Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Gray

De: Dorothy Love

Narrado por: Allyson Johnson, Emily Sutton-Smith

A general's wife and a slave girl forge a friendship that transcends race, culture, and the crucible of Civil War.

Mary Anna Custis Lee is a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and heiress to Virginia's storied Arlington house and General Washington's personal belongings.

Born in bondage at Arlington, Selina Norris Gray learns to read and write in the schoolroom Mary and her mother keep for the slave children and eventually becomes Mary's housekeeper and confidante. As Mary's health declines, Selina becomes her personal maid, strengthening a bond that lasts until death parts them.

Forced to flee Arlington at the start of the Civil War, Mary entrusts the keys to her beloved home to no one but Selina. When Union troops begin looting the house, it is Selina who confronts their commander and saves many of its historic treasures.

In a story spanning crude slave quarters, sunny schoolrooms, stately wedding parlors, and cramped birthing rooms, novelist Dorothy Love amplifies the astonishing true-life account of an extraordinary alliance and casts fresh light on the tumultuous years leading up to and through the wrenching battle for a nation's soul.

©2016 Dorothy Love (P)2020 Tantor

A wonderful tale of a dark side of US history

Thank you for a wonderful book, for a retelling of history by Mrs. Robert E. Lee and by Mrs. Selena Gray, who was a former slave. By using both narratives, the author shows both sides of slavery, and that some enslavers (like Mrs. Lee) wanted better lives for their slaves. I did not know that Mary Lee was an abolitionist, and that she wanted all of the slaves to be freed. She feared for their futures if they were suddenly set free, though, and advocated for "colonization", which entailed purchasing slaves and then sending them to Liberia for a better life in freedom. She gave slaves at Arlington, her home, a different type of freedom: she taught them to read and write, which was illegal. I also didn't know that Mary Lee was a great grand-daughter of Martha Washington. This book taught me so much that I didn't learn in school!

great story, horrible accents

At first it was hard to ignore how horrible the accents were but the story was so good that I was finally able to.

Great story!