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In 2016, Rachel Jamison Webster learned from a cousin that her family was related to Benjamin Banneker, a black man who was born free in Maryland in 1731 and worked as a clockmaker, almanac writer, self-taught astronomer, and surveyor of the country that became Washington , DC Perhaps most famously, Banneker challenged Thomas Jefferson by letter for his hypocrisy in asserting in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” while at the same time being an enslaver who assumed that black people were inferior be. Banneker’s grandparents are said to have been an Englishwoman named Molly, who was a white indentured servant, and an enslaved Wolof man from Senegambia named Bana’ka. Webster and her cousin are also descended from Molly and Bana’ka through Benjamin Banneker’s sister Jemima.
Webster’s years of researching, imagining, and empathizing with the history of her ancestors and descendants culminated in her stirring, often insightful, often speculative, and sometimes deeply moving, Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family. The book, her first, benefits from the voices of many black cousins she meets along the way, whose thoughts, feelings, experiences and concerns are woven into the story. It’s written as a work of “reasonable imagination,” Webster explains, as a way to “empathize” with her marginalized ancestors, whose stories were never recorded or have not survived. Banneker’s diaries burned when his cottage was set on fire by vandals on the day of his funeral, with only one volume surviving. By conveying what she imagines of his thoughts and feelings, by evoking her ancestors and bringing in the perspectives of her cousins and living family, Webster intends the book to be a “biography of Benjamin Banneker and his lineage” and to be understood as a “narrative” of sorts, reparation.” The result sits at a fine point between fact and sensitively viewed fiction, based on the minimal available records, oral histories, and the thoughts and hunches of descendants.
Webster grew up in rural Ohio in a family that celebrated Independence Day so enthusiastically that the women made elaborate colonial costumes for relatives to wear to the bicentennial celebrations. Webster rarely thought about race or her family as a white person. She only occasionally thought that her grandparents didn’t have, in the words of her cousin, the “most progressive views on race.” Her grandmother’s room had a hidden trapdoor that had been used in the days of the Underground Railroad, but when Webster became a lifeguard, her grandfather (also a descendant of the Bannekers, although he didn’t seem to know) asked “in his teasing voice” , if she were willing to administer CPR to a black man. The implication, of course, was that she didn’t want to do such a thing. Later, her Chicago Public School students were often curious about Webster’s ethnicity, in part because of her tan. When asked about it, she described herself as “Irish, English, French, Native American and Hungarian”.
But in her conversation with her cousin, she learned that census records showed that one of her ancestors, Webster’s fourth great-grandmother, was 18. Knowing Webster wanted to write about this story, her cousin pushed her, her ancestors’ decision, her lineage reject and take refuge in white privilege, highlighting and not downplaying. She does that all the time. “Whatever you do,” her cousin also warned, “don’t pretend it makes you black.” Her brother stressed the point a few years later, saying, “There’s something particularly obnoxious about a white person who right now claims to have Black ancestry, particularly a famous Black ancestor.” Her family’s reservations filled Webster with self-doubt.
Webster begins her family history with the life of Molly, Banneker’s white grandmother, to justify her own presence in her ancestral history. Webster considers that Banneker’s first biographers were also white women and decides that “Molly here in Banneker’s story must be more to us as whites than to blacks … to make us wonder if we too could act with independence and courage” in the face of laws subjugating a white woman’s children and an enslaved black man to enslavement up to the age of 30.
According to her grandchildren, Molly was sentenced to hard labor in the colonies in England after she was accused of stealing a bucket of milk that spilled when a cow knocked it over. Family history claims that Molly’s ability to read got her that Sentence that was less harsh than other possible punishments, including hanging. Webster imagines her ancestors’ work as milkmaids, the process, and their eventual contract on a Maryland plantation where Molly lives met Bana’ka, the enslaved man who became the father of her children. Webster imagines her ancestors stealing time together and falling in love.
As a reading experience, I found Molly’s life, as envisioned by Webster, to be less immersive than most of the others in the book, in part because Molly didn’t always allow for the same human contradictions and subtleties as other characters, but at times seems to become a vehicle for Webster’s didactic goals. In one scene, Webster imagines Molly struggling to get the attention of an imaginary friend, the only enslaved black woman on a plantation of indentured servants, to let her friend know that she empathizes with her predicament .
I was very attracted and touched by Webster’s portrayals of some of her other relatives – the portrayals of Benjamin and Jemima’s parents, Mary and Robert; her intricate and grand visions of Benjamin Banneker’s life; and some of the sections on Bana’ka. I liked her throwing herself into the confusion and pain and jumble of disagreements and advances with her cousin Robert, whom she met through her research. I was also happy to see her grappling with whether and how, as a white woman, she should tell the stories of her ancestors. And I admired Webster’s research into recently uncovered documents that reveal Molly repeatedly treated her children as enslaved property that liberated her. This is where Webster’s interpretation of the documents is revealing: she makes a succinct, persuasive argument that Molly did not view her family as property, but used every tool at her disposal in a racist society to ensure her freedom and emancipation. In Webster’s narrative, Molly was part of a “blended, multicultural family committed to abolition.”
As Benjamin Banneker und Wir progresses, it is often not entirely clear what is being gleaned from records, what is being passed down through family lore, what is being drawn from contemporary accounts by people in similar circumstances, what is intuitive about the time and place depicted , and what is presented. The text and endnotes provide clarity in some cases, but in many more cases it is difficult to trace the provenance. To be clear, I fully understand Webster’s fascination with the use of imagination in recreating her people, and with her view that both spiritual and experiential storytelling must be addressed the damage suffered by black ancestors like theirs before the founding of this nation. How she argues that Type of Storytelling is especially important to people whose ancestors were stolen from their land and enslaved, who are unable to trace their lineages through genealogical records, which are available to white people with colonial ancestry like myself and are so often taken for granted . Tears welled up in my eyes as I read of Webster’s visit to Banneker Land, where she sat in silence with a heron (nicknamed by Bana’ka) and contemplated all the symbolism this elegant, solitary, and fearful bird conveyed to her. Nevertheless, I would have wished that the historical narrative threads were more explicitly delimited. As I made my way through Benjamin Banneker and Us, I often thought of Dionne Ford’s stubborn, outspoken, ultimately transcendent first book, Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing, which is also interwoven with Family Research conjecture and spiritual quest, but without the murkiness of Webster’s approach.
In “Benjamin Banneker und wir” I often yearned to know whose voice I was hearing: a cousin’s guess, an account from the time, a belief from Webster? I wanted this clarity because Webster is a smart, meticulous researcher. But her slipping in and out of imaginative narratives with no clear lines threatens to undermine her erudition. I also wanted precision, because while Webster is careful to include differing perspectives and to acknowledge her privilege and status as a white woman, she is the one imagining her ancestors. She highlights a few conversations in which she and her cousin Gwen both agree that “griot stories” about plantation life and beyond prioritize feelings and are true in the sense that “the only way to survive these horrors is through spirituality and imagination was”. In asserting this truth, it seems to this reader, Webster implicitly joins the West African historians charged with remembering and telling family histories. In the end, her book raises the question of whether Webster, as a white researcher and author, can fill this role for her family.
Maud Newton is the author of Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation.
Eleven generations of an American family
By Rachel Jamison Webster
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