Collaboration in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: William's Key and Ellen's Renaming

DANEEN WARDROP 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 Dougfoss 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 Arizona Quarterly Volume 61, Number 3, Autumn 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1 610 58 Doñeen Wardrop between husband and wife. Such gender contexts and patterns include the temporally enhanced scene of the key held in William's hand, as well as the layered moment in which Ellen renames herself. The image of William's key encodes the gendered presence of both Ellen and William as narrators in Running a Thousand Miles; likewise Ellen's renaming , to be discussed subsequently, encodes gender in a subtle rejoinder to William's key, thereby vectoring her own particular presence in the text. The scene of William's key, as it encodes his part in the collaboration , appears on the evening of the Crafts' departure. In fact, the scene containing the figure of the key is one of the most constructed of scenes in the narrative, including the particular setting of the cottage room where the two conspire, allowing the reader to witness an intensive dialogue between the partners. Interestingly, the room is both theirs and Ellen's—"our little room" and "my wife's cottage" (32)—in a complication that likewise mirrors the complexity of the strands of their coauthorship, as well as the strains of a marriage made to exist within the confines of slavery. In a swift paragraph, a major shift occurs, a shift which informs, shapes, and structures the text of Running a Thousand Miles. In this paragraph Ellen and William, poised on the cusp of their escape and readying themselves to leave the cottage and venture forth, confront a staggering silence which underscores the momentous nature of the action; it is additionally cued by William's locking of the door, of which he makes a point: We then opened the door, and stepped as softly out as 'moonlight upon the water.' I locked the door with my own key, which I now have before me, and tiptoed across the yard into the street. I say tiptoed, because we were like persons near a tottering avalanche, afraid to move, or even breathe freely, for fear the sleeping tyrants should be aroused, and come down upon us with double vengeance, for daring to attempt to escape in the manner which we contemplated. (42) This is the last moment of Ellen and William Craft's lives in slavery as they have lived it in unpretended roles, the last moment before they begin to play out their new personae; from this point forward they embark on the masquerade ofpretended personalities so as to find, even- Running a Thousand Miles 59 tually, freedom...