Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

BENJAMIN BANNEKER AND US

Rachel Webster

Weaving together past and present, history and memoir, Rachel Webster traces back through 11 generations of her ancestry to explore insidious forces of racism at play.

For readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Webster is a descendant of almanac writer Benjamin Banneker and his grandmother, Molly Welsh, a milkmaid sentenced to indentured servitude in Maryland in 1683. She gained access to Banneker's original almanac and has done extensive research along with his other descendants to bring his story to life. During the writing of this book, several new documents surfaced in the archives. Webster will be the first biographer of Banneker to include these new findings and to integrate both the documentary and oral histories about the Banneker family.

Placing famed almanac writer Benjamin Banneker at the forefront, Benjamin Banneker and Us weaves together past and present to explore the insidious forces of racism that shape our understanding of ancestry, lineage, and family today.

Lyrically written, Rachel Webster's Benjamin Banneker and Us examines her own ancestry and relation to Benjamin Banneker, the African American mathematician and writer of almanacs who surveyed Washington, DC, for former president Thomas Jefferson.

Acting as a griot, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors, among them Banneker's grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the construction of whiteness and the laws that gave it meaning. Webster's passionate and authoritative account adds to the growing body of work addressing structural racism and the inevitable reckoning on race, history, and the legacies of slavery that still affect our society.

Rachel Webster is a professor of creative writing at Northwestern University and the author of four books of poetry and cross-genre writing. She has taught writing workshops through the National Urban League, Chicago Public Schools, Gallery 37, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art, working to bring diversity and antiracist awareness into creative writing curricula. Rachel's essays, poems, and stories have been published in outlets including Poetry, Tin House, and the Yale Review. Benjamin Banneker and Us is her first nonfiction book. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, with her husband and daughter.

Available products
Book Published 2023-01-01 by Henry Holt

Comments

"Benjamin Banneker and Us not only tells the story of Banneker but gives the reader a portrait of the women who shaped him - his mother, grandmother, and sisters. These women stood up in court to argue for their children's freedom, served as midwives and herbalists, and found ways to survive and thrive in a country that continually tried to silence them. I am inspired by this family's resilience, and by the way their lives illuminate the past and our present."

"Rachel Jamison Webster has collaborated with her relatives to weave an impressive investigation of race and our shared American historythe convergences and divergences across time and space. 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."

"For America to outgrow the bondage of white-body supremacy, white Americans need to imagine themselves in Black, red and brown bodies, and experience what those bodies had to endure. They also need to do the same with the bodies of their white ancestors. Benjamin Banneker and Us undertakes this work of imagination, research, and listening, and is written in the spirit of healing.