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Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family Audiobook
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Publisher Description
A family reunion gives way to an unforgettable genealogical quest as relatives reconnect across lines of color, culture, and time, putting the past into urgent conversation with the present.
In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative.
Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, 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 legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in effect in the present day.
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“A stunning meditation on race, identity, and achievement…[that] brings these historical figures to life…An enthralling and clear-eyed celebration of America’s multiracial past and present.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Quotes
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“[Webster’s] excellent and thought-provoking book is on every level about unknowing rather than knowing”
— New York Times -
“Sweeping, frequently insightful, often speculative, and sometimes extremely moving.”
— Washington Post -
“[Shines] a light onto not just a neglected piece of personal and national history but also the hypocrisy inherent in so many discussions around race.”
— Los Angeles Times -
“The book is at its best when Webster interrogates what it means to be white.”
— NPR -
“An engrossing, multifaceted, profoundly thoughtful, and beautifully rendered inquiry that forms a clarifying lens on America’s ongoing struggles against racism and endemic injustice."
— Booklist (starred review) -
“Listeners who relish the immediacy of an author’s voice will embrace this story of generational memory and discovery.”
— AudioFile -
“Webster has collaborated with her relatives to weave an impressive investigation of race and our shared American history―the convergences and divergences across time and space.”
— Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winner and former US poet laureate -
“I am inspired by this family’s resilience, and by the way their lives illuminate the past and our present.”
— Anna Malaika Tubbs, author of The Three Mothers -
“[A] work of imagination, research, and listening and is written in the spirit of healing.”
— Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands
Awards
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A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
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About Rachel Jamison Webster
Rachel Webster writes essays, poems, and stories that have been published in outlets including Poetry, Tin House, and the Yale Review. She is the author of four books of poetry and cross-genre writing. Benjamin Banneker and Us is her first nonfiction book. She is a professor of creative writing at Northwestern University and 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.