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The name of Elizabeth Keckly is well known to numerous Abraham Lincoln buffs, but unknown to virtually everyone else. She was certainly one of the most interesting bit players in the long unfolding drama of American history.
She was born in 1818, the same year as Mary Todd Lincoln. In fact, the birthplaces of the two women were not that far apart --- Keckly's in east-central Virginia, Mary Todd's in east-central Kentucky. Mary Todd was born into a respectable and upwardly mobile white family; Keckly was the child of an illicit union between a slave mother and her white master. The two women did not meet until the day before Abraham Lincoln's inauguration as President in 1861.
Jennifer Fleischner, author of a previous book on how slavery affected women, tells the story of this unlikely partnership in a series of alternating biographical chapters, not allowing her two protagonists to inhabit the same chapter until after their meeting about two-thirds of the way through the book.
Mary Lincoln, of course, is a famous American eccentric --- domineering, limitlessly ambitious, a manic shopper and spender, prone to delusions, furious tantrums and unpredictable mood swings, probably considered mad by many who knew her. Her half of the story, though retold conscientiously by Fleischner, is old news. The real interest of this book is in the life and character of Elizabeth Keckly, a talented and resourceful woman determined to rise above the disgrace and anonymity of her origins to make her way in the world through her gifts as a seamstress and dressmaker.
(Fleischner adopts as standard the spelling of Keckly rather than the more often met with "Keckley", because that was the way her subject always spelled her name. For the same reason, she becomes in this book "Lizzy" rather than Lizzie. At birth she was Elizabeth Hobbs because that was the name of her slave "father." Her actual father was a lusty Virginia planter named Armistead Burwell. Keckly was a feckless slave whom Lizzy married but later deserted.)
Lizzy became a seamstress almost by accident, but showed such an aptitude for the trade that she eventually became sought after by fashionable white women in St. Louis and Washington. She was able to buy her freedom for $1,200 with the proceeds of her needlework plus contributions from grateful women customers. One of her steady customers in Washington was the wife of Jefferson Davis, then a senator from Mississippi. With the Civil War about to break out, Varina Davis asked Lizzy to go with her back to Mississippi, but freedwoman Lizzy refused; had she accepted that offer, she would still be unknown to history.
Fleischner's book catches literary fire only when the two women meet and their complex personal relationship forms. Up to that point, the writing is workmanlike at best. Even with the deep research detailed in her bibliography, Fleischner must often rely on speculation about details. There is a lot of "likely" and "perhaps" in this book. Also, the reader is often entangled in the complicated branches of both family trees, sorting out cousins, in-laws and other members of the chorus who surround the two principals.
Abraham Lincoln is present too, the familiar figure of the ungainly, self-conscious frontier lawyer prone to melancholia and suddenly thrust onto the national stage by his gift for political oratory. Fleischner is of the school that believes Lincoln never really loved Mary Todd; her picture of the lonely, beleaguered President coping with personal and political life while the national skies reddened with the flames of war is nicely drawn.
The end of the relationship between the two women is sad indeed. After Lincoln' s assassination, when Mary learned that Lizzy was writing a book about her White House years, she cut off communication with the woman upon whom she had depended for personal and financial salvation. Elizabeth Keckly outlived Mary Lincoln by 25 years, eventually dying in the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington in 1907. Her story, despite this tragic ending, is inspiring. Jennifer Fleischner has done a service by bringing Keckly out from the historical background for a joint curtain call with her more famous patron.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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