Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave, and: Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (review)

The two books reviewed here consider the lives of three unusual nineteenth-century women, although only one of them, Elizabeth Keckly, author of Behind the Scenes: or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, can be considered a writer in any conventional sense. The other two, Mary Lincoln and especially Harriet Tubman, have acquired nearly iconic status in contemporary American culture, and both books aim to untangle the legends that have grown up around these figures.

Jennifer Fleischner, in Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave, provides not only a joint biography of two women made famous through their own affiliations, but also—and more interesting—reads the lives of the two women through each other. Fleischner is careful with her use of the word "friendship" to describe the "highly visible companionship" shared by the women (6). Asserting that friendship is an accurate description of the relationship despite the apparent power differential between the women, Fleischner argues that such a friendship depended upon Elizabeth Keckly's status as a free black woman and Mary Lincoln's childhood in a slave-holding family. Foreshadowing later events, Lincoln's life as a girl was marked by significant loss—especially of her mother—through death, and her mother's affection was replaced by the comfort of slave women; according to Fleischner, "When Mary ran into the shelter of Sally's arms, it was the origin of her reliance on the competency and comfort of a black female servant" (20). Because she had achieved her freedom through diligence and determination, Keckly interacted with Lincoln by asserting her own competence and independence, creating a partnership in which she could command relative respect.

The opening chapters alternate between Keckly's story and Lincoln's. Many of the details of Mary Lincoln's early life will already be well known to Lincoln specialists and other scholars who work on the Civil War, but they are presented here with the particular goal of understanding the factors that contributed eventually to Lincoln's ability to maintain a public friendship with a free black woman. Despite the recent popularity of Behind the Scenes, the details of Keckly's early life are less well-known because she devotes only the first three chapters of her memoir to her life as a slave. After Lincoln and Keckly meet, Fleischner weaves both lives through subsequent chapters, until Lincoln terminates the friendship in response to the betrayal she feels at the revelations contained in Keckly's book. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly is pleasurable to read, not only for its content but also because Fleischner writes with an eloquent and fluid style. The book is clearly informed by both psychoanalytic and feminist theoretical methods, yet it is virtually jargon-free, a highly unusual combination of qualities in contemporary academic writing.

Jean M. Humez's Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories resembles Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly in its general goal of providing voice to a woman who is more often spoken about. Harriet Tubman is organized into four major sections, the first of which, "The Life," is the most conventionally biographical. Part two, "The Life Stories," will likely prove most engaging to scholars of literature. Here, Humez argues that Tubman created an autobiography through her oral performances and that she actively, even consciously, participated in the construction of her public persona. Humez suggests that Tubman relied on parables for their pedagogical value rather than on the rules of logic more common to literate cultures; similarly, Tubman repeated her stories from one occasion to the next "in precisely the...