Ilyon Woo, Master Stave Husband Wife (Simon & Schuster, 2023, 410 pages)

A story like this is too implausible for fiction, and it is not -- it is a carefully documented history of an amazing escape from slavery in Macon, Georgia, in 1848.  William Craft and his wife Ellen, both enslaved by Macon owners in the same family, set out for the North.  Ellen, a seamstress, outfitted herself as a young planter in need of medical attention in the North, and William played the part of her attending slave.  Traveling by rail, steamboat and coach, they reached Philadelphia and eventually moved on to Boston.  But even there, after the passage of far more cruel Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, they feared recapture.  So they spent 

NOTE TO SELF:  also write about Kindred and Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom