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Never Caught

by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, 2017

Published: 2021.10.18

Home > Book Reviews > Erica Armstrong Dunbar > Never Caught

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★ (3.3 of 5)

(* 197 pages does not include Author’s Note, Foreword, Acknowledgements, reprinted Interviews With Ona Judge, Notes, Selected Bibliography, Credits, Index, About The Author, or Reading Group Questions, all of which pad the book to about 288 pages)

 

Summary

Never Caught is the second book by Erica Dunbar, a professor of history at Rutgers University. The book was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award and joint winner of the 2018 Frederick Douglass Prize. The book concerns the life of enslaved woman Ona Maria Judge (later Staines), who was born into chattel slavery on the Mount Vernon plantation owned by George Washington, though Judge herself was owned by Martha Washington because Judge’s mother Betty was part of Martha Washington’s father’s estate. (Both Ona Judge and her mother Betty were daughters of white men of European ancestry, which had no legal effect on their status as human property.)

Judge was one of a handful of the Washington slaves brought with the first First Family to serve at the original U.S. capitol in New York City and then in Philadelphia. As Washington’s second term neared an end, Martha Washington decided to gift Judge as a wedding present to granddaughter Elizabeth Parke Custis Law, known to be tempestuous, and word of this plan made it to Judge, who packed up and left the Philadelphia house while the Washingtons were eating supper. She booked passage on a ship and made it to New Hampshire, where she lived until her death in 1848, though the Washingtons wrote angry letters to officials and made half-hearted attempts to recapture her. While there, she married a free Black man (Jack Staines) and gave birth to three children, at least two of whom died before she did.

Perhaps the most interesting part was the closest she came to recapture: when she was recognized in the street by the daughter of a New Hampshire senator, a friend of President George Washington. When Washington sent an underling to round up Judge, the senator quietly sent word to the runaway slave so she could get away in time.

 

The Good

This book fit my primary requirement for nonfiction books: it was informative. Despite very shallow instruction on the period surrounding the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, I don’t think I’ve previously read an entire book focused on exactly this period in time. And I certainly hadn’t read a biography of one of the Founding Fathers’ slaves. The book was filled with information I found interesting: about how slavery differed (somewhat) on the estates of the first president, the size and type of houses the president lived in (their lives in Philadelphia and New York were quite cramped compared to their accustomed space on Mount Vernon), how the enslaved people in their household first laid eyes on free Black people in those northern cities (especially Philadelphia), and what kind of lengths people will go to in order to escape slavery (Judge) or to enforce it (Washington).

The book was clearly well researched, drawing on many primary and secondary sources, with these sources occasionally listed in the text and all listed in the back. While telling the story of Ona Judge, it necessarily had to tell the story of the Washingtons as well, much of which I found fascinating.

Points Off For...

What kept me from awarding a higher rating were three complaints of varying importance.

A relatively minor one is a weakness I see in many historical works: the unnecessary repetition of certain facts. In longer works, this often looks like the author is trying to remind the reader of something she might have forgotten from earlier passages, and can sometimes be necessary. In shorter works like this one, it looks like the author is trying to stretch the book to fill a page-length requirement. It also looks like sloppy editing when the repetition is only a paragraph or two away from the original statement — perhaps the author or editor was copy/pasting text into a different order and forgot to remove the now-second mention.

Much more important to me was the sheer lack of documentation for the bulk of the text. What is known about Ona Judge would fill a book one tenth this size — it was the outline for this book. The “meat” of the text was quite a lot of supposition and assumption. It took the form of “Judge would probably have felt...” or “someone in her position would think about...” Because the author simply did not — could not — know what Judge was thinking, feeling, or experiencing during those periods — no one wrote it down or told anyone who wrote it down. All we have from Judge’s point of view in real life are a couple of interviews she gave to abolitionist newspapers in the 1840s (and those articles are reprinted in full here, at the end of the book). Everything else is either filling in from records about the Washingtons or the places they lived, their letters, or narrative assumptions on the part of the author. I found it disturbing as a fan of history that such assumptions would be presented as facts of someone’s life. While reading, I determined that this alone would be enough to withhold a fifth rating star.

The third problem I encountered was the wording around Judge’s death. When the author wrote (page 186), “On February 25, 1848, eleven days after the doctor’s visit, Ona Maria Staines...”, any reader’s mind would likely guess from context that the next word would be “died” or some usual euphemism for death in our culture that fears the word “died” (like “succumbed to illness”, “passed away”, etc.) Instead, the rest of that sentence is: “was carried away, not by slave catchers, but by her God.” (!!) Without attribution or quotation marks, a book presenting itself as a serious work of history and biography said outright that “her God” carried her away. This is preposterous and coming so close to the end was enough for me to remove another star. (Even absurd fictional myth books like the Old Testament are careful to only have a very few special characters — Enoch and Elijah — carried away by God, and at least one of those stories includes attribution to an eye witness.)

Conclusion

The book was worth reading, and I’m glad I read it. However, I strongly suggest that future editions: (1) remove the ludicrous assertion that a supernatural being bodily lifted Ona Judge from the Earth at the end of her life and (2) include a stronger disclaimer at the beginning that we simply don’t know many of the details of Judge’s life — especially her opinions, thoughts, feelings, fears, etc. — and that a lot of this will be filled in via the author’s imagination.

 





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