Rachel Jamison Webster is the author of the book Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family. She is professor of creative writing at Northwestern University, and she lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Q: What inspired you to write Benjamin Banneker and Us?
A: During the contentious election season of fall 2016, I found out that I had several generations of African American ancestry that I had never known about.
I thought, isn’t that interesting? And I realized that my family had done what the (white) nation had done as a whole. We had denied the presence of Black people and Black genius in our American origin stories. This family line went back through my Grandpa Webster’s mother, to the sister of Benjamin Banneker.
Because Benjamin Banneker became famous in his lifetime (1731-1806), as our first Black scientist, almanac author, and assistant surveyor of Washington D.C., people took the time to record his ancestry. This meant that I had documentable history going back to his grandparents’ arrival in Maryland in the 1680s.
This level of documentation is exceedingly rare for a mixed-race family or a family of color, because Black people were not recorded as people in the colonies. So I became really excited about these ancestors. I felt very connected to them, and I realized that I could use these ancestral stories as a way to tell a more complex American history.
Q: What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about Banneker?
A: Banneker is often called “self-taught,” in a disparaging way that would not be said about white intellectuals. The fact is, he was part of a generation of gentleman farmers who were also scientists, writers, inventors—like Thomas Jefferson, whom Banneker knew.
Benjamin Banneker was a real person. We have copies of his almanacs and his handwritten manuscript journal. We can see that he was a literate man who was making scientific discoveries years before they would be attributed to European scientists. He noted that the Star of Sirius is actually two bodies rotating around each other. And he observed the 17-year cycle of the cicadas.
But because he was a Black man, the truth of Banneker’s life is often framed as if it is a folk tale or myth. The only reason we don’t have more of his writing to draw from is that his cabin was set on fire on the day of his funeral—a violent act of erasure that often happened to prominent people of color.
Q: The poet Natasha Trethewey said of the book, “Webster tells a compelling story as she examines ancestry, DNA, passing, and cultural appropriation, resulting in a resonant addition to our current national reckoning around racial justice.” What do you think of that description?
A: I appreciate this blurb from my friend and colleague Natasha Trethewey! And yes, this book is a reckoning. I wanted to put the past into conversation with the present. I wanted to use these ancestral stories and conversations with my African American cousins as a way to reckon with the way that racism persists in our country today.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: Writing this book was a transformational process for me. My working title for the book was Reunion, because it really felt like a huge family reunion to write this. It became a reunion with my ancestors, a reunion with the African American side of my family, and an integration of more wholeness within myself.
I love my cousins who collaborated with me on the book, and I am grateful for all the truths we were able to share through our conversation chapters.
Once I began talking with them, I realized that the most ethical form for the book would be a collective form. The chapters move back and forth between historical chapters about the ancestors and present-day chapters that are conversations with my cousins. So the very form and process of the book upended notions of individualism.
Because I wrote about so many women through the generations, it also revised the “great man” model of history. I wrote about both European Americans and African Americans, and showed that we are in one family.
So, for me, the book healed some of the solitude, individualism, and separation that can plague our writing and thinking. And of course, I hope it does that for readers too.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am working on another ancestral project. This next book is from my motherline and includes stories about my great-grandmother Hazel and my great-aunt Cynthia. Both of them wrote brilliantly throughout their lives but were never published because they were self-educated, radical women.
Hazel abandoned a daughter (my grandmother) in rural Iowa to live out her flapper dream in New York, London, and Calcutta, India. And Cynthia was “out” as a lesbian in midcentury, riding motorcycles across Europe with her partner. They were both pretty fabulous! And they had distinctive wits and voices on the page.
By sharing their stories, I want to examine the complicated relationships between women across the generations, and I want to think about female brilliance and invisibility. I think readers will enjoy these women, and I hope the book will remind us that we have amazing female and queer ancestors whose true stories are still waiting to be told.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Since Benjamin Banneker and Us was published, I have been teaching
ancestral writing with the organization Ancestral Medicine.
Writing these ancestral books and making it a ritual practice to connect with my ancestors has reshaped my thinking about history and creative work. The ancestral stories we carry within us contain truer, fuller histories than those we often see. They also open up new channels of healing and relationship.
Our ancestors’ stories do not just belong to the musty past, in other words. They can illuminate and help us to navigate our own complex present moment, especially if we are willing to be rigorously self-examining and honest.
Thank you for this wonderful conversation!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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