Read Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker Online
Authors: Jennifer Chiaverini
Tags: #Literary, #Retail, #Historical, #Fiction
Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (50 page)
Elizabeth’s hands trembled, and as Mr. Redpath looked on smiling, she opened the red clothbound cover and turned the first few blank pages. She paused at the engraved portrait of the author—she didn’t think it was a very flattering likeness, but never mind. Next she came to the title page:
BEHIND THE SCENES
.
by
Elizabeth Keckley
,
FORMERLY A SLAVE, BUT MORE RECENTLY MODISTE,
AND FRIEND TO MRS. ABRAHAM LINCOLN
.
OR,
THIRTY YEARS A SLAVE, AND FOUR YEARS IN THE WHITE HOUSE
.
So Carleton & Company had not corrected the number of years she had been a slave. Well, she supposed, what harm would it do to have people think she was a few years younger?
“How does it feel to see your words in print for the first time?” asked Mr. Redpath.
“It feels wonderful,” Elizabeth said. Her heart was pounding so quickly that she had to take a deep breath to quiet it. She turned to her preface and read again the familiar words that until then she had seen only in her own imperfect handwriting. Then an unfamiliar turn of phrase caught her eye, and another. Her brief musings on slavery had been embellished greatly. The sense of her original words was still evident, but it had been cloaked in more ornate prose than she liked. Feeling Mr. Redpath’s eyes upon her, she was careful not to allow her expression to betray her surprise and disappointment. Everyone knew that editors changed an author’s words, she chided herself. An author of a first book should expect even more assistance, especially from such an experienced editor.
She paged through the book carefully, her joy soon returning when she discovered that the rest of the memoir had not been altered as drastically. Then she reached the end of her tale, and discovered an unexpected appendix.
Joy turned to shock when she discovered the letters from Mrs. Lincoln she had lent to Mr. Redpath to assist him in editing her manuscript. They had been reproduced almost exactly as Elizabeth remembered, with only a few inconsequential phrases omitted. Ironically, Mrs. Lincoln’s warning that her confidences were meant to be “BETWEEN OURSELVES” had been preserved, including the emphatic capitalization.
She felt as if all the air had been squeezed from her lungs. “Mr. Redpath,” she managed to say in a strangled voice. “Mrs. Lincoln’s private letters—”
“Yes. We thought they contributed to the authenticity of your work.”
“But I let you borrow them only to assist you in your editing,” protested Elizabeth, distressed. “You agreed not to publish them.”
Mr. Redpath’s brow furrowed. “No, Mrs. Keckley, no,” he said, shaking his head. “We agreed that I would not publish anything from the letters that would embarrass Mrs. Lincoln.”
She held out the book to him and quickly paged through the appendix. “I assure you, this will embarrass her!”
“I disagree,” he replied. “The letters reveal her thinking, the motives behind her actions. You always said that if people understood her good intentions, they would be more forgiving of her…outbursts and mishaps, as it were. I fail to see how that should embarrass her.”
He failed to see because he did not want to see. Sick at heart, Elizabeth sank into a chair, the book on her lap. Mrs. Lincoln would view the publication of her private correspondence as the worst sort of betrayal. She would never forgive her.
“Mrs. Keckley, please do not distress yourself.” Mr. Redpath either truly was utterly bewildered by her reaction or he was a shrewd actor. “These letters—in fact, your entire memoir—will serve their purpose. They will inspire Mrs. Lincoln’s critics to abandon their misconceptions and rally to her side. Mark my words.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded, hoping he was right. There was no point in arguing with him. What was done was done. She could not go from bookstore to newsstand tearing the appendix from every copy of
Behind the Scenes
.
And, as it happened, Mr. Redpath’s prediction proved true to some extent, but not as he had expected.
On April 12, a woman for whom she did some sewing, a native of Boston, greeted her with the cryptic remark “I’m glad to see you doing so well. You should not give a care for what they say in Springfield.”
Elizabeth’s heart thudded, and her thoughts flew to Mrs. Lincoln. “What do they say in Springfield?”
Her patron’s quick, guarded expression revealed that she assumed Elizabeth already knew. She didn’t want to explain, but after some coaxing, she reluctantly told Elizabeth that a brief item about her forthcoming book had appeared in the
Springfield Daily Republican
. Although Elizabeth was relieved to learn that her patron referred to Springfield, Massachusetts, rather than the former hometown of the Lincoln family, she still needed to steel herself before asking her patron to bring her the clipping.
The headline read “Kitchen and Bed-Chamber Literature,” and the review—if it was right to call it a review, before the book was published—was worse than Elizabeth could have imagined.
A disreputable New York publishing house announced a book to be entitled
Behind the Scenes
, by Mrs. Elizabeth Keckley, who professes to have been Mrs. Jeff Davis’s confidential servant while the rebellion was being cooked, and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln’s dressmaker while the rebellion was going on. Such a book may be written in good taste, be interesting, be instructive, be decorous; but the chances are as the Bank of England to a filbert, that it is a sensational enterprise of the worst sort, after the order of Gen. Baker’s “Secret Service,” unprincipled, false, scandalous, indecent. The very idea of domestic servants being persuaded to write books about the secrets of their employers, being crammed by literary adventurers with what they ought to say, and their lumbering and halting narration being helped at every stage by perhaps the very class of men who edit the flash papers of our cities, must be repulsive to every person of an ordinary degree of refinement. We hope it will prove to be a good book. We greatly fear it will be an exceedingly bad one.
At first Elizabeth was too flabbergasted to speak. “Should they not first
read
my book before they condemn it?” she eventually managed to say. “Indecent? My memoir? I was told what to write by ‘literary adventurers’? How could they possibly believe such terrible things?”
“I’m so very sorry,” her patron said, thoroughly miserable. “I wish I had never mentioned it.”
“You’re not to blame.” Elizabeth blinked back angry tears and fought to maintain her composure. “You are only the bearer of bad news. You didn’t write these cruel things.”
“Those newspapermen will eat their words after they read your book,” her patron said comfortingly. “I for one am no less interested in reading your memoir now than I was before they attempted to discourage me.”
Elizabeth managed a wry smile. “Perhaps, but you know me.”
“Think of it, though,” her patron mused. “The
Republican
might have done you a favor.”
“In what way? I don’t see how.”
“They have made the people curious about your story. Everyone will want to buy your book now. They will read it and make up their own minds. You shall see.”
Elizabeth hoped she was right, but an ominous cloud seemed to blot out the sun, casting shadows upon what she had expected to be a bright and happy day.
Undeterred by the newspaper’s grim predictions, her New York friends were immensely proud of her and excited about her book, and her landlady threw a party for her on the first day of its release. Emma, the Lewises, and other friends sent congratulatory telegrams from Washington City. Their enthusiasm lifted Elizabeth’s spirits somewhat, but Mrs. Lincoln had not responded to her letter confessing the matter of their private correspondence made public, and silence from such a prolific letter writer made Elizabeth uneasy.
On April 15, a new advertisement appeared in the
American Literary Gazette and Publishers’ Circular,
but with a dramatic new headline that described her memoir as “A Literary Thunderbolt.” Most of the book description remained the same, although what Elizabeth had to say “in regard to men and things in the White House” was no longer described as merely “interesting,” but now also “startling.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Elizabeth murmured, setting the paper aside. Her insightful, poignant memoir had been transformed into a spectacle.
Behind the Scenes
outraged the press, who were swift, scathing, and merciless in their response.
The New York
Citizen:
“Has the American public no word of protest against the assumption that its literary taste is of so low grade as to tolerate the back-stairs gossip of Negro servant girls?”
The Washington
National Intelligencer:
“Where will it end? What family that has a servant may not, in fact, have its peace and happiness destroyed by such treacherous creatures as the Keckley woman?”
The
New York Times,
after offering three columns of excerpts and
noting that Mrs. Lincoln was in financial distress: “Mrs. Keckley, we also learn, is likewise in trouble. Mrs. Lincoln is unable to pay her, and she supports herself by taking in sewing—and by writing a book. She would much better have stuck to her needle. We cannot but look upon many of the disclosures made in this volume as gross violations of confidence. Mrs. Lincoln evidently reposed implicit trust in her, and this trust, under unwise advice no doubt, she has betrayed. But only in a restricted sense can the book be called her own. It is easy to trace, all through its pages, the hand of a practiced writer—of one who has prejudices to gratify and grudges to repay. As mere gossip, the book is mainly a failure. Mrs. Keckley really knew very little about life in the White House, and she ekes out her scant stock of story and anecdote with extracts from newspapers, moral reflections and other expedients of like character. The public will be disappointed when they come to read her book. They will find it less piquant, less scandalous, than was expected, considering its source, while as a literary work it can lay claim to very little merit indeed.”
And the
Springfield Daily Republican,
which seemed all too delighted to discover that its dire predictions about the quality of her book had been fulfilled: “One would suppose the public had been treated to Mrs. Lincoln and her affairs
ad nauseam,
” the reporter sneered, “but scandal is always a marketable commodity, and this book contains plenty of it.”
The theories about the diffusion of knowledge and the education of the masses, are all very fine, and within certain limits work very well. It is not pleasant, to be sure, to have a cook so literarily inclined as to be continually removing all your pet books from the library to the kitchen, and who insists on the first reading of the morning paper while she is getting breakfast; or a housemaid who prefers reading your letters to attending to her own proper duties. But all these can be patiently endured in consideration of the many benefits that are supposed to accrue to Bridget and Dinah on account of a smattering of knowledge. But
when Bridget or Dinah takes to writing books instead of reading them, and selects for themes the conversations and events that occur in the privacy of the family circle, we respectfully submit that it is carrying the thing a little too far. The line must be drawn somewhere, and we protest that it had better be traced before all the servant girls are educated up to the point of writing up the private history of the families in which they may be engaged.
The vitriol stunned and sickened Elizabeth, and yet she was compelled to read on, nor could she ignore the other withering criticisms and condemnations that threatened to bury her in an avalanche of newsprint and ink. The reviews were overripe with ridicule and condemnation, and often contradictory.
Behind the Scenes
was both badly written, and written so well that it could not have come from the pen of a “treacherous Negro servant.” Her memoir was worthless trash, and yet deserving of multiple newspaper columns for excerpts. Except for the
Chicago Tribune
, which emphasized the presence of notable Illinoisans in her memoir, praised certain sections as “interesting” and “affecting,” and concluded that she was a woman “of more than ordinary intelligence,” the reviews were unanimous in their disgust and outrage, and they seemed less concerned with commenting on her book than with denouncing Elizabeth for writing at all. To her astonishment, the same papers that had spent the past eight years gleefully pillorying Mrs. Lincoln now became her staunch defenders against the villainous “White House Eavesdropper” she had unwisely trusted.
In that sense, Mr. Redpath’s prediction that
Behind the Scenes
would compel the public to rally around Mrs. Lincoln came true.
Mr. Redpath no longer called on her at No. 14 Carroll Place, most likely because they had parted on uncomfortable terms over the printing of Mrs. Lincoln’s letters, but when the attacks upon her and her book became unbearable, Elizabeth visited him at his office and asked him what she should do about the terrible, unfair reviews. “Ignore them,” he advised her simply.
