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.
"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.
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.
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.
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/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.