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Benjamin Banneker and us : eleven generations of an American family / Rachel Jamison Webster, with Edith Lee Harris, [and 3 others].

by Webster, Rachel Jamison, 1974- author.

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New York : Henry Holt and Company, 2023.

Banneker family.

Banneker, Benjamin, 1731-1806 -- Family.

Bana'ka, approximately 1670- -- Family.

Webster, Rachel Jamison, 1974- -- Family.

African Americans -- Genealogy.

Racially mixed families -- United States.

9781250827302 (hardcover) :

1250827302 (hardcover)

xiv, 351 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

Author's note -- Letter to the future -- Denial in the bloodline -- The milkmaid -- Reverse migration -- At sea -- The park and the museum -- The company of Maryland -- The untangling -- Stolen -- The white horse -- The elders -- Juneteenth -- Mary -- Coincidences -- Robert -- Gwen -- Childhood -- I can't breathe -- Keeping time -- Letter carriers -- Revolution -- Toward the setting sun -- The dream -- Griots -- The Capitol -- Insurrection -- The correspondence -- The rift -- Publication -- Reckoning -- The final years -- Legacies -- Burning -- Fragments -- The archive -- On Banneker land -- The end -- Afterword.

"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"--Provided by publisher.

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