Cecelia and Fanny
The Remarkable Friendship between an Escaped Slave and Her Former Mistress
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The lifelong link between a formerly enslaved woman and her childhood mistress provides a unique view of life in Reconstruction era Louisville.
Born into slavery, Cecelia Reynolds was presented as a birthday gift to her nine-year-old mistress, Frances "Fanny" Thruston Ballard. Years later, Cecelia escaped to join the free black population of Canada. But what might have been the end of her connection to Fanny appears to be only the beginning. A cache of letters from Fanny to Cecelia tells of a rare link between two urban families over several decades.
Cecelia and Fanny is a fascinating look at race relations in mid-nineteenth-century Louisville, Kentucky, focusing on the experiences of these two families during the seismic social upheaval wrought by the emancipation of four million African Americans. Far more than the story of two families, Cecelia and Fanny delves into the history of Civil War-era Louisville. Author Brad Asher details the cultural roles assigned to the two women and provides a unique view of slavery in an urban context, as opposed to the rural plantations more often examined by historians.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reading between the lines and around the margins of this "lacunae-laden story," Asher delivers a credible account of how two fairly ordinary women lived their roles as slave and mistress. When Fanny was five, her father purchased the infant Cecelia and her mother for $400; when Cecelia was nine, he gave her to Fanny as a "coming-of-age" gift. Six years later, in 1846, Cecelia escaped to Canada. While Fanny remained moored in Louisville, Ky., Cecelia moved to Rochester in 1860 and back to Louisville in 1865. Although "nothing in the archives substantiates the nature of the later relationship between ," there is evidence they met again. Careful with "speculation," though tantalized by it, Asher serves his history suitably straight, relevant, and readable. In recreating their lives from the slight specific documentation available, he sets an informing context, for example, how the slave hiring-out system worked, how courtship was conducted, what life was like in the Canadian black settlements, how the Civil War affected Louisville. He demonstrates that the two women were certainly "bound together by the most intimate of oppressions, mistress and maid"; he makes a less persuasive case that they had, as the title states, "a remarkable friendship." Nevertheless, Fanny remembered Cecelia in her will with $100 and a black cashmere shawl, and Cecelia saved five letters from Fanny that led to this remarkable recreation of two lives.
