Elizabeth Keckley

I was regarded as fair-looking for one of my race, and for four years a white man – I spare the world his name – had base designs upon me. I do not care to dwell upon this subject, for it is one that is fraught with pain. Suffice it to say, that he persecuted me for four years, and I became a mother. The child of which he was the father was the only child that I ever brought into the world. If my poor boy ever suffered any humiliating pangs on account of birth, he could not blame his mother, for God knows that she did not wish to give him life; he must blame the edicts of that society which deemed it no crime to undermine the virtue of girls in my then position.(Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes. 1868)

Elizabeth Keckley was born a slave in 1818. After she was separated from her parents at an early age, she was brutalized and raped. She rose to prominence as a seamstress and among her clients were several elite white women of the era including the families of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Her friends included Frederick Douglass, Francis Grimke and Anna Julia Cooper. At one point she became Mary Todd Lincoln’s personal seamstress and confidante. She helped to establish several relief organizations for blacks in need. Upon the publishing of her story, Behind the Scenes, white American sentiment turned against her and she lost her thriving business.  Mary Todd Lincoln’s son Robert halted the publication and sale of the book (though it was republished in 1998). Elizabeth Keckley died in 1907 in one of the homes she had a role in creating. The inaugural gown she designed for Mary Todd Lincoln is in the Smithsonian. (Some info, Norton Anthology of African American Literature)