Benjamin Banneker and Us
Eleven Generations of an American Family
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A family reunion gives way to an unforgettable genealogical quest as relatives reconnect across lines of color, culture, and time, putting the past into urgent conversation with the present.
In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative.
Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, among them Banneker’s grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in effect in the present day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Webster (Mary Is a River) offers a stunning meditation on race, identity, and achievement. At a family reunion in 2016, Webster, who is white, discovered that she was related to Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), the African American mathematician, almanac publisher, and astronomer who helped to survey Washington, D.C. Setting out to investigate this open secret (in census records, one branch of the family had M next to their names for "mulatto"), Webster details Banneker's accomplishments, including the publication of his "fervent and eloquent" letter to Thomas Jefferson "accus the Founding Fathers of committing the most criminal act by perpetuating slavery." Webster also sketches the lives of Banneker's grandmother, Molly, an English dairymaid who was sentenced to indentured servitude in Maryland; his grandfather, Bana'ka, who was kidnapped in West Africa and enslaved; and his mother, Mary, who appears to have successfully petitioned the Maryland courts to free her eldest daughter from indentured servitude in 1731. While Webster does not shy away from the uglier aspects of this history, including the sexual exploitation of working-class and enslaved women, a sense of optimism pervades, and her expansive imagination and fluid prose bring these historical figures to life. It's an enthralling and clear-eyed celebration of America's multiracial past and present.
