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the LITERARY HILL A Compendium of Readers, Writers, Books, & Events by Karen Lyon
Reckoning and Reconciliation
able to purchase his freedom at age 19. Using census data, company records, legal Two new books from Georgetown University Press documents, and a remarkable 11-page letter writdeal with the powerful and timely issue of racial ten by Pointer himself to the directors of the Chesreckoning in the nation’s capital. apeake and Ohio Canal Company, the authors comIn 2015, Georgetown joined with a number of pile a thoroughgoing history of a family whose hard American colleges and universities to acknowledge work and accomplishments could not preserve its ties with slavery and to pursue “a path of memothem from the effects of racism and segregation. rialization and reconciliation.” One step on that path Their history was all but lost, in part because the is the publication of “Facing Georgetown’s History: DC farm that the family owned for 80 years was A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation.” seized by eminent domain and razed to make way Edited by Adam Rothman and Elsa Barraza Mendofor a white school in 1928, effectively expunging za, the compendium includes historical documents, all record of the family who had articles, speeches and scholarlived there for four generations. ly essays (including Ta-Nehisi Now, thanks to Torrey and Coates’s landmark piece on repGreen, we all know this valuable arations), that explore the universtory of a family that “emerged sity’s role in the history of slavery from an era of slavery…only to in Washington as well as its more face the withering of hope and recent efforts toward redress. increasing segregation for nearFounded in 1789 by John ly a hundred years,” but whose Carroll, a Catholic slave holder, descendants are now inspired to Georgetown University was fed “dream of a better future for themby a network of plantations in selves and all their descendants.” Maryland that supplied hundreds As one of Pointer’s descendants, of enslaved men and women who James Fisher, writes, “If you don’t worked on campus for seventy know where you’ve come from, years. In 1838, 272 of Georgeit’s more difficult to know where town’s “human property” were Two new books from Georgetown you’re capable of going.” sold to bail the school out of debt. University Press deal with slavery Together, these two groundThe book focuses on this “calamand racial reconciliation in Washington, D.C. breaking books represent a woritous” incident as well as the onthy contribution to the history going controversy regarding repof Washington as well as an acarations to the descendants of the knowledgment of Georgetown group that became known as the University’s ongoing effort to GU272. come to terms with its roots and In “Between Freedom and move toward atoning for its past. Equality: The History of an Afhttp://press.georgetown.edu rican American Family in Washington, D.C.,” researchers BarbaPiecing Together ra Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green trace the family of Captain the Shards George Pointer, who was born In 1959, a 14-month-old boy enslaved in 1773 and, through named Antonios was adopted his work for George Washingfrom a children’s home in Greece. ton’s Potomac Company, was His mother was a farm girl named 66 H HILLRAG.COM
In “A Son From the Mountains,” a memoir by Andrew Mossin, a little Greek boy is adopted and comes to live in DC.
Angeliki whose lover would not marry her, forcing her to give up her baby. For the rest of her life, she thought about her “son from the mountains” and wondered what had become of him. But that was something he would not know about until many years later. In “A Son From the Mountains,” Andrew Mossin tells the story of that little boy who began his life in Athens and was raised here in DC by Richard and Iris Mossin, Polish and British immigrants who “were part of the wave that came to America after the war looking for something better.” What they brought with them—and what the now renamed Andrew found himself enmeshed in—was “a relationship charged by misunderstandings and conflicts.” Motherhood did not come naturally to Iris, a former journalist and volatile alcoholic who agreed to the adoption only because Richard wanted a son. As Mossin writes, “One [mother] claimed but didn’t want me; the other wanted but couldn’t keep me.” His father was a distant figure, absent much of the time for reasons the young Andrew couldn’t understand. Mossin became a “troubled” boy, his behavioral problems landing him in a hospital for clinical psychiatric observation and then on a farm with other boys whose parents were unable to handle them. “It was like a journey was being taken without me,” he writes of those times, “and what I meant to know, what I needed to know, was where I fit, what I could do to be part of some family.”
