- Coming up on Best of Our State.

The love of nature inspires a recycled puppetry experience.

And we'll meet a fascinating historic figure who traveled from Hillsborough to the White House.

Join us for Best of Our State.

We dip into treasured stories for a look at all the beauty and character of North Carolina.

Hello and welcome.

I'm Elizabeth Hudson, editor in chief of Our State magazine.

[bright music] ♪ Inspired by the love of the earth, this creative duo recycles whatever they can get their hands on, to elicit smiles and wonder with each paper-hand puppet performance.

[bright music continues] ♪ - This morning, our Cultural Arts Committee is very happy to bring to you guys the creative thought-provoking group called the Paper Hands Puppet Intervention.

- Good morning.

- [Kids] Good morning.

- We really just want to get kids excited about what we are excited about in this art form, which is that puppetry brings together all of these different art forms.

We get to dance and make music.

We get to sculpt and paint.

- I think it's a beautiful thing, especially for a small kid to grow up sort of feeling inside or believing in this kind of magic that's out there.

- That's a huge part of what we're in this for is to inspire people to just engage with the creative process.

- We can't really fully rehearse the show, unless we have a quorum of volunteers.

- Well, that's the paperhand part is that it takes so many different hands to make what we do.

Really there are dozens of folks every year who come out, help us paper mache and paint and just lend their hands because what we do is kind of a grand scale sort of an art.

- Well, the reason we came up with intervention as part of our name is that we wanted our work be something that was like an awakening or sort of a jolt.

We've both been a part of many different types of protest movements.

- We came to this intersection where there were a bunch of people that have locked their arms together and the police were pepper spraying in their eyes and the cops said okay, we're gonna do it again in 10 minutes.

We sort of rolled this giant moving festival up behind it like what are you gonna do to a beautiful puppet of liberation?

Are you gonna topple it over?

Are you gonna arrest a clown?

Are you gonna tackle a belly dancer?

You saw the cops and some of them were starting to cry and they just like they couldn't deal with what they were being asked to do.

It diffused the sort of violent nature of what was going on.

- I mean, there's a place for anger, but the way that we're approaching it is just through this sort of artistic creative process.

And we're getting close.

- We had just been living in San Francisco and I said well maybe I'll come back to North Carolina and do a puppet show for the Harbor River Festival.

Why don't you guys come alive and start to swim?

And Donovan was living somewhere else.

I said come on down, help me make it.

Like it's not coming together.

You guys are gonna be grabbing the cloth slowly.

- That was a big first experience that took us into this idea that making puppet shows could be something that we could focus on.

It all starts from Jan and I just talking.

We sit around and sketch in our sketch books, share ideas, and then they all just take off in different directions.

And it just slowly, slowly gets built up.

Our show this year is called I Am an Insect.

But we're focusing all on things that are tiny and making them large.

So insects and bugs and spiders.

For Jan and I, I think that looking at things and paying attention to the small and the details and the ordinary is a pathway towards human development.

- We get inspired a lot by what we see in the natural world.

Like just funny people walking down the street that we go God, that person looks like a puppet already.

I'm gonna make somebody that looks like that.

- Well, back here was where we keep a lot of our puppets in storage.

This is a boar from several years ago that we made.

These were the hands of John Henry and his big hammer.

When he had his full costume on, John Henry would get both of his hammers going and start doing his big swinging and this is from last year the show we called A Shoe for Your Foot.

And this year, it's one of this year's characters.

It's a grasshopper.

- Often we make these kind of torture machines that are usually you can see about this much.

Can't breathe very well, extremely hot.

- Sweating and staples poking you in the head.

- You just have to memorize where you're supposed to move and every once in a while you get little cues of like okay, I think that's the edge of the stage, and oh, there's the audience, so I'm facing in the wrong direction or whatever.

A puppet without any kind of a sound can appear lifeless.

Not to say that silence isn't one of the sounds, silence can be the best sound sometimes.

- In order for them to come to life, they need something that sort of stirs the human emotions or thoughts.

Often it's the music that creates that thread of connectivity.

- [Jan] The musicians that we have on the show are incredible.

They're sort of magic makers.

- [Donovan] We do work with the musicians to try and help them understand our vision.

Ultimately, the music they create is another sort of organism that holds the whole thing together.

- [Jan] They put all these nuances and all these little touches.

- We're gonna do these little flutters.

Yeah, like, that's nice.

It takes people on a bit of an emotional journey.

- [Jan] They make our beautiful puppets poignant.

- We have kids who have come to a show that have never sat still in their lives, at least that's what their parents tell us, and they sit sort of wrapped and engaged watching them think.

We have folks that have come down after a show and they're crying and they're they were so moved by something that happened.

- For the next couple days, they're thinking about images and they're thinking about some of the things that they saw.

I mean, there's a lot to talk about and that's what we like.

Your face is covered too much.

Just break through with your hand, break through with your finger.

We kind of look at the show as giving birth too, because we have to do a lot of letting go.

It's kind of like an analogy to parenting.

It's all just narrowing into this point where opening night happens and it just has to...

Here we go, whoosh.

It becomes its own entity.

Because there's 20 some odd people, all of of their inputs on any given night is creating this fabric, this weave.

There's really not any good words to describe it except for collaborative and collective and organic.

- [Instructor] And then release it at the top.

- [Donovan] And it hopefully just blossoms into something that people can really enjoy.

- I've always wanted to be a puppeteer, and now that I can call myself one, I feel very satisfied about that.

- Just been sort of like an upward slow swirl of us finding ourselves as artists and what our vision is.

I'm really quite happy, but at the same time, it is a serious amount of work that is quite hard sometimes.

- I don't wanna do that anymore.

It's a real challenge to take what you love that you dream about doing creatively and doing it all the time for your living.

That's the hardest thing about it for me is trying to keep inspired.

So it's not just oh, here we are making another puppet, but it's how beautiful is this gonna be?

- The reason that we've kept going is just the overwhelming amount of feedback we've gotten from the community and people cheering us on saying come on, keep it going.

We want to see more.

[bright music] - One of the most fascinating characters in our state's rich history is Elizabeth Keckley.

Let's follow her remarkable journey from slavery to freedom and from Hillsborough to the White House.

- [Elizabeth] Of the many splendid dresses worn by our nation's First Ladies, this dress worn by Mary Todd Lincoln, and on display at the National Museum of American History has a fascinating story.

It was made by a former slave from Hillsborough, Elizabeth Keckley.

- It's a three-piece ensemble of a royal purple velvet, which is a very fashionable color at the time, a color that Mary Lincoln favored, piped in white satin and then trimmed on the evening bodice with white lace and Chanel trim, and on the daytime bodice with little Mother of Pearl buttons.

I think it's a very clever idea.

This is a lot of clothing so you can really take the same ensemble throughout the day.

In the daytime, you can wear that demure bodice buttoned up long sleeve, and then when you need to change for the evening instead of having to totally redress, you can just take off the top, freshen up, redo your hair and wear that much lower cut short sleeved evening bodice for your evening's reception or party.

- [Elizabeth] In 1835, a wagon carrying Robert Burwell, newly appointed minister to the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church, arrived in town.

Burwell and his wife Margaret settled here on Sherton Street with their only slave Elizabeth.

- After the Burwells arrive in 1835, a member of the Presbyterian congregation, Dr. James Webb, approaches Margaret Anna and suggests that she know she starts school for young ladies.

Margaret Anna accepted Dr. James Webb's proposal and opened her new school, the Burwell Academy for Young Ladies on July 17th, 1837.

Here on a daily basis, Elizabeth is gonna be cleaning the house, sweeping the floors, setting the fires each morning.

She's also gonna be responsible for gathering vegetables in the garden, harvesting herbs, and certainly she's handling the mending and sewing for the Burwell family and the students that attend the Burwell school.

- The time was very hectic and very demanding, the time she spent here.

Anna Burwell was running a boarding school.

She also had a large family of her own and the Burwells could not afford a lot of slaves so Lizzie got a lot of work and she was busy all day long.

- And we also know that she keeps up a correspondence with her parents, Agnes and George, in Virginia.

She writes a letter from this property to her mother in 1838, and she tells about life in Hillsborough.

She says that she misses her family very much, both black and white as she puts it, and she also fears she's never gonna see them again.

She says that she feels that she's doing the work of three servants, but she's regarded and scolded by the family and she also feels that she could fill 10 pages with her griefs and misfortunes, but no tongue could express them as she truly feels them.

- [Elizabeth] Elizabeth Keckley didn't fit the stereotype of the timid house slave.

Even as a young teenager, she was willful and assertive, traits that didn't go well at the Burwell household.

- Well, from what I can ascertain from her character, she would've been what whites called high strung in the Annabel mirror.

She had her own mind, her own thinking, her own ways.

- [Elizabeth] Now with a young son, Elizabeth left Hillsborough and moved back to the plantation where she was born, but she remained enslaved to the Burwell family, this time to the reverend's younger sister and Garland.

- By the mid 1840s, the Garlands make the decision to move out to St. Louis, and when they're in St. Louis, they hire Elizabeth out as a seamstress to bring in extra income for the family.

So Elizabeth starts sewing for the St. Louis elite, and she quickly gains the reputation as being prompt, reliable, and skilled.

So she soon reaches the level of modiste.

She's a designer of the most intricate and well fit gowns.

By 1855, she approaches Hugh Garland and says I wanna purchase my freedom and I wanna purchase my son's freedom.

He says sure for $1,200, probably thinking that she couldn't raise the funds, but indeed the patrons whom she had developed a relationship with and had been sowing with, sowing for for so many years loaned her the money and on November 15th 1855, she and George are both emancipated.

- [Elizabeth] Elizabeth stayed in St. Louis for another five years and repaid the loans that bought her freedom.

This is her bond of freedom.

Then she moved to Washington DC where she set up a dressmaking shop and her life took another fascinating turn.

- Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley met because Elizabeth Keckley knew that the first lady or the first lady designate would need a dress maker.

And Elizabeth Keckley was determined to become the modiste for the new First Lady so she engineered a means by which to do that and was very successful in developing this relationship.

- Elizabeth was taken on as Mary Lincoln's sole dress maker and in the first four months, she's commissioned to make 16 dresses for all of the social events in town that season.

- She likes a youthful style, so it's bright colors.

The purple dress we have here is a good example, but she likes that low cut look.

She likes to display her shoulders and her bust line.

She was also distrusted.

She was from a slave holding family.

Her members of her family were fighting for the south.

She must therefore be some kind of southern sympathizer or spy so everything's stacked against her.

She has a few friends, but she has no one she can confide in so she turns to Elizabeth who comes from a world that's similar to Mary's, someone who understands who she can form a bond with.

- Something else that brings Elizabeth and Mrs. Lincoln closer is the fact that they lose children at the same time.

Elizabeth's only son George fights for the Union and he's killed in battle in early 1861.

And of course, the Lincolns lose their son Willie around the same time.

So you can only imagine that these women who are spending a lot of time together, they're bonded in this tragedy and in their grief.

On the evening of President Lincoln's assassination, Mary Todd Lincoln is asked who could be brought to her to comfort her as she grieves, and she replies Elizabeth Keckley.

- Mary is not the widow you want if you're trying to keep a government moving forward.

She's so overcome with grief, she can't bring herself to pack up and leave.

It takes a couple of months.

Robert is impatient.

She is grief stricken, and Elizabeth Keckley is trying to manage these people and get them to Chicago, and she does travel with them to Chicago and stays with her there for a while to try and get her settled in.

It's hard to imagine a better person that Mary could have had at this moment than Elizabeth because she's certainly much more of a support and a comfort than Mary's own son.

- In 1868, in an attempt to tell her story and to rehabilitate the declining reputation of Mrs. Lincoln, Elizabeth sets off to publish her memoir behind the scenes for 30 years a Slave and Four Years in the White House.

Elizabeth's memoir is instantly controversial.

Several letters of private correspondence between herself and Mary Todd Lincoln are published without her permission and there's backlash.

There's scrutiny from the public.

They say that Elizabeth is a traitorous eavesdropper and has betrayed Mary Lincoln's privacy.

For Elizabeth's part, she says it was never her intention for the private correspondence to be published, but ultimately this memoir, when it is published, marks the end of their friendship for those reasons.

- Elizabeth is doing her best to try and explain Mary to the world, the Mary that she knew, the Mary that they couldn't see.

The problem is in doing that, she exposes sides of Mary that aren't complimentary.

They may help you understand Mary Lincoln, but they don't necessarily paint her in the best light.

And Mary's just horrified with the notion that a trusted friend tells the world about some of her most private moments.

And it's so sad, a friendship that had lasted through all these things can't overcome this, and it just ruins their relationship.

This is someone Mary called my dearest and best friend and they never speak again.

- It was also unusual because she really didn't focus on all of the things that she could have talked about in terms of the injustices of slavery.

She wanted to focus much more on her experience and freedom.

She wanted to be a kind of progressive voice, looking at the future rather than going back and describing the past.

- [Elizabeth] Chastened by the bad publicity, Elizabeth Keckley retreated from public life.

- In her early 70s for a while, she had a job at Wilbur Forest University in the domestic arts department, but she returned to Washington DC and lived out the rest of her life with very little attention and very few resources as far as we can tell.

She died in a home for African American indigent women and children, an institution that she had helped to found when her life was better and her resources were greater.

- She is able to rise above that an elevator level of consciousness and really I think have an American dream.

So I think that she should go down as not only industrious African American woman, a woman of color, but an industrious woman.

- Keckley deserves to be recognized more for being a career woman at a time when African American women, if they were gonna have careers, it was gonna be in domestic work.

And very, very few women, particularly in the 1860s, if they were women of color, could open a business, have employees, and have a business that was as successful.

- So today, Elizabeth's memoir is seen as a rare and outstanding example of a female slave autobiography and particularly the chapter on her time here on the property, her enslavement in Hillsborough with the Burwells is enlightening for us as a site as we go forward and tell her story to the public.

- Thank you for joining us for Best of Our State.

We have enjoyed sharing North Carolina's stories with you.

See you next time.

- This is a boar from several years ago that we made that someone gets to ride around in the behind and it shuffles along.

Oh, I needed to get used to these, these are my new stilts.

They're a little bit larger than the other ones.

I know, I just needed to practice these a little bit with you guys.

Got some of our old elemental beings here, fire and this was air.

And there's several more of those different elements, but these got worn on a backpack so that the person became just sort of an oversized larger than life sort of character.

We're just still finding our wings.

We're still finding our wings.

Now let's fly a little bit.

Okay, ready, I'm gonna do my first flutter.

Up here is some of our more giant characters.

This is the sort of a goddess figure that we made a few years ago and then we have sort of a day of the dead.

Everybody with me.

These were the hands of John Henry and his big hammer.

So there's a little pulley in here that that locks this with slides and then when you hold the handle, it locks it into place.

And when he had his full costume on, John Henry would get both of his hammers going and start doing his big swinging and nailing those spikes down.

Just do like as much of whatever feels comfortable, back bend wise.

Whatever you can do to give the audience the best view possible.

[calming music] ♪ ♪ - [Speaker] More information about our state magazine is available at ourstate.com or 1-800-948-1409.