Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism
by Rachel Maddow
Crown, 2023
[Publication date: October 17, 2023]
Rachel
Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World
War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private
citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward
an alliance with the Nazis.
Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule.
That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection.
At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court.
None of it went as planned.
While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation.
That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.
Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule.
That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection.
At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court.
None of it went as planned.
While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation.
That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.
REVIEWS:
Praise for Prequel
“Maddow’s sublime research into the precursors of current existential threats is astonishingly deep. She finds rabbit holes even rabbits are unaware of.”—Booklist, starred review
“America beat fascism once. Maddow’s timely study of enemies on the homefront urges that we can do so again.”—Kirkus, starred reviews
Praise for Blowout
“An account of international intrigue, high finance, low characters, and outrageous legal and illegal acts that put the global economy and Western democracy at grave risk. . . . [Maddow] tells this tale deliberately and methodically, building her case not as a cable commentator, but as a Rhodes Scholar.”—The Boston Globe
“Blowout is a rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today. . . . A brilliant description of many of the problems caused by our reliance on fossil fuels.”—The New York Times Book Review
“I can’t stress enough what a great storyteller Rachel Maddow is. [She carries] the reader through some hair-raising journalism in such an engaging and propulsive fashion you simply cannot put the book down. . . . It has left a most lasting impression.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Maddow’s sublime research into the precursors of current existential threats is astonishingly deep. She finds rabbit holes even rabbits are unaware of.”—Booklist, starred review
“America beat fascism once. Maddow’s timely study of enemies on the homefront urges that we can do so again.”—Kirkus, starred reviews
Praise for Blowout
“An account of international intrigue, high finance, low characters, and outrageous legal and illegal acts that put the global economy and Western democracy at grave risk. . . . [Maddow] tells this tale deliberately and methodically, building her case not as a cable commentator, but as a Rhodes Scholar.”—The Boston Globe
“Blowout is a rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today. . . . A brilliant description of many of the problems caused by our reliance on fossil fuels.”—The New York Times Book Review
“I can’t stress enough what a great storyteller Rachel Maddow is. [She carries] the reader through some hair-raising journalism in such an engaging and propulsive fashion you simply cannot put the book down. . . . It has left a most lasting impression.”—San Francisco Chronicle
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award–winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, as well as the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Drift and Blowout, and the New York Times bestselling co-author of Bag Man.
Maddow received a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford
University and earned her doctorate in political science at Oxford
University. She lives in New York City and Massachusetts with her
partner, artist Susan Mikula.
The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church
by Rachel L. Swarns
Random House, 2023
[Publication date: June 13, 2023]
“An
absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church,
whose involvement in New World slavery sustained the Church and,
thereby, helped to entrench enslavement in American society.”—Annette
Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On Juneteenth
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion.
The story begins with Ann Joice, a free Black woman and the matriarch of the Mahoney family. Joice sailed to Maryland in the late 1600s as an indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom stolen. Her descendants, who were enslaved by Jesuit priests, passed down the story of that broken promise for centuries. One of those descendants, Harry Mahoney, saved lives and the church’s money in the War of 1812, but his children, including Louisa and Anna, were put up for sale in 1838. One daughter managed to escape, but the other was sold and shipped to Louisiana. Their descendants would remain apart until Rachel Swarns’s reporting in The New York Times finally reunited them. They would go on to join other GU272 descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America.
Swarns’s journalism has already started a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells an even bigger story, not only demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the American Catholic Church but also shining a light on the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion.
The story begins with Ann Joice, a free Black woman and the matriarch of the Mahoney family. Joice sailed to Maryland in the late 1600s as an indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom stolen. Her descendants, who were enslaved by Jesuit priests, passed down the story of that broken promise for centuries. One of those descendants, Harry Mahoney, saved lives and the church’s money in the War of 1812, but his children, including Louisa and Anna, were put up for sale in 1838. One daughter managed to escape, but the other was sold and shipped to Louisiana. Their descendants would remain apart until Rachel Swarns’s reporting in The New York Times finally reunited them. They would go on to join other GU272 descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America.
Swarns’s journalism has already started a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells an even bigger story, not only demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the American Catholic Church but also shining a light on the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.
REVIEWS:
“No single work of history can remedy the vexing issue of repair for slavery in America, but The 272
advances the conversation and challenges the collective conscience;
without knowing this history in its complexity we are left with only
raw, uncharted memory.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A brilliant blend of history and journalism, this book unearths the story of the enslaved people whose labor benefited the Catholic Church—and what happened when their descendants sought answers.”—People
“Swarns is a gifted writer and storyteller. But The 272 succeeds not only in its telling of a tragic story. [She] centers the experiences of enslaved people owned by the Jesuits for nearly two centuries who remained largely unnamed and unknown until now.”—The Washington Post
“Rachel L. Swarns’s The 272 tells the poignant story of the Black families at the heart of early Catholic America. Owned and sold by Jesuit priests, these families fought to hold on to body and soul across generations. Through dogged research and with great insight, Swarns has stitched together a history once torn apart by slavery, distance, and time.”—Adam Rothman, PhD, director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies
“The 272 is revealing about old sins in the Catholic Church and conclusive at tying American higher education to slavery, but the wonderful part is that Swarns reveals and persuades by telling the story of one Black family across the 1800s—people whose names you learn and lives you follow for three generations, individuals who find their way through the tunnel of enslavement and come out whole.”—Edward Ball, National Book Award–winning author of Slaves in the Family and Life of a Klansman
“Outstanding, exceptional reporting . . . an incredible project of research, deciphering, and storytelling, and a devastating indictment not only of Georgetown but also of the entire Catholic Church.”—Steven Hahn, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Nation Under Our Feet and A Nation Without Borders
“This is a deeply researched and passionately told story that speaks to our ongoing need to confront the legacy of America’s original sin of slavery.”—James M. O’Toole, author of The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America
“Immersive . . . [A] searing investigation into the Catholic Church’s deep involvement in American slavery, which has fueled debates at Georgetown and other colleges and universities . . . A powerful reminder of how firmly the roots of slavery are planted in America’s soil.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Lively and scrupulously documented, the book brings to light a previously unknown piece of the history of slavery in the U.S.’’—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A brilliant blend of history and journalism, this book unearths the story of the enslaved people whose labor benefited the Catholic Church—and what happened when their descendants sought answers.”—People
“Swarns is a gifted writer and storyteller. But The 272 succeeds not only in its telling of a tragic story. [She] centers the experiences of enslaved people owned by the Jesuits for nearly two centuries who remained largely unnamed and unknown until now.”—The Washington Post
“Rachel L. Swarns’s The 272 tells the poignant story of the Black families at the heart of early Catholic America. Owned and sold by Jesuit priests, these families fought to hold on to body and soul across generations. Through dogged research and with great insight, Swarns has stitched together a history once torn apart by slavery, distance, and time.”—Adam Rothman, PhD, director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies
“The 272 is revealing about old sins in the Catholic Church and conclusive at tying American higher education to slavery, but the wonderful part is that Swarns reveals and persuades by telling the story of one Black family across the 1800s—people whose names you learn and lives you follow for three generations, individuals who find their way through the tunnel of enslavement and come out whole.”—Edward Ball, National Book Award–winning author of Slaves in the Family and Life of a Klansman
“Outstanding, exceptional reporting . . . an incredible project of research, deciphering, and storytelling, and a devastating indictment not only of Georgetown but also of the entire Catholic Church.”—Steven Hahn, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Nation Under Our Feet and A Nation Without Borders
“This is a deeply researched and passionately told story that speaks to our ongoing need to confront the legacy of America’s original sin of slavery.”—James M. O’Toole, author of The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America
“Immersive . . . [A] searing investigation into the Catholic Church’s deep involvement in American slavery, which has fueled debates at Georgetown and other colleges and universities . . . A powerful reminder of how firmly the roots of slavery are planted in America’s soil.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Lively and scrupulously documented, the book brings to light a previously unknown piece of the history of slavery in the U.S.’’—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rachel L. Swarns is a journalism professor at New York University and a contributing writer for The New York Times. She is the author of American Tapestry and a co-author of Unseen.
Her work has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Biographers International
Organization, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the MacDowell artist
residency program, and others.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
Arrivals
The priests sailing on board the ship that carried the first English settlers to Maryland feared they might not make it at all. The sea itself turned against them.
The ship, the Ark, was a modern marvel, four hundred tons of wood and iron. But it shuddered and keeled on its voyage as howling winds tore its mainsail and raging waters dislodged its rudder and swept the deck. There were some 140 souls on board: men and women, noblemen and indentured servants, Protestants and Catholics, adventurers and priests, all clinging to the vessel tossed by the raging sea.
Father Andrew White had envisioned the journey to Maryland as a divine mission to bring Christianity to a new world. But on that night, he feared that mission would end before it began, with the ship engulfed by the ocean.
So he prayed. He called to the heavens, describing the Ark’s sacred mission, and promised to dedicate his life to bringing Catholicism to the native people. “I had scarcely ended,” he marveled, when the winds began to subside and the ocean began to calm, sparing the ship.
The Ark stopped at Barbados, Guadeloupe, and Virginia. Then, in March 1634, the ship sailed up the Potomac River and anchored at a small island in Maryland that the priests named St. Clement’s. Disembarking, the voyagers found a land of oak and walnut groves, verdant meadows, and flocks of herons that swooped and soared over the shimmering waters. The men carved a rough cross from a tree and fell to their knees as the Jesuit priest officiated at the first Catholic Mass in the British colonies in America. “We erected it as a trophy to Christ the Savior,” wrote Father White, describing the cross, “with great emotion of soul.”
They had been sent to Maryland under the auspices of Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, a prominent English Catholic, who had received permission from the king of England to establish a new territory. English Catholics, viewed as disloyal to the monarchy because of their suspected allegiance to the pope, faced a raft of harsh restrictions at home. They could be fined, imprisoned, deported, even executed for practicing their faith. The new colony would be a place where they could worship freely, a place where gentlemen farmers and fortune hunters could acquire vast tracts of land, where impoverished white women could work in households of the wealthy and impoverished white men could work the fields and then save to buy plots of their own.
Lord Baltimore would allocate more than twenty thousand acres of the colony’s land to the early Jesuits. In order to work the land, they planned to rely on indentured servants—Father White brought somewhere between twenty and forty-four with him on that first voyage—and initially focused their evangelizing on the people indigenous to the region, the Piscataway. “We had not come thither for the purpose of war, but for the sake of benevolence, that we might imbue a rude race with the precepts of civilization, and open up a way to heaven,” wrote Father White with the characteristic condescension common among Europeans at the time.
Nobody knew whether Catholicism would thrive or wither in the fledgling colony in those early years, but the first reports weren’t promising. Four of the first fourteen priests to settle in Maryland returned to England within a year. Four died of yellow fever. Three died in Virginia. One was killed in an accidental shooting. And two, including Father White himself, were shipped back home in chains when a Protestant uprising toppled Maryland’s Catholic governor.
Still, White’s fellow Jesuits continued to spread the faith, seeking converts among the native people, Protestant settlers, and newcomers who kept coming to the colonies hungry for opportunity and undeterred by the political tumult, hardship, and uncertainty they found there. Among them was Ann Joice, who arrived on a ship that pulled in to the wharf sometime around 1676. She was a teenager, and she had waited for weeks on the sea crossing to feel this new land under her feet. She would tell the people she met that she had been born in the tropics, in a slave society, and that she had ended up in England sometime in the mid-1600s. There, she told them, she had signed on as an indentured servant to Charles Calvert, the son of Cecil Calvert. The Calverts had regained control of the colony from the Protestants, and Charles had become Maryland’s new proprietor.
The passing centuries have swept away much of her story. Her kinfolk no longer remember the name of the mother who bore her, the village that nurtured her childhood, or how she found her way to Europe. But they do know that she stepped off that ship dreaming of a new life. Black people, who first arrived as captives in the British colonies in 1619, were not always assumed to be slaves. And in the early decades following the Jesuits’ arrival, Maryland had become a place where they could wrest some autonomy from employers and enslavers and savor a measure of independence and freedom.
Black people accounted for a tiny fraction of the population at the time—less than 1 percent in the 1660s and 1670s—and most of them, like Ann, had been born in the Caribbean or had spent time there or elsewhere in the Americas. Historians have described them as the charter generations, the first generations of Black people to establish roots in the British territory in the Chesapeake. Many spoke English, practiced Christianity, knew how to navigate life in the European colonies, and worked side by side with white laborers.
George Alsop, a white indentured servant who worked in Maryland, painted a rosy portrait of life there, one that might have appealed to a young Black woman dreaming of a better life for herself. He described fair-minded masters who allowed servants to rest indoors during sweltering summers and required little outdoor work during bitter winters. He pointed out that indentured servants who successfully completed their four- or five-year terms of service could become landowners in their own right, describing laws that required such servants to receive “Fifty Acres of Land, Corn to serve him a whole year, three Sutes of Apparel, with things necessary to them, and Tools to work with all” once their contracts ended. Such indentured servants would become “Masters and Mistresses” themselves, he wrote.
And if Ann had asked, the Catholics who arrived in Maryland with the first bands of English settlers might have offered, as proof, the story of a mixed-race man who had accompanied them, a man known as “Mathias Sousa, a Molato.” De Sousa served the Jesuits for several years as an indentured servant and then set out on his own. Living as a free man, he entered into contracts, testified in court, led a trading expedition, and even joined free white men at a gathering of the General Assembly, the colony’s legislative body, where he may have voted.
But de Sousa himself might have told Ann a different story. Hardship had cut his time as a free man agonizingly short. By 1641, he had fallen into debt and was forced back into indentured servitude. He might also have warned Ann of the threat to Black men and women in British America, which had only grown since his own arrival. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first British colony to recognize slavery as a legal institution. Connecticut followed in 1650. In 1662, Virginia’s General Assembly passed a law that ensured that the children of an enslaved woman would also be slaves.
By 1664, Maryland had passed its own law, declaring that “all Negroes or other [slaves] already within [the colony] And all Negroes and other [slaves] to bee hereafter imported” would henceforth be considered slaves for life, as would their children. The situation on the ground was more complex. Some Black people—likely a small and rapidly shrinking number—continued to work as indentured servants, and some even took their employers to court to defend their rights. With Calvert, Lord Baltimore, himself as her patron, Ann may have felt confident that her work contract would be honored. But she lived in a time when blackness and slavery were quickly becoming synonymous.
Charles Calvert lived in a grand manor on a plantation in St. Mary’s County known as Mattapany, near the mouth of the Patuxent River. Ann became a familiar figure in his home, tending to the kitchen and the table of the most prominent family in the colony even as she tended her own dreams. Some of the old-timers said that she was of mixed race, while others described her as “jet black.” She was “a pretty woman,” one recalled, born into “an East India family” who worked as either a cook or a maid. Ann told her children and grandchildren that the arrangement was meant to be temporary. Once she completed her term of indenture with Lord Baltimore, the Calverts would go their way and she would go hers.
In 1684, Calvert sailed home to England. He planned to return to Maryland, but in the meantime, he sent Ann to the home of his powerful cousin Colonel Henry Darnall, a wealthy Catholic who served as the colony’s deputy governor, where she could complete her contracted service. Ann went, bearing her indenture papers and the promise from Calvert himself.
Arrivals
The priests sailing on board the ship that carried the first English settlers to Maryland feared they might not make it at all. The sea itself turned against them.
The ship, the Ark, was a modern marvel, four hundred tons of wood and iron. But it shuddered and keeled on its voyage as howling winds tore its mainsail and raging waters dislodged its rudder and swept the deck. There were some 140 souls on board: men and women, noblemen and indentured servants, Protestants and Catholics, adventurers and priests, all clinging to the vessel tossed by the raging sea.
Father Andrew White had envisioned the journey to Maryland as a divine mission to bring Christianity to a new world. But on that night, he feared that mission would end before it began, with the ship engulfed by the ocean.
So he prayed. He called to the heavens, describing the Ark’s sacred mission, and promised to dedicate his life to bringing Catholicism to the native people. “I had scarcely ended,” he marveled, when the winds began to subside and the ocean began to calm, sparing the ship.
The Ark stopped at Barbados, Guadeloupe, and Virginia. Then, in March 1634, the ship sailed up the Potomac River and anchored at a small island in Maryland that the priests named St. Clement’s. Disembarking, the voyagers found a land of oak and walnut groves, verdant meadows, and flocks of herons that swooped and soared over the shimmering waters. The men carved a rough cross from a tree and fell to their knees as the Jesuit priest officiated at the first Catholic Mass in the British colonies in America. “We erected it as a trophy to Christ the Savior,” wrote Father White, describing the cross, “with great emotion of soul.”
They had been sent to Maryland under the auspices of Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, a prominent English Catholic, who had received permission from the king of England to establish a new territory. English Catholics, viewed as disloyal to the monarchy because of their suspected allegiance to the pope, faced a raft of harsh restrictions at home. They could be fined, imprisoned, deported, even executed for practicing their faith. The new colony would be a place where they could worship freely, a place where gentlemen farmers and fortune hunters could acquire vast tracts of land, where impoverished white women could work in households of the wealthy and impoverished white men could work the fields and then save to buy plots of their own.
Lord Baltimore would allocate more than twenty thousand acres of the colony’s land to the early Jesuits. In order to work the land, they planned to rely on indentured servants—Father White brought somewhere between twenty and forty-four with him on that first voyage—and initially focused their evangelizing on the people indigenous to the region, the Piscataway. “We had not come thither for the purpose of war, but for the sake of benevolence, that we might imbue a rude race with the precepts of civilization, and open up a way to heaven,” wrote Father White with the characteristic condescension common among Europeans at the time.
Nobody knew whether Catholicism would thrive or wither in the fledgling colony in those early years, but the first reports weren’t promising. Four of the first fourteen priests to settle in Maryland returned to England within a year. Four died of yellow fever. Three died in Virginia. One was killed in an accidental shooting. And two, including Father White himself, were shipped back home in chains when a Protestant uprising toppled Maryland’s Catholic governor.
Still, White’s fellow Jesuits continued to spread the faith, seeking converts among the native people, Protestant settlers, and newcomers who kept coming to the colonies hungry for opportunity and undeterred by the political tumult, hardship, and uncertainty they found there. Among them was Ann Joice, who arrived on a ship that pulled in to the wharf sometime around 1676. She was a teenager, and she had waited for weeks on the sea crossing to feel this new land under her feet. She would tell the people she met that she had been born in the tropics, in a slave society, and that she had ended up in England sometime in the mid-1600s. There, she told them, she had signed on as an indentured servant to Charles Calvert, the son of Cecil Calvert. The Calverts had regained control of the colony from the Protestants, and Charles had become Maryland’s new proprietor.
The passing centuries have swept away much of her story. Her kinfolk no longer remember the name of the mother who bore her, the village that nurtured her childhood, or how she found her way to Europe. But they do know that she stepped off that ship dreaming of a new life. Black people, who first arrived as captives in the British colonies in 1619, were not always assumed to be slaves. And in the early decades following the Jesuits’ arrival, Maryland had become a place where they could wrest some autonomy from employers and enslavers and savor a measure of independence and freedom.
Black people accounted for a tiny fraction of the population at the time—less than 1 percent in the 1660s and 1670s—and most of them, like Ann, had been born in the Caribbean or had spent time there or elsewhere in the Americas. Historians have described them as the charter generations, the first generations of Black people to establish roots in the British territory in the Chesapeake. Many spoke English, practiced Christianity, knew how to navigate life in the European colonies, and worked side by side with white laborers.
George Alsop, a white indentured servant who worked in Maryland, painted a rosy portrait of life there, one that might have appealed to a young Black woman dreaming of a better life for herself. He described fair-minded masters who allowed servants to rest indoors during sweltering summers and required little outdoor work during bitter winters. He pointed out that indentured servants who successfully completed their four- or five-year terms of service could become landowners in their own right, describing laws that required such servants to receive “Fifty Acres of Land, Corn to serve him a whole year, three Sutes of Apparel, with things necessary to them, and Tools to work with all” once their contracts ended. Such indentured servants would become “Masters and Mistresses” themselves, he wrote.
And if Ann had asked, the Catholics who arrived in Maryland with the first bands of English settlers might have offered, as proof, the story of a mixed-race man who had accompanied them, a man known as “Mathias Sousa, a Molato.” De Sousa served the Jesuits for several years as an indentured servant and then set out on his own. Living as a free man, he entered into contracts, testified in court, led a trading expedition, and even joined free white men at a gathering of the General Assembly, the colony’s legislative body, where he may have voted.
But de Sousa himself might have told Ann a different story. Hardship had cut his time as a free man agonizingly short. By 1641, he had fallen into debt and was forced back into indentured servitude. He might also have warned Ann of the threat to Black men and women in British America, which had only grown since his own arrival. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first British colony to recognize slavery as a legal institution. Connecticut followed in 1650. In 1662, Virginia’s General Assembly passed a law that ensured that the children of an enslaved woman would also be slaves.
By 1664, Maryland had passed its own law, declaring that “all Negroes or other [slaves] already within [the colony] And all Negroes and other [slaves] to bee hereafter imported” would henceforth be considered slaves for life, as would their children. The situation on the ground was more complex. Some Black people—likely a small and rapidly shrinking number—continued to work as indentured servants, and some even took their employers to court to defend their rights. With Calvert, Lord Baltimore, himself as her patron, Ann may have felt confident that her work contract would be honored. But she lived in a time when blackness and slavery were quickly becoming synonymous.
Charles Calvert lived in a grand manor on a plantation in St. Mary’s County known as Mattapany, near the mouth of the Patuxent River. Ann became a familiar figure in his home, tending to the kitchen and the table of the most prominent family in the colony even as she tended her own dreams. Some of the old-timers said that she was of mixed race, while others described her as “jet black.” She was “a pretty woman,” one recalled, born into “an East India family” who worked as either a cook or a maid. Ann told her children and grandchildren that the arrangement was meant to be temporary. Once she completed her term of indenture with Lord Baltimore, the Calverts would go their way and she would go hers.
In 1684, Calvert sailed home to England. He planned to return to Maryland, but in the meantime, he sent Ann to the home of his powerful cousin Colonel Henry Darnall, a wealthy Catholic who served as the colony’s deputy governor, where she could complete her contracted service. Ann went, bearing her indenture papers and the promise from Calvert himself.
Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton
by Calvin Hernton
Edited by David Grundy and Lauri Scheyer
Wesleyan University Press, 2023
[Publication date: August 1, 2023]
The definitive guide to a major African American poet
This
volume promises to be the definitive guide to Calvin C. Hernton's
unparalleled poetic career, re-introducing readers to a major voice in
American poetry. Hernton was a cofounder of the Umbra Poets Workshop; a
participant in the Black Arts Movement, R. D. Laing's Kingsley Hall, and
the Antiuniversity of London; and a teacher at Oberlin College who
counted amongst his friends bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Odetta. As a
pioneer in the field of Black Studies, Hernton developed a theoretical
and practical pedagogy with lasting impact on generations of students.
He may be best known as an anti-sexist sociologist, following in the
footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois, but Hernton viewed himself, above all, as a
poet. This volume includes a generous selection of Hernton's previously
published poems, from classics like the often anthologized "The Distant
Drum" to the visionary epic The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong,
reprinted in full for the first time since 1964, alongside uncollected
and unpublished material from the Calvin C. Hernton papers at Ohio
University, a new critical introduction, and detailed notes, chronology,
and bibliography.
The Distant Drum
by Calvin Hernton
I am not a metaphor or symbol.
This you hear is not the wind in the trees.
Nor a cat being maimed in the street.
I am being maimed in the street
It is I who weep, laugh, feel pain or joy.
Speak this because I exist.
This is my voice
These words are my words, my mouth
Speaks them, my hand writes.
I am a poet.
It is my fist you hear beating
Against your ear.
REVIEWS
Cofounder of the Umbra Poets Workshop and a member of the Black Arts Movement, Hernton (1932-2001) was a pioneer in the field of Black studies who placed his contributions and identity as a poet above his other accomplishments.
The lively anecdotes in Ishmael Reed's foreword to this comprehensive and immersive retrospective bring to life Hernton's character: a charismatic genius with a penchant for drama who accepted wild dares, got into altercations with Norman Mailer, and suffered the effects of systemic racism.
Reed notes that "In poetry, Calvin Hernton dared to go where others were scared to go," as is evident in "The Distant Drum": "I am not a metaphor or symbol./ This you hear is not the wind in the trees./ Nor a cat being maimed in the street./ I am being maimed in the street." The short, often anthologized poem memorably ends: "I am a poet./ It is my fist you hear beating/ Against your ear." In "Southern Laughter," Hernton writes of "Laughter from the throats/ Of folks/ Who know nothing/ But pain and misery," and describes a scene of widespread "fear and race hatred." This necessary volume contextualizes and celebrates a complicated and visionary poet's work. - Publishers Weekly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CALVIN COOLIDGE HERNTON (1932―2001) was an American sociologist, poet, and author, particularly renowned for his 1965 study Sex and Racism in America and for co-founding the Society of Umbra.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_C._Hernton#References
Calvin Hernton was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States, on April 28, 1932. He studied at Talladega College in Alabama, where he received a B.A. in sociology (1954), and at Fisk University, where he earned a master's degree. In the mid-1950s, he worked as a social worker in New York City. He also gave poetry readings there and co-founded the magazine Umbra, which published a collective of Black writers including Langston Hughes, Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker. Hernton subsequently went to London and worked with the Institute of Phenomenological Studies (1965–69), studying under R. D. Laing.[3] Hernton was active alongside Obi Egbuna, C. L. R. James and others in the Antiuniversity of London.[4]
He returned to the US in 1970, and went to Oberlin College as a writer in residence and two years later joined the Black Studies department. He was a professor of African-American Studies there until his retirement in 1999.[5]Hernton was the author of nine books that reflect his writings as a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and social scientist, including the bestselling Sex and Racism In America (1965), which was translated into several languages, and the ground-breaking The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life (1987). His poems were also published in Essence, Evergreen Review and Black Scholar, among other places, and on various recordings and were performed in plays on Broadway and on tour.[5]
