An Unflinching Assessment of the Record

On Rachel L. Swarns' The 272

An Unflinching Assessment of the Record
Review of The 272 by Rachel Swarns

“We are the strongest nation in the western world, but this is not for the reasons that we think. It is because we have an opportunity which no other nation has of moving beyond the Old World concepts of race, class, and caste, and create, finally, what we must have had in mind when we first began speaking of the New World. But the price for this is a long look backward whence we came and an unflinching assessment of the record. For an artist, the record of that journey is most clearly revealed in the personalities of the people the journey produced. Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, make freedom real.”

-James Baldwin, “Creative America” (1962)

---

The essay that Baldwin quote comes from is about artists, specifically the responsibilities they have to their art, and the opportunities afforded them by crisis. True artists, Baldwin maintains, cannot afford to look away from their own demons. And the demons in their own families, neighborhoods, cities, and nations.

Rachel Swarns, author of The 272, is an historian and a journalist of the highest order. She is also, according to any reasonable definition of the word (and certainly of Baldwin’s definition), an artist. And The 272 is indeed an “unflinching assessment of the record.”

A cradle Catholic and a long-time educator at a Jesuit institution, I read this book with no small amount of shame. But little surprise. I mean that it does not surprise me that the Jesuits, a human institution, degraded and enslaved other human beings in order to expand their reach and preserve their influence and power in the United States. (Here by keeping Georgetown University financially afloat.). That is what human institutions do, have always done, and will always do.

What did surprise, though, and I think is the key to the book’s wisdom, is Swarns’ attention to all of the actors on the stage of this particular drama: the Jesuit administrators who orchestrated (and at times argued with one another over) the sale of the 272 enslaved people, the buyer, a prominent statesman and legislator of the time, and most importantly those 272 people whose lives and families were torn apart by this financial transaction.

The book begins with a phone conversation between modern day descendants of one of the 272 people sold, the Mahoney family. (In fact, one of these descendants now works for Georgetown.) Swarns then traces the genealogy back to this family’s arrival on the New World’s shores, through servitude into chattel slavery, and finally, to freedom.

Swarns honors “the 272” not only in the title but in the structure, framing, and composition of her book. Unlike the Jesuit administrators and the statesman buyer I mentioned earlier, there are not reams of documents reporting the words of “the 272”. But Swarns imaginatively reconstructs the experiences of these human beings as she carries forward the story, always clear about what can be known and what can only be guessed at or intuited.

The Jesuits, in contrast, left behind many words that are known, and they function in this telling as characters like Herod or Pilate do in the gospel stories–that is, people with power who serve the interest of themselves and their group at the expense of other people found alongside them in the place where they happen to rule.

Rule. I use that word deliberately. I have the privilege of counting a number of Jesuit priests as some of my dearest friends. And a number of them have risen to positions of power within institutions that serve the Society of Jesus. They are rulers in the same sense that Father Mulledy and Father William McSherry were rulers when they served as early presidents of Georgetown University. As Swarns emphasizes in this book, both Father Mulledy and Father McSherry prioritized the institution’s future over the humanity of the 272 people they owned as slaves. I cannot speak for the rulers in the Jesuit order today–one of whom is Pope Francis, may he rest in peace–but I imagine though the specifics have changed, the core temptation is the same: preserve the reach and power of your institution, ignore the person suffering in front of you.

Swarns notes that other Jesuits, notably with less power to affect change, disagreed with the path set forth by Fathers Mulledy and McSherry. For instance, Father Joseph Carbery, who served as the administrator for St. Inigoes, the Jesuit plantation where the 272 enslaved people lived and worked for decades, spoke up and wrote in opposition to Father Mulledy and McSherry’s plan. Though he was unsuccessful in preventing the sale from happening, Father Carbery bought back himself one of the people sold in the mass Georgetown sale in order to help keep a family together in Maryland.

The significance of actions like these are not lost on Rachel Swarns, herself a Catholic. By laying out and patiently tracing as many actions and actors as possible connected with the sale of the 272, she helps us see the full scope of the tragedy of this moment. For me, when I considered this full scope, it made me ask a question.

Might it not have been better had the Jesuits allowed Georgetown University to close?

Better for the many young men who were formed there, and learned, whether they knew it or not, to value an institution over a human being?

Better for the 272 enslaved people, whose families would not have been torn apart, whose existence on the Jesuit-owned plantations, while not good, was not nearly as brutal as the hellish conditions of the deep south into which they were sold?. [And note: there was nothing–except financial precarity–keeping the Jesuits from outright freeing the enslaved people they owned.]

Better for the Jesuits themselves, and for the American Catholic Church, who benefited institutionally from the blood money of this sale? (Who in the process of “cleaning their hands of slaveholding” also attempted to cleanse their own memories.)

So this is one important thread in The 272: naming, as clearly and specifically as possible, how a religious institution benefited from the enslavement of and sale of human beings.

Another–the more vital one in my opinion–is the story Swarns tells of the Mahoney family, and their experience through the generations of these chapters of American history. As I noted before, and as Swarns acknowledges at the outset and throughout the book, this telling is complicated by the fact that, unlike the priests and administrators who owned them, the Mahoneys could not read or write. “But they could speak,” Swarns writes. And at key moments of the book, she uses family oral history, passed down from one generation to the next, to reconstruct a story that might otherwise be lost to the broader public.

The narrative builds to the 1838 sale of the 272 enslaved people, a sale that was not only approved by the Jesuits in the United States but also by the Vatican. This sale separated families, including the Mahoneys, and sent people enslaved for years by the Jesuits to infamously harsh plantations in the deep south.

Swarns takes care here, as throughout the book, to toggle back and forth between the written evidence of the sale from the church-men–numbers in a ledger, official justifications from institutional leaders–to the imagined experiences of those directly impacted by this decision.

As an example, consider the shift in perspective between these paragraphs as Swarns renders the moment 130 of the 272 people sold by the Jesuits are loaded on to the Katherine Jackson, a ship that will take them South:

“For the crew and customs officials it was all numblingly familiar: the crush of bodies, the wailing babies, the tear-streaked, terrified faces, the men, women, and children herded like cattle, listed by number. Anny, described as brown skinned and about five foot three, was no. 73. Her children, Arnold and Louisa, stood about four foot four and three foot eleven, respectively. They were listed on the shipping manifest as nos. 74 and 75. Anny’s older sister Bibiana; Bibiana’s husband, Nace; and their children boarded, too.

Anny stood amid the crowd of frantic people. What would the future hold for her and for her children? Could she and her sister Bibiana find a way to stay together in the new world on the other side of the water? Would she ever find her brother Robert? And what would become of Louisa, her parents, and the siblings she had left behind at St. Inigoes? Would she ever see them again?”

If you are not moved by these questions and these fears, I have nothing to say to you. They are questions and fears that illuminate the lives of human beings who we must never forget. And, to loop back to Baldwin, who kicked off this essay, they are reconstructed by the artist, by Swarns, who in composing her “unflinching assessment of the record,” does not neglect to include in that account and assessment, the names, stories, and specific imagined experiences of those who have up till now been reduced to numbers on a ledger.

I don’t claim to know what would be a just or equitable reparation for the wrong perpetrated by the Jesuits and the Roman Catholic Church against so many enslaved people. (As well as against so many indigenous people–that is a topic for another day.) But if there is to be meaningful repair, and anything like the forgiveness envisioned by the gospels, then surely work like Swarns’ is of the utmost importance: careful, precise, and accurate. And also visionary, imaginative, and bold.

---

Notes:

-For readers of this review interested in more resources by and on the history and scholarship of Black Catholics in the United States, I highly recommend Tia Noelle Pratt’s #BlackCatholicSyllabus linked here. Dr. Pratt’s resource “prioritizes the work of Blacks in order to center the voice of Black Catholics in the creation of their own narrative.”

-One of the scholars on the syllabus who comes up more than once is Shannen Dee WIlliams, whose book Subversive Habits, “provides the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, hailing them as the forgotten prophets of Catholicism and democracy.” It’s a powerful book, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

-Finally, I never tire of recommending the artistry and scholarship of Father Joseph Brown, SJ, who has prophetically written and preached on these topics (and many others) over a lifetime. And whose life itself is a powerful witness to the gospel. His blog, The Sankofa Muse, is always a gift to readers. But in these current troubling times, even moreso.