During those weeks, something began that Ellen had never been permitted: formal learning. The Ivens daughters taught both Ellen and William to read and write. Ellen’s first encounter with literacy — the specific tool that her enslavers’ world had used to keep her and her husband from being able to read their own passes, from being able to write their own names — happened in a Quaker farmhouse in Pennsylvania in January 1849, three decades before she died.
## Boston: The Free Black Community and the Lecture Circuit
From Philadelphia, on the advice of their abolitionist contacts, they moved not to Canada — it was December, and they were Georgia-born — but to Boston. The Boston they arrived in had a substantial free Black community concentrated on the north slope of Beacon Hill, an organized network of mutual aid, and an abolitionist movement that was among the most active and combative in the country.
William established himself as a cabinetmaker, then as a furniture broker. He built a business. Ellen did needlework. They began building an ordinary life, with an extraordinarily unordinary story attached.
That story had uses. They were introduced into the lecture circuit — the network of speaking engagements through which the abolitionist movement distributed testimony, raised funds, and built public opposition to slavery. They traveled across New England with William Wells Brown, himself a fugitive from slavery, who had been lecturing since his own escape. The audiences were largely white, largely Northern, largely people whose knowledge of slavery was abstract and who could hear something about it from people whose knowledge was not abstract at all.