Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine, by Scott E. Casper, $25, Hill and Wang (January 2008), ISBN-10: 0809084147, ISBN-13: 978-0809084142, pp. 320.
As many peopl e k n ow, the father of our country declared in his will that his enslaved servants would be free, once his widow, Martha, joined him in death and no longer needed their services. This book notes, however, that she feared that the prospect of instant freedom might tempt the servants to harm her, and so she freed them early, in 1801. Nevertheless, slavery lived on at Mount Vernon. Martha herself owned many slaves not covered in her husband’s will, and later heirs brought workers required for the upkeep of the homestead, farmland and neighboring properties.
Even after slavery ended, newly freed African-Americans were among those employed by a preservation society to maintain the estate and greet tourists. These included a mulatto woman, Sarah Parker Johnson, born into slavery in 1844, who served faithfully at Mount Vernon after the Civil War until her retirement in 1892. She died in 1920.
Scott Casper uses her story to anchor a highly detailed history of African-American life at Mount Vernon, other Washington family holdings and the surrounding free Black communities. Extracted from numerous documents, it is a rare and engaging account of how Black labor contributed to the wealth and welfare of America’s first family and to the nation.
Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (Gender and American Culture), by Deborah Gray White (Editor) $21.95, University of North Carolina Press (March 2008), ISBN-10: 0807858811, ISBN- 13: 978-0807858813, pp. 320.
Seventeen African-American female historians tell how they navigated their careers in the field of history. The narratives are arranged in the order that each scholar earned her doctorate in history — from Nell Irvin Painter, formerly of Princeton University, Ph.D. from Harvard University, 1974, to Dr. Crystal M. Feimster, Ph.D. from Princeton University, 2000. As such, it offers a chronology of their experiences and struggles in a field that has not been the same since Black women grabbed the opportunity to do some of the telling.
