Special Guest Blogger: Ellen Craft

As a black person, two things you learn very quickly are that white people really liked eating organic food and owning other people and they really didn't like it if they tried to escape so you could risk your life slipping through woods by night or as one man did, mail yourself to a safe zone in a wooden crate but me and my husband went a different route and hid in plain sight.
I was mixed-race, another thing you learn is that the slavers didn't like their slaves enough to give them freedom or care about them as actual human beings but they quite liked to bump fuzzies with them so my father was also my enslaver much to his wife’s  annoyance so she gave me away as a 'present' to her daughter, my half sister, who took me to Macon, Georgia, as a house servant.
It was there i met William who had been sold to a bank cashier who came up with a plan that as i was nearly white, i could disguise herself as an invalid gentleman, and assume to be his master and we could escape and not be challenged elsewhere.
I started practicing the posture, gestures, and speech of an upper-class white man and made some men's clothing and tried different ways to disguise my femininity and on the night of December 21, William cut my hair short, i put on my trousers and top hat, said a prayer, and we set off.
The first leg of our journey was by train and as luck would have it the person i sat next to was a friend of my master and when he tried to talk to me i looked out the window and pretended to be deaf to avoid talking to him.
The next leg was by steamboat and one man offered to buy William from me, another scolded me for saying thank you to him and some of the black passengers tried to get William to ditch his 'invalid owner' and escape.  
Finally, on Christmas Day, we made it to Philadelphia and with the help of Philadelphia's abolitionist network, we moved to Boston, where William found work as a cabinetmaker and me as a seamstress.
We ditched the costumes and we became local celebrities among white and Black residents alike, which drew the attention of bounty hunters sent by our former enslavers to track us down but we managed to evade capture by moving between safe houses until the bounty hunters gave up.
The constant fear of capture was too much, and we decided to flee to England and settled in Ockham, Surrey, where we gave public lectures on the brutality going on in the U.S. and the British public was devastated by what they heard and displayed said devastation in their own unique way, by turning up, deciding they couldn't be arsed to listen to it and then going right back to shoving children up chimneys.