After President Jimmy Carter arrived at the White House, it took time for his 9-year-old daughter, Amy, to adjust to life in Washington. Time and his beloved nanny from Georgia.
“Amy is much happier,” Mr. Carter wrote in his diary at the end of February 1977, “since Mary Fitzpatrick got out of prison and came to the White House to be with us.”
PHOTO ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
Former President Jimmy Carter, in 1977
When she first met the Carters, Mary Fitzpatrick was a young black woman wrongly serving a life sentence for killing a man and who had been assigned to the Georgia governor’s mansion. By day, she was Amy’s nanny; At night, she returned to her bed in a nearby prison.
After Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election, he and his wife, Rosalynn, asked Mary Fitzpatrick, who later changed her last name to Prince, if she would like to go to Washington with them.
Not only did they request a reprieve from the Georgia Parole Board so she could move into the White House, but Mr. Carter was appointed her parole officer.
Mary Prince worked in the country’s most famous house during the four years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, accompanying Amy everywhere from state dinners to rodeos. She attended school reunions, supervised her swimming lessons and, once, even spent the night with Amy and a playmate in a treehouse outside the Oval Office.
Mme Prince moved to Plains, Georgia, with the family after Jimmy Carter’s defeat in the 1980 presidential election. She remained in their lives afterward, working as a housekeeper, caretaker, seamstress, and confidante of Rosalynn Carter . She was ultimately pardoned by the state of Georgia, Mr. Carter wrote in Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (Keeping the Faith: Memoirs of a President).
“He changed my life,” said M.me Prince, now over 70 years old, at theAtlanta Journal-Constitution in 2002. “He is a blessing. »
Unimaginable under another presidency
Mary Prince’s remarkable story is hard to imagine in the context of any modern presidency except that of Jimmy Carter. It “teaches us something essential about the character and religious values of our 39e president, who leaves us strangely perplexed,” writes biographer Kai Bird in his book The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter (The exception: Jimmy Carter’s unfinished presidency).
PHOTO CHARLES TASNADI, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Mary Prince (3e left) accompanied the Carter family to Camp David in February 1977
Mr. Carter’s press team did not try to get Rosalynn or himself to reconsider the decision to bring the nanny into the White House, and they ignored reporters’ questions about it, recalled Gerald Rafshoon, who served as White House communications director during part of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The couple had made their decision: Mary Prince was coming with them.
“If he’s your friend,” Mr. Rafshoon said of Mr. Carter before his death, “you have a friend for life.”
Mary Prince, who did not respond to an interview request, was not just a bit player in her own story. Through her intense bond with Amy and her “strength of personality,” she cultivated the Carters’ loyalty and devotion, according to Kate Andersen Brower, author of The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House (The Residence: in the private world of the White House). She adds: “It’s like she’s part of their family. »
Mary Prince grew up poor in southwest Georgia and was a divorced mother of two when she was convicted of shooting a man during an argument outside a bar in Lumpkin, Wash. Georgia, in 1970.
Mme Prince later said her cousin’s gun fired accidentally, while a witness claimed she pulled the trigger to defend her cousin. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she told Mme Brower for The Residence.
Mme Prince met with her court-appointed attorney only once before entering the courtroom, where he persuaded her to plead guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence. Instead, she was sentenced to life in prison. “She was young, Black and penniless, so she did what he told her,” Rosalynn Carter wrote in her memoir, First Lady From Plains.
The nanny who made headlines
Less than a year after his conviction, Mr.me Prince worked in the governor’s residence as a “trusty”. Georgia and other Southern states have a history of having inmates work in their capitols and governor’s mansions. In her memoir, Rosalynn Carter wrote that she learned about “the inadequacies and inequalities of our justice system” from the prisoners who worked for her family in the mansion. Currently, 17 state prisoners are assigned to the Georgia Governor’s Mansion, according to a Georgia Department of Corrections spokeswoman.
Mme Prince told the magazine People that Rosalynn Carter asked her if she would like to look after Amy, who was 3 at the time.
(Amy) immediately became attached to me. She liked me to sing to her Swing Low, Sweet Chariot every evening, that I pat her back and lie down with her.
Mary Prince, in a magazine interview People
When she joined the Carters in Washington, she became the most famous nanny in the country. THE Miami Herald published an article about her criminal case under the title “The Night Amy Carter’s Nanny Became a Murderer.” Saturday Night Live featured her in a sketch, with Sissy Spacek as Amy and comedian Garrett Morris as Mary Prince.
PHOTO JOHN DURICKA, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Former President Jimmy Carter, with his daughter Amy and his wife Rosalynn Carter, in 1976
“I made the headlines around the world,” she told Mme Brower. From prison to the White House. »
Mary Prince’s daily life was linked to that of the child. At Amy’s baptism at the First Baptist Church of Washington in 1977, Mme Prince was sitting with the Carter family. A month later, reporters – and the Carters – were present when she joined the same church. The mostly white congregation that voted on his admission had no objection to Mr.me Prince, United Press International reported.
The shuttle between her sons and her work
Mary Prince lived in an apartment on the third floor of the White House and received a salary of $6,004 a year (about $30,000 in today’s money). She later had her two sons moved from Atlanta to Suitland, Maryland, where they were placed in the care of her sister. When the nanny finished looking after Amy in the evening, she took a taxi to see her sons, writes Mme Brower in The Residence.
She helped them with their homework and got their clothes ready for school before taking a taxi back to the White House so she could get up early with Amy. She never asked the Carters if her sons could move in with her.
I never thought it was appropriate for my family to live in the White House under their roof. It was my job. I was able to pay for them to be close to me and have their own home.
Mary Prince, comments reported by Kate Andersen Brower, author of The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House
Mme Prince struggled to make friends with other White House staffers, who viewed her as an outsider with special privileges. “If Prince decided to cook a Southern-style dinner for the first family, she could send all the cooks home in a heartbeat,” M writesme Brower. She didn’t have to follow anyone’s rules as long as she made the Carters happy. »
Mary Prince’s fondest memory at the White House was one evening when she was walking by the White House pool while Rosalynn was doing laps, she told Mme Brower. Mme Prince was still wearing his starched white uniform.
“Come!” Rosalynn shouted. Dive into your uniform. »
Mary Prince had taken swimming lessons so she could keep up with Amy. She threw herself into the water. “It was just the first lady and me,” she said, “swimming together.” »
This article was originally published in the Washington Post.
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