For the Crafts, this created an interesting dynamic. Their story had particular power precisely because of the disguise: the fact that Ellen had passed as white on the journey illuminated, for those audiences, the arbitrariness of the categories the slaveholding system depended on. If Ellen could be a white man for four days, what exactly did white and Black mean as categories of humanity? If the system couldn’t tell what it was looking at, what was the system actually managing?
These questions were not always made explicit in the lectures. But they were present in the simple fact of Ellen standing in front of a Northern audience. She was visibly the person the story described. She had done what the story said she did. The contrast between what she looked like and what she had been legally classified as was an argument in itself, made without being stated.
William’s role in the lectures was different. He was the one who could be seen as the story described him — a Black man, visible, present, the person who had ridden in the segregated car and handled the luggage and answered questions about “his master’s” health. He was the proof that the disguise had worked from the outside: he was what the conductors and customs clerks and captains had seen, and he was standing here in Massachusetts having outmaneuvered them all.
The lectures generated income and generated something else: a kind of celebrity. The Crafts were known, widely known, in the circles that cared about the abolitionist cause. This was useful. It was also, once the Fugitive Slave Act passed and Collins sent his agents north, a liability: the more famous you were, the more surely your location was known.