This proximity to whiteness was not a gift. It was, in several ways, a specific torment. Ellen was a constant visible reminder of something Smith’s white family found humiliating and convenient to ignore. When she was approximately eleven years old, in 1837, Smith gave her to his daughter Eliza and her new husband, Dr. Robert Collins, as a wedding present — a gesture that removed the visible reminder from the household and relocated Ellen two hundred miles away to Macon, where she worked as a house servant.
The separation from her mother was absolute. This was one of the defining facts of Ellen’s interior life, though much of what she thought and felt about it exists in the record only in fragments, filtered through later accounts and through the narrative her husband would eventually write. What she left on record is that she did not want to repeat the experience for her own children. She delayed marriage for years because she could not tolerate the idea of bearing children who would inherit her enslaved status, who could be sold away from her as she had been sold away from Maria.
William Craft was born around 1824 in Macon, Georgia. His experience of slavery was different in character from Ellen’s but equally brutal in its consequences. He was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker, which gave him a skilled trade and made him valuable — and made him a collateral asset. When his enslaver ran into financial difficulty, William’s family was dismantled in the way that creditors dismantled enslaved families: sold off to satisfy debts. William watched his brother be sold. His sister was mortgaged. Then William himself was auctioned.