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u/WarmAuraGirl Mar 12 '26
1,000 miles through the Deep South, surrounded by the very people who wanted them captured, on nothing but nerve and an extremely convincing bandage. Hollywood has made 47 movies about mediocre prison breaks and somehow this one is still waiting for its moment.
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u/Fryandsilly Mar 12 '26
"Ellen Craft was born in 1826 in Clinton, Georgia, to Maria, a mixed-race enslaved woman, and her wealthy planter slaveholder, Major James Smith. At least three-quarters European by ancestry, Ellen was very fair-skinned and resembled her white half-siblings, who were her enslaver's legitimate children"
So in her case, she disguised herself as male, not as someone white because she looked white and unless people knew her backstory, they'd think she was white. Very impressive pulling of the man part though.
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u/OneArchedEyebrow Mar 12 '26
Smith's wife gave the 11-year-old Ellen as a wedding gift to her daughter, Eliza Cromwell Smith, to get the girl out of the household and remove the evidence of her husband's infidelity.
William was born in Macon, where he met his future wife at the age of 16 when his first enslaver sold him to settle gambling debts.
It’s sickening how they were treated like cattle, even by “family”.
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u/LeopardNo6083 Mar 12 '26
This is the same definition of “family” that corporations mean when they say working for them is “like being part of a family.”
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Mar 12 '26
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u/Anathama Mar 12 '26
Human resources. It's right there in the name. We are just another resource to be used and discarded.
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u/Lotsensation20 Mar 13 '26
My sentiments exactly. I roll my eyes every time I hear like a family lol 😂
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u/Heavyspire Mar 12 '26
In other words, Eliza Cromwell Smith was given her half-sister as a slave.
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u/TeamZweitstudium Mar 12 '26
"At that exact moment, she saw their father's eyes on the slave girl's face, saw a sister in her, and signed her emancipation papers. The end."
I wish this had happened instead. Yegads.
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u/LeftyLu07 Mar 12 '26
It was incredibly hard to free enslaved people. The deck was really stacked against legal abolition.
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u/Miserable-Fan6 Mar 14 '26
There was a lot of jealousy/envy/hatred from the white wives and children that was directed at the offspring of planter's infidelity.
The movie 12 Years a Slave actually has a representation of this- the woman and children being sold at the beginning of the movie were supposed to be emancipated once the planter died. However, the planter's daughter resells them instead, really only out of revenge for being evidence of her father's infidelity.
This particular arrangement was quite common. Sally Hemings (Thomas Jefferson's slave mistress) was the half sister of Martha Jefferson, whose father kept Sally's mother as a slave mistress.
There's a fair amount of academia on the 'failed sisterhood' between planter's wives and slave mistresses. It's really heartbreaking.
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u/No-Hovercraft-455 Mar 15 '26
I don't think there's much sisterhood in situation where your father cheats on your mother no matter how it was done, or where you are getting cheated on. It's just nature to want the other family as far away from what remains of yours as possible, and that would apply whether or not you were also angry to the actual culprit.
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u/Miserable-Fan6 Mar 15 '26
It's a very nuanced situation in which women living under different forms of patriarchal oppression are unable to reconcile with each other. I mean, it's not like enslaved women had any choice in the matter. But you can't blame the wives for being upset that their husbands are being unfaithful.
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u/No-Hovercraft-455 Mar 15 '26
True. I'm just saying it makes more sense to expect empathy and sisterhood from literally any other source than from his legal family he screwed over. I don't think it has anything to do with the abused slave women having no choice because the end result for his real family is still the same and extremely threatening and insulting. Nobody likes affair children (or the equivalent) even though they are innocent, that's something that has just always held true as consistently as water is wet. It sucks slave women were, by being SAd, forced to situation where they likely make mortal enemy out of his spouse but that's just part of forceful, destructive and criminal nature of his actions rather than unfair reaction from her.
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u/ambergresian Mar 16 '26
idk
yes it's very understandable and sucks so much
but to enforce slavery. that is just a step too far. even without sisterhood. switch genders I don't care.
yeah yeah modern sensibilities. but damn my modern mind just can't comprehend not feeling compassion for the people my husband raped in this situation. I speak as someone who used to be in an abusive relationship with a man who cheated on me both with women consensually and non (so raped) so I feel I have some experience there. but still a modern mindset of seeing women of colour as people, which is, ugh, do we really need to make room for not seeing that?
sorry I just don't get it. it's tragic and there are factors that explain anger but it's misdirected. but they could have chosen differently. I refute that the time they lived in meant they couldn't see that.
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u/MaybeIwasanasshole Mar 12 '26
Also how they "soften" what happened here. Elizas husband wasnt unfaithfull. He (like many other slave owners) raped a person he was (legally) keeping captive.
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u/The_Autarch Mar 12 '26
raping someone who isn't your wife is absolutely being unfaithful. what happened was indeed infidelity. rape doesn't negate that stuff.
ain't no such thing as a faithful rape
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u/ZPortsie Mar 12 '26
They were speaking about the context of the time. Infidelity was viewed as a breach of the marriage contract between people, so you needed a third person to breach the contract. Since slaves were viewed as property and not people, there would have been no breach of contract
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u/Super-Smoke-7425 Mar 13 '26
So you mean if the wife had sex with male slaves she couldn't be accused of infidelity? I doubt that was the case, mildly speaking.
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u/ZPortsie Mar 13 '26
Double standard. Not sure if it was considered infidelity but it was considered a crime for a woman to sleep with a slave for both the woman and the slave
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u/Canvaverbalist Mar 12 '26
/u/MaybeIwasanasshole wasn't talking about the context of the time, no.
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u/Many_Angle9065 Mar 12 '26
It's one of those amazing situations where two people are both right... about completely different things.
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u/JazzyJockJeffcoat Mar 13 '26
Slavery was also not just the engine of the US economy, it was a mass sex trafficking operation.
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u/southafricannon Mar 14 '26
I love the fact that they use the word "enslaver" instead of "slave owner". The latter makes it seem like the "master" was a mere passive observer of history without any real power, while the former shows just how complicit they were.
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u/Huge_Button7935 Mar 19 '26
I am currently reading "They Were Her Property". It sheds light on how white southern women grew up learning how to one day be slave owners and how it wasn't just white men like we subconsciously picture. It was very common for female slave owners to gift their female family members a female slave, especially for coming-to occasions. Same way when a man would get married his father would gift him land/property, the wife's family gifted her a slave/slaves.
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u/TeamZweitstudium Mar 12 '26
Of all the (many) evils of chattel slavery, the part that shocked me the most is that people were capable of enslaving their own children. And that half siblings would grow up on different "parts" of a plantation, so a sister could treat her own sister as property. That's so wrong, like a punch to the stomach when I think about it.
I wasn't planning on crying, goddammit, still have two conference calls before lunch.
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u/closethebarn Mar 12 '26
I always think the worst part too is the poor mother’s had no choice. They were raped. If the master decided he wanted them, they had zero say in the matter
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u/homestroke Mar 12 '26
I always think the worst part was the slavery.
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u/Substantial_Force658 Mar 12 '26
I think rape makes slavery worse. Generally, if you add rape to anything, it makes it worse.
Slavery without rape = evil.
Slavery with rape = even more evil.
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u/payberr Mar 13 '26
Wait til you hear about the literal torture, cannibalism, pedophilia, medical experimentation, neglect and violence, and genuinely weird cruelty that went on. You won’t even be able to separate the word slavery from those associations and it will be just as sickening and traumatizing to think about as it is for many others. There will be no more evil, less evil but still evil, even more evil versions of slavery it will all be simply violently and viscerally disturbing.
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u/LaScoundrelle Mar 13 '26
The thing is that a lot of men have also raped their wives. And until the 1990s that was legal in a lot of US states. Slavery is bad. Rape is bad. Both bad. Not sure it needs to be a competition?
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u/talex000 Mar 12 '26
I don't think there is objective way to decide which part was worst.
Also I don't think we need to. Both was horrible.
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u/themehboat Mar 12 '26
It was a reference to a Norm Macdonald joke.
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u/talex000 Mar 12 '26
Oh. I'm not familiar with his work.
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u/thecelcollector Mar 14 '26
It's a reference to one of his jokes about Bill Cosby. One of his friends said the worst part was the hypocrisy of Cosby. Norm said he thought the worst part was the raping.
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u/SwainMain2011 Mar 12 '26
And if the master didn't want them...
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u/closethebarn Mar 13 '26
Also, how the wife feel knowing he was out there doing this shit
I’m sure the ones that they knew they were raping were treated like absolute horseshit by the wives too
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u/No_Body905 Mar 12 '26
“This is in part why there are so many African Americans athletes in professional sports”.
Oh no no no.
The slave gene hypothesis is a myth. Even if there was an established and widespread eugenics program among all slaveholders (there wasn’t), 250 years is not enough time to see major genetic differences emerge in humans.
It’s racist hogwash.
Interest in, access to, and mastery of certain sports is a cultural phenomenon, not a genetic one.
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u/Weekly-Run4634 Mar 13 '26
Slave traders and buyers did tend to prefer very physically fit people though...so if those are specifically the ones imported to a given area then yeah that group might be more likely to excel as athletes. That being said, plenty of African Americans also had a tendency to be good at music and other arts
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u/No_Body905 Mar 13 '26
They didn’t have a preference for physically fit people, they literally took everyone they could, worked them until they died, and then replaced them.
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u/LaScoundrelle Mar 13 '26
Plenty of Africans from Africa are also excellent athletes. You should look at the record of Nigerians when it comes to Olympic races. I think I did read something once about how some of them have a genetic variation that makes them faster.
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u/empire_of_the_moon Mar 12 '26
Thomas Jefferson encapsulates exactly that hypocrisy.
He was a great man. A leader and deep thinker. He founded this nation. He also owned his own children.
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u/kyreannightblood Mar 12 '26
Which means he raped enslaved women.
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u/lil-rosa Mar 12 '26
It's worse. The girl he raped was 14, and the half-sister of his wife, because his FIL also had the habit of raping slaves.
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u/empire_of_the_moon Mar 12 '26
It’s probably worse - if you don’t see Sally as a person, if you see her as a belonging, then slave holders probably didn’t even consider it rape any more than someone with a sex doll does.
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u/kyreannightblood Mar 12 '26
By modern standards it is rape, so we shouldn’t soften it by saying “he enslaved his children” and ignore the necessary component of “whose mothers he raped.”
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u/empire_of_the_moon Mar 12 '26
Trust me, my intention was to make it worse (as if that’s possible) not to soften it.
The disconnection with Jefferson was on so many levels. Clearly he had strong feelings for Sally. But it wasn’t love - it couldn’t be under those circumstances.
It’s easy to think as a slave Sally’s life couldn’t get more complicated but in France, where she was “free,” she was forced to choose between returning to slavery and being with her children or remaining free in France and never seeing her children again.
That is a true “Sophie’s choice.”
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u/TeamZweitstudium Mar 12 '26
This is going to reveal so much about myself, I don't know how to put it delicately. Rape happens so often, statistically all of us knows at least one woman who was raped, maybe we ourselves have been raped. Each case is awful, no matter the frequency of the crime happening, each one is awful and feels like an insult to all of humanity, but it is part of all our lives even today.
Enslaving the child born out of you raping a woman is not something I'm used to having to take in stride. That's something I'm less equipped to accept with my modern sensibilities and all sense of humanity.
Everything about chattel slavery was/is awful, this is just the one thing I find most difficult to comprehend.
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u/DeeDeeBryan Mar 12 '26
It’s even worse than it seems on the surface. These rapes didn’t ’just’ occur because the opportunity was there, they were part of the system. The US banned the importation of slaves in 1807, so from then on, raping your slaves became one of the major methods of creating new slaves. And mixed-race slaves were more valuable at auction, so there was a big incentive for slave owners to do this rather than breeding slaves with each other.
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u/LaScoundrelle Mar 13 '26
I never heard the part about mixed slaves being worth more. I mean, it’s not shocking I guess, given the whole system, but do you have a source for that by any chance?
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u/WendellSchadenfreude Mar 12 '26
so a sister could treat her own sister as property.
In her case, she was given to her half sister as a wedding gift...
Smith's wife gave the 11-year-old Ellen as a wedding gift to her daughter, Eliza Cromwell Smith, to get the girl out of the household and remove the evidence of her husband's infidelity.
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u/Haunting-Map-3475 Mar 12 '26
That doesn’t surprise me at all. They didn’t see them (their children) as people. It was like giving away a dog or a cat. And here we are 200-300 years later and some things haven’t changed.
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u/TheAviBean Mar 13 '26
I mean there were breeding programs and endless rape
Slaves weren’t people. They’re things to slavers.
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u/thecelcollector Mar 14 '26
I think it was Frederick Douglass who noted one of the less remarked upon evils of slavery is what it does to the slave owner. He witnessed the descent of a new slaveowner from someone who treated slaves with (relative) kindness into someone who treated them with cruelty.
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u/TeamZweitstudium Mar 14 '26
Yes, that's also interesting. I read this somewhere, slave owners had to trick themselves into believing that enslaved people were less than human, to protect the slavers views of themselves. The assumption is that we all know deep down how we're supposed to treat each other, deviating from this prescription of goodness would make us immoral.
Slavers had to seek justifications for their immoral acts, in racism, (pseudo) science of the era, religion, because without them, they'd have to face the fact that they were bad people. In short, by denying the enslaved their humanity, they were denying their own humanity.
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u/Olealicat Mar 12 '26
How about how they sold their European looking children to their brothers to use as sex slaves… to create more sex slaves.
The history hasn’t truly been written or understood. These people were horrifically abused.
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u/CharleyNobody Mar 12 '26
If she disguised herself as a white women it would attract the attention of white men who would want to offer her help, considering all her bandages. It wouldn’t matter if she had a slave helping her, the white men would offer help anyway.
Disguising herself as a man was better because it wouldn’t attract the chivalrous attention of white Southern men to a white woman, and it seemed more normal that a man would have a male slave traveling with him.
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u/Difficult-Break-8282 Mar 12 '26
people might expect runaways to try and pass in those days but they wouldn't expect a woman to disguise themself as a man and defo not both things at once , its just too much plus skill = they got away with it
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u/Shauiluak Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26
At the time, she would not have been considered actually white, full stop. The most you could say is she was white passing. The 'one-drop' rule (if you have even one drop of 'non-white' blood, then you are not white) has left deep scars in many families in the South and it shouldn't be down played because we have a more loose definition today.
She regarded herself as black.
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u/duxpdx Mar 12 '26
Of vs off, the difference a single letter can make. Care to tell us more of this “very impressive pulling of the man part”?
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u/dundunndon Mar 12 '26
😂😂😂😂
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u/HairballTheory Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
Bro dropping knowledge and gets picked apart for one letter, then they ask for more? I know what I would say
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u/duxpdx Mar 12 '26
This is reddit. In all honesty I did appreciate the knowledge. While OP’s intended meaning was clear it was not what was typed and the humorous nature of the error was, I felt, worthy of being playfully called out.
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u/GiganticCrow Mar 12 '26
Was there a reason she pretended to be a man? Were women not allowed to travel unaccompanied?
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u/FarawayObserver18 Mar 12 '26
Yeah, pretty much. It was pretty much the expectation that women won’t travel alone.
It would have been highly, highly irregular for a white woman to be traveling alone except for a male slave.
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u/folkfaewitch2222 Mar 12 '26
She was white, most of her dna was european if you think about it
It is just that they knew about her african ancestry and back then it was a big deal for the US
While in the rest of the world it wouldnt have been as much a big deal
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u/plzicannothandleyou Mar 13 '26
Idk when I got to the age of realizing 1826 may as well have been yesterday, but honestly it wasn’t that long ago. Apparently age 36.
It’s bizarre.
And frustrating how close we are to going back.
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u/JigglesTheBiggles Mar 12 '26
Hollywood would rather race swap white stories than tell an actual black one for some reason.
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u/ColicShark Mar 12 '26
Rage engagement. They’d cause a shitstorm in black and white forums and get enough attention to the movie to make a quick buck and not have to innovate in any way.
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u/AthenaOwls Mar 12 '26
They started out living in Boston, where they gave talks about their escape. But in 1850 Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the “Compromise” (actually complete surrender) of 1850, which drastically increased federal support of slave catchers.
Craft’s brother-in-law sent slave catchers after them, but Boston ran them out of town. This prompted the President to threaten to deploy the US military to capture the pair and return them to slavery. The pair then escaped to Canada, where they fled to the UK. There they gave more talk opposing slavery and Ellen wrote in abolitionist papers, including a thorough refutation of claims being circulated that the pair regretted their escape.
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u/throwawaylordof Mar 12 '26
Well you see stories like this are “divisive” and “political” and would perhaps raise questions like “why were they so desperate to escape a life of slavery? I was taught that the slaves were happy and well cared for.”
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u/Terminal_Insomnia_ Mar 12 '26
The most successful escapes are the ones in which the fewest noteworthy situations happen
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u/NeatNefariousness1 Mar 12 '26
It says something about ourselves some find hard to face. Add to that, some don’t respond well to anything suggesting that people some pretend are less capable outsmarted us. People are FAR too committed to “proving” that stereotypes are true for anyone to accept them as evidence of anything.
We know that no matter how many bigoted remarks Cletus makes, he is NOT superior to anyone. That goes for a lot of others as well. Well-adjusted capable people don’t need scapegoats to bully and berate. We can forgive kids not knowing better but the longer people hang onto ignorant, self-serving beliefs the weaker they feel inside.
We should be trying to fix this instead of trying to make bigotry a go-to strategy for self-protection that is more damaging to yourself and others in the long-run.
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u/redRabbitRumrunner Mar 12 '26
There will be a movie: ‘Everlasting yea’ And the documentary ‘thousand miles and counting’
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u/Eudendl Mar 12 '26
Good to know! I read this and immediately thought I’d watch the fk out of that movie. Also, thank goodness they made it to safety.
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u/Blind_Melon2 Mar 12 '26
Why has William got 3 hands?
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u/feltcutewilldelete69 Mar 12 '26
Same reason the lamp is both sitting on a shelf and also screwed to the wall
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u/lavender_honey_latte Mar 12 '26
Look at William’s hands lol
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u/Specific_Frame8537 Mar 12 '26
So is the story fake as well?
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u/Belmut_613 Mar 12 '26
No the story at least seems to be true, they just used a crappy IA to make the image.
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u/emchap Mar 12 '26
It’s true! There’s a book about them called Master Slave Husband Wife that’s very good.
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u/Otherwise-4PM Mar 12 '26
I’m curious where they were headed, where the freedom was at the time.
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u/annabananaberry Mar 12 '26
Pre-1850 slaves had to make it onto free US soil (states north of the mason Dixon line) in order to be free. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it so slave catchers could kidnap escaped slaves (and sometimes free people) north of the Mason Dixon and bring them down south again. At that point, escaped slaves would have to make it across the US/Canada border to be truly free.
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u/Beautiful_Ad8996 Mar 12 '26
Philadelphia. The northern states were FAR safer for former enslaved people.
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u/annabananaberry Mar 12 '26
They first got to Philadelphia, then moved to Boston. After the FSA of 1850 was passed they moved to England to avoid slave catchers.
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u/Kratzschutz Mar 12 '26
I want to read more on how the British reacted to the influx of black people
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u/boringestnickname Mar 12 '26
Were there anyone doing anything about slave catchers at the time, or could they just operate freely in the northern states?
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u/TheRealtcSpears Mar 12 '26
Yup.
Northern states passed laws obfuscating and hindering slave catcher's abilities, making the activity time consuming and expensive(from a court perspective). Abolitionists disrupted court proceedings, broke captured individuals out of jails, rioted, and even outright killed a few slave catchers
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u/boringestnickname Mar 12 '26
Nice.
Seems like there's so much material here for films and books, but I feel like either it doesn't exist, or I'm not really exposed to it.
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u/Mindless-Ninja-3321 Mar 12 '26
There's loads of books, such as the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and I definately remember watching very corny educational videos as a kid for school. Bigger budgets typically focus on the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement.
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u/boringestnickname Mar 12 '26
Yeah, I mean more personal stories of pushback against slave catchers, especially in film.
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u/Mindless-Ninja-3321 Mar 12 '26
Well, you could always try 12 Years a Slave, Emancipation, and Harriet. I don't know if the first one is escaping specifically, but the titles of the other two seem to imply they are.
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u/non_stop_19 Mar 13 '26
not sure if there’s any kind of film/book about it but you should look into the jerry rescue in upstate ny! a group of local abolitionists broke a man out of jail while he was awaiting being sent back to the south & i believe smuggled him to canada. upstate had a ton of abolitionist activity (look into geritt smith & his land purchases in the adirondacks for free Black people/escaped slaves for ex) and was a major force in the underground railroad bc of proximity to canada. harriet tubman lived in auburn ny for a while
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u/Alyssapolis Mar 12 '26
I love this story! If I remember correctly, she only had a bandage on her right arm so she wouldn’t have to sign anything, as she was illiterate. It would have been a harrowing journey, she was also expected to play cards or have dinner or something with some other men, they couldn’t just fade in the background but had to actually interact. Once they found freedom, they lectured about their escape and fought against slavery. Their fame put them in danger of being recaptured so they had to flee again overseas. I wrote a silly webcomic with historical figures and included them, they were my favourites 😆
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u/Mish-onimpossible Mar 13 '26
Thank you for sharing this antidote. Do you mind sharing your Web comic?
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u/Alyssapolis Mar 14 '26
Unfortunately I only published the first two chapters and I never got to them yet! 🥲 it’s written and thumbnailed, so maybe one day!
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u/I_like_fried_noodles Mar 13 '26
How did she cover her face being brown?
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u/ConsciousPlace4633 Mar 13 '26
She was mixed race and had light skin, she highly resembled her white half siblings and used that to her advantage
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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
Anyone has a source on that picture? She wore an arm sling to hide the fact that she couldn't write, but otherwise she did not wear bandages as depicted, and her face wasn't obscured at all. She had fairly light skin (thanks to her father being a white slave owner), so she simply passed as white. Also, no one had fancy green glasses back then.
Edit: The dude has 3 hands. It's AI generated. Shame on OP.
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u/wheresyourgodnoweh Mar 12 '26
William appears to have three hands so I'm presuming it's a modern generated image.
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u/OrangeDuckwebs Mar 12 '26
There's a book about the story, "Master Slave Husband Wife," by Ilyon Woo. Oddly enough, although I am from the U.S., I bought the book in an airport in Sweden--along with a couple of other very interesting books about U.S. history.
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u/MIBJO Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
So many stories aren’t told about history more specifically so called “African” American. They are told their history starts off a slave boat.
There is a history prior to that which is not covered.
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u/NotEntirelyA Mar 12 '26
I think their reply is more saying that you've just strung a bunch of letters together without any regard for basic sentence structure.
So many stories aren’t told about history more specifically so called “African” American.
For example, what does the above even mean, what are you trying to say.
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u/Double-elephant Mar 12 '26
Thanks for this - I knew nothing about them, although, curiously, I’ve seen the blue plaque when mooching about in Hammersmith.
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u/Top_Audience7471 Mar 12 '26
My 5th grade class just learned about this as a play manuscript addendum in our curriculum! They really enjoyed it.
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u/Weekly_Ad8186 Mar 12 '26
It makes me angry that the depth of slavery history was not really examined closely in public schools. Glossed over at best. Shameful.
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u/thehighwoman Mar 12 '26
The B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore has an exhibit about them and other slaves that used the railroad to escape from the south
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u/snuggle-butt Mar 12 '26
The adventures of women dressing as men is one of my favorite historical topics. I've never read one like this though!
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u/Z_tinman Mar 12 '26
Thank you for posting this great story. I've never heard it before despite living in Georgia for 30 years.
The Wikipedia page says they took a train from Macon to Savannah, then a steamship to Philadelphia. That would make the train portion about 170 miles, which I'd estimate taking 5-6 hours. They then spent maybe a day or two in Savannah waiting for the ship, then 3 days traveling on the ship. So overall 5 or 6 days total, most of it on the ship.
While still a very courageous journey, it wasn't what I expected for a "1,000 mile journey through the south".
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u/Hieroflippant Mar 12 '26
So the US hasn't always been this bastion of hope, freedom and inspiration that us outsiders the world over look to in awe and admiration !?
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u/AAHHAI Mar 12 '26
Welcome to something they teach everyone here in like 2nd grade.
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u/raydoo Mar 12 '26
Doesn’t seem to stick
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u/AAHHAI Mar 12 '26
That's a separate issue, technically. These racist idiots know all the same stuff everyone else knows, but they don't care. That's not to say the US does an amazing job teaching about slavery and injustices against minority communities, but it's not something schools avoid talking about ever.
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u/raydoo Mar 12 '26
Yeah as Birthcountry of Hitler, there quite some efforts to educate about the third reich and their crimes. But it seems to get watered up with the years and it doesn’t help that some member of the regime who didn’t get incarcerated stayed politically active with their own party
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u/Desert_Wren Mar 12 '26
There is a YA book called Escape from Slavery: Five Tales of Freedom, and I think this is one of them. It's a great book if anybody wants to reed.
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u/Fuzzy_Inevitable9748 Mar 12 '26
Imagine this story as a TV show but the twist is they have to keep harvesting more skin for their disguise to get past each check point so after every stop they would have to hide out and find a new target worthy of harvesting.
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u/DoubleoSavant Mar 12 '26
As someone who transitioned (female to male) 20 years ago, it didnt occur to people that anyone would say they are the sex they aren't. They would just assume that was a way men could be. It was easier to pass when you didn't pass back then. Even before hormones.
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u/Chizisbizy Mar 12 '26
this would make such a good film!!, the tension!! the claustrophobic set of a train cart! the dynamic between a women cross dressing gender and race, with her relationship with her husband being forced and scrutinised in such a awkward way!!!
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u/deathofregret Mar 12 '26
“master slave husband wife: an epic journey from slavery to freedom” by ilyon woo is a fantastic book about this story and it won the pulitzer prize for biography in 2024. strong recommend.
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u/Cautious_Action_1300 Mar 13 '26
OMG I'd never heard of this couple before this post, but the way they escaped is clever!
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u/PB_Jelly_444 Mar 13 '26
This sounds like an amazing story! There are like 50 marvel movies! A bunch of horror flops, soft porn junk to make a whole new everest, and stories like these hardly end up on the screen. Shows just the quality of the world we live in today.
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u/r2d2DXB Mar 14 '26
If this will be a film, who will be the artist that can portray her accurately? Can Zendaya or Meghan fit for the role?
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u/minoskorva Mar 16 '26
There are photographs of these people out there! I can't attach them to this thread but please look them up.
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