Cecelia and Fanny: The Remarkable Friendship between an Escaped Slave and Her Former Mistress by Brad Asher (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2012 91 Cecelia and Fanny: The Remarkable Friendship between an Escaped Slave and Her Former Mistress Brad Asher Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously quipped, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” While Ulrich’s quotation has taken on a feminist life of its own, she originally used the phrase to describe the challenges of studying women in history. Because of women’s circumscribed role in American society, they entered the public record only when they broke the rules, both official and unofficial, enforcing their position as social, economic, and political dependents. In Cecelia and Fanny, Brad Asher meticulously works with scraps of evidence to uncover the often hidden lives of Fanny Thurston, a wealthy white woman, and her former slave, Cecelia. Relationships between white women and enslaved African Americans usually remained private, but Cecelia’s misbehavior— the first time she had broken the rules—made it possible for Asher to tell Cecelia and Fanny’s remarkable story. Thus, he fittingly begins his narrative with Cecelia’s decision to escape from bondage while visiting Niagara Falls with her mistress. After contemplating Cecelia’s possible motives, Asher concludes that the trip to the Falls offered her an opportunity she could not pass up. Through her decision, in effect, Cecelia made history. After the escape, the chapters alternate between Fanny and Cecelia’s lives, stretching across the divide of the Civil War. In many ways, Fanny led an unremarkable life for an elite woman in nineteenth-century Louisville. The daughter of wealthy businessman Charles William Thurston, Fanny understood both the proscribed limits of domesticity and the role of slaveholding mistress that accompanied it. The letters that detail her courtship with Andrew Ballard offer the most complete view of her, suggesting the importance of Fanny’s transition from daughter to wife. The men in Fanny’s circle attended to and supported her throughout her life. As Asher notes, little suggests that Fanny chafed under the limitations of her role as a model of female domesticity. The sources bear that story out; throughout the book, Asher relies on the records of Charles Thurston, Andrew Ballard, and Rogers Clark to tell Fanny’s story. Cecelia’s story contrasts starkly with Fanny’s. Throughout her life, Cecelia often Brad Asher. Cecelia and Fanny:The Remarkable Friendship between an Escaped Slave and Her Former Mistress. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. 240 pp. ISBN: 9780813134147 (cloth), $30.00. BOOK REVIEWS 92 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY appeared briefly in public records, suggesting both her unwillingness and inability to remain in the private sphere. Whereas Fanny married once and never worked, Cecelia married twice and worked throughout her life, often as a domestic servant, to support her family. Fanny lived at the same address in Louisville her entire life, but Cecelia moved to Toronto, Rochester, and back to Louisville after the war in 1865. As Asher points out, the “litany of residential moves” reveals the limited economic opportunities for African American men and women before and after the Civil War (168). Cecelia lacked Fanny’s stable support network, and relied instead on her second husband’s pension and her daughter for support. Race prevented Cecelia from remaining in the private sphere, making her story more visible than Fanny’s. Remarkably, Cecelia and Fanny remained friends after the enslaved woman escaped to freedom. Just five letters, all written by Fanny between 1852 and 1859, remain of the correspondence between the two women. Cecelia initiated the conversation with the hope of obtaining the freedom of her mother and possibly her brother. In the first letter, Fanny updated Cecelia on the status of her enslaved family and about changes in her own life, but showed “no feeling that Fanny herself bore any portion of responsibility to try to reunite Cecelia and her mother” (88). Over the course of the correspondence, Cecelia’s brother died and the Ballards purchased Cecelia’s mother. However, as Asher suggests, the most remarkable development was Fanny’s change in sentiment . After the first letter, Fanny noted, “I think and always thought, it is a very natural desire of the slave to be free” (89). She also offered Cecelia the chance to purchase her mother’s freedom for...