She was deemed unfit for marriage, so her father married her off to the strongest slave, Virginia, 1856….- tamy

They said I would never get married. Twelve men in four years looked at the wheelchair and left.  .

My name is Eililanar Wetmore, and this is the story of how I went from being rejected by society to discovering a passionate love that changed the course of history.

Virginia, 1856. I was twenty-two years old and considered disabled.

I lost the ability to move my legs when I was eight years old, due to a fall from a horse accident that resulted in a fracture of my spine, and this forced me to use this wheelchair made of mahogany wood that my father ordered.

But what no one understood was that the wheelchair wasn’t what made me “unfit for marriage,” but what it represented. A burden.

A woman who cannot be with her husband at parties, a woman who is not supposed to have children, who cannot manage the household, nor fulfill any of the expected obligations of a Southern wife.