Abstract
This chapter examines the intersections of blackness and disability in the slave narratives of Henry Box Brown and William and Ellen Craft, focusing specifically on how these narratives imagine and enact disability as a possibility for freedom—an exit outside a social world order that offers enslaved Black folks limited opportunities for escape. Brown and the Crafts artfully manipulated their bodies primarily to challenge the proslavery argument that Black enslaved folks would be disabled by freedom. Their bodily transformations, however, reveal the centrality of disability to concepts of personhood and citizenship, allowing Brown and the Crafts to partake in the bold and “beautiful experiment” of Black fugitivity and emancipation.
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