me, not just as a reader, but as a member of our community, right, like to be able to put names and faces and personalities into place like I do actually find it intriguing that Boston did not let the crafts get taken by the bounty hunters that came after them from the sound city was like, nope. And there were legal shenanigans, and there were physical countertops, and all that kind of stuff. But the idea that the community said, Hey, you can’t take our people. That’s something we keep missing. Right? And all of these narratives, and I think that’s partially why there are some people who look at a history book and be like, not for me, you’re asking me to read my cultural vegetables. So did you know though, when you were working on the rewrite, okay, let’s, let’s just focus on there for a second. But you’re pulling from screenwriting, you’re clearly pulling from music, because I do I love the idea of the opening of this book as an overture. It’s really about the story, right? Like, you know, what you have, you know, you’ve got to leave some stuff out. But like, when did you know you’d found the spine of the book that we’re now reading,

It’s hard to say, because this is a book, you know, where, despite all the log lining, and all the sort of magic, the stakes, even though I did all that preparation work, when it came to actually writing it, I really kind of tried to tap into a much more spontaneous place. So I’ve always been an outliner, I’ve always been somebody who’s done all the research first, right, and then I’ll you know, and an outline everything carefully. And, and then you know, what I started, like, at the end, it’s like what I started with, it’s, it’s pretty consistent. This, this was not going to happen with this book. And so in some ways, I had to kind of trick myself into into writing it from another place, and the Jelly Bellies helped, but also doing all that work. And then sitting down and sitting down at the keyboard, like I was sitting down at a piano, and writing and whatever shape it came out in and at that point, for me, actually, it was, I was writing it really what looks like verse. So the only person who’s seen this verse writing is my writing partner, who the first time she saw it, she’s like, What the heck is this, and I’m like, this is like, my pre thing. But I write in these very short lines in these very short chapters. And I just do it in sort of one take. And that gives me the feel of it. And then I go in, and I, sometimes I layer things, but for some reason, actually, that first take is pretty the spontaneous thing ends up it ends up having some sort of, I don’t know, movement in it that that that I want to keep. So it was really it was just moving from bit to bit. I don’t think there was a moment where I kind of conceived the spine, it’s more like it was written. And then I could go back and see that a spine existed. But

You’re approaching this as both biographer and historian. I mean, I feel like you can’t in this case, you can’t separate the two. I mean, there are arguments to be made that your biography or your history or whatever, but I do think in this case, you’re doing two things at once, right, like to extend the musical metaphor for a second. You’re playing the piano with both hands. Yeah, yes. And so you’ve got to be able to hold tight to the crafts, and to all of the people in their orbit. Yeah, but also be able to keep them in context. And, I mean, I got very attached to them as people, it was the context that kept kind of breaking my brain as we were going, because I just, I was a little surprised by how many gaps I had. And again, like perfectly decent public school education, but it’s the way we teach history. And sort of who gets to tell stories?

Right? Yeah, exactly. And I think we very often we either get the gigantic picture, we get like the really super close up, right. So we’re following a person and their adventure and their life, or we’re looking at United States history. And I don’t know, that’s when we get people like John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and everything is like this. But what I wanted to do is I wanted to show you know, Henry Clay as being the guy who ladies would line up to kiss his cheek, or Calhoun just looking like he was going to die. But he was really on his deathbed when he came in for that compromised speech, or Daniel Webster, who had his own private drinking room. And this just like crazy little miniatures, you know, I’ll go into the RV to details but our X rated details, actually. But for me, those are the kinds of details that made me made them come alive as a person. So I tried to do both like go, you know, into that little miniature into the drinking room, and out out into the giant national steaks, and put the crafts there.

I didn’t quite also realize that the abolitionists were not as united as maybe had been presented. And, you know, it was kind of like, there were abolitionists. And then there were not abolitionists. And that was it. And I’m like, well, actually, it seems like there was a whole range of views. I mean, this is obviously where the compromise comes out where it Daniel Webster is saying, Well, I’m more concerned about preserving the union of the United States, right, than I am about letting you know, different legislation paths. And it just, there’s a lot in this book that feels very contemporary, I think, for a lot of us that it’s just kind of like, yeah, there’s that Arthur Schlessinger book, the cycles of American history, which I haven’t thought about in a minute. But it literally he argues that we keep basically doing the same thing over and over again. And here I am sitting with your book and enjoying what I’m learning and what it’s making me think about and why I’m thinking about it. And also thinking, Oh, wow, we have not really moved forward as a community, or culture, society or country if you however, you want to define it,

Or even like, I mean, the abolitionists are great case in point, because we tend to look at them as Oh, look at these elevated people. And they’re singing harmoniously and anti slavery, but actually, they were squabbling. There was a lot of ego. There was a lot, you know, they just got really petty over different things. And they had the vision to so they were very, like, it’s there a lot of parallels, I think, to party politics right now.

Yeah. I mean, there was some racism happening to the abolition, just like, oh, so people are being people. As annoying as it is to sort of discover that we haven’t really moved forward. I think it’s really powerful. To just sit with the discomfort, right to sit with the discomfort reading list in 2023. And looking back on all of the change, we tried to make happen, and some genuinely, we did make happen. And yet,

And I think it’s helpful to in that, I mean, this is 175 years ago. So I think most people don’t feel like the stakes are so high right now and talking about what happened 275 years ago. So if we can pause for a moment, look at this as a kind of case study, look at how people are arguing with each other, look at how close we were to civil war and how we got through it, and how we might do things differently or what we might learn from it. It gives us a safe distance to be able to talk about the very things that are happening right now. It’s

why we need to talk about history, right? To teach history. It’s why we need to allow for, shall we say, new additions to the historical record, right? Like, I’m just thinking of Ned Blackhawks book too. It just won the National Book Award and he has sort of laid out a more inclusive vision of what America is about because he’s including indigenous people and writing it from that POV. And you know, before you might get sort of King Philip’s War, right, or the French Indian War, and so to have someone at Yale sit down and say, well, actually Let me fill in the gaps for you. And I feel like that’s what you’re doing with the crafts and giving us much more than just the portrait of a couple. I’m now quite very fond of it. But the idea of saying, hey, wait a minute, we need to look at, we need to start with 1848. Right, we need, as you described it, revolutions everywhere country’s changing. We finally have a telegraph, like all of these things, right? The railroads are happening, like, everything is changing. And yet people are kind of people. Is there anything we can actually do beyond say, well, we should study more, we should read more, we should tell more stories like we’ve kind of been doing that, like, I don’t know, is there anything we can take away from the crafts?

I mean, they themselves I feel like are the model American heroes, right? Because they are doing on the one hand, there are these rugged, that guy that rugged individualists going on this journey, you could say, right, you could, or you could say it’s a love story. But it doesn’t stop when they crossed the border into into the North. They’re constantly making incredibly difficult choices. Not for that not just for themselves, but really for the community, for their nation. I mean, so first, they go and speak on the circuit, then they stand up in Boston, and then they go speak to the world, they’re constantly putting themselves in danger, once they’re overseas, and I won’t, like you know, go into spoil anything, either. But for me, they really challenge my idea of what it means to be an American. And they challenged the country to do better at every possible stage.

What do you think they would think of where we are now? Do you think Ellen and William would have thought that we’ve made that we’ve successfully changed? Or do you think they’d sort of be staring at us with a raised eyebrow going? I mean, I realized that’s kind of a wild question to ask. But I do feel like they were sort of split between doing what they needed to do for themselves in their marriage and their families and, but also, like always keeping an eye to the bigger thing. And that’s really hard to do. Maybe they weren’t thinking about legacy, per se. But I don’t know, have you ever had that conversation with them?

I love the question. But actually, to answer it would be to go against the rules that I set for myself when I when I started with this book, which is that I can only describe or attribute feelings to them, that I can document. Okay, that’s fair. Fiction, for me is totally off limits when it comes to the crafts, just that sort of my way of respecting their story. But I can say that they invite all this kind of imagination. And what I imagine one thing I think I could imagine, I imagine their wonderment at the descendants and the legacy that they left in terms of their own family like that must have been beyond their wildest dreams. But I can’t imagine that they would have any other reaction, but to be incredibly gratified by who’s standing here now.

I know we’ve talked a lot about the crafts and their personalities. And I love what you just said about not being able to put sort of experiences to them, you know, unless you have the actual documentation. I think that’s really important to be able to run that balance between telling a great story, but never losing sight of the people. And I think you make a really good and important point. And you do it throughout the book, right? Like, talking about them as being visionaries talking about them as having a responsibility to the community. I mean, I don’t think it’s overstating it to say they’re heroic.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that’s, that’s really how I saw them from the beginning. And actually, I tried to make that point really, from the get go from the overture they are running by the words from the Declaration of Independence, which they’ve heard somewhere, and maybe they weren’t allowed to read them. But they did hear them these words were in the ether. Now we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal. They have those lines in their ears. And they have the glib, biblical verse as well, you know, God making one blood all nations of men, right. So these are incredibly powerful lines that they’ve heard in church, they’ve heard on the courthouse steps, and they are interpreting them for themselves. They’re taking the lessons of these words for themselves, and they’re carrying them all the way through their lives, through their journey, but also beyond as they’re speaking their storytelling, and they’re really fighting for a better America. That’s

such an important point. I think, too, especially when we’ve been told so many stories that are, pardon me black and white, right? Like it’s it’s one thing or the other. And you’re kind of giving us all of the messy isn’t quite The right word, the human like it’s very, very human people are imperfect. Oh, yeah, people are driven by emotion. The crafts love story is really fun. But it’s also painful. I mean, they’re running. One, they’re enslaved, but also they don’t want their children to experience this. And I mean, that’s a really fundamental human, like, I want my children to have better, I want my children to not go through what I went through.

Yeah. And when you think about really the deep trauma that they each experience being separated from their families, I mean, that it’s just, it hangs over. On the one hand, it’s that deep love that they ah, experience on with her mother, and William with his parents, it’s that love that, that gives them a model for love that enables them to love. But it’s also the fear of losing that love, that terrifies them, that keeps them actually from wanting to get married, Ellen doesn’t want to get married for a long time, because she doesn’t want to replicate that trauma. And yet, it’s also that fear that motivates them to go because they’re reaching for something better, because the love has inspired them to know that there’s something better, I

I think, too, when you haven’t been faced with the loss of your immediate family. And especially when it’s something like your family’s being separated, because members of your family are being sold. And I’m just gonna let that hang in the air for a second because that’s significant trauma. And I think sometimes, because it was so long ago, people are like, well, you know, and I don’t think you can well, you know, with a legacy like that. Can we, for a second, go back to influences? I know, we’ve talked about sort of screenwriting, whatnot, but you’re pulling. And I just realized I was about to say craft.

I was impressed. You actually haven’t used those pens yet. Wow.

Not really upon person. But in terms of technical skill, right, and the building of the narrative and the short chapters in the cinematic techniques and whatnot. You must have been influenced, though, by the amount of fiction that you read. Oh, yeah. And I’m kind of curious who some of those writers might be. I mean, you’ve described yourself in other interviews as a recovering academic, which will never not make me laugh. But let’s talk influences for a second because I feel like they’re not just the music and the art and the cinema. I do think there are some writers in there that you’re pulling from,

The short chapters, I mean, I have to foot note All the Light We Cannot See. Because that I mean, it was gorgeous writing, and I thought, but it’s moving so quickly, how’s it moving so quickly, and I thought, Oh, he’s got super short, little chapters. That’s what’s making it move. And the other one for structure would be Colson Whiteheads Underground Railroad, and the way he can, I mean, that first opening chapter with a Jerry, I mean, he’s flying through space and time. He’s got great, great descriptions of trains, and talk about sort of science, so science fiction techniques, and just throwing your reader into that world and just making them figure it out. I mean, he’s, he’s really the I was gonna say, Master of that, but I will not say that. But he’s really the authority on that kind of narrative power.

We can’t separate ourselves from our history. And we shouldn’t want to separate ourselves from our history, right? Like, we carry the stuff around with us. And if we just pretend it doesn’t exist, then that’s not accomplishing anything, either. What I love is listening to you riff on pulling from music and film, and Coulson, and Tony Dora, and all of these places where it’s like, yeah, it all comes together in the service of story. And making our worlds bigger, right. And I read because I want more. I want to know more. I don’t want to assume that I have all of the answers. I mean, yeah, I know what I like. I like great sentences. I don’t necessarily need characters. I don’t need to like characters, but I need to be invested. And I was invested even in the people that I was not expecting to be invested in like I was. I just wanted to see if anyone was going to surprise me. You know, and some people did in good ways. And some people did not so great ways, but I was surprised by ever, like even Ellen’s family. You know her father was also her first and slaver and her half sister who was her final and slaver didn’t attempt to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. It was her husband, right?

Yeah, but even here, he’s such an interesting character because I think if you read his words now, if you You’d look at his position now, you think, oh, like What a wretched guy like he’s an enslaver. And he believes and all this stuff, but in his world, and in his times, he was not seen as an extremist. Right? I actually called him a sub, which is short for submission. So meaning submitting to the north. And he actually there’s one situation where he actually keeps the newspaper man from hanging a man who is accused of being abolitionist just for reprinting something that had like, I don’t know, something mildly critical.

I mean, that was so much of the pleasure of reading, Master Slave Husband Wife for me, was not being able to predict where you are going to take me. Partially, yeah, that’s slightly due to gaps in my historical, my understanding of historical record, but also, I just really wanted to know what was going to happen next. And I really wanted to know who was going to show up at the craps. And who wasn’t, I mean, I was really invested, really invested in how you were letting things unfold. And I’m wondering if writing this book changed you.

I mean, it really did in every moment, and every character and every situation I wrote about, I really was trying to go for to try to see as much as I could of both sides to not represent people in black and white, or worlds, and black and white. We talked earlier about sort of that north south divide, and there’s a tendency in our country, and I mean, I’m I was born and raised in New England, and we kind of celebrate our love, we stood up were for liberty, and but actually, the North had slavery, we had deep ties to slavery, not just, I mean, it’s not just that we had slavery, even once it was gone, there are people who are profiting from it. So slavery was a national institution. And I think we, when we talk about the crafts, crossing that boundary and not being free, we’re really talking about the whole of America, and that you can’t just say, one part of it was guilty, right? In this institution, we were all complicit in this, you know, some of us did stand up, some of us didn’t. But we were a nation torn. And that’s why we’re really on the cusp of war, when the crash came through. And for me, that’s where a lot of the drama comes in. And how the crash challenge that

What’s next.

But you know, I’m, I’m continuing to speak a lot, I’m doing a lot of oral storytelling, I’m, I think that this is going to change me as a storyteller. I think, too, I’m doing a lot more with images. There’s so many images, I mean, when you open up the book, it’s in the paperback as well as in the hardcover, you can see pictures of all these people who are standing up in the crowd with the crafts and black and white. So I’m getting to play around with images. This is something that I’ve been saving for you me while which is that like, I’m I actually so like, you know, the history is still alive, I am still finding things. So I don’t feel like I’m quite done with the crafts yet. I actually went to the northborough Historical Society at the invitation of the curators there. And they were like, we have some more stuff. I mean, that’s the thing, like the story is an opening a new history is coming out. Fortunately, nothing like you know, huge, something that changes what I already wrote. But you know, when the crafts were first telling their story on the road, and now they’re talking about the fact that they have a relatively privileged positions in slavery and that there are other people who experienced far worse than they did. So somebody in the audience because they have this q&a, somebody in the audience stands up since and says, Well, if it wasn’t so bad, why did you run? And you want to know what William Kraft said back? Yes, sir. Much. My place is vacant. And you can have it if you wish. So I mean, I just love hearing these little bits, right? These like sound bites on the archives. I could hear his voice this ironic, just an extemporaneous, wonderfully energetic zinger.

It also sounds really modern. Yeah, like I could imagine someone saying that right now. And it’s part of why I appreciate it so much that connection right, to this story that took place 175 years ago. Yeah. And here’s this guy who I would very much like to hang out with off the page. Obviously, this is not possible. But that, to me is the sign of a great read, right? Where I’m still thinking about people real or imagined, after I’m done reading something for the first time. I mean, that is so important to me. Alienware, thank you so much. But before I let you go, is there anything we missed?

I wanted to teach you about Middlemarch.

Oh, we can make more jokes about Middlemarch. We can totally we can absolutely always make jokes about Middlemarch. As you know,

I’m a fan of the show. And when I was listening to you or interview with Gilbert Cruz. I noticed two things. One, you had not yet read my book, but there was hope, and the others that you had not yet read Middlemarch. But there was hope. And there’s a connection I could tell you about.

Okay? Please do. Please do.

Actually, I’ve read Middlemarch, I think four times. I read it once in high school. And it is like I understand it’s totally forbidding. There’s so many different characters, that it’s incredibly dense. You know, I mean, it really is like a brick. And it’s hard to track. But where it really blew my mind was in graduate school. So I took a class with Edward Saeed. And this was when Edward say it was in his last days, he was he’s dying at this point, okay. And he was teaching whatever he wanted to teach. So that included Middlemarch, and also included like Meister singer, I mean, like, whatever he wanted was music, you know, could be that opera could be. So this, these were the books that he felt were really important. And the stakes were so high. And what he said about Middlemarch is, it’s takes place in the middle of the 19th century, in the middle of the 1840s, in the middle of England, middle, middle, middle, and so many ways you get that in the title. And yet, you have in this very middle place, this woman, the story of this woman, and how she makes an extraordinary impact, and all around her and how that works its way out to the world. And that is in many ways, how I wanted to frame the story of Elena lame craft.

All right. Now I might actually it’s become sort of a running joke that I still haven’t done. And I’m adding you to the list of writers who said, no, no, really, you would like this, you should do it. You touched on exactly the heart for me, of what you’ve done with master slave husband wife, which is put me into a world that I did not previously know, and make me not want to leave. I mean, that that really is the sign of a great read. I really didn’t want it to be over. I really did not. I didn’t want to leave the craft. I was a little surprised by the ending. And that’s all I’m going to say they make a choice after a few years, and I’m going to let readers discover what that choice was. But I was a little surprised. Not expecting that.

And I asked you a question. Did you read the paperback? Or did you read the hardcover? Because actually, I learned something new for the paperback. And that changes something at the end. Oh, it transforms a particular moment or reunion that I will not.

Hello. And when you and I finish recording, I am going to ask you about that. But we’re not putting it here. We’re just gonna turn it off. I’m gonna say thank you. This was amazing. I’m so glad we got to have this conversation. But it’s kind of hard to do sometimes when you’re leaving out all the spoilery stuff. This was excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Ilyon Woo. Thank you for the book, but also your time we really appreciate it. Master Slave Husband Wife is out in paperback now. And now I have to run downstairs and get a paperback so I can look at the change that was made.

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