The Travels of William and Ellen Craft: Race and Travel Literature in the 19th Century

Abstract

Describing their move north in an escape from slavery, William and Ellen Craft's slave narrative,Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom(1860), offers a peculiar form of travel literature. The notion that slave narratives chronicle movement has not gone unrecognized. Indeed, scholarship on 20th-century African-American literature often argues the thematic importance of a journey motif that some trace to antebellum America. Blyden Jackson, for example, notes that African-American “literature bears within itself content, as well as themes and moods, reflecting the Great Migration” (xv), the period from early to mid-20th century, which Marcus E. Jones says actually began before the Civil War when blacks fled the South for the urban, industrial North (30). And Robert Stepto has identified two basic types of journeys in African-American literature: one of “ascent” in which “an ‘enslaved’ and semiliterate figure [travels] on a ritualized journey to a symbolic North,” and one of “immersion,” which is a “ritualized journey into a symbolic South” (6). Such discussions of journey motifs, however, have not yet led to an examination of slave narratives as travel literature.