Fighting Memory: What We're Still Learning About Race, Gender, and the Civil

“Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series One of the most fun things about going around giving talks is hearing old friends introduce you. I did not know is that alt-academic till just now I thought I was an erst academic, like erstwhile academic. Thank you, Lynn, for the lovely introduction and for having me. So, I’m going to do a talk in three parts today. The first part, I’m going to just give you some background on Mary Bowser. In the second part I'm going to talk about using fiction as a way to teach history with some specific examples, and in the third part, I’m going to reflect on what happens when you do that. How many of you before seeing the poster or hearing about this talk had ever heard of Mary Bowser? The usual number. So, when I was in graduate school working on my dissertation, there was this book that had just come out The Shining Thread of Hope: A History of Black Women in America, and in this book, which is about 300 pages long, there are maybe three or four paragraphs about Mary Bowser. From those paragraphs I learned that Mary Bowser was born into slavery in Richmond, Virginia; she was freed by Bette Van Lew, the daughter of the family that owned her, and sent to the north to be educated; and she later made the rather unusual choice of returning to the south, where during the Civil War, she and Bette worked together in a spy ring for the union. And Mary was spying by pretending to be a slave in the Confederate White House. And it kind of blew my mind for several reasons. One was Mary's immense bravery. Another was the fact that I had never heard of her, as clearly many have not. The fascinating idea that a slave could be a particularly effective spy. If you think about it, life in slavery depends on your ability to surreptitiously, to be what people say you are not and to not be what they say you are, right? You are regarded as property, but you're actually a person, that you are told there are things you have to do that you might want to avoid doing. You are told there are things that you are not allowed to do, but you are always finding ways to do. And so in some ways, living surreptitiously as a slave may have prepared somebody for what you need to do to be successful spy. Most of all, I think the new way was the way that Mary Bowser challenged the basic assumption at the heart of slavery, that blacks weren’t really human. They were like oxen or horse. You could buy them and sell them and work them because they weren't human, and they weren’t human because they didn't have intelligence. And how did she challenge this. She plays to that stereotype. She goes someplace, and nobody expects her to have intelligence, and that's how she's able to become a spy, showing the value of black intelligence in both senses of the term if you think about intelligence and espionage. So I was really interested in that story. So I set out to learn as much as I could about Mary Bowser, mostly looking in Richmond. I don’t know if any of you have ever been to Richmond, but you may know that part of the city is called Church Hill. It named for St. John's church. It’s very important in American history because the phrase “give me liberty or give me death” was uttered here, as a Revolutionary war era time, but this is the church that the Van Lew family went to. Mary was first baptized in this church and then later as an adult married in this church, so we know that from the church records. It’s extremely unusual for any black person to be baptized or married in this church, and even other Van Lew slaves were not baptized or married in this church. So we know that she was very special to the Van Lews, and this building still exists. And you can go and stand in it, and I know what day she was there because of the church records. But across the street from the church was the Van Lew mansion. She would have lived there. She would have worked there in her childhood and probably for at least part of the time when she www.as.ua.edu www.scss.ua.edu “Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series returned to the South after living in the north. Van Lew mansion you cannot go visit because, when the city of Richmond needed to tear down a house in what was then a very fancy neighborhood to build the school, they chose the one that had been owned by Van Lews because, by that point in the 1920s, they knew that Bette Van Lew had been spying for the union, and she was not the most beloved figure in Richmond at that time. So you can’t go to the house, but I was able to find some old insurance records that describe the floor plan of the house. So I had some sense of the indoor space of house. Now where you can go is the White House of the Confederacy where Mary would have been pretending to be a slave and actually being a spy. It's like we just got to Oz. It is preserved in technicolor perfection, and the rooms all look as they did in that time period. We will return to the White House of the Confederacy at the end of the talk, but this, at least I could imagine, walking through this space pretending to be a slave, working as a slave, being worked as a slave, really being a spy knowing between, after the Revolutionary War, the next time somebody was executed for espionage in the United States was in Richmond during the Civil War. So it was clear that if Mary had been suspected, her life probably would've been on the line. And that's all I could find out. There were rumors that, when she was sent to the North, did she go to school in Philadelphia, maybe in Princeton, New Jersey. There were these rumors that she had a photographic memory, which I think is interesting term to use if you know what 19th century photography looked like, whether that was really that useful, but that was really about it. And I’ve since learned more about her, and I’ll touch on that in a little bit. And you're welcome to ask me more during the Q&A. That's not a lot of information. It would be very bad news if I wanted to write a biography, but as a novelist, this was fantastic news. And I never thought I was going to be a novelist until I came across this story, but I felt like this was something that, for those of you who are studying about race and slavery in the United States, and particularly the relationship between whites and blacks who were working together to end slavery, this is a fascinating topic, and I thought more people would want to know about it, including people who are never going to take a college class from me or who wouldn’t read an academic article that I might write. This would be a great way to bring this story forward. So, let me tell you a little bit about how that happens. The novel I decided to structure into three sections doesn't start the Civil War. It starts with Mary's childhood in slavery, in part because I wanted to show the cost of freedom. When we talk about slavery, the assumption is, well, if you were slave you wanted to be free, but often seizing your freedom meant leaving everyone and everything you knew behind. What would it be like to give your family and your community and go someplace you had never seen, with people you didn’t know anybody? That was the cost of freedom, and I wanted to make back there in the first section of the novel. The second section the novel is in Philadelphia, and that kind of does two things thematically. First, it reminds us that being free is not the same as being equal, that even in Philadelphia, a Quaker city, which we think of as one of the most liberal on race issues in the 19th century, there was no slavery there, but discrimination in housing, in education, and employment, even in who could rid public transit was completely legal. So what would it be like to arrive and think you are finally getting everything you want and realize the reality is like? The other thing that I wanted to do in the Philadelphia section was to think about why somebody would give up their freedom to www.as.ua.edu www.scss.ua.edu “Fighting Memory: What We’re Still Learning about Race, Gender, and the Civil War Lois Leveen, University of California Los Angeles Summersell Lecture Series go back into slavery. Here's a bit of the spoiler alert.

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