Representing Chaos: William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

Abstract

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860) is best understood as William Craft's attempt to represent the contradictions and instabilities inherent in white–supremacist thought and culture. I consider race as a complex of various and interconnected social, economic, legal, and political theories and practices. Chaos theory, I argue, offers a useful framework for grasping this understanding of race, in part by discouraging attempts to isolate any discrete concept of race as independent or definitive. Addressing this chaotic reality, Craft approaches his story with a narrative method analogous to fractal geometry–that is, an approach to representation and measurement that accounts for apparent irregularity, fragmentation, and instability. Order and stability do not follow from the successful escape but rather are negotiated through a mode of representation that prioritizes accuracy over a conceptually neat Euclidean order. (JE)