BY KAREN BOSSICK

They hadn't even cleared their first train station when everything nearly fell apart.

William Craft had found his place in the Negro car. His wife Ellen, the light-skinned daughter of her first enslaver, had purchased the tickets and settled into her seat disguised as a disabled white gentleman.

They froze as the cabinetmaker who employed William appeared on the platform, seized by a strange intuition that something was off. Their hearts hammered against their ribs as the cabinetmaker checked the cars of the train, looking for William.

Ilyon Woo shared this portrait of the biracial Ellen Craft disguised as a White man as it appears in the Crafts’ book “Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.”

Then, just when they thought the danger had passed, Ellen looked to her side. Sitting right next to her was a white man she had served dinner to the night before — a close friend of her enslavers.

It was December 1848. And their thousand-mile journey to freedom had only just begun.

"I can't take credit for this amazing story," said Ilyon Woo, whose book “Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom” won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. "It's not my story. It's the Crafts' story. The way they invented their lives is beyond imagining. It's an incredible honor to participate in the telling of their life."

Woo, an American author of Korean descent who grew up in Cambridge, Mass., will be among the featured authors at the 2026 Sun Valley Writers Conference being held Saturday through Monday, July 18-20, at Sun Valley Resort.

The holder of a B.A. in the Humanities from Yale and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University, her book landed on the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2023 list, People Magazine's Top 10 Books of 2023 and Oprah Daily's Best Conversation-Starting Books of 2023.

The story she unearthed reads like a novel — because the Crafts lived it like one.

In 1848, Ellen disguised herself as a sickly white plantation owner, bandaging her arm in a sling and wrapping her face to avoid having to sign documents she couldn't write. William posed as her faithful manservant. Together they traveled more than a thousand miles by steamboat, carriage and train from Macon, Ga., to freedom in Philadelphia — with Ellen rubbing shoulders with slave traders and friends of their enslavers the entire way.

"Even though I know how the story turned out, I'm still on the edge of my seat as I see them get through some of these things," Woo said.

She first encountered the Crafts in graduate school, where she read their own account, “Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.” The 60-page narrative is now in the public domain and accessible on the internet.

"My experience reading it was just as electric as you'd imagine," she said. "It read like a novel. I would highly recommend to anyone to look at the narrative."

The Crafts described with incredible detail the moments Woo resurrects for modern readers — moments like the couple passing by Charleston's largest slave auction house just steps from the custom house where they entered one of the most dangerous spaces of their journey.

"It completely changes the picture for me when I realize that when they walk into that building, they're not only entering this dangerous space but passing by a place where they saw sales of the very kind they hoped to escape," Woo said.

Woo's research took her far beyond archives and 19th-century maps she committed to memory. She traveled to South Carolina, traced the Crafts' route up to Boston, visited the African Meeting House that still stands and walked through the Lewis Hayden House, the central hub of the underground network. It remains in good condition, having had only a couple of owners since that time.

She traveled overseas to England, where the Crafts spent 20 years of their lives on the speaking circuit. She has visited William Craft's grave. A scrapbook found in a collection became a turning point in her research.

Once free, Ellen and William became famous abolitionists, telling their story alongside Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown. They elected to stay in America even though they risked being captured by bounty hunters following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.

But, when the danger became too great, with troops rumored to be heading their way and more than 200 friends pledging to defend them to the death, they realized not only their own lives were on the line but those of everyone who loved them. And, so, they decided to live freely and boldly abroad, fleeing to England until after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.

Then they did something that still astonishes Woo.

They came back. Not to Boston, where they might have had a comfortable life. They went to Georgia — to the Reconstruction South — and started a school. When their first educational cooperative set afire, they hung onto their dream and built again.

"What stands out on so many levels is love," Woo said. "The love the Crafts had for each other. The love they inherited from their mothers. The love they had for their future children, whom they did not want to bring into slavery. And the love they had for this place, for America."

The Crafts could have escaped to Canada. They could have changed their names, as many people did. But they went forward with their story at huge personal risk — because of their love for community, for the people around them, for the things they believed would make America better in the long run.

"That inspired me and has served as a lesson for today," Woo said. "We are in such an incredibly divided time. People are famous for not listening to one another. But in the time of the Crafts the country felt like it was going to explode. People were talking about war all the time. They couldn't see past their differences. Congress people were almost at each other's throats, bringing weapons to Congress."

She paused: "If we go back to that time, the Crafts set an example for us — for how to fight, how to listen to each other, how to work across the divide. How do we support each other in what we share in common and not get caught up in the smaller political divides?"

While Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman have achieved widespread recognition, the Crafts' story has been better known in the Black community than in mainstream America.

Woo is rewriting the story for younger readers — not simply abridging it but completely reimagining it.

"Kids think differently, and I know from my own kids they won't be interested in the same things adults will," she said. "But I didn't want to simplify it. I hope readers across generations can come together over the story of the Crafts."

Woo will speak on the Crafts’ story in a presentation titled “An Extraordinary American Love Story” at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. She also will present “An Asian Father’s Gift.”

Learn more about the conference at https://svwc.com/. Or, check Thursday’s story on the Writers’ Conference in Eye on Sun Valley to see how you can listen to some of this year’s presenters.