remembering Stephanie Tubbs Jones & Fannie Lou Hamer

I am most grateful for the voice of Stephanie Tubbs Jones. Despite mainstream opinion, her voice and life is especially important to this country because it spoke for the voices of many Ohio voters who were disenfranchised in 2004 by Jack O'Dell who promised to "deliver" Ohio's votes to the then president. This was comparable to the election fiasco of 2000 in Florida. But it only happened with the complicity of the national Democratic Party. As we approach the eve of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, let us remember the voice of Stephanie Tubbs Jones who was continuing the loud, strong voice of Fannie Lou Hamer when she challenged voter disenfranchisement and intimidation. Below is an excerpt of a manuscript I wrote reminding us of the long line that Ms. Hamer is part of, that Ms. Tubbs Jones is part of. We shall not be moved. -RF.

Excerpt of "A Surviving Legacy," Copyright © 2007 by Rhone Fraser. All Rights Reserved.

There have been two significant Congressional Challenges that indicate a surviving legacy of resistance in the Congressional Black Caucus: one by Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray-Adams, and Annie Devine in 1965 and one by U.S. Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones forty years later in 2005. These Congressional Challenges are significant for two main reasons: both involved black women with similar socioeconomic backgrounds, and both challenged voting disenfranchisement specifically.

There are many interesting similarities between Fannie Lou Hamer, who led her small Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation one day to the U.S. House to lobby for a challenge and Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, who was already a U.S. Representative when she challenged. Both women are first generation political activists. Fannie Lou Hamer was a Mississippi sharecropper whose parents were also sharecroppers who lived in an overtly racist Mississippi society that denied their family living wage. Chana Kai Lee, a biographer of Fannie Lou Hamer writes of her family:

“Sometime between 1928 and 1929, James Lee Townsend [Hamer’s father] and his family momentarily broke the cycle of perpetual indebtedness and cleared enough to purchase their own wagons, cultivators, plows, and even livestock—three mules (Ella, Bird, and Henry) and two cows (Mullen and Della). Evidence of the Townsends’ upward mobility was no secret to the members of the community, including its white members. Late one evening a white man sneaked up to their animal trough and poured into the stock feed a gallon of poison known as Paris green [killing all their animals]…the poisoning dashed any hopes the family had of achieving self-sufficiency…Life became increasingly difficult after this tragedy…Fannie Lou had to drop out of school at the end of the sixth grade and began full-time, year-round fieldwork to help her family survive. In spite of the tragedy, according to Hamer, the Townsends mended their spirits and continued on, but all was not forgotten in her heart. She remembered, ‘I watched them [her parents] suffer and I got angry.’”[i]

Like Hamer, Stephanie Tubbs-Jones also grew up in the working class affected. She says: “my dad was a skycap for United Airlines and my mom was a factory worker for American Greetings. I came from a working class family." Political scientist Richard Fenno wrote that the family in which Stephanie Tubbs-Jones grew up “did not know poverty but they knew discrimination:

My mother had a two-year teaching degree from Alabama State, came here [in Ohio], and couldn’t get a chance to teach, worked in a factory or wherever she could get work…My father retired after thirty years of carrying bags for United Airlines, because at the age of sixty four, he could not stand one more person calling him ‘boy.’”[ii]

The similarities between the upbringing of Fannie Lou Hamer and Stephanie Tubbs-Jones provide backgrounds to their ambitions to challenge the Congressional seating of candidates in 1965 and 2005. Both brought legitimate cases of voter disenfranchisement after being raised in a family that had experienced racism, as all African-Americans at that time had. In 1965, Fannie Lou Hamer along with Victoria Gray-Adams and Annie Devine ran to become U.S. Representatives from their districts. However, they lost in the 1964 national election due to a case of what they believed was voter disenfranchisement. Less than two months later, they traveled to Washington, D.C. to present documented evidence of voter disenfranchisement along with the actual legal documents that proved that racial discrimination at the polls was an infraction of the law. On January 4, 1965, they approached U.S. Representative William F. Ryan, asking him in his role as a U.S. Representative to challenge the seating of the five white male U.S. Representatives that were voted for in an election that they claimed discriminated against blacks. William Ryan, agreed, challenged their being given the oath. After successfully lobbying U.S. Representative William F. Ryan, the MFDP then proceeded to inform the public about this Congressional Challenge.
The decision to make a concerted effort to inform the public about this Congressional Challenge follows Gene Sharp’s nine step framework of nonviolent activism. It is the third step of the nine step framework, after first having an investigation of alleged grievances and second having stating the desired changes. The investigation of alleged grievances was documented in 1964 by COFO, the Council of Federated Organizations. In a three day period in Mississippi, COFO totaled these events: June 21 in Brandon: Molotov cocktail explodes in basement of Sweet Rest Church of Christ Holiness; McComb: homes of two civil rights workers planning to house summer volunteers bombed; Meridian: three civil rights workers [Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney] missing after a short trip to Philadelphia; Clarksdale: four volunteers arrested on vagrancy charges while engaged in voter registration work; Brandon: negro youth killed in a hit-and-run accident; Jackson: shots fired at the home of Reverend R.L.T. Smith; Moss Point: Knights of Pythias Hall [has been] firebombed; Jackson: white car fires shot at Henderson’s café; three shots fired, hitting one Negro in the head twice; Ruleville: Look and Time reporters who are covering a voter rally at Williams Chapel are chased out of town by a car [and] early next morning, nine Negro homes [are] hit by bottles thrown from a similar car…[In 1964], the summer’s statistics were staggering: six killed, eighty beaten, one thousand arrested, thirty seven black churches and thirty one black homes burned or dynamited.”[iii] This completes Sharp’s first step. Sharp’s second step of formulating a statement of desired changes was made clear in their publicized ambition to unseat the U.S Representatives from Mississippi. Their work followed the fourth step of Sharp’s framework which is a distinct effort at negotiation, through personal meetings and letters, as well as a clarification of minimum demands, the fifth step, which for MFDP became the demand to have a vote on whether to seat and whether to unseat these Mississippi congressmen. This campaign included significant protest element, with numerous arrests in Jackson of people showing their support for the MFDP. The MFDP also went to great lengths to publicize the voter disenfranchisement of their fellow Mississippians by demanding that the House clerk Ralph Roberts print thousands of pages of testimonies of Mississippi voters about their experience. Roberts at first refused saying that the documents were not properly certified, however he eventually relented and gave three 1,000 page volumes of these testimonies to the speaker of the U.S. House.[iv]
Despite the MFDP’s adherence to a nonviolent activist framework that included not only the persuasion phase but a protest phase as well, these white male Representatives from Mississippi were still seated on a technicality and that year, the U.S. House officially dismissed Hamer’s Congressional Challenge, citing that the 1965 Voting Rights Act that was passed a month prior to the formal challenge and henceforth offered sufficient voter protection.[v] Kay Mills writes that the Democratic Party, like the rest of the Congress in 1965, seemed much more inclined to prohibit future discrimination rather than act against past discrimination, especially when it members feared the precedent that ousting the Mississippi representatives might set. This proved a pattern of white racist oppression not only during the 1964 presidential election in Mississippi, but a pattern that lasted throughout the entire year of 1964, extensively recorded by the umbrella organization of all civil rights groups, COFO (Council of Federated Organizations), and retold by Eric Burner. It was this pattern to which the MFDP sought to bring national attention. The MFDP was organized to bring this kind of white racist oppression to national attention and create a legal basis for mounting their Congressional Challenge in January of 1965.
On January 6, 2005, Stephanie Tubbs-Jones released a press statement about 2005 Congressional Challenge that protesting Bush’s receipt of the Ohio’s electoral votes after the 2004 presidential election, saying that she “object[s] to the counting of the electoral votes of the State of Ohio on the ground that they were not, under all the known circumstances regularly given.” This challenge was meant to protest the results of the 2004 presidential election and contains incidents of voter intimidation that were certainly less brutal yet undeniably effective when compared to the voter intimidation and disenfranchisement that existed during the 1964 presidential election. In this press statement, Tubbs-Jones writes:
I thank God that I have a Senator [Boxer] joining me in this objection. It is imperative that we object to the counting of Ohio’s electorate votes…poor and minority communities had disproportionately long waits—4 to 5 hours waits were widespread. Election Protection Coalition testified that more than half of the complaints about long lines they received “came from Columbus and Cleveland where a huge proportion of the state’s Democratic voters live. One entire polling place in Cuyahoga County (Greater Cleveland) had to “shut down” at 9:25 a.m. on Election Day, because there were no working machines…the Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell who served as co-Chair of the Bush re-election campaign, issued a bizarre series of directives in the days preceding the 2004 presidential election that created a tremendous confusion among voters in Cuyahoga county and across the state of Ohio. For example, [he] issued a bizarre series of directives local boards of elections mandating rejection of voter registration forms based on their paperweight—80 pound text weight. Mr. Blackwell’s issuance of this directive—which he ultimately reversed by September 28, 2004, resulted in serious confusion and chaos among the counties and voters. My objection points to the need to implement across this nation standards that apply to all states. We need to enact legislation that will: allow all voters to vote early so that obligations of employment and family will not interfere with the ability to cast a vote. [We need to enact legislation that will] provide equipment—whether it is the traditional punch card or the more modern electronic machines that are properly calibrated, fully tested for accuracy and provide a paper trail to ensure a verifiable audit of every vote.[vi]

The demands that Stephanie Tubbs-Jones calls for in her role as U.S. Representative are undoubtedly at the end of a long line of nonviolence, of which Fannie Lou Hamer’s 1965 Congressional Challenge is a part. Both Congressional Challenges ironically and symbolically, depended on the consciences of white U.S. Congresspersons: Ms. Hamer’s depended on William F. Ryan, and Ms. Tubbs-Jones’ challenge depended on U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer. In 2000 however, no U.S. Senator was willing to sign to formally allow a debate about the delegates. Barbara Boxer admits to being asked by Al Gore not sign to allow a debate in 2000 and expresses regret that she followed that request. However in 2004, U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer allowed the official challenge to be debated. Like the 2000 presidential election, the electoral college results of the 2004 presidential election centered around one state: Ohio. After Stephanie Tubbs Jones brought the debate to the House floor, the decision to still grant the Ohio delegates to Bush was still made after a formal re-counting ceremony where Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hosted and Dick Cheney attended.
The congressional office of John Conyers has prepared a report on the presidential election results in Ohio entitled What Went Wrong In Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election. This report exposes striking similarities between the purveyors or executors of Jim Crow disenfranchisement in 2004 and disenfranchisement during 1965 in Mississippi. In 1965 those who carried out the most disenfranchisement were the local police officers, the election circuit clerks, and the local judges. In 2004 in Ohio there are two main executors of Jim Crow disenfranchisement: the voting machine companies and Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who also happened to work for the Bush/Cheney campaign in 2004. According to the Conyers report, “there was a wide discrepancy [in Ohio] between the availability of voting machines in heavily Minority, Democratic and urban as compared to heavily Republican, suburban and exurban areas.”[vii] The programming software for many voting machines was provided by Diebold whose CEO, Walden O’Dell is a member of George W. Bush’s Pioneer and Ranger team, and has visited the Crawford ranch and wrote a letter promising to deliver the electoral votes of Ohio.[viii] Not only does this speak to voter disenfranchisement via voting machine programming, it also speaks to the media spectacle or circus of the presidential “election.” When a CEO guarantees to deliver a state’s entire electoral college votes to a president, the aspects of presidential elections, that seem to actually be publicity campaigns giving the impression that the U.S. is a real democracy, are then raised. Another voting machine company employed whose machines were notorious for having its votes easily manipulated is Triad GSI. Triad is controlled by the Rapp family and its founder Brett A. Rapp has been a consistent contributor to the Republican causes; an affiliate of this group supplied the notorious butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election.[ix] Through these corporations’ desires for infinite profit, they continue the Jim Crow voter discrimination that disenfranchised tens of thousands of black voters in Mississippi. Former Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell also functioned to continue Jim Crow discrimination in 2004. As Tubbs-Jones, stated, he ordered outrageous directives or binding regulations that made the vote count process more difficult for Ohio county supervisors. His directive to that voter registration forms be printed on 80 pound paper was one that Blackwell himself did not even follow. In addition, Blackwell on election day of 2004 issued Republican poll challengers who caused long delays and long waits in voting lines. These poll challengers had the legal right to investigate vote counting procedures at their will. However according to the Conyers report: “two federal district court judges…found the challenge procedure to be problematic and tantamount to voter disenfranchisement. In one lawsuit, the plaintiffs were Donald and Marian Spencer, an elderly African American couple who alleged that the challenge statute hearkened back to Jim Crow disenfranchisement.”[x]
Ms. Hamer’s challenge calling for the seating of the U.S. Representatives was dismissed on the grounds of a law that was passed months after the disenfranchisement while Ms. Tubbs-Jones challenge that called for a simple debate, was just that: a debate, with Ohio’s electoral votes still going to Bush. What Ms. Hamer’s challenge represented, however, is the uncompromising political stance in support of the voting rights and the rights of those in poorer socioeconomic classes to make a living. What Ms. Tubbs-Jones challenge has represented is the way that the struggle to end voter disenfranchisement continues, with those who insist on using a nonviolent method to try and win that struggle, not only as a legislator, but as a challenger.
Richard Fenno characterizes Stephanie Tubbs-Jones and other CBC members Louis Stokes and Chaka Fattah in a similar way: “the [Congressional] voting records of Stokes, Fattah, and Tubbs Jones track closely with one another and with the voting records of their fellow African Americans from northern urban centers. For them, the core socioeconomic agenda, to alleviate poverty, unemployment, and discrimination and to promote health care, housing, and education—is dominant, settled, and noncontroversial.”[xi] Noncontroversial is exactly how Ms. Hamer fought for civil rights. Voting rights in her mind and on many policy issues is a noncontroversial issue: you are either for it or against it. Without the activism of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, that forced the Democratic party on a national level to begin to integrate their convention delegations, and eventually their party’s state and national representatives, African-Americans probably would not have become U.S Representatives in the mass numbers they had. From another perspective, Stephanie Tubbs-Jones is the fulfillment of Fannie Lou Hamer’s activism. She is the reason Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray-Adams, and Annie Devine traveled to Washington, D.C.—not only to represent fellow Mississippians but to expose the racist political system to the entire nation during a national broadcast, of her dramatic testimony at the 1964 Democratic credentials committee, of her being beaten for helping other blacks register to vote. After the broadcast, President Johnson received thousands of letters and from that moment, Mississippi as well as other southern states included more black delegates. However Stokely Carmichael also suggests that were it not for Fannie Lou Hamer’s presence in Washington, clamoring for her Congressional Challenge to be heard, the Voting Rights Act, passed in August of 1965.
Perhaps the most significant difference between the MFDP and the CBC is related to their longevity. Robert Moses who conceived the idea of the MFDP noted that he never meant for it to last longer than its struggle against the Johnson administration. As opposed to the one presidential administration that the MFDP confronted, the CBC has experienced remarkable longevity after confronting the Ford, Carter, Reagan, First Bush, Clinton, and Second Bush administration. Each presidential administration in its own way, like the Johnson Administration has expressed in their behavior or through their public statements “paternalistic and condescending” views towards the CBC. With Nixon, it was ignoring the CBC for twelve months, after which time Nixon agreed to meet with them only after being implored to do so by then U.S. Senator Edward Brooke, the lone African American Republican in the Senate. With Ford, it was defending the insensitive remarks by vice president Spiro T. Agnew who stated that black leaders in America could “learn much” from Jomo Kenyatta, Haile Selassie and Joseph Mobutu who were, to a significant degree, dictatorial leaders in Africa.[xii] With Carter and Reagan it was their intransigence against making a federal Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday; William Clay writes that “it took fifteen arduous years to realize the dream of establishing a national holiday celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King. [John] Conyers efforts were stymied in four successive presidential administrations: those of Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan. Three of the presidents openly opposed the bill. The other, Jimmy Carter, was much more subtle but equally effective in blocking its passage. His hidden agenda was more detrimental than the others because it was less known but, in effect, just as callous.”[xiii]
The first Bush administration exposed their white racism and their condescending attitude toward blacks in their use of Willie Horton as the quintessential violent man in their political ads. The icon of the criminal Willie Horton was used to imply that Bush’s democratic opponent was soft on crime and would consequently let more criminals like Horton commit crimes. This ultimately scared many Americans into voting for Bush at the beginning of the 1990s. Joe Feagin, Hernan Vera, and Pinar Batur write that between 1988 and 1993, no fewer than 148 speeches or extensions of remarks in the Congressional Record, many of them by CBC members, contained references to the Horton ads.[xiv] These comments expressed disappointment at the way Bush was using a stereotype of the black criminal to win votes. With Clinton, Feagin, Vera, and Batur write that his actions regarding two talented black women, Sister Souljah and Lani Guinier, reveal a president who often pays more heed to the racial concerns of the majority of white Americans than to the desires for empowerment of the majority of African Americans. In both cases, he took the side of the mainstream media in attacking misrepresentations of both Souljah and Guinier. With Souljah, Clinton supported the notion of the mainstream media that Souljah herself advocated killing whites, based on a quote that was taken out of context; Souljah was not expressing her personal point of view but was attempting to justify the killings of whites by blacks during the Los Angeles riots. With Guinier, Clinton declined from defending her from attacks by conservatives who called her a “quota queen.” These relentless public attacks that went unchecked or unaddressed by Clinton created an upset CBC, which he satiated to some degree by appointing Dr. Mary Frances Berry as chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by 1996. In the second Bush administration, the CBC has witnessed the very deliberate packing of the commission by the administration with very conservative ideologues such as Peter Kirsanow and Gerald Reynolds who announced that racial discrimination does not exist anymore. This dismantling not only saw the withdrawal of Berry but also the staggering decrease of funding the commission has received, which has rendered its work all but ineffective. Feagin, Vera and Batur writes that white racism is a centuries-old system intentionally designed to exclude Americans of color from full participation in the economy, polity, and society; it is a system of oppression of African Americans and other people of color by white Europeans and white Americans.[xv] The longevity of the CBC despite the exercise of white racist power by several presidential administrations is a testament to the power of its very critical cohesiveness. The CBC is more likely to act as a cohesive body when the president and the CBC do not share the same policy initiatives, usually during Republican administrations.[xvi] The function of this cohesive body is crucial to political representation of African Americans. The research of Charles E. Jones in 1980 has argued that the CBC is most cohesive on social issues such as civil rights, education, benefits, health, housing, and law and order issues.[xvii] Jones adds that “a prolonged and insidious history of dehumanizing discrimination has resulted in the feeling of a shard history and the recognition, among most black elected officials, of the need to undertake extra representational responsibilities.”[xviii] However several members of the CBC today can still stand to learn the lessons that those in the MFDP taught, in terms of refusing to compromise. The Johnson administration, in the presentation of its “compromise,” functions a lot like the corporate lobby in the U.S. House today in its ambition to persuade party members to make political choices that undoubtedly oppress those Americans in the lowest socioeconomic classes. Writer Glen Ford has reported in April 2005 that the corporate lobbying of the U.S. House during the Bush administration has been one of the most historic threats to cohesiveness of the Congressional Black Caucus. Three climactic bills during this month were passed that were corporation-friendly bills but had detrimental effects on the lowest socioeconomic classes of Americans. The surprising support or votes for these bills signaled for Glen Ford “a cataclysmic collapse of African American electoral leadership, to which progressive blacks within and outside the Caucus must respond—or be rendered irrelevant by their own inaction.” The collapse can be seen as cataclysmic particularly because fifteen of the CBC’s then 43 members, over one third of the caucus, voted for the detrimental April 2005 bills. These three bills: the bankruptcy bill, the estate tax bill, and the energy bill were detrimental in their own specific way. The bankruptcy bill puts limits on the ability to file for bankruptcy, which allows more venues for creditors to harass those in the working class. The Estate tax bill passed in April of 2005 repealed the estate tax, so the riches billionaires and millionares can have the luxury of another tax break. The Energy bill makes it tougher to block offshore oil drilling and shields oil companies from costly lawsuits. Of the fifteen CBC members that voted for one or more of these bills, U.S. Representatives William Jefferson, Sanford Bishop, David Scott, and Albert Wynn voted for all three of these detrimental bills. Their vote indicates the success of what Thom Hartmann calls the “corporatocracy” that in their drive for infinite profit will ultimately erode the ability of the middle class to be able to maintain a living. This is why this thesis has focused on the work of select U.S. Representatives such as Barbara Lee, Chaka Fattah, Maxine Waters, John Conyers, Charlie Rangel, and Stephanie Tubbs-Jones because it aims to celebrate the resistance against neoconservative and neoliberal policies that have attempted to reverse the gains made by the civil rights movement.
[i] Lee, Chana Kai. For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998:15
[ii] Fenno, Richard F. Going Home: Black Representatives and Their Constituents. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003: 192.
[iii] Burner, Eric. And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi. New York: New York University Press, 1994: pages 163-164, 168.
[iv] Mills, Kay, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. New York: Dutton, 1993: page 162.
[v] Mills, Kay, page 171
[vi] Tubbs-Jones, Stephanie. “Congresswoman Tubbs Jones Objects to Certification of Ohio’s Electoral Votes,” Press Release, January 6, 2005. http://www.house.gov/tubbsjones
[vii] The Conyers Report on the 2004 election, page 18.
[viii] The Conyers Report on the 2004 election, page 59.
[ix] The Conyers Report on the 2004 election, page 82..
[x] The Conyers Report on the 2004 election, pages 30, 31, 38.
[xi] Fenno, Richard F. Going Home: Black Representatives and Their Constituents. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003: page 220.
[xii] Clay, Wililam. Just Permanent Interests: Black Americans in Congress 1870-1992. New York: Amistad (HarperCollins), 1993: page 181.
[xiii] Clay, page 98.
[xiv] Feagin, Joe. White Racism: The Basics. page 171.
[xv] Feagin, White Racism, pages 2-3.
[xvi] Neil Pinney and George Serra. “The Congressional Black Caucus and Vote Cohesion: Placing the Caucus Within House Voting Patterns” Political Research Quarterly. 52:3 (September 1999): 603.
[xvii] Charles E. Jones. “United We Stand, Divided We Fall: An Analysis of the Congressional Black Caucus’ Voting Behavior, 1975-1980.” Phylon 48:1 (1987): 32, 27.
[xviii] Charles E. Jones. “United We Stand, Divided We Fall: An Analysis of the Congressional Black Caucus’ Voting Behavior, 1975-1980.” Phylon 48:1 (1987): 32, 27.

Fighting Great Aunt Cuney: An Appreciation for Paule Marshall's "Praisesong For the Widow"

I have been warned in my life about huge disappointments (Ruth in Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun says "sometimes life can be a barrel of disappointments") and one of the things I have been told that really, really comforts me is the fact that sometimes, some people will fight and fight and fight against their heritage, their history, their truth. This is beautifully captured in the character of Avatara (Avey) Johnson in Paule Marshall's 1983 novel and masterpiece, Praisesong For the Widow. This novel is about one woman's journey, one woman's mission to learn about her history & heritage in the face of a decadent, tempting Western culture that seems to deny or belittle such history & heritage. When I got sad about the disappointments I was warned about, I think about how hard Avey Johnson fought her Great Aunt Cuney when visiting the town where she spent her summers as a child, Tatem, South Carolina. In the following excerpt of the novel, Marshall presents the conflict from which Avey suffers: a longing to respect her childhood past and the African past that her Great Aunt Cuney taught her and a longing to ascribe to upper middle class American values that essentially teaches her to shun her African heritage. This conflict manifests itself in a huge physical fist fight between Avey and her Great Aunt Cuney when Avey imagines her deceased Great Aunt while walking on the same Landing she spent her summers in Tatem. Thinking about this physical fight comforts me because it brings to mind the ways that all of us will fight to death the truth of the heritage that we cannot deny. It's comforting, sometimes funny, the way we can try and beat and beat and beat the truth in front of our faces, all to a futile end. In the following excerpt, Marshall writes about this conflict all people of African descent confront on this side of the Atlantic at some time:

Did she [Aunt Cuney] really expect her to go walking over to the landing dressed as she was? In the new spring suit she had just put on to wear to the annual luncheon at the Statler given by Jerome Johnson's lodge (He was outside the house this minute waiting for her in the car). With her hat and gloves on? And her fur draped over her arm? Avey Johnson could have laughed, the idea was so ridiculous. That obstacle course of scrub, rock and rough grass leading down from the cotton field would make quick work for her stockings, and the open toed patent-leather pumps she was wearing for the first time would never survive that mud flat which had once been a rice field...From a distance of perhaps thirty feet, the old woman [Aunt Cuney] continued to wave her forward, her gesture exhibiting a patience and restraint that was unlike her. And she was strangely silent, standing there framed by the moss-hung wood; her voice, unlike her body, had apparently not been able to outfox the grave [this "outfox the grave" is an expression that would appear twenty years after this novel was published Toni Morrison's Love]...A battle, she sensed, had been joined. They remained like this for the longest time, until finally, the old woman, glancing anxiously at the declining sun, abruptly changed her tactics. Her hand dropped and, reaching out with her arms, she began coaxing her foward, gently urging her, the way a mother would a one-eyar-old who hangs back from walking on its own...Moreover, in instilling the story of the Ibos in her child's mind, the old woman had entrusted her with a mission she couldn't even name yet had felt duty-bound to fulfill. It had taken her years to rid herself of the notion. Suddenly Avey Johnson drew herself up to her full height, which equaled that of the tall figure up the road. The whole ridiculous business had gone on long enough. She was leaving. Let the old woman think what she will! Reaching over, she straightened the fur stole on her left arm, took a deep defiant breath, and was about to turn and walk away when a sudden eruption of movement up ahead caused her to stop, confused, in her tracks. Before she could take in what was happening, or think to complete the turn and run, she saw her great-aunt charging toward her over the thirty feet between them like one of those August storms she remembered would whirl up without warning out of the marshes around Tatem to rampage out of the land. In seconds a hand with the feel of a manacle had closed around her wrist, and she found herself being dragged forward in the direction of the Landing...she was raising her free hand, the fist tightly clenched, and bringing it down with all her force on the old woman. Wildly she rained blows on her face, her neck, her shoulders, and her great fallen breasts--striking flesh that had been too awesome for her to even touch as a child. Her great-aunt did not hesitate to hit her back, and with the same if not greater force. While firmly holding her wrist with one hand, she began trading Avey Johnson blow for blow with the other. Moreover, as if the fallen stole had also triggered a kind of madness in her, she began tearing at the spring suit, the silk blouse, the gloves. The tug-of-war was suddenly a bruising fist fight, which Avey Johnson saw to her horror, glancing around, had brought her neighbors in North White Plains out on their lawns [here Marshall is beautifully dramatizing the conflict in Avey by having her imagine this fight is being seen by her neighbors, in order to justify even more fighting by Avey to shun her African heritage and give the appearance of "normalcy" or Western "civility." She must do this, she feels, in front of her neighbors by shunning her African past, manifested in her blows against her aunt Cuney]...Worse, among the black faces looking on scandalized, there could be seen the Archers with their blue-eyed, tow-headed children, and the Weinsteins. The only ones for blocks around who had not sold and fled. An uncharitable thought surfaced amid the shame flooding her. Could it be they had stayed on in the hope of one day being treated to a spectacle such as this: at any moment the beast may spring, filling the air with flying things and an unenlightened wailing...It was something Marion [Avey's upper class friend] was always quoting. The fight raged on...With the fur stole like her haard won life of the past thirty years being trampled into the dirt underfoot. And the clothes being torn from her body. The wood of cedar and oak rang with her inflamed cry. And the sound went on endlessly, ranging over Tatem and up and down her quiet streets at home. Until suddenly, jarring her, her cry was punctuated by the impatient blast of a car horn. The luncheon! The Statler! And this year they had been scheduled to sit on the dais, Jerome Johnson having been made a Master Mason. The thought of the ruined day brought her anger surging up anew, and ignoring the look of anguished love and disappointment in the old woman's gaze, spurning her voiceless plea, she began hammering away at her with renewed fury there on the road to the landing, with the whole of North White Plains looking on (Marshall, 40-45).

This experience of Avey will train her for the mission she undertakes when going on the Excursion, on a boat, where she basically re-lives the trauma of the middle passage experience. There is a scene in Morrison's Beloved, when Beloved is in the outhouse and calling for Sethe and Denver that is similar. Reading this really helped me deal with a lot of rejection in my life because it shows how no matter some people can reject you, they cannot deny the truth you are trying to bring. They can fight and fight and fight, but they still have to confront it, as Avey Johnson does in Praisesong For the Widow.

I had the pleasure of talking with (NYU Creative Writing) Professor Marshall in November of 2006 about this novel, when my master's committee member and huge mentor, Dr. Shirley Toland-Dix, was teaching this novel in her English course at the University of South Florida. Thank you, Dr. Toland-Dix, and thank you Professor Marshall for Praisesong For The Widow: a must read. -RF.

review of Susan Neal Mayberry's "Can't I Love What I Criticize"

Greetings! I am most grateful for the writings of Toni Morrison in my life, and I was most appreciative of a new book of criticism of the masculine in all Morrison's first eight novels, written by Susan Neal Mayberry. Also see Carolyn Denard's edited work of Morrison entitled "What Moves at the Margin," released this year. Professor Morrison is expected to release a ninth novel by the end of this year. I wrote this review in April, and would appreciate any feedback. For publication reasons, this review is much shorter than I would have liked, and for that reason what I wanted say in addition to what is in this review, is italicized below. Take care. -RF.

Review by Rhone Fraser of Can’t I Love What I Criticize: The Masculine in Morrison by Susan Neal Mayberry

Addison Gayle, Jr. wrote in the late sixties that works of art should be explicated in terms of the work’s contributions to the alleviation of problems like racism and sexism which have confronted humanity for too long a time. According to Gayle, “the Negro must demand that the Negro writer articulate the grievances of the Negro in morals terms” since the critic should be dedicated “to the proposition that literature is a moral force for change as well as an aesthetic creation” (Gayle, xiv-xv). In Can’t I Love What I Criticize: The Masculine in Morrison, author and English professor Susan Neal Mayberry articulates Toni Morrison’s contributions to “the alleviation of those problems which have confronted humanity for too long a time” by providing an analysis of the male characters in all of Toni Morrison’s first eight novels. Unlike any other literary critic of Morrison heretofore, Mayberry does an outstanding job of piecing together Morrison’s non-linear narratives in order to provide a complete portrait of her male characters. Mayberry’s criticism exposes the ways that Morrison’s novels alleviate the societal problems of racism and sexism ultimately by suggesting that African Americans “confront their traumatic heritage in order to escape the cycle of violence that plagues their communities” (Mayberry, 305; Reed, 539). An adequate discussion of Morrison’s male characters should include some discussion of their traumatic heritage. Mayberry’s most poignant exposures of these societal problems were in the endnotes of this book when they should have been in the original text, suggesting an unnecessary division that Mayberry sees between literary and social criticism. For example, she writes in endnotes that The Bluest Eye implies alternative worldviews apart from those of the dominant white male, Western worldviews; and that schoolteacher’s “straight lines” in Beloved were fatal to black manhood. Both these points should have been included and elaborated upon in the original text since these realities govern the lived experiences of most of Morrison’s male characters. Morrison said that when she began writing, she “wanted to write about what it was like to be a subject of racism” (Dreifus, 74). In creating Pecola Breedlove, Morrison creates her father, who like Pecola and most other male characters in Morrison’s novels, are subjects of racism. Since Morrison is mainly concerned with black communities in the United States, most of her black male characters are subjects of racism. As such, how they view the world, as opposed to just being mere subjects, evolves in a much different way than those of the dominant white population. Thus, their worldviews need serious considerations that are not relegated to endnotes. This division between literary and social critique that Mayberry creates weakens Morrison’s own assertion as a novelist that art must critique society; that art “must be political.” Morrison writes that novelists provide in their stories “the people, habits, and customs that one should approve of” (Morrison, 1984; 344, 340). And even Mayberry writes that Morrison “intends no diminution of political activism—simply the opportunity to be more discriminating” (Mayberry, 136). Mayberry seemed overly discriminating in delegating very important social critiques to her endnotes section. What Mayberry also seems to miss is the trauma in the traumatic heritage of Milkman and the Morgan twins. This could have been done by an adequate consideration of J. Brooks Bouson’s look at Morrison in Quiet As It’s Kept.
In piecing together Morrison’s often fragmented novel forms, Mayberry functions like a quilt-maker, whose weaving together of scattered yet crucial information yields a tapestry that provides key information about how to alleviate the scourge of sexism and racism. Mayberry devotes each chapter of this book to each of Morrison’s eight novels thus far except her very first, where she provides an introductory review of masculine identity, and quotes Maurice Wallace’s important assertion about the need to “abandon all references to a singular black masculine identity for an increasingly nuanced plurality” (Wallace, 12). The title of this work comes from the character of Guitar who tells Milkman in Song of Solomon: “Can’t I Love What I Criticize?” Mayberry reveals that the subject of criticism in this quote is not black men, as the title suggests with its subtitle including “masculine,” but black women for their demanding love.
Mayberry calls The Bluest Eye a masculine manifesto because it connects Cholly Breedlove, Mr. Henry, and Soaphead Church who use sex as a vehicle of communication and turn it into “a weapon of mass destruction” (20). Mayberry singles out other Western-imposed weapons of mass destruction in The Bluest Eye by exposing the destructive effects of repressive sexuality seen in Soaphead Church; competitive ownership seen in Mr. Henry and Cholly Breedlove; physical beauty which plagues the novel’s protagonist in Pecola who seeks Soaphead Church; and romantic love in Pauline Breedlove who “indulges her ugliness, introduced to her by white male movie directors” (32). Perhaps Mayberry’s most striking observation about The Bluest Eye is her point and overwhelming evidence that Cholly “has no frame of reference in which to comprehend a parent-child relationship” (38). This constitutes ultimately for Mayberry a warning about “the destructiveness of certain white codes” (50). Confronting these white codes, according to Mayberry, helps alleviate the problem of racism. In Mayberry’s second chapter on Sula which she titles “The Beautiful Boys in Sula,” she adequately establishes three main masculine models: passive, adventuresome, and mad. The passive model is seen in Jude who Mayberry writes is “whiny”; the adventuresome is seen in Ajax and his departure from Sula which precipitates her affair with Jude; and the mad seen in Shadrack’s celebration of National Suicide Day. These models, Mayberry writes, “collapse preconceptions about gender” because they could each easily “be represented by its women—Nel [as passive], Sula [as adventuresome], and Ajax’s conjure mother [as mad] (70). This reaffirms Mayberry’s early point about all of Morrison’s characters: “to single out her men is not to negate the preeminence of her women. It means, rather, to recognize their interconnectedness along with the balance between them” (14). Mayberry proves this by providing Sula’s retort to Nel as evidence at this chapter’s end: “I’m a woman and colored. Ain’t that the same as being a man?” Mayberry’s analysis of male characters in this chapter proves that “most African Americans are not ready to assign a man’s freedom to a woman” (Mayberry, 51). Understanding this confrontation in Sula helps alleviate the problem of sexism. In Mayberry’s fourth chapter, “Flying without ever Leaving the Ground,” she provides a complete portrait of the implication that Morrison’s Milkman provides about ways to alleviate both sexism and racism. Mayberry writes that Milkman “needs two sets of information in order to become a complete man” (79). Milkman is a man who has a “feminine masculinity, connected to women, anchored by delicately balanced dualities, and based on flying without ever leaving the ground” (73). From Guitar, he learns the ABCs of urban male survival which he uses to defend himself when going to Shalimar, and from Pilate he learns he learns his ancestral heritage which helps him fly: “Milkman unites Guitar’s playing, rapping, hunting, fighting with the complex rhythms of the woman who has been teaching him her tunes all his life” (114). We are shown how to confront the traumatic heritage which helps, in this novel, alleviate the evil of both racism and sexism in Milkman’s choices at its end.
Mayberry’s fifth chapter on Tar Baby is perhaps most lacking in valid critique because of its omission of Son’s overall influence on Valerian Street’s household. Mayberry titles this chapter “Nigger in the Woodpile,” but fails to engage it fully by not elaborating on how and why Son’s presence was problematic, particularly in this novel’s sixth chapter when Son, who “had been silent” until this moment, calls Yardman by his real name, Gideon (Morrison, 1981; 201). A more complete analysis would also discuss the dynamics of Son’s relations with Sydney and Thérèse: Mayberry misses the complex relations between blacks from the United States and those from the Caribbean that are prominent in this novel; she also misses the implications Morrison makes on such relations by Son’s relations with Valerian and Margaret. Mayberry shows us how Jadine, limited by her racism, and Son, limited by his sexism are unable to remain a couple. In Son, we see a masculinity that prefers a “perpetual fraternity” more than a committed relationship. This fraternity is explored through Paul D in Mayberry’s sixth chapter. What Mayberry shows us in this sixth and most powerful chapter of the book about Beloved is a community of caring black male characters in Halle, Sixo, Paul D, and Stamp Paid, who rearrange masculinity in order to alleviate themselves and others from the scourge of slavery. If Halle at his core is so caring that he is broken after seeing his wife Sethe raped, Sixo fills the father role and becomes, according to Sethe, “the biggest help of anyone at Sweet Home” (Mayberry, 170). We get from Mayberry that Halle and Paul D have a more “feminine masculinity” that differs from Sixo’s which is more daring and willing to die for family freedom. Mayberry writes that Stamp Paid “incorporates the feminine masculinity like a griot…[being one who helped transport Sethe and Denver across the Ohio River], he observes human nature like Halle and like Sixo he communes with nature” (177). While Halle runs away, Sixo is burned, Paul D survives and is mentored by Stamp Paid, who each become stronger men by learning humility in their own way. Mayberry shows us that Morrison presents these characters to show how men can be humble even in one of the most racist and sexist institutions of human history.
In her seventh chapter on Jazz, Mayberry describes a kind of masculinity seen in Joe Trace as one that, like jazz music, will continually re-make oneself in order to survive: “Joe is an old cock made New Negro seven times to survive. If his female counterpart hits upon the one and final thing she had not been able to endure or repeat [seeing Joe in a parade, then] the black male changes ‘once too often’” (218). Her questions at the end of this chapter about whether African art or Greek influence came first beg a complete reading of George G. M. James’ Stolen Legacy. This chapter includes incisive analysis of Joe Trace, however like the novel and the jazz art form lacks formal structure and leaves Gayle’s “problems of humanity” unaddressed. The seventh chapter about Paradise is titled “Putting Parking Lots Out There” and is one where Mayberry necessarily compares “parking lots” to represent the rigid paternalism of the Ruby Men which precipitate their murder the women in the Convent. Mayberry deals impressively with the traumatic heritage of her male characters most in this chapter by her assertion that the sins of the father are “certainly visited on their sons,” especially in their tendency to “tie manhood to capital” (246, 312). We learned that Steward “[bolted] the house as though it were a bank too” (Morrison, 1998; 90). This issue of tying manhood to capital could have been more thoroughly explored in the original text and not in endnotes, especially since all other male Ruby characters besides Deacon and Steward Morgan are profoundly influenced by these twins in some way who have these financially based definitions of manhood. According to Lone, “Harper, Sargeant, and certainly Arnold wouldn’t lift a hand to these women if Deek and Steward had not authorized and manipulated them” (288). The character of Reverend Misner serves as an important foil to the Ruby men and according to Mayberry, manifests “griot androgyny, he embraces duality and allows disagreement, including that between spirit and science” (Mayberry, 258). Ultimately, to alleviate the problem of black male paternalism and sexism, Mayberry writes that Morrison suggests we affirm “the significance of language as agency and the importance of generations and genders listening carefully to one another” (248). In her final chapter on Morrison’s 2003 novel Love, Mayberry writes that in Morrison’s “obsession with love and its excesses,” she wrote this novel to widen this net to examine, literally and figuratively, love of (the) Man” (261). This “Man” is Bill Cosey who is obviously governed by a masculinity that is subject to Western codes yet powerful in its control of the female characters despite his scant presence: “never speaking directly but always talked about” (273). Mayberry analyzes this novel according to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and like traditional European literary criticism, makes too strong a division between literary and social criticism in this chapter when she refuses to call the names of “perverse white law Administrators” that Morrison critiques in her 1992 work. She also unnecessarily names a state home (Florida) of the Up Beach community when Morrison doesn’t (270). Her exposure of Morrison’s suggestion to alleviate problems of intergenerational conflict (as in Paradise), is “talk,then, respectful but serious” (287). Mayberry writes that alleviation of these problems is a two-way street between generations. The younger generation must “listen to the voice of his decent daddy [like Romen does, in order to] save his own life and sometimes that of others” (292). Overall, each chapter of this important book of literary criticism provides an important exposure of the problems of our society, some of which are related to a traumatic heritage that must be confronted to curtail cycles of violence. Mayberry shows us that Morrison’s novels are integral in alleviating these kinds of problems, however Mayberry may make an even stronger argument by stripping her artificial division between social and literary criticism.

Bouson, J. Brooks. Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: SUNY, 2000.

Claudia Dreifus, “Chloe Wofford Talks About Toni Morrison,” The New York Times Magazine (September 11, 1984), p. 74.

Gayle, Jr. Addison, ed. Black Expression. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969.

Mayberry, Susan Neal. Can’t I Love What I Criticize: The Masculine in Morrison. Athens: University of Georgia, 2007.

Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. New York: Random House, 1981.

Morrison, Toni. “Rootedness: The Ancestor As Foundation,” in Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Mari Evans, ed. New York: Doubleday, 1984.

Morrison, Toni. Paradise. New York: Random House, 1998.

Reed, Andrew. “’As if word magic had anything to do with the courage it took to be a man’” Black Masculinity in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” African American Review 39.4 (2005): 527-40.

Wallace, Maurice O. Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995. Durham, NC: Duke University, 2002.

What I wanted to add to this review was the problematic masculine identity of Bill Cosey in Morrison's Love as addressed by Mayberry. Like most of the book, Mayberry does a masterful job of exposing the ways that Morrison critiques the dominant Western norms. One of these ways is in her analysis of Cosey when she writes: "Indisputably a Good Man, Bill Cosey tries to be a decent daddy, but the scar left by the white Law of the Father just cuts too deep. So he becomes a Big Daddy instead" (278). Cosey's father amassed his family's fortune by basically bowing to white Law. Cosey's father was a police informant who worked against blacks that broke oppressive Jim Crow law. This is a serious plight of many black men today--the alienation one feels for not trying to be the Big Daddy, but also the lack of serious choices to work professionally in ways that do not advance white Law. In the novel of Love, L says: "the one police could count on to know where a certain colored boy was hiding, who sold liquor, who had an eye on what property, what was said at church meetings, who was agitating to vote, collective money for a school--all sorts of things Dixie law was interested in. Well paid, tipped off, and favored for fifty five years, Daniel Robert Cosey kept his evil gray eye on everybody" (68). Unfortunately, a lot of the wealth rich families enjoy today is "earned" off the backs of victims of Jim Crow. What is "success," to one person is oppression to another. This was the kind of critique that Brandon King and Jason Robinson made of HBCUs (at: http://www.blackcommentator.com/162/162_corporate_plantation.html). The work to advance white Law is perhaps not worth the sense of self that some HBCUs can provide. I thought Mayberry's strongest point towards this limiting definition of the Big Daddy role for black men was her statement: "in essence, his people call on [Bill] Cosey to sell out to white law in a way merely different from that of his father [Daniel Robert]. The weak pressure [was on] Bill to play not Dark but a black Big Daddy" (272). And that pressure on Bill Cosey was very real. A friend told me that Cosey's name suggests Cosby, however the roles that these fictional and non-fictional black men play are fundamentally different. Cosey was a descendant of a police informant, breaking from the social norms, mores of his father in founding his resort, while Cosby was a descendant of a working class urban family that aims to teach [like Sandler] values to black men of younger generations like myself, who is most grateful for the images and values I learned while watching Fat Albert, The Cosby Show, A Different World, Little Bill, and many others. Ultimately, I just hoped Mayberry could have elaborated on the pressure on Bill Cosey to play this Southern Big Daddy role that Morrison obviously satirizes in his marriage to Heed, his granddaughter's playmate. His marriage and his inheritance are also products of his selling out to white Law and its aforementioned Western modes of oppression. Both are subject to the class struggle within the black community: the main struggle between Christine Cosey and Heed the Night Johnson that brings the Resort to a close. In being tied into this Big Daddy stereotype, Cosey is prey not only to Celestial, but also to the class struggle between semi-affluent blacks and less-than-affluent blacks who fight tooth and nail for what they prize: Cosey's inheritance. This fight really seems to be one of the main issues that arise as a result of integration. Morrison said this novel was meant to raise important questions about integration. More than educational opportunity, integration in some cases has provided opportunities for internecine class struggles within the black community that ultimately advance white Law. Both these women, Heed and Christine seemed to be reared prior to integration, not to take advantage of educational opportunity, but to take the heart of "Big Daddy." I firmly believe each of Morrison's novels is an important ministry. For those patient, quiet, and willing enough to listen. In Love, we get the importance of rejecting societal norms ascribed to black men. Mayberry aptly points this out.

See "Beautiful Me(s)" by Robin Hayes

From: Robin J. Hayes <robinhayes@aya.yale.edu>

Beautiful Me(s): Finding our Revolutionary Selves in Black Cuba, is the truestory of an underdog group of graduate students at Yale who journey to Cubaand discover hope for the struggle against racism. Many of the studentsfeatured have gone on to earn PhDs in African American Studies.Until June 30, you can watch the entire film online athttp://cinema.lycos.com/promo/independentfeatures<http://cinema.lycos.com/promo/independentfeatures> . When you arrive atthe website, click ³Documentary² under All genres and enter Beautiful Mes inthe search bar. The films with the most views and highest ratings will beinvited to screen at the Independent Features Film Festival this July atTribeca Cinemas in NYC. If you can, please watch the film, rate the filmand pass this link on to a friend.If you¹d like more information about the documentary, to host a screening ofit or be added to our email list, please email me atblackresistancereadinggroup@gmail.com.

Interviewing Ms. Ruth Washington

It is my pleasure to share with you my interview with Ms. Ruth Washington, the descendant of a Civil War Hero, and former slave, John M. Washington, whose newly published civil war narrative is the subject of two recent books: first, David Blight's A Slave No More, and second Crandall Shifflett's John Washington's Civil War which focuses exclusively on John M. Washington's life, while Blight's book looks at two narratives, one by Washington and the other by Wallace Turnage. Ms. Ruth Washington is a member of the church that my parents attend, St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Tampa, Florida, and I was most inspired by reading Shifflett's work. I said to Ms. Washington in a personal note that reading about the lives of her great grandmother Sarah and her great great grandmother Molly was interesting, and reminded me of how Paul encouraged Timothy in II Timothy chapter 1, verse 5 to think about his grandmother Lois and his mother Lois in order to be inspired. While the entire narrative of just Washington's life presented by Shifflett is inspiring, the details of Sarah and Molly's life presented by Blight is as interesting, particularly because of their acts of defiance of slavery, which is part of a much longer, stronger, extensive narrative of the myriad ways that blacks defied their own enslavement. This duty of remembering one's ancestors in order to encourage oneself has been highly demonized by a few racist, religious Europeans as "idol worship." Too often, racist Europeans who claim to be Christian too often exaggerate the African tradition of respecting one's ancestors as idol worship and really do a disservice during the colonization of African peoples, by cutting them off from their heritage. I recently got into a very dynamic yet important confrontation with two members of Epiphany Fellowship Church in Philadelphia because they suggested that one should not remember one's ancestors, but just call on Jesus alone. That is wrong. We can call on, or remember our ancestors, for encouragement as Paul shows us. I think these two members were so preoccupied with idol worship that they essentially forgot their ancestors and fell into the trap of considering it "idol worship." I did tell them that we should not be getting encouragement from all ancestors, as some of them just can't provide such encouragement, but that we should not ignore them altogether. There are always lessons to learn from other peoples' lives. One of these members suggested I be more careful when I say "call upon," as though it is dangerous to call upon your ancestors and not call upon Jesus. That, I agree with. I do need to be more careful about that. However we can always use the work of our ancestors as encouragement, and we can call upon them without necessarily excluding Jesus Christ, whom we can call upon at all times. This is what John Washington teaches and you see how this legacy of spiritual life was passed to his son and his granddaughter, Ms. Ruth Washington. It is my pleasure to share this interview with you.

Interview with Ruth Washington on May 8, 2008, by Rhone Fraser
My personal footnotes are in italics and in square brackets. Numbers in parentheses are page numbers in Crandall Shifflett’s text John Washington’s Civil War or David Blight’s A Slave No More.

FRASER: In 2007, David Blight wrote A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped To Freedom. One of these stories in this book A Slave No More, is that of John Washington. In 2008, Virginia Tech University Professor of History Crandall Shifflett wrote the book John Washington’s Civil War. It is my pleasure to speak with the granddaughter of John Washington, Ms. Ruth Washington who happens to attend the church of my parents in Tampa, Florida, St. Mark’s Episcopal. This afternoon it is my pleasure to talk with Ms. Ruth Washington about her grandfather, John Washington. Ms. Washington, thank you for joining me.

WASHINGTON: My pleasure.

FRASER: My first question is to ask you to describe to our listeners [and readers] the children of John Washington and how you fit into his narrative.

WASHINGTON: Well my father was named after John Washington, a slave, about whom the book A Slave No More is written. I am the youngest of five girls that were born to one of the sons of John Washington. My father was John Washington, Jr. I am the youngest and the only survivor. There were two older sisters who were…stillborn but only three of us survived. And as I say, I am the last survivor. The other two sisters, who were older, have both been deceased for a number of years. I heard about the book A Slave No More, through my niece who also lives here in Tampa. She was contacted by one of the researchers of Dr. David Blight who is the author of the book A Slave No More. This young lady, her name is Christine McKay [Blight’s researcher] called from the Philadelphia area, I believe and contacted my niece to find out if she was a relative of a person named John Washington. And my niece said ‘yes I am. I would be his great granddaughter. But there is someone here in Tampa who is even closer in relationship and that is my Aunt Ruthie.’ And so she gave this lady my phone number and the lady called and that’s how we were located. They had been looking for a number of years trying to research relatives of the slave John M. Washington and they found out that there were some survivors and they tried very hard to locate us.

FRASER: I’m wondering, how’d they contact…[your niece, Barbara Anne Hinksman] in Tampa?

WASHINGTON: My niece Barbara was located through an obituary that Mrs. McKay saw in an Atlantic City, New Jersey, newspaper. She had heard that there might be a connection of a person [with the] last name of Martin, who would have been a connection to John Washington the slave. So she just happened to look in a newspaper and saw an obituary of a lady who had passed away. Her name was Harriet Martin Lampkin. So Mrs. McKay said that this name Martin looks a little familiar, let me look at the obituary, she read the obituary and she saw the name of my niece, Barbara Anne Hinksman. She had also in her research heard about Hinksman and she said that is such a strange name, I will try to locate her. My name also was in the obituary, Ruth Washington. But she wanted to contact Hinksman because that was the more interesting name. Washington could have been a common name, but Hinksman she wanted to investigate. That’s how she called my niece. And then my niece referred her through to me who was also in the obituary, Ruth Washington. And that’s how after a number of years, of doing research, Dr. Blight and his research team were able to locate the only survivors of John M. Washington, a slave.

FRASER: Thank you. In this new work by Crandall Shifflett, he said that he found out about John Washington while working in the collections of the Library of Congress on Civil War Fredericksburg. And he said that he came across an index entry on John Washington, Memorys of the Past. And basically, he goes through an in-depth look at just his life. He provides the text that Blight also provides…and [after reading both analyses of texts by Blight and Shifflett] Crandall Shifflett, I believe compared to David Blight… seems to have more emphasis on the perspective of the slave. And I’m not saying that Blight ignores this or Blight belittles this but Crandall Shifflett has an expressed and stated interest in trying to capture as much as possible the perspective of the slave. In the preface of this text he says “the slave angle of vision, sometimes makes familiar historical questions appear simplistic, irrelevant, or condescending” (xiii-xiv). One of the questions that I think Blight brings up is the issue of memory. How we remember things, and how bias can appear in memory, and not just by the slaveholder in trying to present slavery as overall a benevolent institution, but also how memory from the slave’s perspective can kind of caricature the slaveholder. However Shifflett says the slave’s angle of vision sometimes makes familiar historical questions that I think personally Blight asks, makes seem simplistic, condescending, or irrelevant, especially when it comes to memory. But I must say, upon reading both narratives of John Washington, from Blight and from Shifflett—Blight [seems to] challenge more of how its remembered and Shifflett [seems to] challenge more of how much of the slave’s perspective we’re getting [which I personally think is the most important question when reading a nineteenth century slave narrative]. Both have different challenges. Just before Washington’s actual text where we get Memorys of the Past, this is what Professor Shifflett says about Washington: “John Washington is at the center of this book. Contemporary diaries, local histories, public records, manuscript collections, and scholarly works guide the annotations that I write and provide supporting evidence for Washington’s recollections. I have tried chosen titles [for chapters 6-11, as they are not named, unlike the first five chapters] based upon a central theme or event covered in each and my own sense of what words Washington might have used to capture the essence of this part of his life” (xxxiii)…What is striking in the first chapter of Washington’s memoir is the similar observation that John Washington makes to what Frederick Douglass makes. Frederick Douglass has a very popular narrative that is antebellum, before the Civil War, however John Washington’s is critically important because [it takes place] before, during and after the Civil War. Basically on page 3 of Memorys of the Past, Washington describes a corn shucking and he says: “A corn shucking is always a most lively time among the slaves. They would come from miles around to join in singing, shouting and yelling as only a Negro can yell for a good supply of Bad Whiskey, corn Bread, and Bacon and cabbage” (3). Right at that line, Crandall Shifflett has a footnote. And in that footnote, he said: “Washington reveals that he is not unaware that masters use these occasions such as corn shucking to curry favor of the slaves. Likewise, Douglass contended that slaveholders used whiskey…to keep the slaves from thinking about earning money through independent industry lest they do so in hopes of buying their freedom—or running away”(9). Then Shifflett later says: “Masters deceived themselves when they encourage their slaves to play the happy darkie and then interpreted their singing and dancing as signs of satisfaction with their masters and their lives as slaves” (9). And then finally he writes: “from the slaves’ point of view, in Washington’s recollections, these were celebrations of community and freedom despite the transparency of the owners’ intentions” (10). And so like Douglass, he could see through the Master’s intention even in their use of religion, and just after I talk about what Washington says about religion, seeing that my parents and myself met you in the church and religion is a very important question that will lead me to my second question, but your grandfather has a very striking phrase to me about religion. He says: “Now the result of all this compulsory church attending was just the reverse of what was desired” (12). And here he’s referring to how his female master, Catherine Ware…forced him to attend church.

WASHINGTON: He was young at that point, he was not even in his teens. And maybe early teens when he was forced to go to church. Because he mentioned that he would rather have been swimming and down at the water hole than to go to church on many occasions. But he had to go because he was forced by his mistress to attend church. And at that point he had no deep feeling for religion. He was young and I guess he thought that there were other things that were more important at that time, because of his age. I remember him saying that in order to prove to his mistress that he had been at church, he would just stand outside of the church area and listen and get the substance of what was going on, and then he would run to the watering hole and swim. Then he would report back to his mistress about what had happened simply because he was eavesdropping. In other words, he really did not attend the service. That was at a young age. That was how he felt about the church at that time. But subsequently later on, as he grew and matured, he did have a feeling for religion. Because attended, it was a Baptist church, I believe, and he became a clerk of the church which shows that he had a great interest in religion at that point. So his un-interest was when he was a youngster, but he did mature into a religious man.

FRASER: Yes, he was clerk of the African Baptist Church.

WASHINGTON: Yes, and subsequently my father, during his lifetime, was clerk of his church in Jersey City, so he inherited that trait I guess from his father and did a very, very fine job. I remember seeing this big ledger that he used to write in, the events of the church, and the church history and whatever recordings he had to make as a clerk, in this big ledger that he kept in his desk, so my father inherited that trait from his father and they were both religious men.

FRASER: And if I may say, you seemed to have inherited that trait from your father.

WASHINGTON: Oh, definitely. As a family, as I say, there were three of us girls. I was the youngest. It was then my mother and my father. And we all attended the Episcopal Church in Jersey City where we lived. My oldest sister was very musically inclined. She was the church organist. My father was a great tenor. He had a beautiful voice. And he was the lead tenor in the choir. My mother was alto. My sister and I were both sopranos. And so we grew up in the Episcopal Church, and as church persons, my family living today, most of them are Christians who attend churches. Not all Episcopalians, but they do attend.
FRASER: However, you like your father, like John Washington (Senior) attended the Episcopal Church.

WASHINGTON: Yes, I was born, raised, and still am an Episcopalian. Although, as I said, my grandfather turned to the Baptist church when he matured. But my family, we were all Episcopalians.

FRASER: It is striking to me how that experience he had with Catherine Ware where he would eavesdrop on the church and then report to her without exactly attending [laughing together].

WASHINGTON: That was in a portion of A Slave No More. I’m using the term eavesdrop, but he [Blight] didn’t use that term. He just said he would stand outside and listen. But I’m using the term of eavesdropping.

FRASER: Right, because that’s technically…

WASHINGTON: That’s exactly what it was, but he [John Washington] probably didn’t know, or had not heard of that word to use in his memoir.

FRASER: And Shifflett didn’t seem to use that in his text, and so we get the importance of that in Blight’s text. What Shifflett does say, and he really articulates what Washington does with religion more than Blight, he says: “slaves rejected the owners’ narrow version of Christianity and its one-dimensional message of obedience and docility. Instead, they blended their own cultural heritage of African religion with conventional beliefs and what might be called ‘emancipation [or liberation] theology’”(14). So it seemed like Shifflett just interprets what Washington did with religion instead of what many people might do, which is just give it up. Emancipation Theology. I could not help but think of the recent media uproar right now over Jeremiah Wright and his statements that have to do with what he calls a liberation theology. And I’m wondering if what he believes…of course we live in a very different time period, it’s the post-1980s era, but I’m wondering how similar Jeremiah Wright’s theology would be to John Washington’s.

WASHINGTON: I have not followed Jeremiah Wright too strongly because I am not an Obama supporter. But I know there’s been a controversy between him and Obama. But I have not followed it through to be able to discuss in detail about what remarks were made…I’m a Hillary person so I, as I say, I’ve not followed that through on Jeremiah Wright. So I really can’t speak intelligently on the remark that he has made. But I’ll have to go on from there.

FRASER: Just what is important is how they saw Christianity in a different way. The third chapter is titled Left Alone, and this is the separation part, where he’s separated from his mother who was sold off to R.H. Phillips and about this John Washington writes: “I slept in the white people’s house and [she, his mother] laid down on my Bed by me and begged me for her own sake, try and be a good boy, Say my prayers every Night, remember all she had tried to teach me, and always think of her.” Could you talk about this?

WASHINGTON: I remember reading that in the memoirs. I certainly do. And he said ‘who is going to do that [lay beside him]?’ After they had to separate. He had to separate from his mother and siblings. And it was very very tragic for him to go through such a period. I do remember reading about that. All of this comes to me as such surprise because I knew nothing about this grandfather until reading David Blight’s biography. I just was not aware of all of this and this was so enlightening to me.

FRASER: In the next chapter, Washington writes: “having never had a regular course of Spelling taught me, I am in consequence very defficent,” (18) deficient is spelled d-e-f-f-i-c-e-n-t…

WASHINGTON: Oh yes, he misspelled many words. He wrote phonetically, he wrote according to how the alphabet sounded to him.

FRASER: And Shifflett has a very sympathetic footnote, when Washington ends his sentence saying “in every branch of a common and education” (18), Shifflett has a footnote right after that that says: “Washington’s handwriting, choice of words, and syntax are really quite remarkable, and he is being overly critical of himself” (18). Especially considering his situation, his status, and how he took the initiative to learn, for instance, from the friends of William Ware. He says that they taught him how to write. He took that initiative. Did you have that same initiative? Was education stressed among your family?

WASHINGTON: The initiative to write?

FRASER: Yes.

WASHINGTON: Oh yes, indeed. It has been handed down through generations. My older sister who passed at the age of fifty four, was a teacher. She had her master’s in music education. And she composed many wonderful speeches. She was a good speechwriter and she delivered very well. And I have a presentation that I’m going to make—this is just a personal aside. I told you that David Blight is coming to Tampa next week to appear in St. Petersburg, and he mentioned that we might be asked to have a few words to say. So I am going to present an article, its really a poem, that my niece, the same Barbara Anne Hinksman had composed years ago before she ever thought anything about her [great] grandfather. And the writings would be somewhat similar, about the same period of the year, Easter. My grandfather mentioned in the book [Memorys of the Past] about Good Friday. It was a Good Friday where I believe he was to move on, I’ve forgotten just what…something was happening good on that Good Friday [on page 45 of Shifflett, Washington writes: “April 18th 1862, Was ‘Good-Friday,’* the Day was a mild pleasant one with the Sun shining brightly and every thin unusually quite [sic]. the Hotel was crowded with boarders who was Seated at breakfast a rumor had been circulated amoung them that the Yankees Was advancing, but nobody seemed to believe it, until Every body Was Startled by Several reports of cannon.” Shifflett writes in a footnote about this point that “Washington correctly recalls the date when Union forces arrived on Stafford Hills for the first occupation of Fredericksburg, which lasted from 18 April [Good Friday; Good for slaves who saw the Union Army as rescuers in a sense] to 31 August 1862. Some historians give a date for the troops’ arrival several days later, but other first-hand accounts support Washington’s memory” (51)]. My niece’s poem is about Easter which is two days later. So I’m going to surprise, she doesn’t know anything about this, but she’ll be surprised to hear her poetry read at the group we appear before next week. So writings have gone down the way. Nothing public, but just on a small scale I would say, intimate scale, before groups. But nothing public, to that degree. But my father [John M. Washington, Jr.] was a fine writer. He liked to write and so that’s passed down through generations.

FRASER: And you also said that you noticed your father writing in a ledger when he was a clerk in the church.

WASHINGTON: Yes. The church ledger, this big ledger. He was a church clerk. He had a fancy handwriting very distinct handwriting. It was more like a drawing, the formation of letters, and he used to write in this ledger and he enjoyed doing it [Here I meant to ask if her father’s handwriting is seen in the family Bible, which is a family heirloom that Ms. Washington showed me when I visited her home in January 2008].

FRASER: We also get John Washington’s actual handwriting in Blight’s book. If you look in the margins [behind the book flaps] we have the actual transcript of what Blight first saw in Memorys of the Past and we also see ornate handwriting.

WASHINGTON: He gave me original copies also of the original writings in my grandfather’s handwriting and how he and his staff could decipher some of the words was remarkable because the spelling was so remote from actually what the word should be, that they had to really do a little thinking about what the word should be…[if it was] written in correct form.

FRASER: So we get already that not only writing is important but spiritual life is important. Later on, in chapter five he talks about—or chapter six—he mentions that he was concerned about the salvation of his soul. And in about the 25th of May he writes: “I was converted and found the Saviour precious to my Soul, and heavenly Joyes Manefested, and began to be felt at that time,” this is [around] 1855, when he is just about fifteen [or] in his late teens, “Still burning like coals: fanned by the breeze…and is to this day the precious assurance of my life. God grant me more faith and a better understanding, for these things let rocks and hills their lasting Silance break” (29), and then he said later “I became a close reader of the Bible. And wrote many comments on different Chapters which has been lost” (29). Once again, we go back to the writing that was important. You said he was a writer. And he articulated, I guess, his faith through his writing. Later on he says, “but to me the change was very agreeable indeed all Sunday and night restrictions were removed except what was very agreeable indeed all Sunday and night restriction was removed except what was really necessary. He’s talking about the work he had to do for Mr. Ware until August of 1869, and then what happened when he had to live with, when he was working on his own, how the time that he could spend writing was reduced. Chapter seven was when he started talking about the war but before we get there I just wanted to note how his faith was important to him. When we talk about themes in John Washington’s life, one of them is writing. Another that we get from Blight and Shifflett is the river.

WASHINGTON: The Rappahannock River.

FRASER: Yes. And how that represented not only a passage into freedom, when he’s working with the Union and when he has to cross the river to escape the Confederate forces, but also it’s the same river in which he was baptized [which for him, represented a passage into salvation]. Have you visited that area?

WASHINGTON: Yes. My niece, Barbara Anne was not able to make the trip but her daughter Maureen Ramos, who would be the great great granddaughter of John Washington, and I were invited to the city of Fredericksburg last November by Dr. Blight. We were guests of the city, you might say. We had a tour of the areas that my grandfather lived in and we walked the ground that he walked on, and were taken to the Rappahannock River, and its not that wide. You could cross it easily. I doubt if its very deep. But I think they could swim in it, so its deep enough for swimming. But it is not a wide river, it could be longer because we couldn’t see the end of it but we could see from one bank to the other, across to the other bank. And we stood on the bank of the Rappahannock and the tour guide told us that was about where John Washington, my grandfather, crossed, at about that point. And we visited two of the places where he lived, we visited the Farmer’s Bank [which Washington mentions in his memoir and which Shifflett includes in his illustration of downtown Fredericksburg on page 15] where he worked and lived in the upper quarters. The owner of the bank lived in the upper quarters. And there were rooms designated to each side and nice sized rooms, where the tourists said my grandfather, those were his quarters. And so we visited the City Hall where they had the picture of my grandfather on the wall. And they really honor him in Fredericksburg. And we visited the house. A brick built house, a small house that a man had just purchased and he’s going to use as a storing space for some of his memoirs and different things that he wanted to show for the public. And so we had quite a nice visit, we spent the night in Fredericksburg, and we were on the front page of the next day’s paper. And so we, my grandniece and I, had a fine visit, a very fine visit to the areas where my grandfather once lived.

FRASER: In Shifflett’s text he has a map of the Rappahannock along with the city. It’s like a city map. He has landmarks that Washington mentions in his memoir and I’d like you to tell me [if] you were able to see any of these [landmarks]: the African Baptist Church?

WASHINGTON: Yes, we stood outside of that church. And the tour included that church. And he pointed the church out to us, yes he did.

FRASER: Ficklin’s mill? [Washington mentions this mill in his eighth chapter. Shifflett writes that J.B. Ficklin, the mill’s probable owner, was a worshipper at the same St. George’s Episcopal Church that John Washington writes that Catherine Taliaferro made him attend paid a rental fee of $450 for a pew in this church (24).]

WASHINGTON: Same street, a narrow street, and that’s where his church was located.

FRASER: And his mother’s house? Did you get to see where Sarah Washington [or Ware] lived?

WASHINGTON: This brick house that I mentioned, that the man has just purchased. I’m not sure if that was the house where his mother Sarah was. I think it must have been because we went inside and it was very crudely built inside, it had an open fireplace where a big cauldron hung and that’s where they cooked, in their big pots. Mother would make stew and you could see the open fireplace, they didn’t have a stove, and then there was a ladder, a wooden ladder that would lead upstairs to an upstairs attic where they would use as a bedroom area. We didn’t climb the ladder because it had to railings and we wouldn’t dare. But we could peek up and see where the ladder, [we]would see the area, a bit of the attic. And that was behind, that was a small house adjacent to the owner’s house. I guess that was the Ware, where Thomas Ware, I believe, it must have been his home. That was a larger area. But the small area is where my grandfather and his family lived at that time. Very crude inside, no wallpapers, just brick. You could see the brick. And it was something to see, it really was. Very historic.

FRASER: He says later in the next chapter, called The War Comes, that when he returns when the Union Army’s approaching Fredericksburg, and he goes to his previous master, the Taliaferros, he writes: “my master was well satisfied at my apparent disposition” but before then its very interesting to hear what he writes (39). The proprietors of the Shakespeare, (which is he worked at the time) now told me the house would have to be closed very soon in consequence of the approach of the near Yankees and that I would have to go to Saulsbury, North Carolina to wait on Captain Payton for the balance of the year. He later says, “When I was told that I would have to go to Saulsbery I became greatly alarmed and began to fear that the object in Sending me down there, Was to be done to get me out of the reach of the Yankees. and I Secretly resolved not to go But I made them believe I was Most anxious to go” (39).

WASHINGTON: Yes, he told them that, but within himself, he knew that he was not going.

FRASER: [Washington later says:] “In fact I made them beleive I was terebeley afred of the Yankees, any Way. My Master was well satisfied at My appearant disposition and told Me I was quite Right, for if the Yankees were to catch me they would Send me to Cuba or cut my hands off or otherwise Maltreat Me. I of course pretended to believe all they said but knew they were lieing all the while” (39).

WASHINGTON: Yes, he did, because he knew that he was going to try to get to the Yankees himself. So he told a little white lie.

FRASER: And then Shifflett says about this, “it was common for masters, especially in areas close to the front lines, to try and frighten slaves into loyalty by spreading rumors about how horribly the Yankees treated captured slaves. Many slaves did believe that Union soldiers were “devils” come to devour them and their children. Yet many other slaves routinely pretended to believe what whites told them, an attitude historians have labeled ‘wearing masks.’ It is evident from Washington’s experience,” Shifflett writes, “that some enslaved people had their own idea of what the arrival of the Union army meant for them. Ironically it was southern whites’ accusations against northerners that gave many slaves the sense that the U.S. Army was a beacon of liberty for them before U.S. officials decided to use the threat of emancipation as a war measure” (43-44). So we see already that [some] slaves saw the coming Union troops as an opportunity for freedom.

WASHINGTON: Yes, well he knew that he was going to try to get to the Yankees. Now he didn’t know quite how he would be received. He didn’t know when he crossed the Rappahannock whether he’d be received as a runaway and shot, or if they’d receive him cordially. So that was the risk that he took but he was willing to take that risk. And I believe one factor that helped my grandfather go as far as he did with his freedom and not be as ill treated as some of the slaves was the fact that he was so fair complexioned, that they treated him, they treated him differently. That has been something that I have just learned about slavery. Because when I was raised in New Jersey, we were taught in school that slavery was so ugly that it demeans the individual. They were beaten, they were raped, they were so mistreated. They were ill-fed, they were ill-clothed. We had a terrible, terrible picture in our school system of what slavery was. The book written by Dr. Blight about my grandfather, reveals that my grandfather was not as subject to that kind of treatment as a lot of the slaves were. So it gave me a different outlook on what slavery was. Slavery was, according to your appearance, your color, your skin color, your owner treated you differently. There was a racial problem there as far as the color of your skin [was concerned]. My grandfather could pass for a Caucasian. And he was treated more humanely as a result of that. Now when he decided to cross the Rappahannock, he realized that he was going to be seeing a lot of Caucasian soldiers. And being of the same complexion, I think is what encouraged him to take that risk because when he approached them, as they asked him who he was, he said ‘I’m a slave.’ I’m John M. Washington, a slave. I may not be quoting exactly, but this is the substance. And one person said “Are you a slave?” and he [John Washington] said “yes sir, yes sir, I am a slave,” which means they doubted him because he did not look like a slave…

FRASER: He was lighter than what they would expect…

WASHINGTON: Yes, and so that is one feature that enabled my grandfather to succeed as he did in his freedom. Had he looked like a slave [with a darker complexion] they may have shot him on the spot. So he took that chance and used his appearance as a plus in making that crossing of the Rappahannock River, and hoping that, they will treat me [John Washington] fairly, and they did. They did.

FRASER: That’s right. Because in the next chapter eight, he writes that Shifflett names First Night of Freedom, Washington writes: “After we had landed on the other Side,” just like you said Ms. Washington, “a large crowd of the Soilders off duty, gathered around us and asked us all kinds of questions in reference to the Whereabouts of the ‘Rebels’ (those are the Confederates). I had stuffed My pockets full of Rebel Newspapers and, I distributed them around as far as they would go greatly to the delight of the Men, and by this act Won their good opinions right away” (48). So we see how Washington, not only his skin color helped him, but his distributing the Rebel newspapers. Very intelligent.

WASHINGTON: Yes, he certainly did. His pockets were stuffed. You’re absolutely right.

FRASER: Very intelligent.

WASHINGTON: He became an ally to the Yankee army, he certainly did. And an asset. And he was able to tell them things they [the Union army] wanted to know about the enemy so that’s the way it works.

FRASER: And he put down their guard by distributing the newspapers. If he didn’t have them, like you said, he just might have been shot on the spot.

WASHINGTON: He had enough intelligence to know that at some point those papers might come in handy. And to give evidence that would be needed so he had the presence of mind to say, ‘well I’ll just stuff these in my pocket.’ So he was a wise man.

FRASER: And apparently knew the power of the written word, being a writer himself. And knowing how to not only write, but understand writing in order to continue his writing. He knew that they knew the power of the written word and presented that power that the Union used to know where the Confederates were. He later says in that chapter: “I now ascertained that I had been brought along to act as a guide in identifying the prominent Rebels of the Town [this is Fredericksburg], and after they had crossed the Rappahannock River and Entered the Town was proceeded directly to the Post-Office, then kept by one R.T. Thom [R.T. Throm]” (51). So he basically proceeds to tell the Union soldiers where the powerful, prominent people, Confederates of Fredericksburg, were.

WASHINGTON: Yes, he did.

FRASER: One of Shifflett’s interesting footnotes in this chapter is when he describes his old mistress, Catherine Taliaferro who is visibly packing to leave her residence because the Union soldiers are arriving. Shifflett writes: “This extraordinary scene speaks volumes about the two different worlds that slaves and owners occupied. One of the first concerns of slaveowners faced with imminent invasion was property. Typically silver and slaves. Notice,” Shifflett writes, “as Washington does, that Taliaferro reminds Washington of his status as a child in her care and how she attempts to scare him into her control” (55). This is when she’s telling him ‘you may want to avoid the Union presence because they might be as much harm to you as they are to me, but he, just like everything else [not everything else, a lot of other things] just reads that differently, reads the Union presence much much differently. He later works for Rufus King, and I think the final chapter…or the second to last chapter actually is called “On the Move with the Union Army,” once again this [chapter] was named by Shifflett [who] titled chapters six through ten, and he later works with the [Union] as a mess hall cook and after he is settled with them, as you say—having his lighter skin color be an advantage, but also having his proof that he will work for the Union army—Shifflett writes about his time with the Union Army: “Washington’s account gives ample evidence that as the Union Army advances in the South, slaves and their families took the opportunity to escape behind Union lines. The men often attempted to join the military forces, while the women and children followed along as ‘contraband of war’”(70). So we see how his work has helped increase the presence of the Union and have that be a method through which then slaves in the Confederacy could escape to their freedom. The final chapter is a chapter called Unwelcome Home. In it, he talks about his time specifically with the Union Army: “they [Confederates] regarding me in the light of a Spy or traitor to their cause” (74). This is when he notices [there’s] Confederates looking at him during one of the battles. He writes: “I had intended now to Stay at home and make a living and after a While, perhaps, to go North Some where, When My Wife Would possible be able to go With me,” and he does in fact do that (74).

WASHINGTON: And his mother also joins. He was able to get his mother away from slavery. I think David Blight said he does not know exactly how he arranged that but somehow or another my grandfather did arrange to get his mother free, and his sisters, siblings, I believe. Because they had not seen each other in a length of time, and he was able to show them their freedom, help them with their freedom, also.

FRASER: And this issue of finding freedom, not only for one’s self, but for one’s relatives is a theme not only in John Washington, but also in his mother Sarah and John Washington’s grandmother Molly. David Blight writes that Molly and Sarah who had been runaways, provided a deep layer of silent inheritance embedded in his, John’s spirit if not, his memory [David Blight writes in A Slave No More of John Washington that “his maternal grandmother was a slave named Molly who was born in the late 1790s and owned by Thomas Ware [whose family also owned his mother Sarah]. Molly, called “my Negro woman,” is acknowledged for her “faithful service” in Ware’s 1820 will, in which he bequeathed her and her children (valued at $600) to his wife, Catherine (who would eventually be John’s owner). By 1825 Ware’s estate inventory lists Molly and four children; John’s mother, Sarah, was the oldest at age eight. Molly would have another four children by the 1830s. In June of 1829 this strong-willed mother misbehaved (perhaps running away) in such a manner that Catherine Ware arranged with a punishment house to execute a “warrant against Molly and for whipping her by contract $1.34. Perhaps Molly’s defiance was sparked because her sister, Alice had just been sold away for $350. We can only imagine the sorrow and scars in Molly’s psyche, a woman whose life was spend nursing white children as well as her own and serving the extended Ware family. But she would live to join her grandson on their flight to freedom in 1862. She died a free woman hear her daughter, grandson, and great grandchildren…Sarah Tucker, John’s mother was likely born in January 1817. Who the men fathering all these children were remains a researcher’s mystery. Sarah probably also had a white father; she is described in various documents as being “bright mulatto” and short in height…On February 19, 1841, Thomas R. Ware, Jr. advertised in a Fredericksburg newspaper for a “NEGRO WOMAN SARAH.” She is described as ‘about 20 years of age, a bright Mulatto, and rather under the common size.” Clearly she had fled some distance and for some length of time, because the notice offered a twenty-dollar reward if Sarah was captured “more than 20 miles from this place.” But she [like Molly and her son John] was surely a woman of unusual intelligence and resourcefulness if she managed to escape and remain on her own for a period of time” (Blight 18-21). These accounts by Blight provide rich evidence for what he calls a deep layer of silent inheritance that is embedded in John’s memory and spirit.] Shifflett also reminds us of this when he tells of Washington’s defiance to slavery, the different ways [from the different interpretations of: the corn shucking gatherings, faith, and the presence of the Union Army] that he thinks about it, but also the ways that we’ve seen that John rescues his wife and [how he] is able to bring his relatives to the D.C. area. I remember in our first interview I talked to you about the rebellious nature of certain slaves when it came to having their relatives sold. You know, after relatives had been sold from them, they would rebel by going away and Blight writes of an account where Molly, John Washington’s grandmother was whipped because her close relatives were sold off [because she ran away, probably because she was separated from family members who were sold off].

WASHINGTON: Yes, she was whipped. They paid a dollar and some sense, I believe the quote was to have someone whip her. Yes, she was.

FRASER: This last question I’d like to ask you, and I hope we can meditate for about the next ten minutes on it, is [the] questions: what do you think future generations should learn of this story of John Washington?

WASHINGTON: Well, I guess one thing would be determination. The belief in what you’re doing is whole substance, and you have to work very hard in the direction in which you want your life to go. If you’re living in substandard conditions, there should be no stopping you in obtaining, in trying to obtain better circumstances, conditions, benefits. Life, in general, can be improved if you put a mind to it, and use every ounce of your intelligence to gain ground upon which you would be more proud than what you are at the time of consideration. So I think youngsters today should realize, to attain a future, they have to concentrate and be diligent in their concentration and endeavors to gain whatever their aim is in life. That would be the only way I could put it into words at this point.

FRASER: Yes. Diligence, and…

WASHINGTON: Determination. Fortitude. Education, of course. Belief. Religious belief plays a great part, I do believe, in helping you attain your goals. You must believe in some one, some power greater than yourself. And that will help, I do believe.

FRASER: This is what John Washington’s mother did in telling him to read the Bible when he was a young boy. [And that belief in the Bible is represented I believe by what Ms. Washington showed me in their family heirloom, which is a family bible that might include, the distinctive handwriting of her father John M. Washington, Jr.]

WASHINGTON: And it has played such an important part in my family’s life: my son, my relatives, my siblings, although they were all deceased, they had a belief that there was a superpower, and God is a superpower. And it helped in their short lives to make them know that they were doing the best they could, and would attain their final goals.

FRASER: And that comes out through education. Education is that groundwork. Its hard to get to that determination, that level of high literacy that John Washington had without being determined, and making sure that your experience is told. Ms. Washington I thank you so much for your time.