Benjamin Banneker and Us by Rachel Jamison Webster

Author:Rachel Jamison Webster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER 22

Toward the Setting Sun

Pasadena, California, and Evanston, Illinois, December 2020

“I REMEMBER BEING very young at a family reunion,” Robert began, “and my dad lifting me up onto his shoulders and saying, ‘Now, the old-timers are going to tell the story of the beginning of our family.’”

I was out for a quick walk, listening to Robert’s warm, nostalgic voice on the phone. He had told me this story before, but the details changed a bit each time. Robert was the only one of us who had grown up going to Lett reunions and who had heard these stories as a child.

“This very old man walked out,” Robert said. “He sat in a cane-back rocking chair and wore a caned hat, and he was smoking a pipe. ‘They turned their faces toward the setting sun,’ the elder began, ‘and decided to go West for better opportunities.’ And then he would tell the story of these families. They were the Calimans, the Guys…’”

“And the Simpsons?” I asked. These were the free families of color who had lived in community in Frederick and then migrated together to Ohio.

“Yes, the Simpsons and the Tates and the Earleys. That was funny, because the Earleys were the last to come to Ohio, so we always laughed that the Earleys came late.”

I smiled. I could picture Robert’s grandmother telling him that as a little boy.

“Then the elder would say a prayer and thank God for the riches that had been bestowed upon our family. And I’d kind of peek up through my bowed head and try to figure out who there was rich? Who had the family money?”

I laughed with him.

“Now from the perspective of someone who just turned seventy, I realize that the riches were the opportunities we have been given as a family. It is the fact that we can document our history, and the fact that our history is one we can treasure.

“These ancestors had opportunity,” Robert went on. “The Lett group, and those they married, all had opportunities. They had been indentured people, some had been enslaved, some had become free people, and some had risen to the level where they were able to vote. Voting rights were tied to landownership then. Unless things were specifically spelled out otherwise, anyone who was a landowner could vote. So we had all of those things in our tradition—landownership, voting rights, and educational training.

“But after the Revolution, the ancestors saw the Freedmen Codes being instituted in the area and realized how those were going to limit their rights. At the same time, colonization societies were rising up and trying to round up aging Black folks to ship them out of the country. This was how Liberia was founded, by the American Colonization Society of white people who wanted to take African Americans back to Africa. Maryland had its own colony in Liberia, called the Maryland State Colonization Society of Africa.

“And this is interesting,” Robert continued. “John Latrobe—you know, the guy who read Benjamin Banneker’s history aloud before the Maryland Historical Society? He was the president of the Maryland Colonization Society.

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