Fulani in Georgetown, Then and Now

   I first encountered an image of Yarrow Mamout at the public library in Georgetown, which has James Alexander Simpson's painting of him.  Yarrow was Fulani, a distinct ethnic group that had migrated from what is now the country of Mali into Senegal and Guinea.  The Fulani settled in the highlands known as Futa Jallon.  In Africa, Yarrow's name would have been spelled Yero Mamadou.  Both were given names, but he treated Yarrow as his last name even though it is written first.  Yarrow was living in Georgetown when Charles Willson Peale painted the different, more striking portrait of Yarrow that appears below in 1819.  The portrait on the left now belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
    I ran into Mamadou Mbengue in Georgetown as well, but in 2012 and in the flesh.  He too is Fulani from Matam in northern Senegal.  I was struck by the fact that he had Yarrow Mamout bear a vague resemblance to each.  Mbengue agreed to pose for the picture on the right. 

The Library Company of Philadelphia

Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Library Company of Philadelphia

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo by William Hoare

On the afternoon of my lecture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I was the guest of the Library Company of Philadelphia.  Benjamin Franklin helped found the company in 1731 as a cooperative, lending library for the enlightened citizens of the city.  Later, it was transformed into what it is today, a leading research library with an extensive African American history collection.  While I knew this, I was still surprised when I arrived to see that Phil Lapansky, curator of the collection, had laid out an 1734 edition of the book on Ayuba Suleiman Diallo that was written by Maryland lawyer Thomas Bluett.  I used the book to write about Diallo's life in the first chapter of From Slave Ship to Harvard.  I had never seen the physical book; I had relied on a digital copy.  I didn't know it had this fold-out in front.  Like Yarrow Mamout, Diallo was a Fulani Muslim and was brought to Annapolis, Maryland on a slave ship.  He arrived twenty-two years before Yarrow and soon came to the attention of important men.  After a few unhappy years as a slave in Maryland, Diallo was sent to England where he became somewhat of a celebrity and was freed.  He was painted by William Hoare, a student of Thomas Gainsborough.  Hoare's portrait is the frontispiece to Bluett's book.  It and Peale's portrait of Yarrow appear to be the only two portraits by major artists of men who experienced the horrors of being "cargo" on a slave ship.  Diallo's portrait is owned by the Qatar Museums Authority and is on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Rachel Weeping

Not far from the portraits of Yarrow Mamout and Charles Willson Peale at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is Peale's dramatic painting "Rachel Weeping."  It shows the artist's wife, Rachel Brewer, crying over the body of their daughter Margaret.  Rachel was Peale's first wife.  He married twice more after she died.  Yet it is fitting that Rachel's painting be displayed close to Yarrow's, for it was her nephew, Joseph Brewer, who first told Peale about Yarrow.  Peale was in Washington D.C. in 1818 and had gone to Georgetown to see Brewer and Brewer's sister (Rachel's niece).  They lived next door to each other.  The sister was married to the wealthy William Marbury.  Several years later, Marbury's son John served as trustee on the deed of trust that was used to secure a loan of Yarrow's.  In other words, it was through Brewer and Marbury that Peale was introduced to Yarrow, and they stayed in contact with him.  Also see the image at the museum's Web site.

Oxford University Press blog

The book is being featured this week on the Oxford University Press blog.  It matches the historical cartoon series that Patrick Reynolds drew this year on Yarrow in his Flashbacks comic strip with excerpts from the book.  http://blog.oup.com/2012/05/charles-willson-yarrow-mamout/

Philadelphia Museum of Art

     Charles Willson Peale's portrait of Yarrow now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  On Friday, May 11, I gave a lecture there as the museum's guest.  This was the first time that I saw the portrait rather than just photographs of it.  Someone asked me how I felt seeing the portrait after researching Yarrow for nine years.  I had no remarkable emotion, but what I did notice was that I felt I was looking at Yarrow in the flesh.  Peale was that good of a portrait painter.  There is a depth and three-dimensional aspect in an oil portrait that is not found in photographs.  The painting seems literally to come alive.  So here we are, me, Yarrow, and Peale, together again for the first time.  The paintings are so lifelike that I should point out that I'm the one who is not framed.

Latest on Yarrow's lot

     Yarrow's property was sold for taxes.  The tax sale occurred in the summer of 2011 and was finalized in May 2012.  This isn't the first time the property had been lost in a tax sale.  Yarrow's heirs lost it in 1837 for delinquent taxes.  Yarrow's niece was still around then.  Maybe she didn't try to save the house because she didn't have the money to pay the delinquent taxes, or maybe she didn't know her rights.  But, a few years later, she sued to collect on an old loan of his and won.
     Now that it is in the hands of a new owner the house appears being readied for demolition even though no application has been filed with the DC government for permission to do so.  Below are three images.  The first is how the house looked in April; the second is how it looked on May 10; and the third is a close up taken on the same day of the siding that has been removed and stacked to the side.

April 2012

May 2012

May 2012

Reginald Lewis Museum event

   On Saturday, May 5, I spoke and signed books at the Reginald Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History in Baltimore.  The descendants of the Turner family attended. 
    From left to right:  Emily Ford Willis, Denise Ford Dungee, me, Cynthia Ford Richardson, Alice Ford Truiett, her husband Melvin Truiett, and their son Phillip Truiett.  Alice's father, Robert Turner Ford, entered Harvard University in 1923 and graduated in 1927.  Emily, Denise, and Cynthia are her cousins, daughters of Robert Turner Ford's brother George.