From Oral Storytelling to Orchestral Score: Ilyon Woo's Approach to Biography

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Excerpts from the interview:

Q: Why don't you describe 'Master Slave Husband Wife'?
A: So, in a nutshell, 'Master Slave Husband Wife' is an extraordinary true story of an actual husband and wife, William and Ellen Craft, who, in 1848, go on an epic journey of mutual self emancipation. They're escaping slavery from the middle of the south and the middle of the state of Georgia, and they're doing it in the most ingenious way with Ellen Craft, who is the fair complexioned wife of the couple, pretending to be a rich, white, disabled enslaver, and William Craft, her husband, pretending to be the slave. So in this story, it's not about any kind of underground railroad. It's really a love story about this couple who go riding all the latest technologies of their day on the steamships, on the actual railroads, and they make this escape in broad daylight over 1,000 miles all the way to the north. And it has twists and turns like you couldn't make up.

Q: It has these extraordinary moments of pure luck, twists and turns, and it reads like a thriller. How did you recreate it in this manner?
A: That was actually really my biggest quest that I was trying to figure out from the beginning, which is how to bring this sense of urgency, but also the vastness of the scope of their endeavour in the writing of the story. So they actually themselves wrote a narrative in 1860. They published a narrative, and they told their story on the road, because that journey is really just the beginning of a really expanded and extensive journey to freedom, which actually carries them all over the northeast, in the United States, and also beyond. So because they write their story down, we have had materials to draw from. And what I wanted to do was basically to create the equivalent of an orchestral score.

Q: To what degree did you have to research this book?
A: Well, I love doing research. There's nothing like entering an archive, there’s a smell of that old paper which I actually love, and turning those pages and opening letters. Some of these letters that I opened would say confidential or this should not be repeated or this should not be shared. I felt a little bit bad about that, but I hope the people who wrote and penned these letters 100 years ago see that their writing was in the service of telling a much larger story. So I went down so many different rabbit holes, and there are many things that actually didn't make it into the story. So every detail that you do see is there because it was chosen, because it says something about the crafts and that the journey that they're on and their world.

Q: A lot of primary material exists around this couple.
A: It is remarkable, and it’s another testament to the incredible heroes they were, both nationally and internationally. Here you have a couple that are fleeing slavery together. When they get to the north, the safest thing for them to do would have been to leave the country. And that was their original plan. But the reason why there are so many sources about them is because they decided once they got to the north that they were going to share their story. So they decide that they are going to go on the abolitionist lecture circuit and tell their story. So they're telling their story repeatedly. The newspapers are reporting on them. People are writing about them in their diaries in all kinds of places. And then, of course, they themselves write their story down. So because of their brave decision to tell their story, we have all these.

Q: How much technical material did you wade through?
A: Well, I did wade through a lot, especially legal papers. And I really hoped that I could do it in such a way that I could just really rescue the golden nuggets that were essential to the story and not drag it down to the details.

Q: How did you come about the title?
A: The title actually came just very fast, sort of in my ear. I come from an oral storytelling tradition in my family. I grew up first hearing stories and then seeing them written down. And I wanted the book to read in that kind of way. That's sort of how I wrote it. And sometimes that's kind of how moments of the story would come to me. And I just heard in my head, I just heard master, slave, husband, wife. But it really ended up becoming like a musical theme.

Q: I kept getting the impression that you were trying to recover Ellen Craft's history and give her as much importance as her husband.
A: Definitely. And I definitely wanted to see how I could point the camera at Ellen Craft or try to represent what it is that she's seeing, because her voice is a lot quieter in the archives. I think some of that has to do with personality and the choices they make. It's pretty clear when you read about their travels that William Craft was very enthusiastic about being on the stage. That's something he wanted to do well past the point when they actually did stop telling their story, and she did not want to do that. So how do you represent somebody who, in some ways doesn't want as much to be represented. How, most of all, to try to bring her voice alive? And there are so many different ways that I tried to do this, but really, Ellen crafts own voice, the few times when she does use it in ways that are publicly recorded, was a big part of it.

Q: What is it that you seek in a good biography?
A: I don't actually read many biographies for pleasure. I've read a great many biographies in order to glean into the life stories or the moments that I need for my research. But I am primarily, for pleasure, a fiction reader.