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Conversation Lesson

Aaron: This month we’re talking about the story of Ellen and William Craft. Ellen and William Craft, two married slaves in the mid-1800s who escaped.

Can you just briefly give us summary of the story?

Dan: Okay, right. Ellen and William Craft, they were two slaves that were owned, had different owners, and they were married. They both had, at an earlier age, had been separated from their families. Because of that, they were afraid to have children on their own. The fact that they were married is something I really never considered. Of course, we know that slaves had families in the U.S., but the idea of them actually getting married, I don’t know if they …

Aaron: Yeah, I wonder if that was actually recognized by the Whites, their owners; if their marriages were recognized or if those marriages were just in spirit only.

Dan: I mean certainly they were respected as a legal right to stay together because that’s one of the reasons that Ellen and William felt they needed to take the risk to escape was the fact that they wanted children…

Aaron: They wanted to stay together. They had to, yeah.

Dan: As children themselves, they had been separated from their families. Ellen and William Craft, they knew that if they had children, there was always the risk that they would lose their children, which I can’t imagine the thought of …

Aaron: Yeah, I can’t. Yeah.

Dan: Legally, somebody being able to rip you away from your children, but that was the situation. They were actually the favorite slaves of their owners, which meant that they had some degree of, I won’t say freedom, but they had some time off. They had the ability to ask for time like in the holiday.

Aaron: Right, where they could actually leave the plantation grounds and maybe go into the town or something like that.

Dan: Right. I think some of these slaves … We think of slaves only working on farms, but some of them actually worked in factories or stores. They might not even work in the stores of their owner. I think in the case of William, he actually worked for a different White man.

Aaron: I see, I see.

Dan: Maybe there was some arrangement where William’s owner would rent him out.

Aaron: I see.

Dan: William was working for a cabinet maker who was not his owner, but he was able to get time off from the cabinet maker and his owner. Ellen also, a different owner, she was able to get time off. This time off was crucial because they needed to have some space of time where they could make it. It was a long journey for them, a couple of days.

Aaron: Oh yeah, I mean because they were in Georgia and they were trying to make it to Pennsylvania, right?

Dan: Right. That involved multiple trains.

Aaron: Oh yeah. Even nowadays, with the highway system and you’re in a car going sixty miles per hour, that takes a good … That’s probably a good eight to ten hour drive, I would imagine. That’s a long way.

Dan: Right.

Aaron: Yeah.

Dan: I’m not sure how long their journey was, but I imagine it was at least three days of trains…

Aaron: I bet it.

Dan: Both rides.

Aaron: Yeah, at least, in those days. Sure. That was a pretty risky thing they did. I mean had they been caught, I wonder what the consequences would have been.

Dan: I think, for one, they certainly would have lost any privileges they had and would have been separated for good as punishment.

Aaron: Yeah.

Dan: Certainly they would have been beaten severely.

Aaron: At least, yeah.

Dan: Whippings and branding of slaves is common.

Aaron: Sometimes they would put them in isolation in holes in the ground and keep them there without food or water for days on it.

Dan: Another thing they did was to hobble slaves, which meant to…

Aaron: Break their bones, and …

Dan: Break their ankles so that some of them would never walk again, and certainly, you would never be able to run.

Aaron: Right.

Dan: They were taking a huge risk. Of course, they also could be killed.

Aaron: Yeah, but I guess they

Dan: They were property.

Aaron: I guess they felt though that it was worth the risk because what kind of life is it being a slave and having absolutely no freedom. Maybe if it were me or you or any of our friends and family, we might have taken the same risk.

Dan: Right.

Aaron: Yeah.

Dan: When you think about somebody taking away your children, certainly, that would probably push anyone, of getting risk.

Aaron: Oh yeah. Yeah, I’d be willing to risk my life for that, for sure.

Dan: I actually read about this. It’s going off on a tangent.

Aaron: That’s okay.

Dan: I heard about this other amazing story of the slave called Henry Brown.

Aaron: Henry Brown.

Dan: He decided to take the risk of escaping because his family had been sold by his owner.

Aaron: Oh, wow. Okay.

Dan: He realized that there is nothing left to live for, so it was worth dying since he would never see his family ever again. He had a really … Ellen and William is a really unique story of using disguise, but Henry’s plan to freedom was he mailed himself to the north.

Aaron: Are you kidding?

Dan: He put himself in a box, and with the help of a slave friend and a White person who helped him …

Aaron: Was sympathetic to his …

Dan: Was sympathetic.

Aaron: Yeah, right.

Dan: He was put inside a very small, I think, two meter by two meter box.

Aaron: Oh my gosh.

Dan: Which even though it had a right side up arrow on it, he was put upside down for a lot of the trip.

Aaron: Oh no.

Dan: He was in that box for a couple days. He almost died by the time he made … that box made it to the north. It was mailed to a pastor, a Christian pastor in the north who was sympathetic to escaping slaves. When they opened that box, he was almost dead.

Aaron: Wow.

Dan: Unfortunately … The story goes. He spent his life giving speeches about his escape.

Because of that, it became very well-known.

Aaron: It drew attention to them, yeah. Right.

Dan: Some people have theorized that many more slaves would have been able to use that route of escape, but he gave some speeches about it.

Aaron: Uh-oh.

Dan: Then maybe they were checking lots of boxes.

Aaron: Oh, no.

Dan: Anyhow, Henry “Box” Brown.

Dan: Anyhow, Henry “Box” Brown.

Aaron: Henry “Box” Brown.

Dan: Interesting story.

Aaron: That sounds like an interesting story.

Dan: Ellen and William were … They had an ingenious plan too, because Ellen was mixed race. Her mother was half-Black, half-White. She was a three-quarters White.

Aaron: She was very light skinned.

Dan: Yes. Both her grandfather and her father were White slave owners. I’m sure she wasn’t treated as, “Hey, granddaughter or daughter” by these people.

Aaron: No, of course not. No.

Dan: She was treated as property, but she looked White. They realized this was their ticket to freedom. That people wouldn’t be able to recognize her as a slave if they dressed her up in slave owner clothes.

Aaron: Not just slave owner clothes, but the clothes of a man.

Dan: Right, right.

Aaron: Who was traveling with a slave, with property.

Dan: Right, right. Because for a White woman to be traveling alone with a slave, that would be way too strange and you draw attention.

Aaron: Yeah, that will draw attention.

Dan: To add to the disguise dressing up like a man, they also put bandages on her to make her look like she was a very sick person that you wouldn’t want to bother and talk to.

They put her arm in a sling to try to cover the fact that she couldn’t read and write, because they knew she would have to sign for tickets when they buy tickets and to prove that you are the owner of the slave that you’re traveling with.

Aaron: Yeah, that’s pretty crafty.

Dan: Yeah, they’re pretty smart.

Aaron: Yeah.

Dan: Yes. They made it to the North. Slave owners came looking for them. They had to flee again and they fled to England. Once in England, they felt that they were really safe and they did have children.

Aaron: Right. They had five, right?

Dan: Five children, right.

Aaron: Yeah.

Dan: Then, I think, what was it? Twenty years later?

Aaron: Something like that. About twenty years later, they decided to come back to the States because the Civil War, I assume, had ended and slaves were now free.

Dan: Right. Now, they decided to not just come back to the U.S., but they went back to the south. While slavery was now illegal, of course, that didn’t mean things were good for Black people.

Aaron: Of course not.

Dan: It’s still a very dangerous time. In fact, all the way up until a good sixty years, sixty seven years after slavery was made illegal, there were Black people being killed, being lynched…

Aaron: Yeah, lynchings.

Dan: …which means being hanged till death from trees by mobs of White people that were not accountable to the law. In fact, some of these lynchings probably were by policemen.

Aaron: Yeah. There’s a group in the United States that’s quite famous for a legacy, a history of lynching. That’s the Ku Klux Klan.

Dan: Right, the KKK.

Aaron: Yeah.

Dan: Fortunately, they’re on the decline, but they still exist to this day.

Aaron: Yeah, they do. They do.

Dan: White power extremist. Back in the day, they … and this time, certainly, they weren’t just full of criminals. They were full of respected members of the community.

Aaron: Sure. Doctors, lawyers, politicians …

Dan: Doctors, lawyers, policemen, politicians … sure.

Aaron: Yeah, yup.

Dan: They (Ellen and William) obviously had a lot of courage, not just to make their escape, but maybe even more so, to choose to come back to the South. They chose to come back to the South because they wanted to do something to help the freed slaves that had no education…

Aaron: That’s right, yeah.

Dan: …and very little opportunity. They were taking a huge risk in coming back, really risk with their lives.

Aaron: Yeah, but I mean I’m trying to imagine being in their shoes and in that situation where you’re coming back to a country. You’ve started a family. You’ve raised your children. Your children are now older. What are you going to do when you get back to the States? I mean their choices probably were to go to the North somewhere and maybe continue working and just live like a normal life.

Wow, to go back to the South? They must have felt a really strong sense of purpose and responsibility to do something good for society. That was their way of giving back to where they came from. In that sense, they came full circle. Yeah.

Dan: It definitely wasn’t the easy way out and it wasn’t the path of least resistance. They knew that they would be facing lots of discrimination and danger. Like I was just saying, up until the ’20s and ’30s, people were being lynched. Even until the 1950s, I think, they were making laws about Black people’s rights to vote or Black people’s rights to go to public schools.

Aaron: My parents and I assume your parents as well, back in the ’50s and the early ’60s, grew up in a segregated times where there were different bathrooms for Blacks and Whites and there were different sinks to wash your hands for Blacks and Whites and there were different sections of the restaurant for Blacks and Whites. In some restaurants, the Blacks had to eat in the backroom. They couldn’t even be seen in the main dining area. Yeah. Then, of course, the buses. The Blacks had to sit in the back and the Whites had to sit in the front.

Dan: Sure.

Aaron: Of course, the famous Rosa Parks incident in the ’60s was related to that.

Dan: Right.

Aaron: That’s when things started to change and segregation was starting to unravel and people were starting to integrate more. Yeah, that was not long ago. That was not long ago, yeah.

Dan: Yeah. In the 1950s, my grandfather was the City Manager of Compton, a small town or suburb outside of L.A.

Aaron: Oh yeah, Compton, sure.

Dan: Of course, famous in the 1980s and 1990s for gangster rap, but at that time it was a very segregated White town. My father told me that at sundown, all the Black people had to leave.

Aaron: Really?

Dan: Now, sure, it wasn’t like a law that they had to leave by 6 PM but I think it was understood that you had your employees come in during the day and they were to be out by nighttime.

Aaron: Wow, it’s such a …

Dan: That’s in my father’s childhood.

Aaron: Yeah. Even today, I mean even though the U.S. has a Black president, Barack Obama, I mean there certainly has been a lot of progress towards greater equality and integration. Even today, there are still racism in the United States and institutionalized racism, in fact. Blacks do not have, even to this day, do not still have the opportunities that Whites have to them. It’s just more difficult. There are still a lot of struggle and change to be made.

Dan: Right.

Aaron: Yeah.

Dan: Yeah. You think about how a lot of people today will say, “Well, slavery, that doesn’t have anything to do with me. Everything is all fair. Everything is a level playing field.

We’re all good now.” Clearly, you can’t separate the fact that just a few generations back, White people owned other human beings from the fact that today, that Black people have much less opportunity in the U.S.

Aaron: I don’t think it’s … I mean, of course, in the United States, it’s always been a White Black issue. Around the world, it’s not necessarily an issue of White and Black. In many case, it’s an issue of money and power, because slavery still exists in places in the world today. It’s people with lots and lots of money who are enslaving, in different forms, people to do work for them. Yeah, slavery goes beyond race. It also delves into power structure and also economic wealth and, of course, lack of morals and ethics.

Dan: Yeah. I mean to this day, a lot of … In a lot of countries, there are farms and factories where you could compare the life that they lived to slavery.

Aaron: Absolutely.

Dan: That they’re beholden to their owners, not to their owners, to their bosses.

Aaron: Their employers, right, yeah.

Dan: That they have no opportunity to leave and that they are indebted. Yes, slavery does exist maybe not in the same form, but for sure.

Aaron: Right, yeah.

Dan: I think in the Western world, we benefit from having cheaper iPads and Snickers …

Aaron: That’s right, yeah, yeah.

Dan: Based on the labor, that could be compared to slavery.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative), absolutely. It’s quite a well-known fact that in many of these factories around the world; of course, there are some in China and Southeast Asia and I’m sure in other countries, maybe in Latin America, and even maybe in the developed countries. I don’t know to what extent this problem exists but the amount of money that they’re paying these people to work sixteen-, eighteen-, twenty-hour days is minimal, like almost nothing.

A lot of times they “hold” their passports for them. They couldn’t flee. Where are they going to go?

Dan: Right, right.

Aaron: Yeah. It’s still a problem. It’s still a problem, slavery. Yeah. Of course, there’s another meaning of the word “slavery.” We’re talking about humans owning other humans, but we can also talk about being a slave to something that you are enslaved by. Some people are enslaved by money. Some people are enslaved by their desire. Some people are enslaved by their job or their situation in life. Some people are enslaved by drugs, whatever you have such a strong attachment to something. You can’t let go of it. It controls you. That’s a form of slavery; maybe a mental form of slavery or an emotional form of slavery.

I think all of us have issues that we have to deal with concerning our freedom or lack of freedom and feeling enslaved by certain situations in life. I think everybody has the capacity to understand, at least, on an experiential level a very small aspect of slavery.

The kind of slavery that Ellen and William and all the Blacks in the U.S. endured, I don’t think any of us could even come to close to imagining the pain and the suffering and the absolute horrific situation they must have been.

Dan: Yeah. I don’t think we can compare the idiomatic use of slavery to drugs or alcohol or slavery to our need for approval from others, or … But it’s important to understand, we can’t compare that to what actually happened historically to people who had no freedom over their own selves.

Aaron: Right.

Dan: It is useful to understand how that word is used idiomatically.

Aaron: Yeah, because there are other meanings to it, right.

Dan: How you could say that our own minds can be a prison. Because like you’re saying, our attachments, our ideas with things that we think we need can imprison us or cause us to feel less free. Yeah, people do talk about being a slave to things, being a slave to my iPhone, or being a slave to drugs and alcohol, or being a slave to my need for status, or worrying too much about what other people think of you.

Aaron: Yeah. I think freedom, that opposite term, “freedom,” from slavery is one of the key components for just a well-being and happiness in life. I think it’s good to examine this concept of slavery and freedom in all of our lives, so yeah.

Dan: Free your mind.

Aaron: Free your mind.