Benjamin Banneker and Us

October 1, 2022

In The Long Reckoning, award-winning investigative journalist Black (The Good Neighbor) chronicles the efforts of U.S. veterans, scientists, and pacifists and their Vietnamese partners to compel the U.S. government to acknowledge the ongoing damage done by unexploded munitions and the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, particularly in the demilitarized zone. From notable U.S.-based Dutch writer/editor Buruma (The Churchill Complex), The Collaborators examines three figures seen as either heroes or traitors during World War II: Hasidic Jew Friedrich Weinreb, who took money to save fellow Jews but betrayed some of them to the Gestapo; Manchu princess Kawashima Yoshiko, who spied for the Japanese secret police in China; and masseur Felix Kersten, who claimed to have talked Himmler out of killing thousands. Oxford associate professor Healey's The Blazing World portrays 17th-century England as a turbulent society undergoing revolutionary change. A professor of politics and global health at Queen Mary University of London, Kennedy argues in Pathogenesis that it was not human guts and ingenuity but the power of disease-delivering microbes that has driven human history, from the end of the Neanderthals to the rise of Christianity and Islam to the deadly consequences of European colonialism (75,000-copy first printing). Continuing in the vein of his New York Times best-selling The Princess Spy, Loftis introduces us to Corrie ten Boom, The Watchmaker's Daughter, who helped her family hide Jews and refugees from the Gestapo during World War II (100,000-copy first printing). Mar's Seventy Times Seven chronicles Black 15-year-old Paula Cooper's murder of septuagenarian white woman Ruth Pelke in a violent home invasion in 1985 Gary, IN; her subsequent death sentence; and what happened when Pelke's grandson forgave her. Journalist/consultant Roberts fully reveals the Untold Power of Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, who effectively acted as president when her husband was incapacitated. A best seller in the UK when it was published in 2021, Sanghera's Empireland--an exploration of the legacy of British imperialism in the contemporary world--has been contextualized for U.S. audiences and carries an introduction by Marlon James. In Benjamin Banneker and Us, Webster explores the life of her forbear, the Black mathematician and almanac writer who surveyed Washington, DC, for Thomas Jefferson, and his descendants to highlight how structural racism continues to shape our understanding of lineage and family.

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Starred review from January 30, 2023
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.

Starred review from February 1, 2023
Discovery of her "lost" African American ancestry set white poet Webster on an unexpected path. She spent years immersed in archival research and in extensive conversations with her newly found Black cousins who had gathered documents and oral histories tracing their connections to the extraordinary mathematician, naturalist, astronomer, writer, and freedom fighter Benjamin Banneker. A free man of color, Banneker created best-selling almanacs and was hired by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to help survey Washington, DC. Webster writes candidly about her white privilege in telling this story and her decision to give voice to the "thoughts and feelings" of her ancestors in sections based on "grounded imagination" that bring spare genealogical and historical facts to intimate, vivid life. This complexly involving chronicle of revelations and conscience begins with a young English indentured servant, Molly, who was exiled to the colony of Maryland in 1686. She eventually married an enslaved African man, Bana'ka. Their oldest daughter, Mary, a healer and herbalist, had five children, including Benjamin and Jemima, Webster's direct ancestor. Drawing on her acute sensitivity to language and bias, sharing long discussions with her cousins, and meshing their family history with the brutal realities of Banneker's time, Webster has created an engrossing, multifaceted, profoundly thoughtful, and beautifully rendered inquiry that forms a clarifying lens on America's ongoing struggles against racism and endemic injustice.

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