An Unlikely Friendship

by Ann Rinaldi

  I DON'T KNOW WHAT brought the devilment about. I never sashayed in front of that man. I never made eyes at him, and all the while I spent at Ayr Mount I dressed proper-like. No low necklines. And I always wore a neckerchief.

  But in the fourth week of going to his house, he came at me. Like quality ladies all did, his wife and niece made afternoon calls, and he made sure they were out of the house, first. But always he made sure I had chores enough to keep me home. Then he sent Peg and Joy on some work down at the loom house. I was in the parlor, sewing, and when he came in he was in his cups, the smell of corn liquor on him, his eyes all glassy-like.

  He came at me like a rutting hog, his hands all over me.

  "Master Kirkland," I said, "please, sir."

  "Please what?"

  "Leave off."

  "You telling me what to do? I'm the master around here, and I do as I please."

  "But sir, it isn't right."

  "You telling me what's right, you nigra you? You think because you sit at our table you're not still a slave? I hired you, girl, and you'll do as I say. This is part of the bargain. I don't care what Master Robert says. You're just chattel. You have no call to say no to me."

  All the time he was unbuttoning my dress. I recollect, likely he's right. Likely I have no call to say no. I should do as he wishes.

  I was supposed to give myself over to him because he was white and I was nigra. Because he was master and I was a slave. Just like my mama had done with Master Burwell.

  Still, I fought him, as fierce as I'd fought Mr. Bingham. But this man was too strong for me. He slapped my face so's I near fainted. The blow sent me somewhere else, not here at all. So I succumbed. I remember screaming and him putting his filthy hand over my mouth. I recollect thinking: God is soon gonna kill this man if He's the God I know. And then I did faint, after all.

  Mr. ALEXANDER KIRKLAND made me bring myself to rights, made me stop crying. I remember he shoved a glass of whiskey at me to becalm me, but I'd never had whiskey so I near choked on it. He made me put on a new dress and sit at the supper table with them that evening.

  "You behave," he said. "You tell anybody and I'll kill you. The authorities won't question me, not in this state. I mean it. You don't even tell Master Robert. I don't care if he is kin."

  I was frightened as a hog going to slaughter, sitting at table with them that night. I couldn't eat. Master Kirkland coaxed me. Nicely.

  "You don't eat you'll get sickly, Lizzy. I can't send you home to Robert ailing."

  Somehow I ate. My head was aching. I told him I had a headache and he took pity on me and gave me laudanum.

  I NEVER PRACTICED conjure, but I reverenced it too much not to hold some belief in it. As a child I'd seen it done in the quarters on Master Burwell's plantation many times. Grandma Sarry even did it on occasion. But only for good.

  Could I do it? I vowed to try, so that night I went into the kitchen where Peg was preparing biscuit dough to make in the morning.

  "What you want in here?" she asked. "Ain't you 'fraid you'll get dirty?"

  "You got any nuts?"

  "What kind?"

  "Any kind will do. Walnuts, almonds."

  She fetched some from a crock and eyed me. "They come dear," she said. "What you gonna do?"

  I set one down on the wooden table and split it in half and put it in my apron pocket.

  "Ain't you gonna eat it?" she asked.

  I didn't answer.

  Understanding lit up her eyes. "You conjure?" she asked.

  "No."

  "Why you split that nut then? I know what that means. My grandma used to conjure."

  A new look in her eyes then. Respect. "Lord bless you. You still remembers who you are after all."

  SURE 'NUF, NEXT MORNING he came to the breakfast table late, that man. And when he came, he had a splitting headache. His face looked like ashes from the fireplace. He looked old of a sudden. His eyes were sunken in.

  "Coffee, Peg," he ordered. "Make sure it's hot. And get me my laudanum."

  While she stood over his shoulder pouring the coffee out of the silver pot, Peg gave me a small smile.

  He had the headache all day. I knew what he needed, jimsonweed beat up into a poultice and tied around his head. And another string tied around his head with the knot in front to draw out the pain. But I kept a still tongue in my head about it. Let him suffer.

  He was so sick that Arnold the butler had to drive me home that day. And I didn't tell Robert what had happened. I kept my own counsel. Because I believed Alexander Kirkland really would kill me.

  HE KEPT AT ME whenever the evil possessed him, that man. He had me whenever he wanted. I fought him every time, but it did no good.

  Did Anna, his wife, suspect anything? I lived in terror that she would find out because she was so good to me. I didn't want her hurt in this sordid business, especially since she was carrying his second child.

  Peg kept me supplied with nuts. And allst I could say is that he got migraine headaches of a sudden, and he had them all the time now.

  He consulted with his doctor who gave him more laudanum. He took to drinking, regular-like. He lay on the couch in the parlor all day, half out of his senses. He stopped going to the store. He let his manager run it for him.

  He got fat. He quit chewing tobacco. He became easily agitated and all the time talked about dying.

  God punished him in other ways, too, ways that had nothing to do with me. Scarlet fever came to the quarters of Ayr Mount that summer. Bad. Three of his field hands died right off, and he had to have shanties built in a field for the other sick ones. They called it "shantytown," and food had to be carried there and left outside the shanties.

  At night it looked like a scene from hell, that field with sticks of fat pine dipped in tar and burning, sticking out of the ground.

  He lost seven field hands in all. I hoped it wasn't my doing. But I misdoubt I could do all that just by splitting nuts.

  ALL THE WHILE he kept preying on me. He'd all the time follow me about the house and seize his moments when his wife and niece were out making calls. I didn't tell Robert. I wrote to my mother and never told her. She'd blame it on me. She'd say I was loose. What was worst of all was that if anybody did find out, I would be blamed. I, the nigra wench. The pretty nigra girl and the master of the house. It happened all the time. People expected it. It wouldn't be thought of as anything so terrible. Still, the blame would be mine.

  SOON I was in a childbearing way and I panicked. What should I do? What would Robert and Anna say? I put off telling Robert as long as I could.

  Finally I had to. And Robert's response was just what I expected. "You should have known better than to take up with that man, Lizzy. I'm disappointed in you."

  "I didn't, Robert. He forced me. And he said he'd kill me if I told you."

  For a moment he studied on that. Then, "You should have come to me. He's nothing but a drunken sot. His business is failing. He's stopped coming to church. I feel sorry for his wife."

  "What am I going to do, Robert?"

  "I'd send you home to Virginia, but my father has died and my mother is living with Anne and her husband, Hugh Garland. I can't burden them with this. Have your baby here, and then you go back when you and the child are ready to travel."

  "Why can't I stay here?"

  "Because I can't afford the gossip. People love to take on about something like this. I can't afford hurting the school."

  There was some kind of a showdown between Robert and Master Kirkland. I don't know what happened, but money changed hands. Robert paid him. But he was to admit that the child was his if asked. So the reputation of Robert and the school wouldn't suffer.

  My baby was born in midwinter of that year. Robert hired a doctor to attend me. "Pa would turn over in his grave if I did anything less," he said.

  Did I mourn Master Burwell, my real father? For a few moments, yes, but having a child put the chill on that. I now knew what my mother had gone through, h
aving me, submitting to him like I'd had to submit to Kirkland.

  I named the baby boy George Pleasant Hobbs, not Kirkland. I named him after my Daddy George. Would Kirkland claim my son as one of his slaves? I worried that like a dog worried a bone, but Robert spoke to him about that, too, and assured me that I and the baby now belonged to his mother.

  I went home with George Pleasant Hobbs when he was four months old, in April. Kirkland died soon after. People said he died from his drinking and his headaches, but I knew he died from the evil inside him. They say he cried out to the Lord for forgiveness before he died. On his tombstone is written this: "Gone where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest."

  Elizabeth Keckley: From a Virginia Slave to the White House

  WHEN LIZZY returned to Virginia early in 1842, she went to a farm that had a lovely view of the Appomattox River. She and her baby son were welcomed at the farm, called Mansfield. It had nearly three hundred acres of fields, numerous trees and barns, and a score of slaves.

  It was owned by Anne and Hugh Garland. Anne was the oldest daughter of Lizzy's father and old master, Armistead Burwell.

  Here Lizzy was reunited with her mother, Aggy, her aunt Charlotte, and her three cousins, Amy, Hanna, and Lucy. All of them, including Lizzy and her son George, belonged now to Mary Burwell, wife of Armistead.

  If Lizzy ever knew happiness as a slave, it was in Virginia with the Garlands. She was a nursemaid and substitute mother to Anne Garland's toddlers, Nannie and Maggie.

  But within two years, Hugh Garland, the breadwinner, was bankrupt. Financial times were bad all over. He had to leave Mansfield and take his family to Petersburg, a bustling manufacturing town.

  But the Garlands soon discovered that it took money to live in Petersburg, too, and to be socially accepted. They did not fit in with the gentry, so Hugh Garland moved his family again, this time to St. Louis, Missouri, a town of seventy-eight thousand people. St. Louis had scores of shops, restaurants, fancy hotels, and a steady influx of travelers from all over the world who came in steamboats to the town's levees.

  The move was a stroke of luck for Lizzy, though she didn't know it at the time. There was a sizable black population in St. Louis, many of them women and many of them free. On the streets, shopping for the family, Lizzy ran into these free black women. Though many were domestics, a good number were professionals: midwives, nurses, even doctors, keepers of taverns and cook shops.

  With a young son to consider, Lizzy began to truly think about her own freedom, and that of her son's.

  She did not want her darling boy to be a slave to anybody.

  Established in a small law firm, Garland was not doing well and as always, needed money. So he decided to hire out some of his slaves.

  He wanted to hire out Aggy, Lizzy's mother, but Lizzy intervened, saying that her mother was too old and that she herself had all the skills of a seamstress and could certainly bring in a goodly amount of money. Garland agreed. So did Betty Burwell, Garland's sister, who, on marrying Mr. E. P. Putnam of Pittsburgh, became Lizzy's legal mistress. And so, for the next twelve years Lizzy sewed for the white gentry, helped to make contacts by the Garlands' connections. The ladies for whom she sewed quickly recommended her as being especially talented, polite, genteel, trustworthy, and responsible.

  Lizzy sewed everything for wives of rich husbands, from exquisite breakfast robes to walking dresses to dinner gowns. Soon she was regarded as the very best in her profession. And the money she made she gave to Garland.

  With her earnings she was supporting seventeen people in the Garland household, and she still performed all her domestic duties as well.

  She was now thirty-two years old and very pleasant to look at. In this time she met a man named James Keckley whose acquaintance she'd once made in Petersburg. He asked her to marry him, but Lizzy refused. She first wanted to be free, because James Keckley was free. She was afraid he'd grow frustrated with her still in bondage and abandon her. Or worse yet, want to leave St. Louis with her and she could not.

  So she approached Hugh Garland with the idea of buying her own freedom and that of her son's.

  Garland refused. But Lizzy knew he could always use the money, so she kept after him from time to time until he finally said yes. She could buy her freedom and that of her son's for $1,200, an enormous sum at that time.

  Encouraged that she would someday be free, Lizzy Hobbs married James Keckley in 1852. The wedding took place in the Garlands' parlor and was attended by the whole family and many friends.

  After marriage, Lizzy's husband was discovered not to be a free man after all, and even to possibly being a runaway. And he drank heavily. They lived together for eight years and after their separation, as always, Lizzy kept on as a seamstress and continued working in the Garland household.

  In spring of 1854, Hugh Garland died and Anne's brother, Armistead Burwell Jr., came to help settle matters. He was a successful lawyer and planter and Lizzy approached him with her proposal to be free. He was also her half brother. He was, as Lizzy tells us, "a kind-hearted man."

  He agreed, as did Anne, to honor Hugh Garland's word. Lizzy made $3 a day as a seamstress. On the advice of people she knew she decided to go to New York, where it would be easier to raise the money. But as she was readying to leave, Anne Garland told her that before she could go she had to have six names of responsible people who could make up the loss if Lizzy did not come back.

  Lizzy got five names and could get no more. She was already cast down and weeping when a Mrs. Le Bourgois came to the house and offered to raise the money for her. She had heard of Lizzy's plight and felt terrible for her.

  The $1,200 was raised and on November 13, 1855, Anne Garland signed the papers making Lizzy Keckley free, as well as her son George, "a bright mulatto."

  George was now sixteen years old, almost white, and his mother had saved him from a lifetime of slavery.

  Lizzy decided that her next move would be to go to Washington City. Before she left she paid the money for her freedom back to Mrs. Le Bourgois, in full.

  LIZZY KECKLEY CAME to Washington without a husband and penniless. Soon she was making $2.50 a day, sewing for many kind and wealthy ladies who were the cream of American society. She had enrolled her son, George, in Wilberforce University in Ohio, a school for blacks that was full of the mixed-race children of white planters.

  One of Lizzy's foremost employers in Washington was the wife of Colonel Robert E. Lee, of the distinguished Lee family. Lee would someday become the commander of Virginia's defenses in the American Civil War. His wife, Mary, was the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. In the fall of 1860, a dress Lizzy made for Colonel Lee's wife was so admired that Lizzy soon had other important customers, like Mrs. Mathilda Emory of Texas; Mrs. Margaretta Hetzel of Virginia; and Mrs. Varina Davis, whose husband, Jefferson, would soon become president of the Confederate States of America.

  Lizzy sewed for Varina Davis's children as well. And when the Union started to tear apart after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, the Davises were all set to return South and leave Washington. Varina Davis asked Lizzy to go with them.

  "I will take good care of you," she told Lizzy. "When war breaks out, the colored people will suffer in the North because they will be blamed for being the cause of the war."

  Lizzy thought the matter over seriously. But she knew the North was strong and right, so she decided to stay in Washington City.

  ONE DAY AS she was sewing in her rented Twelfth Street house, Lizzy was visited by a woman named Mrs. Margaret McLean, one of her patrons. She had been invited to dinner at Willard's, the exclusive hotel in Washington. The date was the following Sunday and she needed a dress. Willard's was the place to be seen.

  "You must commence to work on it right away," she told Lizzy, who told her she had more work promised now than she could deliver.

  Mrs. McLean wouldn't take no as an answer. "I have often heard it said that you wanted to sew for ladies
in the White House. Well, I have it in my power to obtain for you this privilege. I know Mrs. Lincoln well."

  Right about then Lizzy employed some helpers to work on the dress for Mrs. McLean. Sometime during the next week, Mary Lincoln spilled coffee on an expensive lavender gown she hoped to wear to a party. Distraught, she did not know what to do until Mrs. McLean told her about Elizabeth Keckley.

  When Lizzy delivered Mrs. McLean's dress to her at Willard's, Mrs. McLean told her to go upstairs to parlor number six, where she would meet Mary Lincoln. "She may find use for you yet," Mrs. McLean said.

  And so Elizabeth Keckley went upstairs in Willard's to parlor number six, where she met Mary Lincoln, who told her to come to the White House the next morning for an interview.

  * * *

  Epilogue

  MARY LINCOLN GOT her bright rose-colored moiré antique gown in time for her party. And she also got herself a best friend in Elizabeth Keckley, though she did not know it at the time. Lizzy not only delivered the gown on time, she helped Mary Lincoln dress and did her hair as well.

  That spring Lizzy made about sixteen dresses for Mary Lincoln. And when the president's wife went to Long Branch, New Jersey, on vacation that summer of 1861, Lizzy sewed for other important wives, like Mrs. Secretary Welles, Mrs. Secretary Stanton, and other wives of cabinet members.

  It soon became known that Lizzy Keckley was the "only person in Washington who could get along with Mary Lincoln when she went into a frenzy about people maligning her or her husband's name."

  Lizzy fit in with the staff of the Lincoln White House, too, even though color discrimination existed "below-stairs." Most of the staff were the mixed-race children of slaves, and when Abraham Lincoln brought his valet from Springfield along into the president's mansion, the man left in two days, feeling the disdain of the servants because of his dark skin color.