Benjamin Banneker and Us

Eleven Generations of an American Family

By: Rachel Webster

Narrated by: Rachel Jamison Webster

A family reunion gives way to an unforgettable genealogical quest as relatives reconnect across lines of color, culture, and time, putting the past into urgent conversation with the present.

In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative.

Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, among them Banneker’s grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in effect in the present day.

©2023 Rachel Jamison Webster (P)2023 Blackstone Publishing

A unique story read by a beautiful storyteller

I loved this book so much. It’s part autobiographical, part non-fiction, part historical fiction, part poetic prose. What a wonderful way to tell a family’s journey through the centuries and across the landscapes of America.

You should read this book. It will warm your heart and inform your mind.