Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit Of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Published February 2017 by Atria
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital, after a brief stay in New York. In setting up his household he took Tobias Lear, his celebrated secretary, and nine slaves, including Ona Judge, about which little has been written. As he grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t get his arms around: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire.

Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, the few pleasantries she was afforded were nothing compared to freedom, a glimpse of which she encountered first-hand in Philadelphia. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs.

At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property.

My Thoughts:

What I Didn't Like: 
Never Caught, sadly, suffers from coming in my reading directly on the heels of Victoria: The Queen, a subject of which there is so much information it took 600 pages to include it all. Of course, much less is known about the life of a slave in 18th-century America; it stands to reason that the book would be much shorter but it also stands to reason that much would have to be inferred about Judge, rather than based on known facts about her.

Throughout the book, Dunbar tended to use phrases like "we can assume that" or "she would probably have." It's a small thing but, for me, the book would have been stronger if Dunbar had simply given us the facts that led her to those conclusions then let readers draw their own inferences or simply said something like "this being the case, it's possible that" or "given those circumstances, this might be why..."

What I Liked:
I learned a tremendous amount about George and Martha Washington when I read Ron Chernow's Washington so I was not under any illusions that the Washingtons were progressives when it came to matters of slavery. But, let's face it, the majority of  people are not delving into that 900 page behemoth; a bite-sized lesson like Never Caught is far more likely to be the way they will find out that although Washington treated his slaves better than many slaveholders, they were still his property and he was acutely aware of their value and his reliance on them.

When Ona Judge dared to leave them, they knew they ran the risk that if they did not capture her, their other property might get ideas into their heads as well, something they couldn't tolerate. Furthermore, they were the most famous couple in this new country and their reputation was at stake, both in the eyes of other slaveholders and in those of the people already fighting against slavery. Once Judge made her escape, Dunbar had much more information to base the book on, the ads the agents for the Washingtons posted, the letters Martha wrote, and Judge's own story which she told to a couple of reporters late in her life.

I had not been aware of how many people were already opposed to slavery eighty years before it was finally abolished, particularly in the city of Philadelphia. It would have been difficult for slaves to make the acquaintance of free blacks, but it was not impossible. The free blacks had a good system in place for assisting runaways and, although it was still not easy and extremely dangerous for all involved, many slaves made their way to freedom this way.

That guy we grew up believing was so honest he could not tell a lie? Yeah, he wasn't above using illegal methods to try to bring Judge back to Virginia. Fortunately for her, her own quick wits and some luck in the people that were hired to help Washington, Judge managed to elude her would-be captors. Even so, life for a free black was extremely difficult. This might go without saying; still, I learned a lot about the lengths they had to go to just to stay alive.


In the end, despite the terrible poverty she suffered most of her life after her escape, Judge still felt it was preferable to having remained a slave. That's a statement about slavery that's hard to ignore.

My Happiness Project: February

When I posted my January resolution, I said that I wasn't entirely set with my resolutions for the year. Since then I've finished that, put together a list of "commandments," and I'm working on ways to measure my progress for each of the resolutions. Which brings me to February's resolution: Focus.

I've always been a daydreamer, and a person that has a hard time finishing projects; electronic devices have made it even harder for me to stay on track and make good use of my time. I struggle to stay focused. In the coming months, it's going to be really important for me to make good use of my time, stay on task, and keep my eye on the ball.

Here are the things I'm going to do to try to become a more focused person:

1. Limit use of my phone - If you know me, you know how attached I am to my phone. Sometimes when I'm working on the computer, I'll even pick up my phone to check Litsy or other apps I can only use on my phone. While I'm already on an electronic device! The trick to this has been in trying to decide what my limit is going to be and how I'm going to reach that goal. At home, I think this will mean, leaving my phone in a different room than the one I'm in; at work, leaving it in my purse.

2. Stay on task - Again, this is a tough one to measure and a lot depends on what the task is and how long it takes. The main thing will be, I think, to just say "no" to myself any time I think I'll stop in the middle of something to do something else. Say "no, you can't redo the bookshelves right now" while I'm in the middle of dusting them. Yes, I have done that before and a fairly short task soon became a project lasting several hours.

3. Try meditation or yoga - This was already on my list when I started yoga last month. I'm leaving it there as a reminder to continue the yoga (which takes much more focus than walking on a treadmill). And I'm thinking adding some meditation time might not be a bad idea, either; try to clear my mind and calm myself.

4. Shut the television off - We are terrible about turning on the television when we walk in a room and once it's on, it tends to stay on, even if we're not particularly interested in anything that's on. Makes it tough to focus on the other things I'm trying to do. The other piece of this will be to leave the room if it's on. The Big Guy likes to have the t.v. on (he suffers from tinnitus and that doesn't bother him as much if there's some other noise) but I don't have to be in the same room all of the time. After all, we used to limit the kids' t.v. time; why not limit ours?

So I'm turning off the computer now and walking away from the television BG just turned on!

Victoria: The Queen by Julia Baird

Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire by Julia Baird
Published November 2016 by Random House Publishing Group
Source: my ecopy courtesy of the publisher through Netgalley

Publisher's Summary:
Drawing on previously unpublished papers, Victoria: The Queen is a new portrait of the real woman behind the myth—a story of love and heartbreak, of devotion and grief, of strength and resilience.


My Thoughts:

Coronation

More than 600 pages. More than 80 years of life. More than 60 years on the throne. Some of the best known names in world history. Some of the greatest changes in world history. One of the great love stories. One woman we think we understand. After all, we've read our history books. We've watched the movies.

I didn't know the half of it. Baird schooled me not just on Victoria's life, but on the lives of her family, her place in the world, and world politics in her life time. I tend to learn history one place or one person at at time, often losing track of where that person or place fit into the greater world. Baird does an excellent job of grounding readers on world events throughout Victoria's life, without getting too mired down in them and losing track of her subject.

Suffice to say that Victoria lived in a time of massive changes in the world: the overthrow of monarchies, the surge of the industrial revolution, and the dawn of the suffragette movement. She reigned through wars, saw her family married into the monarchies of other powers, and her life intermingled with most of the most famous people of her time.

The book is slow going; those pages are tiny print packed with information. Baird had unprecedented access to diaries, letters and papers which allowed her to paint an incredible full and nuanced portrait of a queen who was so much more complex than most of us realize.

We so often think of Victoria in one of two ways - the deeply devoted wife that spent the rest of her life in mourning after the death of her husband or as a cranky looking, fat old woman. She was, in fact, both of those things. But she was also a a feisty queen who was prone to give her prime ministers hell, a woman who loved to laugh, a ruler who reveled in her country's strength but preferred peace to war, a woman whose beloved husband may not have been the greatest love of her life, a woman who was so desperate for someone to care for her that she allowed herself to be hoodwinked, and a person who often doubted her own knowledge.

With John Brown, who may have been
Victoria's great love (left) and Munshi Abdul
Karim, (who abused Victoria's trust (right).

I'd always thought of Victoria as something of an super hero for women. But it turns out she wasn't entirely the paragon of feminism I'd imagined. Partly because the queen just didn't have as much power as I'd thought. Then there was the relationship she had with Prince Albert. She called him "my Lord and Master!" I mean, I know it was kind of the thing to do in those days but she was the queen! Also, she was strongly opposed to the suffragette movement and reveled in the love her country showered on her for being the mother figurehead.

You may recall that I don't keep very many books once I've read them. This one is a keeper because of the wealth of historical information it contains. Unfortunately, my copy is an egalley, which will be unreadable in a few more days. I may just have to buy myself a copy.

Life: It Goes On - February 5

Honestly, folks, I don't even know how to open these posts any more. I type something up; I erase it. I'm tempted to tell you how unproductive I've been this week (after all, my bathrooms still haven't been cleaned) but I have been productive, just not in the ways I usually define it. Nothing much has happened but I have been busy all week. I don't want to come to you every week whining. I want to get back to telling you about the things that are going on in my life. So I'm going to try very hard to set politics aside again (here anyway!) and use this space to refocus on the other things that matter.

This Week I'm:

Listening To: This will be my last week of The Emperor's Children; it's been slower going because I've finally been able to get back to listening to NPR in the mornings to get some news. My podcast listening has been entirely The History Chicks.

Watching: A lot of what's been on our television screen this week has been us learning to navigate our way through our new streaming Direct TV and the Apple TV. It's definitely a learning curve that's going to take some getting used to. Of course, I will be watching the Super Bowl later, even though I don't care who wins.

Reading: I'll be finishing Never Caught in the next couple of days and then it's on to George Saunders' Lincoln In The Bardo. Never Caught is the story of Ona Judge, a slave who belonged to George and Martha Washington. It suffers from following in the footsteps of Victoria: The Queen, in no small part because there's not nearly as much information to craft a book from.

Making: Omelets, fried potatoes, chicken and stuffing, pork chops. Last night we had to go with a frozen pizza because a plumbing project gone awry meant we had a torn up kitchen and no water when supper time arrived (which was shortly before a plumber arrived!).

Planning: On installing new kitchen hardware this week and painting the powder room.

Thinking About: Spring. I'm already counting down the weeks until I can eat dinner on the patio. The Big Guy brought me home this planter the other day that has me ready to put away my snowmen collection already (although I won't yet because putting it away early is always a jinx!).

Enjoying: Some beautiful sunrises as I drive into work. Almost makes it worth going to work. Almost.

Feeling: Ridiculous as it sounds, I was a little sad to box up my perry gold phone the other day to ship it up to Mini-me. His phone has died and our phone situation being what it is, he's taking my phone, I'm taking Mini-him's (boring black) phone and Mini-him is getting a new phone. I mean, I've got a newer phone but I seriously need a girly case for it!

Looking forward to: Forty Bags In Forty Days which starts in March. I've reached that time of year when I am seriously in the mood to get rid of "stuff."

Question of the week: Whether you watch the game or are just watching for the commercials, will you be going to a Super Bowl party today?

My Happiness Project: January Wrapup

I'm a month into my attempt to bring more happiness into my life; January is in the books and it's time to check in, to make myself accountable. For January my resolution was to Have More Energy and I picked six strategies to keep me. My results were mixed, partly because I didn't work hard enough at it, partly because life got in the way. At least I'm moving forward and the things I've put into place this month will continue into the rest of the year, they just won't be the focus.

1. Get More Sleep - utter and complete failure on this one, except on the weekends but that's only because I never had to get up on the weekends so I could sleep in. But then I felt guilty about wasting so much of the day in bed. I'm working on some things to help me be better at getting to bed earlier because I'm sure sleep is the key to much of what's to come.

2. Get Moving - I am doing better at getting to the gym more (although still not as often as I want to) and I started doing yoga at home. I'm making sure that I get up more often at work, too. If nothing else, I feel better about myself for doing these things.

3. Drink More Water - I'm killing it on this one, especially during the work week. I'm noticing markedly less dry skin so that's a good incentive to keep it up.

4. Act More Energetic - Eh. The key to this one was not to sit down after dinner, to stay in motion. But that's so much easier said than done. Warmer weather will help - yard work, no need to stay curled in a corner of the sofa just to stay warm.

5. Eat Better - We've been planning meals much more, making sure to include more fruits and vegetables in our meals and I've taken a piece of fruit for lunch almost every day. 

6. Take Care Of Yourself - This was meant to be my kick in the butt to schedule doctor's appointments. That hasn't happened. Yet. But it's on my calendar for the coming week. 

What I learned this month: 

The steps need to have some way to be measured. February is going to be tougher to measure so I'm going to have to give that some thought this weekend. 

Just putting the Happiness Project resolution for the month on my monthly bullet journal page is not enough. I need to add the steps to my daily to-do lists to keep them front and center. 

On to February!