It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.
I have, as it were, a superstitious hesitation in lifting the veil that clings
about my childhood like a golden mist. The task of writing an autobiography
is a difficult one. When I try to classify my earliest impressions,
I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past
with the present. The woman paints the child's experiences in her own fantasy.
A few impressions stand out vividly from the first years of my life;
"the shadows of the prison-house are on the rest." Besides,
many of the joys and sorrows of childhood have lost their poignancy;
and many incidents of vital importance in my early education have been
forgotten in the excitement of great discoveries. In order, therefore,
not to be tedious I shall try to present in a series of sketches only the
episodes that seem to me to be the most interesting and important.
I was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, a little town of northern Alabama.
The family on my father's side is descended from Caspar Keller,
a native of Switzerland, who settled in Maryland. One of my Swiss ancestors was
the first teacher of the deaf in Zurich and wrote a book on the subject of their
education-rather a singular coincidence; though it is true
that there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors,
and no slave who has not had a king among his. My grandfather,
Caspar Keller's son, "entered" large tracts of land in Alabama and finally
settled there. I have been told that once a year he went from Tuscumbia
to Philadelphia on horseback to purchase supplies for the plantation,
and my aunt has in her possession many of the letters to his family,
which give charming and vivid accounts of these trips.
My Grandmother Keller was a daughter of one of Lafayette's aides,
Alexander Moore, and granddaughter of Alexander Spotswood, an early
Colonial Governor of Virginia. She was also second cousin to Robert E. Lee.
My father, Arthur H. Keller, was a captain in the Confederate Army,
and my mother, Kate Adams, was his second wife and many years younger.
Her grandfather, Benjamin Adams, married Susanna E. Goodhue, and lived in
Newbury, Massachusetts, for many years. Their son, Charles Adams,
was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and moved to Helena, Arkansas.
When the Civil War broke out, he fought on the side of the South
and became a brigadier-general. He married Lucy Helen Everett,
who belonged to the same family of Everetts as Edward Everett and
Dr. Edward Everett Hale. After the war was over the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee.