It is also, in significant respects, careful about what it claims. William is explicit that what he is recording are recollections, told from memory, of events that happened twelve years before publication. The conversations rendered in the text are reconstructions, offered as representations of what was said rather than verbatim transcripts. The emotional truth of the account is clear; the documentary precision of specific quotations is a different matter, and the narrative itself, to its credit, does not pretend otherwise.
The book was popular on both sides of the Atlantic, circulating in abolitionist communities in Britain and in the American North. It remains in print today, and it remains the primary source through which the escape is known.
## What the Disguise Required of Ellen
The scholarly attention given to the Craft escape has, in the decades since, illuminated aspects of what Ellen did that go beyond the narrative of a clever costume and a plausible cover story.
She posed as a white man, which meant presenting as a member of the race that had enslaved her and as a member of the sex whose authority underwrote the entire system she was fleeing. She did this in first-class carriages, in hotels, at customs counters, for four days, under sustained, if not always suspicious, scrutiny. The social performance required was not just the maintenance of a disguise but the inhabitation of a specific social identity — the invalid Southern gentleman, travelling with his property, slightly distant, possibly hard of hearing, clearly in pain.