They said I would never marry. Twelve men in four years took one look at my wheelchair and walked away. But what happened next shocked everyone, including me.
My They said I would nevThey said I would never marry. Twelve men in four years took one look at my wheelchair and walked away. But what happened next shocked everyone, including me.er marry. Twelve men in four years took one look at my wheelchair and walked away. But what happened next shocked everyone, including me.is Elellanar Whitmore and this is the story of how I went from being rejected by society to finding a love so powerful it could change history itself.
Virginia, 1856. I was 22 years old and considered damaged goods. My legs had been useless since I was eight. A riding accident shattered my spine and left me trapped in this mahogany wheelchair my father had commissioned.
But here’s what no one understood. It wasn’t the wheelchair that prevented me from getting married. It was what it represented. A burden. A woman who couldn’t stand by her husband’s side at parties. Someone who supposedly couldn’t bear children, couldn’t run a household, couldn’t fulfill any of the duties expected of a Southern wife.
12 proposals arranged by my father. 12 rejections, each more brutal than the last.
“She won’t make it down the aisle.” “My children need a mother to chase them.” “What’s the point if she can’t have children?” This latest rumor, completely false, spread like wildfire through Virginia society. Some doctor had speculated about my fertility without even examining me. Suddenly, I wasn’t just disabled. I was disabled in every way that mattered to America in 1856.
When William Foster, fat, drunk, and fifty, rejected me even though my father offered him a third of the annual profits from our estate, I already knew the truth. I was dying alone.
But my father had other plans. Plans so radical, so shocking, so completely at odds with all social norms, that when he told me about them, I was sure I had misheard.
“I am giving you to Josiah,” he said. “The blacksmith. He will be your husband.”
I stared at my father, Colonel Richard Whitmore, owner of 5,000 acres of land and 200 slaves, certain he had lost his mind.
“Josiahu,” I whispered. “Father, Josiahu is enslaved.”
“Yes, I know exactly what I’m doing.”
I didn’t know, no one could have predicted, that this desperate solution would turn into the greatest love story I would ever experience.
Let me tell you about Josiah first. They called him a brute. He was six feet tall, though he was an inch tall. He weighed 300 pounds of solid muscle, a weight he’d gained from years of working in the forge. He had hands that could bend iron bars. He had a face that made grown men recoil when he entered a room. People were afraid of him. Whether enslaved or free, he gave him space. White visitors to our plantation would stare and whisper, “Did you see how big he is? Whitmore has a monster in the forge.”
But here’s what no one knew. Here’s what I was about to discover. Josiah was the gentlest man I’d ever met.
