Buxton Books is proud to host Ilyon Woo & Dr. Shannon Eaves for a conversation on the incredible true story behind Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife. This is a FREE event; RSVPs are strongly recommended. Please email rsvp@buxtonbooks.com to reserve your spot!
On Wednesday, January 25, please join us in welcoming Ilyon Woo into the bookstore to talk about her new book, Master Slave Husband WIfe, with Dr. Shannon Eaves - Assistant Professor of African American History at College of Charleston.
Master Slave Husband Wife follows the astonishing story of Ellen and William Craft and their escape from slavery - one of those tales that proves truth is stranger than fiction. Ilyon Woo and Dr. Shannon Eaves will be talking about the writing of Woo’s book, the practically cinematic true events that it centers around, and why the Crafts journey is still relevant today.
Doors for this event will open at 5:30 pm with the conversation to begin at 6:00 pm. Hang around after the event to get your books signed and personalized! This is a free event, but please RSVP by emailing rsvp@buxtonbooks.com.
ABOUT MASTER SLAVE HUSBAND WIFE:
The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his” slave.
In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.
Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day—among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.
But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again—this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.
With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story—one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.
ABOUT ILYON WOO:
Ilyon Woo is the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times. She received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Writing Grant for MASTER SLAVE HUSBAND WIFE. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, and she has received support for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Antiquarian Society, among other institutions. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a PhD in English from Columbia University.
ABOUT DR. SHANNON EAVES:
Shannon C. Eaves earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of African American History here at the College of Charleston. She is a specialist in 19thcentury U.S. History, African American History, and Slavery and Gender in the Antebellum South. She most recently served as the 2017-2018 Race and Gender Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University. Her current book project Illicit Intercourse: How the Sexual Exploitation of Enslaved Women Shaped the Antebellum South inserts enslaved women, rape, and sexual exploitation into the center of scholarly debates on the Slave South’s system of power and culture. This study illustrates the processes by which rape and sexualized violence and the trauma that ensued resulted in a Rape Culture that became woven into the very fabric of the plantation complex, influencing daily life for the enslaved and slaveholders alike.