Who need it most. Charter communication supports cspan as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. Book tv continues now, television for serious readers. Dr. Ilyon woo is with us today courtesy of ivy council. Dr. Woo is the author of the great divorce, a 19th century mothers extraordinary flight against her fight, excuse me, against her husband, the shakers and her time, as well as the recipient of a nonfiction writing grant. Her articles appeared in the boston globe and the wall street journal and National Endowment for the humanities among many organizations. She holds a ba from yale as we know, i did not go to yale, and a ph. D. In english. Please give a warm welcome to dr. Ilyon woo. [applause] its wonderful to be here with you all today and i want to thank you, thank you to the savannah book festival for having me here. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. What they say about Southern Hospitality is absolutely true. I was welcomed so warmly here by my sponsor, ivy council, and her son jonathan. To tell you the truth ive been travelling a lot this last month, kind after whirlwind since my book came out and i was feeling home sick and i stumbled in yesterday to eshavers bookstore and it was light and radiant and filled with books that felt like friends and i felt right at home. So, thank you, savannah. So, savannah has a special place in the story about william and ellen craft that im about to tell. Its special because its the first stop on their thousand mile journey. And i, the first thing that i did when i came into savannah a few days ago is i went straight to Johnson Square, which is where i discovered they actually paused and had tea and i looked at those live oaks and i felt the presence of that history and i thought about something that id learned on a tour on my last visit here to savannah, which is that if you go to just about every other square, and i dont know if this is true, but its consistent with what ive experienced so far, theres spanish moss growing beautifully on all the trees, but the spanish moss does not grow in Johnson Square, perhaps theres a scientific reason, but i guess the lore that i heard is because of all the suffering that this square contained. So i greet savannah as a city of beauty and also hauntedness and as i walk through these streets, i honor the memory of women and ellen craft. So, to that day id like to share with you some stories, ill talk a little about the story of the crafts, of course, and then i would like to share with you, because this book does a better job than what i can try to summarize in a few minutes, ill share with you a bit about my story with the crafts. My journey, which has been full of its own plot twists. So ill begin with an introduction to the story, how i first came across it, how i came to write about it before going deeper into the process and i offer this as a story in three chapters or x. Chapter one, the bad draft. Chapter two, pros diet. Chapter three, an archival deficit or ellen craft and her mother. And if theres time, i might try to squeeze in something about William Brown and his donkey, but i cant promise. Excuse me for just a minute. And i ran across them from a published and you like me all must be readers. And i imagine youve had this moment as i have reading this book and sometimes you read something for me, it was an audible experience of hearing this voice in my ear and learning about their story, this incredible adventure story, which is just a page turner in and of itself. Its 60 pages long or short and it tells of their incredible travels from macon, georgia, a thousand miles to philadelphia and beyond. And the twists and turns in this story are amazing and they really conjure the moments. And in reading this, about this extraordinary adventure, i felt now i can identify this because theres apparently a new book about this and i was reading about this book. The sensation that i felt was awe. So, im in this space that elliss sits awe and when i read, i thought both the hugeness of their journey, and the smallness of myself. And i felt deeply leak i wanted to learn more. I was moved by losses they tell us, william and ellen crafts journey in many ways begins with a love they experience with their family members, ellen with her mother and william with his parents and his siblings, each of whom was stolenen from them. So i reflected deeply on the trauma they described, but i also wanted to learn more. So, they say at the beginning of this narrative that theyre not going to tell the full story of their lives. Theyre just going to tell a piece of it and theres good reason for that because at the time of their writing, ellens mother, maria, was still enslaved by the people who originally enslaved here. So there were things that they both could not and they would not tell and those are the things, those are the other questions, as well as the voice that kept calling me back. I wanted to know who loved them, who taught them to love. Who had they known and loved in bondage. Who held them in bondage. What was the world like at this time . What was it like to travel on a train or on a steam boat in this era. How did they know where to go . Was there anything in particular that prompted this extraordinary run . And what i started to do, its been about, more than two decades since that moment when i read their narrative at the Columbia University library. What i kept coming back to, what is the story and what i started to do was to dig a little bit and i love to dig. And what i found, excuse me, what i found was, i started looking at other people had researched before and kind of, i guess, ive described this as like knocking on a wall of something, but really, the original feeling i had was like pressing down, excavating something and its like in a movie where you push and then like something starts to open up and i realized that with this research, the leads that i was founding about these people and their world, i had fallen into like an alice in wonderland space, like a whole other space and i thought this was a room and that room became a house and that house became a world and once i was immersed in that, thats when i decided this is a place where i need to start dispatching reports and start to tell the story. So the archive yielded so much. Sometimes its like a magical feeling in there. When it feels like the papers are speaking to you and ill talk more in a minute about that. But i found so much that i quickly, i started to write about it and i found so much that it quickly got to the point where i entombed my editor and brings me to chapter one, the bad draft. The craft story, one. Things thats so exciting about it, is that there are multiple acts to their journey to freedom. So their first journey, they went from macon to philadelphia, a journey of a thousand miles. They land in philadelphia. They could stop there, they could go change their names, they could start new lives, they could go to canada. All number of things could have happened, but activists seized upon their story and theyre invited to tell their story and share their story with people and they do this with enormous risk to themselves. Thats the beginning of act two. They go, they travel another thousand mile on the abolitionist lecture circuit, telling their story not only for their own freedom, fighting for just their own freedom, but the freedom of all of those left behind, including their loved ones. Then in the middle of this dramatic act two, the fugitive slave act passes sending slave hunters from georgia and then theres another whole crisis, culminating in a second escape from the United States because its not just from fleeing the south, but its from the entire United States that they have to run in order to be free. So for me, reading that original story, running a thousand miles, the emotional heart of the story began with the childhoods and in particular i was drawn to the story of william craft. He names a mr. Craft as being his enslaver. And he tells a little of the background of now he came into macon and how he launched on this journey and where it began was with this mr. Craft essentially gambling on cotton and wagering the lives of his loved ones. This man, as he tells us ends up selling williams parents and then one by one, each of his siblings and he and his younger sister are the last ones to go. So theres a very powerful and painful moment that they recount in their story about when william craft is on this Auction Block and he watches his sister be sold. This is the last member of his family to be sold from mr. Craft. And i wanted to honor him by starting with this moment so i started with this warm june day when he is a teenage boy, 16 years old, standing on this Auction Block watching as his sister who has just been sold, is being driven away and he knows that hes never going to see her again and then i proceed in this account of it to pull out and i actually ended up finding so much more than i ever imagined possible about mr. Craft, the man who sold him, about i found actually the mortgage by which william craft and his sister were mortgaged as property, this is a mortgage that ended up leading to the sale on this june day. I pulled out and i basically told a lot more information than any reader would probably be prepared for at this time. I thought i had started with a strong beginning and i knew i had a moving moment. I sent it to my editor, i sent about 100 pages or so and i thought, okay, shes going to say this is a really good start, its a powerful opening and lets just go. A day passed, a couple of days passed, you could imagine what happened. I got an email back, it was a sixpage email and you know, usually when people are trying to give you constructive criticism they start off with something positive, right . So the letter starts off, clearly youve done a Staggering Amount of research. [laughter] that was the good part. She proceed today say that i had ive committed much of this letter to memory, if you cant tell. She said that i had created a scholarly tomb. So the literary person in me is kind of interesting, is this a place like researchers like myself go to die or places where readers like yourselves are buried alive. [laughter] neither of which was going to be very good. She said i had to start again. I had to start absolutely from scratch, from the beginning. From the beginning. And she said i had to start the story with another scene, the scene in which i actually began my proposal, the scene that i started telling her, which is a scene in macon, georgia in 1848, this time in winter, right before christmas as william and ellen craft are in a cottage behind, the home of ellen crafts. And its a moment where at four in the morning, shes getting dressed, shes putting a gentleman shirt and and jacket and hat and boots. And the last thing that they do for costume before theyre about to leave is william cuts her hair short in the back and they touch hands and thats the moment where their journey launches the start of this thousand miles. So the from a writers perspective, that is the beginning of the story. I understood this is powerful moment but then i did research into what happened before and their loved ones and enslavers and where do i put that . The story starts in 1840 with a journey and my editor said you have to figure out a way to tell it both at the same time so the idea of the casting in the present is something that i had felt strongly from the beginning in connecting with the story. In fact, so much so that before my draft my goal was to write the entire story and i dontthink ive ever said this out loud. My goal was to write the entire story in the present tense so my initial chapters were all in the present tense. That had to stop but the impulse was there. When she said you have to put the past and present simultaneously as an idea that may sense to me but i have no idea where to begin so i didnt look to writing at least not nonfiction writing, i looked to novels, i looked to musicals and my own history in music. So what this brought to mind was when i was a girl in middle school and i was playing the piano, theres a piano piece that i really wanted to play and its a fast, rollicking piece. It just feels like something careening almost out of control and where that speed comes from i learned is from a difficult read on. I asked my teacher can i play this piece and she said okay but you have to learn the and i said what the rhythm and as it turns out the rhythm as 2 parts. In the last hand you have triplets. And the righthand, you have 16th notes. One, two, three, four and they have to go at thesame time. So my Little Middle School brain was blown by this and i said how do you do that . My mother is a pianist and i said can you do this and she was too quick and she said no, youve got to feel this so i went everywhere tapping on my knees, on my body, on any surface. [tapping] i found it. I found that the and the way i found it in the way my teacher said i had to find it was absolutely right. You have to find where the beats converge and i realized thinking about this piece that i had done, not a piece now, a book the left hand is the past. The righthand is the present. I had to find that moment together where past and present me in the story. Thats when you tell the story you move with the present but feel the past has its own being at once i found that out what those beasts started going to was no stopping me i was writing like crazy and i wrote it in fact so much that i have is was done this we shall call diet. So ive always been a prolific writer and i started getting this facet that i was writing too much. It cracks work even halfway where they needed to go and i had 100 pages. This didntfeel right. And i met don at a party and i kind of trying to act like highways. How long do you expect the book to be and i thought i it maybe how long is a verylong as it could possibly be . And so she says i guess i looked away andshes like maximum 400. And i was, i guess i tried to change my expression but i mustve looked like terrified and shes a really good reader of books and people and she said you need me to . Then she got this gleam inher eye. And shes like, because i can cut. I bought my house, i can cut and i was thinking about this yesterday because there was a beach where preston and giles were talking about murder darlings, it was like one in my eyes. I did as i as i had always pages, was i cant actually hundreds of pages outlines, not outlines but timewise and next i kept a crazy chart which was like a diet chart for words some people calories, i was talking my numbers i get over it was a painful process some point during this process my husband, and also my husband got this book, marie condo book having to do with clearing out spaces and the central idea is like you take each object at a time you hold it and say does this bring me joy and in this case it would be is this meaningful to me so i would take each item and say this means something to me about a certain point i turn around and say everything means something to me but will it mean something to you. And that, so you in my mind, came into this process and i decided there could be certain things you dont want to read sas hard as it was for me to part with them i parted with them and now we have instead of 1000 facebook more manageable book at the end. But against all this abundance and archival abundance that i found there were moments in the archives where i just was stunned. I found one of the earliest trips that i could make in georgia and there have been a number of times on this trip where i have been what am i doing here . This is one of those times i was driving on highway and i thought i have no what im doing. How am i going to tell the story and i thought to myself if i find something in the archives, if i can see you then i will continue and if maybe not this is maybe just not meant to be. I got to this courthouse where theyleft the upstairs. And let me, i was astonished by this because they had photocopies and i dont want to get anybody in trouble but photocopies on the downstairs and while i couldnt read and well i said you the originals and one very nice guy is says you can go up here its all upstairs. You can see through thefloors under these. Its just this race with metal structure day and its just mind with these books and it just so happened that i was going through these i found for example this page by which ellen krafts biological father, i guess i havent gotten to this part of the story yet but her biological father gives her away as a piece of property to his biological daughter and legal daughter as a wedding present. This is something i guess i spoke about william crafts journey already and his experience but as a powerful part of this story of loss and love is connection that ellen kraft had with mother maria and the forced separation between ellen and her mother when ellen was 11 years old. Alan was the daughter of this woman named maria who was 18 years old when she gave birth to alan. And her first and slaver james smith. James smith also had a legal wife who was probably the same time that maria was pregnant. They were all in the same household and whether or not this mister smith as i call her because there are a lot of analyzes in this book so mister smith was so enraged crafts describing their own na narrative this child who bore such a strong physical resemblance to her own husband, to allens father and she was so upset that alan was mistaken for a legitimate child of the family that at the soonest opportunity she gave away ellen as a wedding gift to her own 18yearold daughter when this daughter was going to get married. So to be at the end of this rainsoaked journey upstairs in the space and opening up this book to find this paper by which this action was made possible, to see this beautiful hand, they handwriting is justgorgeous. This beautiful hand james smith saying out of the love that i bear for my daughter eliza i am getting her up as property. And im not just getting her up as property im getting her this property ellen and all of her increase which meant that for generations upon generations ellen crafts children and their children ld and their children would forever be the property of mister eliass children and on and on. So i have this story and im able to find out a lot actually about the smiths. Ellen crafts father and his wife and especially through his wife. I didnt want to write a story wishes just simply good guys and bad guys because these are real people that i wanted to respect as real people. People who made choices and i think its much easier to hold people at a distance and say ive never do that. If you kind of other than for separate them and i want to know as much as i could about mister smith and theres a lot about this mister smith in the archives. But what ended up happening and this is again something that i was aware of because there were a lot of really scholarship especially black feminine scholars who found a way to ar