Conversely, the lives they were leaving behind were also composed of ordinary moments. William went to the cabinetmaker’s shop. Ellen worked in the Collins household. They lived in their cottage. They had each other, in the constrained way that two enslaved people with different enslavers could have each other — permitted to visit, not permitted to live together, never legally recognized as a unit.
What they wanted was also ordinary. They wanted to live together. They wanted children they could raise without the fear of separation. They wanted to be able to read and write. They wanted to keep what they earned. The escape, in this sense, was not the pursuit of something extraordinary but the pursuit of something ordinary — the ordinary life that the extraordinary cruelty of the system denied them.
## What the Law Required
The legal architecture of the antebellum South is sometimes treated as a backdrop to stories like the Crafts’ rather than as a central character in them. But the law was not backdrop. It was the mechanism that determined what happened to people.
In Georgia in 1848, enslaved people could not enter into legal contracts. They could not own property. They could not legally marry. The children of an enslaved woman were her enslaver’s property regardless of who their father was. An enslaved person found off their enslaver’s property without a written pass from that enslaver could be stopped by any white person and returned by force. Teaching an enslaved person to read or write was illegal. The penalty for aiding the escape of an enslaved person was severe.