A little earlier this year, I read a book recommended by a friend: author Rachel Webster’s Benjamin Banneker and Us. Part biography, part genealogy, part memoir, Webster has crafted a heavily researched, deeply felt account of one extended American family’s efforts to come to terms with nearly a dozen generations of racism, sexism, and classism. My friend is a collateral descendant of Benjamin Banneker, an early American mathematician, intellectual, and author. Benjamin Banneker, born in 1731, was widely revered in his time. In the classifications of the day, he was considered a free colored man. During the 1790’s, Banneker helped survey the land that became Washington, D.C. He also published several widely read almanacs. He died in 1806, leaving no children, but multiple sisters, nieces, and nephews. Banneker owned a farm in the vicinity of Ellicott City, Maryland that has since become a park and memorial. Because Banneker was free and so widely known, researchers of his lineage can delve much further back than is possible for most African-Americans.
One set of Banneker’s grandparents met around 1680 in what later became the state of Maryland. Molly was a British woman serving a term as an indentured servant; Bana’ka was an African man of Wolof heritage who had been brought across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery. It’s not entirely clear how their relationship developed, but Molly and Bana’ka both obtained their freedom and had four daughters together in a tumultuous era when chattel slavery had not yet become fully fixed by law and marriage rules were confused. Their eldest daughter, Mary, fairly late in life became the free mother of Benjamin.
Rachel Webster had always been told she was “white,” until a chance conversation at a family wedding in 2016 opened up a Banneker connection. Webster and her cousins have done lots of genealogical research. They’ve used increasingly available DNA testing, public records, and oral traditions passed down mainly through the black-identifying cousins of the family to identify over 20,000 Banneker-Lett descendants, all but one of whom have at least some traceable European or “white” ancestry.
The book shifts back and forth between the historical facts and ambiguities of the Banneker-Lett lineage and the extended efforts Rachel makes to learn how and where she fits into this newly expanded version of her family. Some of her ancestors must have at some point decided to “pass” as white. Webster and many of her cousins on all sides of an increasingly blurry “color line” have mixed emotions about the complexities of the family’s story. Who constitutes “us” is rarely as simple as we think.
Those of us who’ve been told we are “white” still struggle with our heritage. Our cousinships are typically murkier and less well documented than Rachel Webster’s. We wonder how to go about celebrating Juneteenth, a recently established Federal holiday commemorating June 19, 1865, when U.S. Major General Gordon Granger, recently arrived with his troops in the area of Galveston, Texas, issued “General Order Number 3.” The order reads, in part:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves…”
Somewhat less cause for celebration, the order goes on to say:
…and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
It can take a very long time for the knowledge that none of us are free unless we all are free to enter our intellectual understanding. It can take even longer for this knowledge to move from head to heart. Some of our current debates surrounding race, sex, and class are not so different from those of Banneker’s day or from the mixed messages in General Order Number 3.
Still, as one of my brothers sometimes reminds me, “We are all human.” Please let’s expand our understanding, delving beyond labels, working for adequate wages, sharing in loving homes, enjoying full equality of personal rights while respecting those rights in others. Whatever our supposed racial identity, that will truly be cause for celebration!
Jinny's Occasional Poems 