Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge - Softcover

Dunbar, Erica Armstrong

 
9781501126413: Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1501126415 ISBN 13: 9781501126413
Verlag: 37 Ink, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Never Caught is the powerful story about a daring woman of “extraordinary grit” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).

When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital. In setting up his household he brought along nine slaves, including Ona Judge. As the President grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t abide: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire.

Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, she was denied freedom. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs. At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property.

“A crisp and compulsively readable feat of research and storytelling” (USA TODAY), historian and National Book Award finalist Erica Armstrong Dunbar weaves a powerful tale and offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked everything to gain freedom from the famous founding father and most powerful man in the United States at the time.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Erica Armstrong Dunbar is a historian and professor of African American studies at Emory University. Her first book was A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City. Her second book, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and a winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Award. She is also the author of She Came to Slay, an illustrated tribute to Harriet Tubman, and Susie King Taylor and is the coexecutive producer of the HBO series The Gilded Age.

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Chapter One: Betty’s Daughter One Betty’s Daughter A table lists enslaved people owned by George Washington, by his right and by marriage, with names, ages, and remarks on roles and family ties. List of slaves at Mount Vernon, 1799. Courtesy of Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
In June of 1773, the unimaginable happened: it snowed in Virginia.

During the first week of June, the typical stifling heat that almost always blanketed Virginia had not yet laid its claim on the colony. Daytime temperatures fluctuated from sultry warmth to a rainy chill during the first few days of the month. Even more peculiar yet, on June 11, it snowed. As he did most days, Colonel George Washington sat down and recorded the unusual weather, writing, “Cloudy & exceeding Cold Wind fresh from the No. West, & Snowing.” His diary went on to note, “Memorandum—Be it remembered that on the eleventh day of June in the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy three It rain’d Hail’d snow’d and was very Cold.”

The men and women who lived on George and Martha Washington’s estate must have marveled at the peculiar snow, but whatever excitement the unusual weather brought was most certainly replaced by concern. Shabby clothing and uninsulated slave cabins turned winter into long periods of dread for the enslaved men and women at Mount Vernon and across the colony of Virginia. Although the intense heat of summer brought its own difficulties, winter brought sickness, long periods of isolation, and heightened opportunities for the auction block. To exacerbate matters, the selling of slaves frequently occurred at the beginning of the year, connecting the winter month of January to a fear of deep and permanent loss. The snow in June, then, could only be a sign of very bad things to come. For the nearly 150 slaves who labored on the Mount Vernon estate in 1773, a mixture of superstition, African religious practices, and English beliefs in witchery must have intensified a sense of fear. Things that were inconsistent with nature were interpreted as bad omens, commonly bringing drought, pestilence, and death. As for what this snow portended, only time would tell.

Sure enough, eight days after the snow fell, Martha Parke Custis, daughter of Martha Washington, fell terribly ill. The stepdaughter of George Washington, just seventeen, had long struggled with a medical condition that rendered her incapable of controlling her body. Plagued by seizures that began during her teenage years, “Patsy” Custis most likely suffered from epilepsy. The early discipline of medicine was far from mature, offering few options for cures outside of bleeding and purges. Her parents had spent the last five years consulting with doctors and experimenting with unhelpful medicinal potions, diet, exercise modifications, and of course, deep prayer.

Their faith was tested on June 19 when Patsy Custis and a host of invited family members were finishing up with dinner a little after four o’clock. Although sickly, Washington’s stepdaughter had been “in better health and spirits than she appeared to have been in for some time.” After dinner and quiet conversation with family, Patsy excused herself and went to retrieve a letter from her bedroom. Eleanor Calvert, Patsy’s soon-to-be sister-in-law, went to check on the young woman and found her seizing violently on the floor. Patsy was moved to the bed, but there was very little anyone could do. Within two minutes, she was gone.

The June snow and Patsy’s death combined to create an eerie feeling of uncertainty. House slaves understood that Martha Washington would need to be handled with more care than usual, especially since this was not the first child that she had lost. Two of her toddlers had succumbed to the high childhood mortality rates of colonial Virginia, and Patsy’s death left the devastated mother with only one living child. George Washington wrote to his nephew, breaking the news of his stepdaughter’s death and his wife’s emotional distress, stating, “I scarce need add [that Patsy’s death] has almost reduced my poor Wife to the lowest ebb of Misery.” George Washington wasn’t the only one attuned to Martha’s emotional state. Slave women who worked in the Mansion House tended to the devastated Martha Washington, taking great care to respect their grieving mistress, while helping the household prepare for Patsy’s funeral.

Yet while the mistress Martha Washington wept over the loss of her daughter, a slave woman named Betty (also known as Mulatto Betty) prepared for an arrival of her own. Born sometime around 1738, Betty was a dower slave; that is, she was “property” owned by Martha Washington’s first husband, Daniel Parke Custis. As a seamstress and expert spinner who was among Mrs. Washington’s favored slaves, the bondwoman had a long history with her mistress, one that predated the relationship between Colonel Washington and his wife and one that had seen Martha endure great heartbreak. In 1757 Betty watched her mistress survive the sudden loss of her first husband, followed by the death of her four-year-old daughter, Frances. She also watched Martha reemerge from sorrow’s clutch. Betty continued to spin and sew as her mistress took control of the family business, which included six plantations and close to three hundred slaves that fed Virginia’s tobacco economy. With the death of her husband, Martha Parke Custis stood in control of over 17,500 acres of land, making her one of the wealthiest widows in the colony of Virginia, if not throughout the entire Chesapeake.

Before her move to Mount Vernon, Betty worked in the Custis home known as the White House on the Pamunkey River in New Kent County, Virginia. Two years after the death of her owner, Betty learned that her mistress was to remarry. She most likely received the news of her mistress’s impending second marriage with great wariness as word spread that Martha Custis’s intended was Colonel George Washington. The colonel was a fairly prominent landowner with a respectable career as a military officer and an elected member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. His marriage to the widowed Martha Custis would offer him instant wealth and the stability of a wife and family that had eluded him. For her part, the young widow had managed to secure a surrogate father to help raise her two living children. She had also found a partner with whom she could spend the rest of her days. Nevertheless, a huge yet necessary transition awaited Martha Custis as she prepared to marry and move to the Mount Vernon estate, nearly one hundred miles away.

For Betty, as well as the hundreds of other slaves that belonged to the Custis estate, the death of their previous owner and Martha’s marriage to George Washington was a reminder of their vulnerability. It was often after the death of an owner that slaves were sold to remedy the debts held by an estate. Betty and all those enslaved at New Kent had no idea what kind of financial transactions would transpire, which families would be split apart, never to be united again. For enslaved women, the moral character of the new owner was also a serious concern. When George and Martha Washington married in January of 1759, Betty was approximately twenty-one years old and considered to be in the prime of her reproductive years. She was unfamiliar with her new master’s preferences, or more importantly, if...

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Verlag
37 Ink
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1501126415
ISBN 13 
9781501126413
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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