Unmasking the Genteel Performer: Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes and the Politics of Public Wrath - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by Carolyn Sorisio

When Keckley visits the White House to make a dress for President Johnson's daughter, she notes that the sight of the President's daughter "busily at work with a sewing-machine" was "a novel one," as she could not "recollect ever having seen" Mary Todd Lincoln "with a needle in her hand" (225).

Keckley's subtle comparison of the preparedness that women from different races showed in the postbellum era is particularly noticeable in her representation of reunions with her former owners after the war. Keckley's reunion scenes shape her as an active participant in reconstruction history, and we can understand them as genuine attempts to revisit her past and salvage what was useful from it. [9] However, they also highlight her economic success, and juxtapose this success with the status of her former mistresses. For example, when Keckley's former mistress, Miss Ann, asks her if she always feels "kindly" toward her, Keckley answers that the only thing she holds against her is that she "did not give me the advantages of a good education." Miss Ann agrees, but goes on to comment that Keckley has "not suffered much on this score" since she gets "along in the world better than we who enjoyed every educational advantage in childhood" (257). Although this scene is designed to create a mood of reconciliation, K eckley's former mistress's comments reveal that the education Southern ladies received was virtually worthless in the postbellum economy. Keckley underscores her success when one of her former master's daughters comes to see her and is surprised to find Keckley "so comfortably fixed" (259). Likewise, she ends the chapter that contains these reunions with a letter from one of her former master's daughters, who has been forced to take up teaching and is suffering through a Massachusetts winter. The writer laments that none of the children Keckley worked for were "cut out for 'school marms' [ldots]. I am sure I was only made to ride in my carriage, and play on the piano. Don't you think so?" (265-66). But Keckley does not answer this question explicitly. Rather, she leaves it up to the reader to conclude that her former charge is not so competent, as Keckley in thriving in the social order surfacing after the war.

Nowhere is the juxtaposition between former slaves and former "ladies" more evident than in Keckley's representation of Mary Todd Lincoln's financial excesses. It is in this example that we can explore further the text's narrative pattern of juxtaposition. Keckley calls upon readers to consider the logic structuring her narrative early in her work, when in her Preface she discusses slavery, saying that, if she has "portrayed the dark side of slavery," she has also "painted the bright side" (xi). Just a few pages later, after Keckley has shifted from a discussion of slavery to a justification for writing about Mary Todd Lincoln, she echoes her earlier language, arguing that "history plainly shows that her [Lincoln's] life, like all lives, has its good side as well as its bad side" (xv). Keckley's use of similar language invites the reader to compare the two subjects of her study--the story of her life in slavery and the story of Mary Todd Lincoln--in order to identify connections. Just as her Preface attempts to integrate the different parts of her narrative, so too do individual chapters often reveal a similar pattern of juxtaposition. In effect, we can read some chapters as a synecdoche for the overall structure of the book, as Keckley often intertwines seemingly disparate but actually relevant topics with one another. Such is the case in Chapter Nine, which functions to compare ironically Mary Todd Lincoln with the Contraband population in Washington. Keckley begins by describing the freedmen and women who arrive in Washington with "exaggerated ideas of liberty" (139), particularly one "good old, simple-minded woman" who was "fresh from a life of servitude" and seemed to think that "the President and his wife had nothing to do but to supply the extravagant wants of every one that applied to them" (141-42). However, Keckley clarifies that this woman's wants were in fact "not very extravagant," that the freed woman was only upset because Mrs. Lincoln had not given her the standard present of two sets of undergar ments that mistresses often provided for their slaves each year.