>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Jane Sanchez: Good
afternoon, everyone. I am so excited to see so many
folks here this afternoon. Thank you for coming. We're so glad that you could come and spend some time
with us this afternoon. My name is Jane Sanchez. I'm the Chief of Humanities and Social Sciences
Division here at the Library. On behalf of our division
and the Library of Congress I welcome everyone to this afternoon's talk
by Dr. Jessica Millward. The lecture today is part of
our ongoing series of programs in the humanities and
social sciences. Today's program interprets
and promotes an awareness of the Library's unique
African American collections. Other recent examples of such programs include a full day
June Teenth book festival symposium entitled, "Celebrating African
American Literature, Literacy, and Independent Artists," which
featured Dr. Haki Madhabuti, founder and publisher of the
"Third World Press" and several other outstanding
literary activists, the panel discussing "Remembering
Edward Williams Brooks, 1919 to 2015." It also included a lecture and book
signing, "Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays,
Performance, and Citizenship, 1890 to 1930," by Dr. Koritha
Mitchell of Ohio State University. And a lecture and book signing
for the "Segregated Scholars: Black Social Scientists and the
Creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890 to 1950," by Dr. Francille
Rusan Wilson at the University of Maryland who is also the
current president of the Association of Black Women Historians. A number of staff members have been
involved in planning our programs and I'd like to just take a moment
to thank them for today's event. Dr. Sibyl Moses for suggested Dr.
Millward as a speaker, Leroy Bell and Darrin Jones of HSS for
their assistance, Wallace Perry, Office of Business Enterprises,
and Nichelle Wingfield, Office of Special Programs
and Public Programs. And now, to introduce Dr.
Millward, Dr. Sibyl Moses, Reference Specialist for African
American History and Culture. [ Applause ] >> Sibyl E. Moses: Good
afternoon, everyone. And thank you for your
support and your interest. It is my pleasure to
introduce Dr. Jessica Millward, Associate Professor of History
at the University of California, Irvine, and author of "Finding
Charities Folks: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland." Can we imagine what life would
have been like for enslaved women of African descent in the
nineteenth century of Maryland? Will we ever be able to calculate
the number of enslaved black women who have been lost to history. These are the concerns that our
historian scholar has addressed. Today Dr. Jessica Millward
will share her research and her inspiring story
of uncovering, capturing, and preserving the life and
experiences of Charity Folks, an enslaved woman from
Annapolis, Maryland, and the multiple generations
of folk, or descendants, of Charity Folks. Using personal accounts, oral
history, photographs, artifacts, and several Library of Congress
collections, as well as collections in other repositories,
Dr. Millward shows us in her own words how
enslaved women moved across and beyond the boundaries
between slavery and freedom, and ultimately changed
those boundaries. And the three words that she
features in her epilogue are faith, hope, and love as the means
by which they overcame. And for those of us who are familiar with even African American
history today we know that that is what is sustaining
us: Faith, hope, and love. Dr. Millward is the recipient of
several awards and fellowships, including the Association of Black
Women Historians' Leticia Woods Brown Best Article in Black
Women's History prize. Following this presentation,
Dr. Millward has agreed to answer a few questions,
and then please note that we are recording this
presentation for the Library of Congress' website and any questions asked
constitute your permission to be recorded, thank you. So we are honored to host Dr.
Millward at the Library of Congress so please join me in
welcoming her to the podium. >> Jessica Millward: Okay. Normally I would ask
if you can hear me but I guess I'll ask can you see me? I'm a bit -- . [ Laughter ] I want to thank you all
so much for coming out. This is in some ways it's
a homecoming and a reunion because I lived in D.C. for
three years while I was doing dissertation research. So I might be having a
little feelings this morning. This is a bad time for it to
hit me but I'll work through it. So thank you to all of those who
made me feel very welcomed today, especially to the Humanities
and Social Sciences Division. Thank you to Chief Sanchez. And I especially want to
thank Dr. Sibyl Moses. Dr. Moses has been my liaison
and she's my host today. She moved literally heaven and earth so that this talk could take
place during Black History Month. This included and was not limited to
processing every item that is needed for a talk in a Federal space,
meaning everything had to go through three levels
of clearance, or more, and they had to go
through very quickly. So I do want to give a
heartfelt thank you to her. A special acknowledgement to the
archivists and reference librarians in the main reading room,
the manuscript room, the newspaper room,
photographs and prints. I spent a great deal of time in each of these rooms researching
these projects. And also I want to thank all
of you who came today and some of you literally were
sitting at the table with me when I started this project. And so it's nice to see so many of
you and especially to those of you that brought your students so you
can help educate a new generation. So today's talk, "Finding
Charity Folks: Public Memory and the Construction of an Enslaved
Biography,"is a play obviously on the title of my
recently released book. Charity Folks is a formerly enslaved
woman who lived in Annapolis, Maryland, during the time
of the American Revolution. The book uses the fragmented
archive of Charity Folks' life to give a window into the
ways that slavery, freedom, and liberation were intertwined in
the lives of African American women. In particular, as Dr. Moses said,
it explores how enslaved women moved across and beyond the
boundaries of slavery and freedom, and ultimately changed
those boundaries. In the decades following the
American Revolution enslaved women such as Charity Folks
acquired freedom by buying it, by being granted it, by
petitioning it, and then, of course, by negotiating for it privately. By accessing manumission, or
that is the act to be free, freedom by a legal deed,
enslaved women, as I said, shifting the boundaries of
freedom in terms of the law, their communities, their
family, their work, and even their own bodies. Maryland may have been
typical in the 1880's. It was typical because it had
a large free black population. And this tended to happen
in places like Virginia, in places like South Carolina
where there was an urban center, number one, and number two, where
slavery was no longer profitable. Maryland in particular
shifted from tobacco production to wheat production and that
doesn't necessarily mean that one needed a labor
force for the entire year. So planters were able to relieve
themselves of enslaved property by either hiring them
out or freeing them. But freedom came with
some kind of stipulation which I'll discuss in a moment. So when I looked at
this larger project, this genesis actually
happened to be in questions of motherhood, resistance,
and slavery. And so I opened the book
with this very first line: "Motherhood during slavery was
the farthest thing from freedom. For enslaved African American
women freedom, like enslavement, was actually tied to the womb." And slave women, particularly
in Maryland, realized that if they
could give birth to an enslaved child they also, because of how the
law was structured, could give birth to a free child. Meaning because the way
the laws were structured and because slave holders
were freeing their slaves in greater numbers, if the
status of a child was written down in a document before
the mother gave birth, in theory if the owner said they
were going to free that child, the child could be born free. Well, we know that this
didn't always happen. But, for the most part,
Maryland is unique because there's this notion
that, as the law was changing, particularly in 1808, enslaved
women actually had this thought that perhaps they could
give birth to free children. So the gendering of freedom
influenced notions of liberty, equality in race in what
becomes this new nation. And this gendering of freedom
also held long term implication for African American women's
interactions in the state which, hopefully, we can get to. While a singular definition
of freedom or its manifestations is not really
possible because the conditions and experiences of
enslavement were not uniform, this study focuses
chiefly on two aspects of how enslaved people
define freedom. So in the book I talk about
the historical groundings of enslaved women trying to
lobby for their own freedom, either negotiating
with their owners, or filing petitions,
and what have you. I don't want to say
the greater story, but the story you're here
today to hear is how, in fact, families influence
the writing of history and history influences the
writing of families, okay. So with that said, in this talk
Charity Folks appears as a ghost who haunts public memory. She appears as an embodied subject. She appears as a founding mother. And she appears as a
forgotten ancestor. So my final thank you this
morning is to Charity Folks who has waited a long time
to have her story reclaimed. Charity Folks is a ghost of
slavery who refuses to be silenced. She finds herself in the company of
Margaret Garner's beloved daughter, the young girl known only as
Celia a slave, Sarah Baartman, Sally Hemings, Sojourner Truth,
Queen Nanny of the Maroons, and countless unnamed women who
haunt historical memory precisely because they carry the weight
of the diasporas traumatic past. Collectively and individually
their lives testify to the multifaceted legacies
of enslavement and attempts by captives to dismantle it. And they do so without suppressing
the slave system's most violent and horrific truths. The recovered pasts of black women
underscore the competing interests involved in remembering,
constructing, and commemorating their lives. So Charity Folks isn't as well
known as these other women but she is no less important. She was enslaved in
Annapolis, Maryland, and she gained her
freedom as an adult. We know from an 1811 freedom
certificate she was, quote, bright mulato and about
52 years old, suggesting she was born around 1759. She, sorry, one local historian
suggests that she was born at Belair Plantation, which is
actually ten minutes outside of Annapolis. Oops. Okay, we're going to wait. Just wait. It happens all the time. And what can be deduced from her
life is that she probably worked in the home, in the domestic
space, and she lived with -- at least initially at
Belair Plantation -- she lived with her
mother and her brother. Charity Folks gave
birth to five children, all of whom gained their freedom. And her family line produced
generations of race men and race women committed to
uplifting African Americans. Among her descendants are some of the most accomplished
African American families of the nineteenth and
twentieth century. During the nineteenth century
members of her family were prominent in the free black class in
Annapolis and Baltimore. They served as pillars of the
Methodist and Episcopal church. They even fought in the
Civil War, rather one was on a Navy ship during the Civil War. During the twentieth
century her descendants, who were named the Bishops, became
pioneers in the fields of medicine, religion, and participated
in the ongoing struggle for Black equality in America. So I first encountered Charity Folks in the year 2000 while I
was conducting research, dissertation research, which
was supposed to be on freedom and slavery in Anne Arundel
and Baltimore Counties. She introduced herself through
manumission documents executed by her owners in 1797 and 1807. And these deeds revealed
that Charity had arranged to secure not only her
freedom, but for her children and her grandchildren as well. That's more than 50 years before the
Emancipation Proclamation I found an enslaved woman who was the
architect of her own liberation. Charity's name and fragments of
her story quickly became the focus of a dissertation chapter,
a book, and an article. Charity Folks worked
her way literally into every single conference paper
and article I tried to write. And if I did not include her name,
the article wouldn't be published, the paper didn't go well. So she literally worked her way
into every project I was doing. And, I don't know, has
Dr. Brown arrived yet? I don't think Dr. Brown is here. So people would often ask
in sustained disbelief, "Charity Folks, is
she still around?" Indeed Charity was present
and she was unshakeable. And one of my colleagues, I see
my colleague, Damien Thomas here, one of our colleagues at Illinois
said, "Wouldn't it be great if you found more information
on Charity Folks? Wouldn't it be great if you told
the book from her perspective?" And I said, "Yeah. That's not going to happen." At that point I had two
documents, two documents. I will say for the record that
Professor David Roettger was right, it was really great to tell
this book from her perspective. But that forced me to do
a lot of things in order to take two documents
and make a book. So that my search for Charity Folks
has spanned more than a decade. Like I said, she found her
way into every conversation. I've catalogued more than 1500
manumission documents to see if her history was typical
or if it was exceptional. I conducted work on three
continents, the United States, Great Britain, and in Ghana. And one of the most
important things that happened in this finding Charity Folks is I
actually realized I possessed a bulk of the information about her
life and I had for some time. But that was only revealed when
I listened to the silences. And sometimes we know, if we're
doing the kind of work that some of us do, looking for people
who weren't meant to be in historical documents, doing
this kind of research revolves around not just looking at
how history is documented, but how it is remembered and, in
most cases, how it is imagined. I did a considerable amount of
work to step outside of the archive to chase after this ghost
that was chasing me. And the first thing I did
is I called the Historic Annapolis Foundation. And there a gentleman by the name of Glen Campbell answered the
phone and said, "Oh, Charity. I don't know anything about her
but I know she's important." So that sent me on this trail. I met Janice Hayes Williams
who is a local genealogist and local historian. She assured me the story
of Charity Folks didn't end with the two documents that I had. I was encouraged to speak to
the descendants of the people who owned Charity Folks,
who was the Rideout family. And the Rideout family is very
prominent in the state of Maryland. And they actually have a history
and a connection to Kunta Kinte, the ancestor that is talked
about in Alex Haley's book. And we can discuss how legitimate
or non-legitimate that is. The point of the matter is the
Rideout family is very used to people calling them
and saying, "I'm sorry. May I talk to you about the enslaved
people your family used to own?" So it wasn't as awkward as
it initially was going to be. And I also contacted descendants
of Charity Folks which I will talk about in the latter
part of this talk. So, without a picture to guide
-- me well, let me back up. When we think about
the history of slavery in Maryland we really only
think about three people. We think about Kunta
Kinte, who I just named. We think about Frederick Douglass. And we think about Harriet Tubman. And this is one of the reasons
that Charity Folks has remained such an obscure historical figure. We know that Annapolis hardly ever
receives attention by historians. People are much more
interested in Baltimore. And we know that when
people are telling stories and recreating movies, we know
the story of Harriet Tubman, or Kunta Kinte, or Frederick
Douglass is much more exciting. So there are a couple
of places in Maryland where there are actually
monuments and exhibits dedicated to these three individuals. We have in the upper corner the
house that Frederick Douglass worked in and lived in when he was
enslaved in Philips Point. There's another bust
commemorating his head. We have Harriet Tubman down here. And then we have the Alex
Haley memorial that sits on the dock of Annapolis. What is interesting about this is
even though there are all these plaques and that we can --
plaques and monuments -- and we can take a tour
for $18.00 and walk around Frederick Douglass'
Baltimore, what is interesting is
just as Baltimore belonged to Frederick Douglass, Annapolis
certainly belonged to Charity Folks. Charity Folks is more representative
of the enslaved experience in Maryland than Kunta
Kinte, Frederick Douglass, or Harriet Tubman, and this is
why: She did not flee bondage like Frederick Douglass
or Harriet Tubman. She did not die enslaved
like Kunta Kinte. Nor did she end her life in poverty. Okay. Folks and her family were like
the 45,000 other enslaved people in Maryland who gained their freedom in the decades following
the American Revolution. So in Maryland the small geographic
region boasted a remarkably fluid slave and free Black population. Folks lived the majority of
her life in the Chesapeake and during her lifetime she
inhabited all three zones of freedom. Okay. So, as I said, I had
to go on an expedition. I had to go on an expedition. I literally would, we don't,
sorry, I know we're being recorded so I guess I won't walk around. So without a picture --
we don't have a picture of what Charity Folks looks like -- without a picture I was
literally forced to go to the site where she lived and literally
consider myself an archeologist and look for places where I thought
her imprint might be visible. So this is a map sitting just
offsite of Church Circle. You can see Doctor Street. You can see South Street. Charity Folks, from her grown adult
years, during her grown adult years, inhabited these, what, three
blocks that adjoined one another. That was it. That was it. She was enslaved at the bottom,
at the bottom of this, well, is the bottom of what I'm saying
right here, Doctor Street. She moved to the corner of
South Street when she was freed. So her entire life was
contained in this area. However, it's much more
interesting than you would expect. Charity Folks' imprint
is all over Annapolis. Nearly every place she worked
in, that she inhabited, is part of historic Annapolis or
part of the National Historic Trust. Properties once owned by Charity
Folks and her son-in-law are sites for archeological digs and continue to yield crucial details
about Black Annapolis. Now during the late nineteenth
century Folks' property at 84 Franklin Street was sold to the Mount Moriah
Methodist Episcopal Church as the site of their new building. The church has since came into the
hands of the National Historic Trust and it's been converted to
the Banneker-Douglass Museum which is Maryland's
official repository for African American heritage. And this is where I'll
do a shameless plug and say we two representatives
from the Banneker-Douglass Museum. We are actually working
on an exhibit around this story for next year. So, welcome them. And I also learned
that going through this that not only was Charity Folks'
imprint visible but she was integral to the history of Annapolis. Which means I also had to accept
that there were public narratives about her life that may or may
not agree with the documents. That's put me out of
favor with some people. I think we have come
to a conclusion. But it was very awkward to have
to write a history as an historian and be challenged by
people who had passed down a history for generations. So Charity does not enter
the historical record until she's an adult. As I said before, one local
historian thinks that she was born at Belair Plantation which is now
part of the city of Bowie museums. We don't have any documentation
for this. But it's alluded to in family lore. It's alluded to in several places. Okay. The slave quarters
of Belair have not survived but the public display
at the mansion suggests that the enslaved people
made their home in the cellar of this grand mansion. They lived among rats,
and mice, and horses. They lived as chattel. Charity may have spent the first
ten to twelve years of her life, like I said, in the cellar with
her brother, James, and her mother. Or she might have lived
in Annapolis. We're really unclear. We do know that she
entered the house of John Rideout between
1765 and 1767. But it's unclear how
she ended up there, too. Some say that she was
part of a dowry. When Samuel Ogle, who owned Belair
mansion, who was the governor of Maryland, his daughter
actually married John Rideout. So this brings us to
the Rideout house. Some of these pictures are actually
from the Library of Congress. The John Rideout house stands on
Gloucester Street in Annapolis and it is a historical
monument and testament to eighteenth century architecture. So this is frontispiece
of the house. You can see the little
historical landmark marking. A picture from the
Library of Congress. I've been in the house. The house almost looks like
this picture that was taken in the 40's -- 40's or 50's. This is an outside view of the house
and then the house from the back. So Charity folks probably
came to the Rideout house when she was about 13 years of age. And we don't know what kind of advice her mother
would have given her. We don't know if she had a chance
to say goodbye to her mother. But she comes to the
Rideout house right when she's on the cusp of puberty. In a house with a mistress she knew
because she was raised at Belair with Mary Rideout we're told. And she was also placed
in a house with a master, John Rideout, that she did not know. So we're not really sure what her
experiences would have been like. Was she free from sexual violation? Did she come in close
contact with people? Was she punished often? We don't know this. But living outside the
normative definition of womanhood probably forced
enslaved women like Charity to nurture her spirit
in a particular way to combat the psychological and physical abuse that
encircled her life. We know that while she was a slave
Charity gave birth to five children and maintained a broad relationship with another slave
named Thomas Folks. Meaning he lived a few doors down. He was owned by John Davidson,
a shopkeeper and tavern owner. And from what we know he fathered
three of her five children. Where Charity was determined to influence her own
liberation it's clear to actually manumit her took
place over quite a few decades. In total it took almost
40 years from the time that Charity's first daughter was
freed by John Rideout to the time that her grandchildren
were finally freed. It took 40 years for this entire
family to live as free people. For Charity Folks in
particular she died in -- I mean John Rideout died in 1797. And within two months
his wife signed a deed to grant Charity Folks' freedom. And she, at this point two of Charity's daughters were already
freed and they lived with her mother or her free Black husband. Thomas Folks has been freed. And Charity Folks still had
children remaining in bondage. So I'm going to short shift so we
can get to questions and answers and basically say that by 1807
all of her children were freed. And by 1810 we can tell
that she's living in a house with Thomas Folks and her children. Despite Charity Folks' desire to
keep members of her family close, their experiences in
slavery continued to drive a wedge between them. And ultimately the fact that
some were freed and others stayed in bondage actually produced
resentment among her children. Her son, for example, felt
that she had a greater fondness for little daughter,
named Little Charity, than she did for the other
children in the family. And this often frustrated her
husband who by now was free and he remarked that Little
Charity's influence would actually carry his wife to hell. For their part, James Jackson,
her son, and her other daughter, Mary Folks, certainly believed
that they were unfairly separated from their mother when
they were young. And they felt that because Charity
was probably the one that stayed with her the longest that she
had the better relationship. And so this produces
a longstanding rivalry between Mary Folks
and Little Charity. The rivalry was so intense that
they actually sued one another. Mary Folks and her husband
sued Charity Folks Bishop and her husband, William Bishop,
because the Bishops erected a fence that would not allow them to cross
the alley and go to their own home. So when it came down to it, the two
sisters were competing literally over a space that was
18 inches long. Who owned it? Who was it bequeathed to? What have you. So this rivalry was intense. And this tension exacerbated in the
family even more when William Bishop and his wife, Charity
Bishop, Little Charity, moved into the house
with Charity Folks. In fact Little Charity asked
her brother, James Jackson, to remove the pigs that
he kept in the front yard. And this ensues such a violent
argument that James drew a knife on his mother and called
her ill names. Charity Folks never forgave her son
and she was removed from her will. And that was a significant penalty because she really
amassed a lot of property. In addition to the lingering
memories of slavery in her home, the imprint of slavery was still
apparent all over Annapolis. A perfect example is if
we go to Annapolis now, you can go to Reynold's Tavern. You can go there for high tea. I'm the scholar of slavery. I should have known this. I went to Reynold's
Tavern for high tea. Thomas Folks had worked
there when he became free. And then the local historian said,
"We don't go to Reynold's Tavern." We don't? "We don't
go to Reynold's Tavern because during the slave trade they
sold people in the parlor room." And archeological evidence from Mark
Leone at the University of Maryland, College Park, reveals
they actually held people in the basement waiting to be sold. So this imprint of slavery even
exists today but at the time that Charity was a free
person this building was right across the street from her home. So slavery is still
everywhere, right. In an form of eerie foreshadowing
Charity Folks anticipated being lost from history. In her final years she
felt she was displaced and feared being turned
out of doors. She obsessively searched
for something that was lost and half the time she did not
know what she was looking for. Family members and neighbors
described her as deranged. And given her age and her failing
health, and probably the experience that she endured, it's
probably not surprising that Folks probably had something
that likened to dementia. Now part of her ruthlessness
and restlessness in her later years stemmed
from a sense that her position in the family was being overtaken,
that her son-in-law, William Bishop, was displacing her as the
mistress of the house. Bishop ultimately assumed
control of her residence and eventually the
deed to the property. Substantiating Folks' worse fear that she was losing
power among her kin. A family friend described a
fight between William Bishop and Charity Folks and
the family remarked that, "There was just no place for her." And she set off to the graveyard. This was the last public
account documenting the life of Charity Folks. Charity Folks we know
suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1834 when she was 75. She regained the ability to
walk and some ability to speak, but she died within that year. Charity Folks did leave a will
at a time when white men failed to even use this legal mechanism. Her will and its related codicils
underscore the importance she attached to property and kin alike. She left property to each of
her three surviving daughters. And Folks in some ways resembled
African Americans during Reconstruction, which is
discussed by Dylan Penningroth, in that her family - sorry -- in like many nineteenth
century African Americans, Charity Folks attached value to reclaiming her family members
even though they had been lost to slavery. And in essence her kin was
as valuable as property. She also had a clear understanding
of what it took to succeed in a free society and worked
hard to become a woman of property and social standing. Though she was not formally
educated, Charity learned protocol, legal protocol, from life
experiences and her exposure to business transactions. A family genealogical chart bears
the notation that Charity Folks, the wife of Thomas, personal
maid to the wife of the governor, is buried in St. Anne's
Cemetery in Annapolis. Tucked away between the
Severn River and Route 50, St. Anne connects historic
Annapolis with the modern world and it contains graves spanning back to the 200 years of
the city's history. And there's a Bishop family plot
where twelve members of the Bishop and Folks family are buried. Next to a headstone for Thomas
Folks, which is the one closest to me, there's an empty space. And there's a footstone at the end
of this that you'll see in a moment. So it's Thomas Folks, there's an
empty space, and there's Mary Folks. And the footstone allegedly
belongs to Charity Folks. So 200 years after she was forgotten
to history, I place flowers, giving her some kind of monument
to mark her death and her life. Yet, without a headstone to
commemorate her existence, Charity's life appears
as a ghost story. She like the wondering
spirits who died on board slave ships
during the Middle Passage and did not have proper burial. Charity Folks has been
denied the important process of being remembered and
honored by the living. She is forgotten. And because she is
forgotten she is restless. Yet, as Charity Folks
demonstrates, the absence of a body, or even the absence of a physical
headstone, does not always equate to the absence of memory. And we are winding up
because I know some of you are here on your lunch break. Even without a headstone, Charity
Folks continues to draw attention to her life in interesting ways. So, case in point, when I
was finishing this book -- you have to finish your book, you have to turn it in,
you have to get tenure. The clock is not on the
side of the historian. And I sent the book to the press
but I was still very unsettled. I was uncertain. So I went on an elaborate mission to
track down some of her descendants. I looked on Facebook. But unfortunately the one person
I found had a Facebook account but doesn't use it. So I actually had to go the old
fashioned way and look at books, go through another historian who
linked me to one of her relatives that worked in the government, who then said that she would give
me this secret information what she went through, the person themselves. So this is how I came to meet a
woman by the name of Liberty Rashad. And Liberty Rashad is the five
times removed granddaughter of Charity Folks. The first time we spoke was in
December 2012 and the phone rang, I answered it, "Hello, Jessica. This is Liberty Rashad." And she was very dramatic
and just wonderful. And she was great. And I said, "Is Liberty
your real name?" "Yeah. That is my given name." I said, "Well, little ironic. Do you know that you're descended
from a line of freedom fighters?" And so the irony was not
lost on either one of us. But as we spoke about her
ancestor, Charity Folks, we quickly realized we were
speaking about two different women. So for the family historians
you'll love this. I was talking about Charity
Folks, Senior, the mother. She was talking about Charity
Folks Bishop, the daughter. There were two Charity Folks. And I knew this but Liberty did not. And so that was the
connection I was looking for. My academic hunch had been correct. Charity Folks had been
lost to history and she was lost to
her family as well. And in one phone call we
restored not just one generation, but two generations because I told
Liberty not just about Charity Folks but about her mother, Rachel Burr. And for a historian, this in
some ways is that aha moment. This is when you get goose bumps. I mean I have goose bumps. I don't know if you do. But this is that moment
that a historian dreams of. We don't talk to people
that are living and walking around in the present moment. So this was a beautiful moment
but of course this means that Liberty has to come
to Annapolis to meet me. She had never been to Annapolis. She lived in New York. She knew Annapolis was important for her family history
but she'd never been. So on Easter morning, a day of
rebirth, in 2013, I met Liberty, her son, his two children who
live in D.C., and their niece who was visiting from Chicago. And we walked all around
Annapolis and I showed them things. I showed them the dock with the
Alex Haley memorial and we talked about how many Africans
probably came through that port or lost their lives beforehand. We walked around downtown
Annapolis and I showed the grounds where Charity's house
may have stood. We saw Reynold's Tavern. We saw the Banneker-Douglass Museum. And as we're walking past the
front of the Rideout house, and we're looking at it, and we're
exchanging remarks about whether or not it was a tribute to
eighteenth century architecture or what it must have been
like to be enslaved in there, someone comes from
the side of the house. So Liberty looks at me. I looked at her. She sends me over to the
gentleman and it turns out he was the owner of the house. I introduced him to --
I introduced myself. And Liberty started
to introduce herself. I cut to the chase
and said, "Listen, this is the descendant
of Charity Folks." "Ah! Charity Folks?" So he invited us in. He invited us in through
the front door. [ Laughter ] And we spent a lot of time
just walking in her footsteps, looking at this garden that she
probably got herbs and roots from to do some root work, looking
at the time she probably, you know, secreted herself to go to the bushes to have a safe harbor
and perhaps pray. And it was this incredible
experience. I had tried to get into
this house so many times but it's not open to the public. I just didn't have
the right combination. I had to walk there with her
descendants and it opened right up. [ Laughter ] We're almost, I mean, I haven't
even gotten to the good stuff yet. So here's a picture
of Liberty and myself. You can see why some
people might have said when I went traipsing around, "Are
you a descendant of the Bishops?" "No." I have no resemblance
whatsoever. This even happened in New
York when I went to a church that the Bishops had
been ministers at. No family resemblance
to my knowledge, no family relationship rather. So Liberty and I spent two
additional days retracing her family's past. And the trip was profound. It was blessed by the ancestors
and it exceeded our expectations. Her presence was everywhere. We felt here when we entered
the John Rideout house. We felt her at the
Banneker-Douglass Museum. We actually felt her as we
stood at the side of this Bank of America building that
sits right on Church Circle because that's actually where
her house used to stand. So perhaps it's ironic given that
she accumulated so much money. And we felt her as we entered
St. Mary's Catholic Church. We snapped photos and
toasted her memory. And we ended our visit at the Bishop
family plot in St. Anne's Cemetery where of course Liberty placed
flowers honoring her ancestors and she called out their names. As Folks' example suggests
the enslaved are persistent in their desire to be remembered. They beckon to be seen more
than names and prices jotted down on plantation account books. They invite us in through artifacts,
oral histories, and photos. They challenge us to engage
in the untelling in narratives that neglect their pain, their
suffering, and even their triumphs. Their ongoing presence forces
us to deal with the flesh and blood diaspora involved
in the trafficking of bodies. They call for attention, they call for atonement, they
call for apologies. So how we choose to engage the
past as archivists, as scholars. How we choose to engage the
past then is not simply a matter of discourse. If the story of Charity Folks and other enslaved women is any
indication, what we do matters. The story of enslaved women and Black women more generally
are crucial to our understanding of the long fight for freedom. One of the ways I like to end this
talk is I actually like to speak about actually what it was like to
reconstruct Charity Folks' life. And part of reconstructing
Charity Folks' life, it was to understand her pain. And this was the historic pain
brought out of social conditions -- it was a historic pain born out of
social conditions, legal policies, and particular constructions that
were anti-Black, anti-woman, and, for the most part, anti-Black woman. Only by experiencing this
pain can one truly write about and understand the redemptive and revolutionary nature
of Black women's joy. As generations of Black
women can attest, we know that rejoicing
is the key to surviving. So, in closing, -- I'm a lefty,
that's what's going on over here. That's what's been the
problem all day long. So I like to believe that
Charity Folks is finding peace. She rests in the center of the
family plot surviving the ebb and flow of time, encircled
by all her folk. The tombstones of her husband,
her daughter, her son-in-law, and even some grandchildren
bear witness to the family's enslaved past. There are other descendants that
bear witness to the experiences of the family in freedom. So in this paper Charity Folks has
inhabited many forms, be it a ghost, an artifact of public memory, an
enslaved woman, a free Black woman, a founding mother, and
a forgotten ancestor. In each form Charity Folks
testifies to the incomparable spirit of survival and adaptation
among African Americans. Charity Folks seems to call
out the past and say to us, "Despite it all we are still here." Thank you. [ Applause ] Okay. I know some of you have
to leave and go back to work. We have time for a few questions
and then we'll move outside to a formal book signing. Yes, Mr. Jones. >> Have you thought about
going back to the cemetery and [inaudible] take a probe
and stick it through that area where you think she might be buried? >> Jessica Millward:
See that's a great idea. Yes. I don't have that
kind of power. But the Library of Congress
knows a lot of people. [Laughs]. I mean this would take,
you know, asking the family. It would take some negotiations. Yes. The answer is yes. And I'm not close to
that experience. I hope that at some point it
will actually lead us there. Yes, in the back. >> Could you speak a little bit
about how her life and the choices that she was able to make so much of
might have been affected by the fact that she lived in a city,
and then of course how that might have [inaudible]. >> Jessica Millward: So Annapolis
at this time we can call it a city. Annapolis by city standards
never grew to be more than just a large town. But urban centers like Annapolis,
Baltimore, and Charleston, for example, people are
in some ways it's believed that they have more
access to freedom. In that they're not on the
plantation under and overseer. They've been hired out
to work for someone else. You know, Frederick Douglass talks about being almost a
free man in the city. I think in Charity Folks'
situation it has been said that she probably had a
degree of more freedom because the family also
had a house in Whitehall which is just past Annapolis. And it's believed she traveled
back and forth to see her children. But I also want to underscore that
even though she had more freedom and even though enslaved people had
more freedom in cities, you know, they might be able to sell their
wares and use some of that money to buy their freedom,
they were still enslaved. So their circumstances
are conscribed in a particular manner, right. Yes, sir. In the back. >> Would you like to tell us about your research on
the other continents? London, and Africa, Ghana? >> Jessica Millward:
Oh, I don't know. You all might not be ready for this. So London was London. London was London. And, ma'am, I see you in the back. I'll answer your question
in a minute. London was London. But there's a particular
experience when you go to Africa and when you go to Ghana. I went to Ghana in particular. And because now we're all friends
I will say that I gave this paper at the University of Ghana Legon. And the instructor, who's an artist,
had this great idea to put me with this backdrop of Cape Coast
slave dungeon in the background. I said, "Yeah. I don't know if that's a good idea." But he was insistent on this
because he knew the majority of enslaved people
passed through Cape Coast. Okay. So there's a part in this talk where I start saying the
names of the families, right. I call out there names. And that was probably one of the
most beautiful memories I have of doing this kind of work. And it wasn't doing archival work
but it was literally bringing part of someone back home
to the continent. And if you do African American
history, that's also one of those best moments
you can hope for. You can't touch it. You can't see it. But you can feel it. Yes, in the back. >> [Inaudible]. >> Jessica Millward: Thank you. So I think that's a
good place to end. I know they're monitoring the time. So I'm going to turn the
microphone back to Dr. Moses. >> Sibyl E. Moses: Please join me
again in thanking Dr. Millward. [ Applause ] Dr. Millward, you really don't know
how much we have appreciated your visit, and your presentation,
your research, and your spirit. Your talk was so appropriate
because the Humanities and Social Sciences Division, in addition to African
American history, also covers women's
history, and local history and genealogy, and American history. [Laughs]. And so for all
of you, we welcome you to come in to use our resources. We have a Ask a Librarian
service where you can send in your questions via the internet. We have a genealogy
section where we welcome you and we can assist you
with your research. And we want you to come back again. So if you do not have a reader
registration card, go and get one because the reason we have so many
people here is our chiefs sent out something to Patron Services. Which is when you sign
up for your card to use the Library you automatically
get on this list and so you hear about everything that's happening
at the Library of Congress. We thank you again. We have for the past couple of
years featured lectures and programs that where we have starred
members of the Association of Black Women Historians
of which I am a member. And it's fabulous research. It's cutting edge research. And it goes into areas that
we have not visited before. So we encourage all of you here
to recover someone from the past so that they will not be
lost in history, okay. Our book signing will occur outside in the lobby and she'll
be available. [Inaudible]. >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
