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Literary Hill by Karen Lyon
the LITERARY HILL
A Compendium of Readers, Writers, Books, & Events
by Karen Lyon
Reckoning and Reconciliation
Two new books from Georgetown University Press deal with the powerful and timely issue of racial reckoning in the nation’s capital.
In 2015, Georgetown joined with a number of American colleges and universities to acknowledge its ties with slavery and to pursue “a path of memorialization and reconciliation.” One step on that path is the publication of “Facing Georgetown’s History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation.” Edited by Adam Rothman and Elsa Barraza Mendoza, the compendium includes historical documents, articles, speeches and scholarly essays (including Ta-Nehisi Coates’s landmark piece on reparations), that explore the university’s role in the history of slavery in Washington as well as its more recent efforts toward redress.
Founded in 1789 by John Carroll, a Catholic slave holder, Georgetown University was fed by a network of plantations in Maryland that supplied hundreds of enslaved men and women who worked on campus for seventy years. In 1838, 272 of Georgetown’s “human property” were sold to bail the school out of debt. The book focuses on this “calamitous” incident as well as the ongoing controversy regarding reparations to the descendants of the group that became known as the GU272.
In “Between Freedom and Equality: The History of an African American Family in Washington, D.C.,” researchers Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green trace the family of Captain George Pointer, who was born enslaved in 1773 and, through his work for George Washington’s Potomac Company, was able to purchase his freedom at age 19.
Using census data, company records, legal documents, and a remarkable 11-page letter written by Pointer himself to the directors of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company, the authors compile a thoroughgoing history of a family whose hard work and accomplishments could not preserve them from the effects of racism and segregation. Their history was all but lost, in part because the DC farm that the family owned for 80 years was seized by eminent domain and razed to make way for a white school in 1928, effectively expunging all record of the family who had lived there for four generations. Now, thanks to Torrey and Green, we all know this valuable story of a family that “emerged from an era of slavery…only to face the withering of hope and increasing segregation for nearly a hundred years,” but whose descendants are now inspired to “dream of a better future for themselves and all their descendants.” As one of Pointer’s descendants, James Fisher, writes, “If you don’t know where you’ve come from, it’s more difficult to know where you’re capable of going.” Together, these two groundbreaking books represent a worthy contribution to the history of Washington as well as an acknowledgment of Georgetown University’s ongoing effort to come to terms with its roots and move toward atoning for its past. http://press.georgetown.edu
Piecing Together the Shards
In 1959, a 14-month-old boy named Antonios was adopted from a children’s home in Greece. His mother was a farm girl named
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 Two new books from Georgetown University Press deal with slavery and racial reconciliation in Washbrought with them—and what the now renamed Andrew found himself enmeshed in—was “a relationington, D.C. ship 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.”
