Collaboration in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: William's Key and Ellen's Renaming
Arizona Quarterly, The › Vol. 61 Nbr. 3, October 2005
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Summary
Fugitive slaves William Craft and Ellen Craft wrote the narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom to strengthen the abolitionist movement, encouraging northerners to aid fugitive slaves. Here, Wardrop discusses how the authors highlight gender contexts so as to prevent the political and auctorial agency of their relationship and to define the patterns of gender interactions between husband and wife. The image of William's key encodes the gendered presence of both Ellen and William as narrators, while Ellen's renaming encodes gender in a subtle rejoinder to William's key.
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Collaboration in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: William's Key and Ellen's Renaming
FUGITIVE SLAVES WILLIAM AND ELLEN Craft wrote the narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom to strengthen the abolitionist movement, encouraging northerners to aid fugitive slaves. Partners both in marriage and in the political and historical objectives of their collaborative narrative, they worked together to negotiate the terrain of escape and to advance the political objectives of liberation. The rhetorical interventions used toward such political objectives are augmented by the fact of their collaboration, the circumstance of their partnership; the Crafts' shared political enterprise is paralleled by their collaborative narrative enterprise. While critics have long understood Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to emphasize the power of the "self-reliant" individual in attaining freedom and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to stress political power as it draws upon the resources of the black family and community, the Crafts' narrative presents a slightly different manipulation of available power. Political agency for William and Ellen Craft in Running a Thousand Miles depends upon the mutuality of partnership which accrues, significantly, from within the dynamics of marital cooperation.1
The Crafts encode gender positionings that are part of the negotiations of the institution of marriage and in specific ways part of the collaboration in their authorship; such positionings prove of necessity to be both cooperative and vexed. William and Ellen Craft highlight gender contexts so as to represent the political and auctorial agency of their relationship and to define the patterns of gender interactions between husband and wife. Such gender cont...See the full content of this document
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