She was born into slavery and was primarily held by the Major Taylor Berry and Judge Robert Wash families.

As a teenager, she was the subject of a freedom lawsuit, because her mother lived in Illinois, a free state, longer than 90 days.

[2] The memoir recounts her mother's legal battles in St. Louis, Missouri, for her own and her daughter's freedom from slavery.

For Delaney's case, Berry attracted the support of Edward Bates, a prominent Whig politician and judge, and the future United States Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln.

They had a comfortable middle class life and Delaney and her husband were active leaders in the St. Louis area.

[13][14] After 90 days in Illinois, slaveholders were required to register their slaves as indentured servants, which legally made them free.

[17] Delaney said of the transaction: Major Berry was immediately attracted by the bright and alert appearance of Polly, and at once negotiated with the trader, paid the price agreed upon, and started for home to present his wife with this flesh and blood commodity, which money could so easily procure in our vaunted land of freedom.

[19] After the major died in a duel, the widow Fannie Berry married Robert Wash of St. Louis, a lawyer later appointed as a justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri.

Sinha states, "A shared belief in courageous female resistance helped mothers and daughters support heavy loads of responsibility, pain, sorrow, and loneliness.

"[10] Delaney, her mother and sister went to Taylor and Fannie Berry's daughter, Mary,[20][22] who married Henry Sidney Coxe on March 21, 1837.

Nancy had been previously instructed by Polly to escape into Canada (where slavery had been abolished and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was invalid).

In Niagara Falls, Nancy received assistance from a servant at the hotel where they had been staying, and she made it safely across the border into Canada.

[10][25][26][c] Delaney, who took care of Mary Berry and Henry Sidney Coxe's children,[30] was subject to the parents' "fiery personalities.

[20] When her suit was finally heard in 1843, her attorney Harris Sproat convinced a jury that she had been in Illinois long enough to have earned her freedom.

[33] After Martha complained about the ruined clothing and called her lazy, Delaney replied, You don't know nothing, yourself, about it, and you expect a poor ignorant girl to know more than you do yourself.

[20][d] According to the rule of partus sequitur ventrem, which had been adopted into United States slave law, the status of children followed that of the mother.

[20][32][37][e] During that time, Delaney was fell ill sue to the poor conditions of the jail that was crowded, cold, damp, and smelled of sewage.

By this suit, Polly and Murdoch may have been trying to preclude Mitchell from appealing the court's decision, in addition to seeking reparations for poor conditions that Delaney suffered in jail.

[41][42] To my mind it seemed a singular coincidence that the boat which bore the name of the great and good man, who had given me the first joy of my meagre life – the precious boon of freedom – and that his namesake should be the means of weighting me with my first great sorrow; this thought seemed to reconcile me to my grief, for that name was ever sacred, and I could not speak it without reverence.Lucy Ann married Zachariah Delaney in St. Louis on November 16, 1849,[44] a free black man from Cincinnati, Ohio.

[49] I frequently thought of father, and wondered if he were alive or dead; and at the time of the great exodus of negroes from the South, a few years ago, a large number arrived in St. Louis, and were cared for by the colored people of that city.

I wrote to my father and begged him to come and see me and make his home with me; sent him the money, so he would be to no expense, and when he finally reached St. Louis, it was with great joy that I received him.

Old, grizzled and gray, time had dealt hardly with him, and he looked very little like the dapper master's valet, whose dark beauty won my mother's heart.She was active in women's clubs, religious organizations and charity groups.

She joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1855, founded in 1816 in Philadelphia as the first independent black denomination in the United States.

[31] The book accomplishes the following: Polly releases motherhood from its ties to 'pure womanhood's' fragility, realigning nurture with liberation.

Darkness culminates in Delaney's perpetuating her dead mother's legacy of freedom in her election to numerous civic posts, including the presidency of the 'Female Union'—the first society for African American women—and of the Daughters of Zion.She died at the Negro Masonic Home, purchased by the Freemasons for aged members and widows in 1907, in Hannibal, Missouri on August 31, 1910.

[54][55] Funeral services were held for her at the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Louis,[54] sponsored by the Heroines of Jericho.

[53] The city of St. Louis has frequently acknowledged Lucy Ann Berry's significance to local and national Black History.