from bondage to becoming America's first couturière...

LIZZY: THE ELIZABETH KECKLEY STORY, from bondage to becoming America’s first couturière, is a sweeping tale of survival, artistry, and defiance set against the brutal landscape of the Deep South to the charged and conflicted heart of Civil War-era Washington. D.C.  Enslaved for thirty years, Lizzy endured unimaginable hardship. Yet despite these challenges, she holds fast to a unique gift— an unparalleled talent for couture. Wielding her needle and thread like weapons, she stitches her way toward the unimaginable— buying her freedom along with her son's.  She rises to become the most sought-after modiste in the nation, and forms a profound bond with First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln as her official dressmaker— a role that grants Lizzy intimate access to the nation’s innermost halls of power. Inside the White House, she is more than a dressmaker; she is a confidante, a keeper of secrets, and a woman navigating the fragile balance between service and selfhood.
As war tears the nation apart, Lizzy is determined to help her people, risking everything, as she threads defiance into every creation.  Faced with growing prominence, Lizzy must decide whether to remain within her role as a dressmaker, or leverage her influence to champion her people's cause.
But history is unkind to women like her and as the years pass, her name fades into obscurity—until, decades later, during the Harlem Renaissance, amidst bootlegged gin, juke joints, and jazz, a preacher from Buffalo, New York, uncovers a long-buried secret. What he finds could rewrite the past and resurrect the legacy of a woman the world tried to forget.