Road To Freedom
Due to financial difficulties in the Garland family, they sold some slave children and "hired out" others, collecting the fees of their wages. Keckley and her mother remained with their mistress Anne Garland and her husband. Keckley's sewing helped support the family.
After many moves, in 1847 the Garlands moved to St. Louis, taking Aggie and Elizabeth with them. They cared for the children and did all the family sewing. Living and working for nearly twelve years in St. Louis enabled Keckley the chance to mingle with its large free black population. She also established connections with women in the white community which she drew on as a free dressmaker.
Keckley met her future husband, James, in St. Louis, but refused to marry him until she and her son were free. She asked Hugh Garland if he would free her and her son, but he refused. Persistent, she worked for two years to persuade him to free them. In 1852, Garland agreed to release them for the price of $1,200.
Keckley considered going to New York to try to "appeal to the benevolence of the people." According to Keckley, her patroness, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Le Bourgeois, said, "it would be a shame to allow you to go North to beg for what we should give you." With the help of her patrons, Keckley collected the money to buy her and her son's freedom, and was manumitted in November 1855. Keckley had promised to repay her patrons, and stayed in St. Louis until she had earned enough to do so.
Keckley worked hard in her business as well as personal life. Looking beyond life in St. Louis, she enrolled her son in the newly established Wilberforce University. She also made plans to leave St. Louis and James Keckley.
In early 1860 she and her son moved to Baltimore, Maryland. She intended to run classes for young "colored women" to teach her system of cutting and fitting dresses. She was not successful; after six weeks had hardly enough money to get to Washington, DC, which she thought might offer better chances for work." At the time, Maryland was passing many repressive laws against free blacks.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Keckley
Famous quotes containing the words road to, road and/or freedom:
“Evil can be got very easily and exists in quantity: the road to her is very smooth, and she lives near by. But between us and virtue the gods have placed the sweat of our brows; the road to her is long and steep, and it is rough at first; but when a man has reached the top, then she is easy to attain, although before she was hard.”
—Hesiod (c. 8th century B.C.)
“Hail ye small sweet courtesies of life, for smooth do ye make the road of it! like grace and beauty which beget inclinations to love at first sight; ‘tis ye who open this door and let the stranger in.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew,
In prison pine with bondage and restraint;
And with remembrance of the greater grief
To banish the less, I find my chief relief.”
—Henry Howard, Earl Of Surrey (1517?–1547)