Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (55 page)

Abruptly she fell silent. She had not meant to broach that unhappy subject, nor would she care to return to it, no matter how long Mr. Fry sat there regarding her with plaintive, hopeful, puppy-dog eyes beneath a furrowed brow. “I understand you have fallen upon hard times,” he eventually said, all frank sympathy.

Slowly drawing in a deep breath, Elizabeth nodded. She did not want his pity. “When I am in most distress,” she said with an effort, keeping her voice calm and even, “I think of what I often heard Mr.
Lincoln say to his wife: ‘Don’t worry, Mother, because all things will come out right. God rules our destinies.’”

Mr. Fry’s pencil hovered above the paper. “He truly said so? He believed that?”

Elizabeth nodded. “Many and many a time have I heard him say those words, when disasters surrounded the Union armies, and also when domestic troubles came.” His words had comforted Mrs. Lincoln, and Elizabeth too, though he had not intended them for her. “Yes, that good man’s memory helps me, for I recollect very many of his sayings, showing faith in God and His goodness.”

“It is good to find comfort in memories,” Mr. Fry said gently.

“Yes.” Elizabeth smiled wistfully, her gaze faraway. “I have always thought so.”

They chatted awhile longer, and Elizabeth tried not to lament too much about her poverty, or her loneliness, as she had outlived so many of her friends. When she grew tired, Mr. Fry noticed and promptly stood, shook her hand, thanked her profusely, and showed himself out.

She wondered, as she watched him leave, what he had seen that she had not intended to reveal to him. She wondered if he would invent dialogue and sighs and long, sad looks to fill in the gaps in the story he had surely already composed in his head before she had spoken a word, gaps she had neglected to fill because she did not have the pieces his story required. Why should one write the story to fit the facts, she thought wryly, when nothing could be easier than to invent one’s own facts to suit a more provocative story?

She sighed, pulled herself slowly to her feet, and made her way alone to her solitary room. She would learn soon enough what Mr. Fry thought of her, and after his story ran in the papers, a brief flash of notoriety might again illuminate her quiet life before it faded into embers. And when it was gone, it would be gone. Such was the nature of fame. Soon she would be forgotten again, except for the few dear friends yet living who mattered to her most.

Her life was smaller than it had been at the height of her success
and fame as Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker, but she was older now, and wiser, and did not require so much as she once had.

She was a free woman in a nation united and at peace. She had lived a full and fascinating life. She had known the most remarkable people of the age, and she had never refused to help the humble and downtrodden. Despite its disappointments and losses and heartbreaks, she would not have wished her life a single day shorter—nor, when the time came for her to join the many friends and loved ones who had gone on before her, would she demand an hour more.

She was ready to lay down her burdens and rest, and perhaps to find in heaven the reunion and reconciliation that had eluded her on earth.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley lived out her remaining years in Washington, DC, at the Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children. There, after a brief illness, she died in her sleep of a paralytic stroke on May 26, 1907, at the age of eighty-nine. According to John E. Washington, author of
They Knew Lincoln
(Dutton, 1942), she was laid to rest in the Columbian Harmony Cemetery “on a beautiful knoll, facing the east beneath a spreading elm tree” among “most of the illustrious colored people who loved and served Lincoln while he was in Washington.”

The controversy surrounding Elizabeth Keckley’s memoir lingered on after her death. In 1935, a Civil War historian, journalist, and self-proclaimed “unreconstructed Southerner” named David Rankin Barbee contended that not only had Elizabeth Keckley not written
Behind the Scenes,
but no such woman had ever existed. The memoir was a fraud, he insisted, a fiction created by the outspoken “abolitionist sob sister” and Washington correspondent Jane Swisshelm. Barbee apparently had not considered how many friends and acquaintances of Elizabeth Keckley were yet living, and one can well imagine his feelings when they promptly came forward to refute his claims and to testify that Elizabeth Keckley had indeed existed. In the face of such adamant opposition, Barbee partially retracted his statements, explaining that what he had meant to say was that “no such person as Elizabeth Keckley” could have written
Behind the Scenes
. “Scholars, with whom I cannot class myself, have long been bothered over the authorship of this book,” he stated in Washington’s
Evening Star
on November 26, 1935. But despite the
attempts of Barbee and others to deny Elizabeth Keckley’s authorship and to erase her from memory, her memoir, so denounced in its day, is now widely regarded as a significant historical artifact offering invaluable insight into the Lincoln White House and the private lives of Abraham and Mary Lincoln.

The provenance of the exceptional quilt attributed to Elizabeth Keckley is even less certain than that of her memoir. At the time of this writing, the earliest documented appearance of the Mary Todd Lincoln quilt was in 1954, when its owner, the quilter and author Ruth Ebright Finley, mentioned it in a lecture. Finley reportedly claimed that Elizabeth Keckley pieced the quilt from scraps of fabric left over from sewing Mary Lincoln’s dresses, and that she had presented the quilt as a personal gift to the First Lady, who used it as a counterpane on her bed in the White House and took it with her when she departed after President Lincoln’s assassination. When Finley died in 1955, her quilt collection passed to her nephew, Bill Dague, who kept the quilt until 1967, when he and his wife sold it at a yard sale at their family farm in Sharon, Ohio. The quilt was purchased by Ross Trump, an antiques collector and dealer and family friend of the Finleys and Dagues. In 1994, Trump donated the quilt to the Kent State University Museum, where it remains to this day. However, other accounts question whether Elizabeth Keckley ever gave the quilt to Mary Lincoln, or indeed whether she was the quiltmaker who made it. I was unable to establish the quilt’s provenance before Ruth Ebright Finley’s ownership, and so, in the absence of historical evidence, I created a history for the quilt that best suited my story.

In the 1950s, after years of neglect, the Columbian Harmony Cemetery was sold to a land developer, and the remains of approximately thirty-seven thousand people—including Elizabeth Keckley—were moved to the new National Harmony Memorial Park Cemetery in Landover, Maryland. Whether due to neglect or mischance, the headstones were not relocated, and thus Elizabeth Keckley’s remains were reinterred in an unmarked grave. For decades, historians believed that her gravesite would remain forever unknown, but in 2009, a
self-described amateur historian named Richard Smyth was researching historical graves within the cemetery’s ledgers and records when he discovered the plot and section where Elizabeth Keckley had been buried. For two years, Smyth worked with National Harmony Memorial Park and several other organizations, including the Surratt Society, Black Women United for Action, the Lincoln Forum, and the Ford’s Theatre Society, to raise funds to purchase a memorial honoring Elizabeth Keckley’s role in presidential history. On May 26, 2010, the 103rd anniversary of her death, the new bronze and granite grave marker was erected. The inscription reads:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I offer my heartfelt thanks to Denise Roy, Maria Massie, Liza Cassity, Christine Ball, Brian Tart, Kate Napolitano, and the outstanding sales teams at Dutton and Plume for their support of my work and their contributions to
Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker
.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the people who graciously assisted me during the research and writing of this novel. Geraldine Neidenbach, Heather Neidenbach, Marty Chiaverini, and Brian Grover were my first readers, and their comments and questions proved invaluable throughout the writing of this book. Nic Neidenbach willingly responded to my frantic questions when technology failed me, proving once again how wonderful it is to have a computer guru in the family. I always appreciate the support and encouragement of Marlene and Len Chiaverini, and Marlene’s enthusiasm for this story in particular was especially heartening. Karen Roy and Alyssa Samways went on library research expeditions and sent me copies of crucial historical documents that I could not have obtained on my own; and Sara Hume of the Kent State University Museum not only provided me with a personal tour and viewing of the Mary Todd Lincoln quilt but also offered intriguing and informative replies to the many questions that occurred to me after my visit. Many thanks to you all.

I am fortunate indeed to live so close to the Wisconsin Historical Society, whose librarians, staff, and excellent archives I have come to rely upon in my work. Of the many resources I consulted, the following proved especially valuable and instructive: Jean H. Baker,
Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography
(New York: Norton, 1987); Joan E. Cashin,
First Lady of the Confederacy:
Varina Davis’s Civil War
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006); Catherine Clinton,
Mrs. Lincoln: A Life
(New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Daniel Mark Epstein,
The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2008); Jennifer Fleischner,
Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave
(New York: Broadway Books, 2003); Ernest B. Furgurson,
Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War
(New York: Knopf, 2004); Becky Rutberg,
Mary Lincoln’s Dressmaker: Elizabeth Keckley’s Remarkable Rise from Slave to White House Confidante
(New York: Walker and Company, 1995); Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner,
Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters
(New York: Knopf, 1972); and John E. Washington,
They Knew Lincoln
(New York: Dutton, 1942).

Of course, no work was more important than Elizabeth Keckley’s own memoir,
Behind the Scenes
(New York, G. W. Carleton & Company, 1868). Though I regret the unhappiness its publication brought her, I am deeply grateful that Elizabeth Keckley left behind such a rich and evocative account of her life.

As always and most of all, I thank my husband, Marty, and my sons, Nicholas and Michael, for their continuous love, support, and encouragement. I tell you every day how much I love you, but there are times when words cannot suffice, and this is one of them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JENNIFER CHIAVERINI is the author of the
New York Times
bestselling Elm Creek Quilts series, as well as five collections of quilt projects inspired by the novels.
Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker
is her twenty-first novel and first stand-alone work of historical fiction. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, she lives with her husband and sons in Madison, Wisconsin.