By LJ Woolcock, Library Assistant

It’s National Novel Writing Month, and particularly in this year of plague, thousands of writers across the country (myself included) are spending their free minutes at their computer or holding a pen, scribbling to reach a goal of 50,000 new words of a creative work. It’s a daunting task. Especially with our souls being bombarded on all sides by what’s going on in the rest of the world, it’s doubly hard to quiet the anxiety and assert your creative voice. To inspire us all, here’s an extraordinary object from the MHS collections.

One of the most precious objects in our collections is Phillis Wheatley’s desk. Wheatley was the first African woman to publish a book in North America: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773.

After being stolen from her home in West Africa and enduring the months-long, deadly journey of the Middle Passage, Wheatley was brought to Boston, where she was sold to John Wheatley, a Boston merchant and tailor. She learned to read and write English, and to read Greek and Latin. She began writing poetry, translating her complex struggles into verse.

It’s essential to remember that although Wheatley was an extraordinary woman, she wasn’t “fortunate.” Even though her enslavers supported her education and literary efforts, she was still enslaved. The Wheatleys exploited her labor and her literary talents: they showed her off to friends, and didn’t free her until after she published her book in 1773. She was constantly questioned, actually having to defend that she wrote her poems in court in 1772 to a panel of Massachusetts’ most prominent politicians and slaveholders, who couldn’t conceive that an African woman could write so beautifully.

One of the things that I love most about objects is how they give us the chance to physically connect with history. When I stand in front of Wheatley’s desk, I am in awe that I stand so close to the place where her work took flight. I am able to connect with the history of Black struggle and oppression in the Americas in a different way than reading about the history of slavery. In a time when Africans and African Americans were sold and treated as property, it must have been so powerful for Wheatley to have this piece of furniture—a physical manifestation of the freedom she had eked out for herself, and a place where her mind could roam free. The desk itself is simple, yet so beautiful. I love its distinctive clawed feet, balancing gracefully on wooden balls.

Being in the presence of a historical object encourages us to walk with a person from another time. Approaching a desk is a familiar experience for all writers. When I go to sit at my own desk to work, I feel a complex mix of emotions: fear, that my writing won’t be good; excitement, to discover what happens next in my story; joy, that I get to play with words and create something out of nothing.

Approaching Wheatley’s desk in the MHS, I wonder how she felt when she went to write each day. Relief, that she was walking towards one of the few places she could be entirely herself? Was her mind already so wrapped up in words that she rushed to it, eager to write something down? How did she cope with her fears, her doubts?

Yet Wheatley and I stand in entirely different positions: as a white queer person, I did not have to face the horrors of the Middle Passage or enslavement. The privilege afforded to me by my skin means I live in comfort, without fearing for my life or facing the economic and social inequalities that African Americans do. My world was built on Wheatley’s back, and on the backs of so many others who didn’t get a chance to write their books, because they were robbed of their lives, their chance at an education, their freedom. I have to grapple with that, too.

It reminds me of the words of the lesbian poet Audre Lorde, who said, “Our white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free (“Poetry is not a luxury,” 38).” When I read this quote, I always think of Wheatley: a woman who wrote herself free; a mother who died trying to stave off the poverty she endured in the later part of her life, because the white supremacy of the new United States continued to press her. Still, she wrote. She felt, and wrote, and made beauty out of suffering.

After Wheatley’s sudden death in 1784, from an illness she contracted while out working trying to support herself and her infant child while her husband was imprisoned, the desk was sold at auction. It is a chilling full circle. Her child died soon after her own death, also from illness.

The power of Wheatley’s life and perseverance have long outlived the systems of oppression that shaped her world, and they continue to be a guiding light. I hope Wheatley’s desk gives us all strength as we try to get words on the page, and makes us brave enough to tell more honest and diverse stories.

Whether you’re writing a novel, short story, poetry, screenplay, video game, fan fiction, or non-fiction (perhaps even a history?) I wish you the best of luck. Keep heading to your desk (or wherever you write) each day. Get words on the page. Try not to turn down the voices in your head telling you to stop. Because as Audre Lorde said: “…there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt—of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 a.m., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead—while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.” (“Poetry is Not a Luxury,” 39)

Works Cited

Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 36-40.

If you’re interested in reading more on Phillis Wheatley, check out the following books:

Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

Richard Kigel, Heav’nly Tidings from the Afric Muse: The Grace and Genius of Phillis Wheatley, (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2017).

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003).

Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

By Rakashi Chand, Senior Library Assistant

Saturday, 14 November, is Diwali, India’s biggest holiday which is celebrated by over a billion people across the globe. In honor of Diwali we would like to share a selection of letters housed at the MHS that showcase the historic relationship between the people of Boston and India. Before the United States became an independent nation, ships from Boston and Salem Harbor would depart on a regular basis for India to bring back much needed goods like spices, fabric, dyes, and other commodities. This regular and constant contact created an influential exchange of culture, philosophy, religion, and fashion. If you have ever worn a cummerbund, calico, bandana, or said ‘namaste’ or ‘brahmin,’ then you too are a part of that cultural exchange.

The cultural exchange between the two nations is found in letters, travel logs, ships logs, journals and souvenirs. Bostonians went to India for various reasons ranging from commerce to curiosity. They often wrote letters back home to loved ones.

Our first example is a letter dated 22 February 1855 from John Eliot Parkman. He wrote about his travels and excitement:

Calcutta February 22nd 1855

“My dear Mother,

“…We have been living there now about a fortnight and like it better and better everyday. The house is about 3 minutes from town, almost on the banks of the river, and in the pleasantest place near Calcutta, we have a large garden and a tank in it almost as large as the Frog Pond, and beside these advantages two dogs and a billiard table. there is one drawback however to a new comes in the shape of jackals who drift about to the house every night and gangs above 50 and howl like so many rampant Devils- , it is unnecessary to add that I slept but little the first three nights but I have since got used to them.

Mr Bullard who has just come down from up country is living with us but goes to Paris by the steamer, he has told me such stories about Delhi, Agra and half a dozen other places that I am well-nigh crazed and probably shall remain in that condition till my turns come to travel. (!)…”

Boston’s most lucrative trade with India was ice. Ships full of ice cut from the ponds of Massachusetts would sail across the globe to ice houses in Bombay and Calcutta. Frederic Tudor of Boston, known as “the Ice King,’ became very wealthy due to the ice trade. Calvin W. Smith, an agent of the Tudor Ice House, sent many letters home to family and friends in Boston. On 2 September 1865 Calvin Smith wrote to his mother marveling at a nature preserve:

“A few days before he left Captain F (Freeman) and myself went out to see the nature “Institute for Animals” and a sight it was. There were cows, buffalo, deer, horses, mules, monkeys, sheep, goats, In fact every kind of an animal that came to be thought of except a pig.”  Smith goes on to wonder if he would ever see such a place back home in Boston.

In a 24 September 1887 letter to Mrs. Andrews, Pandita Ramabai indicates that she will stop in Boston on route to Manchester NH, as part of a national tour. A group of Bostonians formed the American Ramabai Association, to support the work of Pundita Ramabai as she sought to create a home and school for child widows in India. Ramabai writes:

Sept. 24, 1887

“My dear mrs. Andrews I write this to tell you that I shall be in Boston on 29th of this month for two hours on my way to Manchester New Hampshire I shall arrive in Boston buy a way of Taunton from Newport at 10 in the morning on 29th, and then shall have to wait nearly two hours in the city before I leave for Manchester I shall have to and to go the Boston and Lowell Railroad Station if you have nothing particularly to attend to I should very much like to meet you and have a little talk about our work will you come and meet me at the station where trains from Newport come in if I do not see you there I shall understand that you are too busy and cannot see me hoping that you are very well.

I am affectionately yours,

Ramabai”

These are just a few examples of the cultural exchange through the centuries between India and Massachusetts found at the MHS. In our ongoing relationship our cultures continue to grow and learn from one another. We know that Bostonians may have experienced Diwali in India in centuries past, and we look forward to celebrating Diwali in Boston for centuries to come.

Happy Diwali from the MHS!

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

This is the third installment of a five-part series on the Jarrett family letters at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Click here to read Part I and Part II.

I’m really enjoying learning about the Jarrett family of Shiloh, Ga., and I hope you are, too. I’ll continue now with the third letter in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s small Jarrett family collection, another long one from Julia Jarrett to her son Homer. Below is a complete transcription. As I’ve done before, I’ll retain misspellings but add sentence and paragraph breaks for readability.

Shiloh. Harris Co. Ga. R.F.D. #2 Box 37

June 7th 1906.

 

Mr. Homer C. Jarrett

My Dear son

Both letters has ben received, one yesterday and the other wk. before last. They both found each and every one well at home and doing ditto. The reason why we havent wrote before now or answered your letter, we were trying to get the detail of a terrible shooting scrape took place between the white peoples last wk. in Chipley, Ga. Honarable Hoke Smith to the White P. a great orator of this State so said to be was to speake there but never spoke. Instead of speaking a dispute arrived between the Stable mens of that place and the Earven boys of Hamilton. Two men and one collard woman were killed and severel others were wounded. In a few minutes 60 sixty or 75 seventy five shots were made in session one after another. It was said to be dreadfull times there for a few minutes. Dont know if any of the wounded ones are dead or not.

I forgot to tell you in my last letter a few wks. a go Sarand Dowdle old man Barlow Pollard’s daughter had a fit and fell in the fire and burnt both feet. Burnt one [off] and the other cooked. Died day before yesterday. Burried yesterday at 11 OClock.

Uncle John J. Will come home a few days ago. He give Uncle John $60, dollars sixty dollars and a $30,00 thirty dollars suit of Clothes and give little sis $5,00 five dollars, and give little buddie $6,00 dollars six dollars and a rifle and give Cousin Jimmie $10,00 ten dollars give Maxcie and Oler $2,50 two dollars and fifty cents a piece. He come and none of us didnt get to see him. Stayed two nights and one day. When we hard it he had come and gone.

Now the girls you ask of. I cant tell you anything of Miss Imogene Biggs now but in a few Sundays I can tell you all you want to hear of her. You just aught to be here now. Brother Wilson & Charlie both have new top Buggies just broght in about three 3 wks. ago and I am just rideing girls on every hand. We are going to visit Powels Church as soon as we catch up with our works and if she Miss Imogene be there Charlie say he is going to burn her up.

Our Teacher is not a sister to Anna M. Williams. This Willie Williams is the daughter of Henry Williams of Hamilton Ga.

I shall if nothing happen write you a long letter telling you of all the girls and everything at home in short.

Respectfully yours mother

Julia Jarrett.

The Jarretts certainly lived in tumultuous times! I’ll start, as Julia does, with the “terrible shooting scrape.” Hoke Smith (1855-1931), a Georgia lawyer and former editor of the Atlanta Journal, was campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for governor. He was slated to give a speech in Chipley (now called Pine Mountain), a town about eleven miles west of Shiloh, but the event was rocked by a violent confrontation between two local men. I found details of the shooting in one of the historic newspapers digitized and presented online as part of the Library of Congress “Chronicling America” project. Here’s an image of the article with a transcription.

KILLED FOR FIFTEEN CENTS

Hoke Smith Witnessed a Tragedy at Chipley, Ga.

Columbus, Ga., May 24.—An Enquirer Sun special from Chipley, Ga., says that an outdoor political meeting addressed by Hoke Smith, candidate for governor, was broken up there yesterday afternoon by a pistol duel in the edge of the crowd, in which Joe Hastey, a farmer, was shot and killed by a man named Irvin.

Irvin was then pursued by several persons in the crowd, whose identity is unknown, and fell, shot to death, after running about three blocks.

It is reported that bad feeling had prevailed between the men for some time on account of an indebtedness of 15 cents, and that when they met today at the meeting the quarrel was renewed.

Tfforts [sic] to quiet the men were unavailing and the shooting began.

Two persons in the crowd were slightly wounded by the flying bullets.

The man named Irvin who died that day (incidentally the day before his 23rd birthday) was Virgil H. Irvin. His tombstone reads: “Gone but not forgotten.” The man Irvin killed was 34-year-old Joseph Walter Hastey. I couldn’t identify any other individuals shot and/or killed in the incident, including the Black woman mentioned by Julia Jarrett.

Unfortunately, as it so often does, the cycle of violence continued. On 10 June 1906, a man named Theophilus Theodore Murrah, who served on the governor’s staff, was also shot and killed in Chipley. The Atlanta Georgian reported that the murder was committed by Abb (or Ab) Hastey as retaliation for his brother Joe’s death, but I couldn’t determine what, if anything, Murrah had to do with it. Another Georgia newspaper summed up local sentiment: “The series of tragedies has greatly stirred the Chipley community.”

Hoke Smith went on to win the gubernatorial nomination and the office, though he didn’t serve for long. The online New Georgia Encyclopedia has a good article about Smith that touches on some of his efforts to disenfranchise Black Georgians with Jim Crow tactics. As governor, he would sign an act to add a literacy test and grandfather clause to the state’s constitution. This amendment stood until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Julia continued her letter with another horrifying piece of local news, the death of a woman from fire, but the rest of the content is fairly mundane. Most of the handwriting matches that of the previous two letters, which I’m fairly confident means her son Claud transcribed it for her. (The passage about Imogene Biggs seems to be in his own voice.) However, a few sentences in the middle were written by someone else, possibly another of Julia’s children. The next two letters in the collection are written in this second hand, which you’ll see in upcoming posts.

As I mentioned in my last installment, Homer C. Jarrett moved around a lot. This letter was originally addressed to him at Chestnut Street in St. Louis, Missouri, then forwarded to the Algoma Club, 176 Congress Street, Detroit, Michigan. He eventually settled in Boston, Mass., but he hadn’t arrived here yet. Stay tuned for more.

by Laura Williams, Visitor Services Coordinator

November is National Aviation History month, and the MHS is the perfect place to commemorate with our many collection items surrounding the history of flight! While we’ve been stuck on the ground for much of this year, take a look back and see how the history of aviation changed our country and the rest of the world.

Previously featured as one of our ‘Objects of the Month’ on the 100th anniversary of the first flight in 2003 was a series of letters regarding the successful venture into the skies. These letters are housed in the MHS’s Godfrey Lowell Cabot collection, and include correspondence with the civil engineer Octave Chanute, who served as an advisor to Orville and Wilbur Wright. These letters describe the technical properties of the plane and the details of the four short flights that the “Flyer” was able to make in December 1903. You can read more about the MHS records of the first flight and sources for further research here.

Also included in the Godfrey Lowell Cabot collection are photographs of some of the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flight. These images in particular were taken by the previously mentioned Octave Chanute, and besides the Wright brothers’ own photographs these images are the only other known photographic records of the flight experiments. Massachusetts natives Godfrey Lowell Cabot and his brother Samuel were both avid aviation pioneers and did much for the advancement of aviation. Their incredible family history and influence is described in greater detail here.

Another interesting piece of aviation history from our collections is this barograph record of a flight circa early 1915 most likely made by Frazier Curtis at a French aviation school at Pau.

This piece of data reports the height and endurance of a flight which was used to approve pilots at Pau for active duty. This piece was also previously featured as one of our ‘Objects of the Month’, and its full description can be found here. Notably, Frazier Curtis spent much of his life working to form a flying corps of American pilots, rather than volunteering as individuals, in British and French armies. Before his death in 1940, this barographic record was added into a scrapbook of letters, photographs, newspaper clippings and magazine articles that, “documented his unsuccessful efforts to fly for Britain or France, and his small but important role in founding the Lafayette Escadrille/Flying Corps and promoting aviation training and military preparedness at home.”

by Mia Levenson, Tufts University, Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellow

By the serendipitous combination of the pandemic’s limitations and a mislabeled folder, I found myself with scans of John Van Surly DeGrasse’s medical account book, located in the DeGrasse-Howard papers. At first glance, a medical account book seemed like an opaque collection of names, services, and charges. However, I found his records to be filled with nuggets of information about how medicine plays a role in people’s lives, both patient and physician. Through a careful excavation process using census data and city directories, I was able to find bits and pieces about the ways in which one of the first African American physicians educated in the United States served his community.

There has been little written on DeGrasse and his life, but what we do know is that alongside another student of color, he was one of the first Black graduates of the Maine Medical School at Bowdoin College in 1849. DeGrasse practiced in Europe and New York City before coming to Boston in 1852. Two years later, he became a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society and was the first Black physician to be admitted into a medical society anywhere in the nation. His medical account book, which records his services rendered from 1852 to 1857, offers fascinating insight about his practice as the first Black physician in Boston from the very beginning through the contentious years before the Civil War.

While DeGrasse’s account book notes the monotony of his day-to-day work – most of the entries are simply charges for “visit and prescription” – there are also references to the kinds of treatments he would administer. Bloodletting, for example, was a common practice in nineteenth century medicine and DeGrasse similarly used cupping and leeches on several patients. DeGrasse also inoculated many of his patients, particularly in 1854, which corresponds with a massive smallpox epidemic that year. In the mid-nineteenth century, vaccination was a contentious debate, so it is notable that DeGrasse not only believed in its efficacy but administered vaccines to the marginalized communities he served.

While only a few diagnoses are included in his records, what DeGrasse chose to include provides insight into the kinds of diseases he encountered. One John Henry Garrison passed away during a minor cholera outbreak in 1854. Two of DeGrasse’s patients, Mr. H and Lloyd McCabe, were treated for venereal disease. It is unclear why their diagnosis was remarked upon while others were not. Perhaps it noted a potentially chronic issue. Or maybe it explained why they were charged significantly more for their treatment (for instance, for McCabe, DeGrasse charged him $15 for a visit and prescription rather than the usual $1).

Genealogical research gives a closer look into the communities DeGrasse served.[1] Operating out of Poplar Street, he primarily treated patients living in the Fifth and Sixth Wards, a once historically Black neighborhood that is now known as Beacon Hill and the West End, respectively. DeGrasse began his practice treating mainly his in-laws, the well-known Howard family. Interestingly, he treated his wife’s nephew, Edwin Clarence Howard, who would later go on to be Harvard Medical School’s first Black graduate. Peter Baldwin also appears in DeGrasse’s records as one of his first non-relative patients. A noted abolitionist, his daughter, Maria Louise Baldwin, would become a leader of Black education in Cambridge. DeGrasse’s records thus reveals how he served an emerging African American middle class in Boston that was intricately linked to nineteenth-century activism.

Among DeGrasse’s patient base were also a number of African Americans who were born in slave states. One such patient, Benjamin C. Gregory, who was a regular of DeGrasse’s, was born in North Carolina. Historians can only imagine what it must have meant for a formerly enslaved person—whose experiences with physicians were exclusive to plantation doctors who viewed them as chattel rather than people—to be treated by a Black physician.

DeGrasse did not only serve Boston’s African American community. While census data does not always provide information on race, he had multiple patients who were born in Ireland, like William Mellen and Ellen Marshall. While a contemporary physician of color, James McCune Smith in New York City, has been noted as having a multi-racial patient base, it has yet to be acknowledged that DeGrasse had one as well.[2] During his time as an assistant surgeon in the Union Army, DeGrasse continued to serve both white and Black soldiers. After the War, he returned to Boston and continued with his medical practice until his death in 1868.[3]

As historians continue to pan for golden flakes of information about nineteenth-century life, DeGrasse’s medical account book gives small but marvelous glints of one of the nation’s first Black physicians. His medical practice, the illnesses he encountered, and the communities he served offer glimpses into how DeGrasse’s groundbreaking work fit into the constellation of Boston society. His records have been a wonderful reminder for me that the archive is filled with these treasures if only we pause to look.

[1] All genealogical research was done using the 1850 and 1860 U.S. Federal Census and the 1855 Massachusetts State Census, all accessed via AncestryLibrary.com

[2] John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 66.

[3] Franklin A. Dorman, Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts: 1742-1998, (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1998), 155-7.