It highlights the people and groups who were ahead of the abolitionist curve (like those Philly Quakers, along with Benjamin Franklin and Washington’s own secretary, Tobias Lear). It underscores the role of individuals, including George Washington, in furthering that system for their own wealth and comfort. The young readers’ text is more emphatic about condemning slavery (described as “a grotesquerie,” an “abomination,” and a “disease”). The book isn’t a diluted version of the adult Never Caught. In some ways, it delivers more than the original: a map of the Eastern Seaboard, a timeline from 1731 (Martha Washington’s birth) to 1848 (Ona Judge’s death), and the transcript of an interview Judge gave to a New Hampshire newspaper in 1845. I kept asking: Why am I not encountering people who look like me in our narratives?” This book, the young readers’ version of Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught - a 2017 National Book Award finalist in nonfiction - is a welcome, compelling corrective to the whitewashed version of Revolutionary-era history I received: a story in which the Anglo men were heroes, the black people were nameless, and slavery was simply, unquestionably, The Way Things Were.ĭunbar, a Rutgers University historian who coauthored the young readers’ version with University of Pennsylvania professor Kathleen Van Cleve, wanted to help fill an aching gap in the historical narrative.Īs a student at Germantown Friends School in the 1980s, Dunbar says, “I learned very little about American slavery. And then, I wish someone had thrust a book like Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge into my hands. I wish someone had pointed out that I was lolling on a campus founded by Philadelphia Quakers, many of whom who drew the line against slavery almost 200 years before the Civil War. Because, while I never finished an entire can of soda, I gulped every morsel of Margaret Mitchell’s romanticized South, including the images of loyal, hardworking, genial slaves whose ministrations made Scarlett long for the antebellum days when all was ducky. We could argue about which was the greater poison.
Each afternoon, I parked myself under a maple tree and devoured Gone with the Wind while sipping a Diet Coke. The summer I was 12, I spent weekday mornings on the tennis courts at Friends Central School in Wynnewood, swinging a clumsy backhand and counting the minutes until lunch.
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