Open Letter from Ellen Craft

To those who have fought with me, and to those I have fought against:

I am talked about through the color of my skin. I am talked about through my beauty, my physicality, a part of my identity that I cannot control. My voice, it seems, is confined to the perspectives of abolitionists shocked at my enslavement. Or to slave owners who allow me to be the “favourite” slave, as if chains and locks have degrees of entrapment. You talk about my enslavement of a “white” woman, a beautiful “girl”--how is it that my shackles made slavery even more gruesome than it is. Had I been darker, or more homely, would the torment that my dear husband and I endured would have been less shocking? Those slave-owners, knowing that I had some African ancestry, drew few lines between me and the rest of us working on the plantation. Knowing that, how can these progressive freedom fighters, put such an emphasis on the shade of my skin? How can they make a distinction between themselves and me? How can they say that what I endured is any worse than what the rest of my brothers and sisters went through?

My escape itself, was likewise based on my appearance. I passed as white. I passed as a man. What does it mean to be living in a society in which I am accepted, nay respected, in disguise, but not otherwise? Does not the fluidity with which I shift from black to white those around us impose and assume about our identities. Is it not clear that this very struggle is artificially created? That we who have been enslaved are no different, save for the rhetoric that has been perpetuated through the states about our apparent biological deviation?

W.E.B. Du Bois was correct, then, to say that the problem with race, is the “problem of the color line.” It is the problem of drawing these lines within our species to separate those who are worthy of being treated as human and those who are not. I have straddled both the race line and the gender line. I know how thin they are. And how susceptible they are to our will to transgress them. Let my story be seen as proof, that we can overcome that which is our human creation. We can work to erase the lines that, from female to male, suggest the insignificance of such distinctions? Is it not obvious that this struggle is one of imposed, not inherent, differences? Is not Thomas Holt correct then, to say that race is simply socially constructed? That it is a facet of what divide our society.

E. Craft

Questions:

1) Where do we go now in terms of transgressing racism? Is our job to erase the color lines or increase understanding and tolerance of difference? What are the pros and cons of such multiculturalism? What would the Crafts say?

2) How would this memoir be different through Ellen Craft’s point of view? What do you think she thought of William’s description of their escape? Does William aptly convey the significance of Ellen’s role in the escape?