Woo, Ilyon. MASTER SLAVE HUSBAND WIFE: AN EPIC JOURNEY FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM. New York: Simon & Shuster, 2024. 409 pp.

An enslaved couple who disguise themselves as a disabled male master (Ellen, wife) and “his devoted slave” (Michael, husband) make a daring escape from a plantation in Macon, Georgia. It’s a harrowing journey of 1,000 miles to travel by carriages, steamboats, and trains. At any point they can be discovered and sent back into slavery. Woo’s book is based on their 1840s narrative.

Mark Twain’s ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN also takes place in the 1840s. Both books revealed the attitudes and treatment of how enslaved people were bought and sold. Twain’s novel and Woo’s book align in these cruel truths. Valuable property like the fictional Jim and the enslaved Michael were both worth $800 to a buyer.

NOTE from Irene Wong

I am pleased to announce that I have completed MY BABY BOOMER CHINATOWN (2026) after many years during which I was Alan Gribben’s traveling companion and collaborator in his Mark Twain scholarship studies, including MARK TWAIN’S LITERARY RESOURCES (2022). For almost a dozen years Alan was the editor and I was the managing editor of the MARK TWAIN JOURNAL. MY BABY BOOMER CHINATOWN includes photographs, interviews, and memories of my childhood and adolescence in a Chinatown in California’s San Joaquin Valley. It is a large (10×10) full color book, illustrated with 380 images in 103 pages, with 82 book reviews, including Ilyon Woo’s MASTER SLAVE.

Website for My Baby Boomer Chinatown

BUY MBBC HERE