From Slave Ship to Harvard

References in newspapers and magazines to Yarrow Mamout as “Mr. Mamout” make me cringe. He was never called that when he was alive. In my book, I followed what I felt was his preference and used Yarrow as his surname. Still, writers and especially editors insist on mindlessly thinking of names in terms of English naming conventions that require a given or Christian name first followed by a surname, usually that of the person’s father. Infant naming conventions differ around the world. Trying to fit the name of a man from West Africa into English naming conventions reflects a cultural insensitivity.

There is no such thing as a universal naming convention. The convention in most Spanish-speaking countries is to put the Christian name first, the father’s surname name second, and the mother’s surname name last. Wikipedia gives the example Jose Fernandez Martinez. In my book Murder, Inc., I mention that the FBI followed the practice of putting the father’s name in capital letters as Jose FERNANDEZ Martinez to be doubly sure that its agents understood. In Korea and China, the surname is put first. Men with names that begin with Kim should, therefore, be addressed in English as Mr. Kim, not by their last names, which are given names.

Yarrow Mamout was a Fulani, so we must look first at Fulani naming conventions. The Fulani equivalent of a surname is actually a clan name. These clan names are rarely used because there are only five or six, e.g., Diallo, Bah, and so adding them to someone’s name doesn’t help identify the person. We don’t know what Yarrow Mamout’s clan name was.

A 1940 study by French sociologists attempted to explain how Fulani parents chose names. Commonly they consulted a holy man. The convention was to first chose a birth order name. Yarrow, as an example, was one of the many male names available for a woman’s fourth child. The Fulani were Muslim, so a second name would be chosen from the Quran. The French sociologists referred to this as a child’s Quranic name. These are names shared throughout the Muslim world just as Christian names are shared in the Christian world with variations in the different languages, e.g., the English James is Jacquea in French and Iago in Spanish. Among the Fulani, Mamoud was one of many male names for a boy born on a Monday. Mamadou, which sounds similar, was preferred for the woman’s first male child regardless of birth order or day of the week. In any event, the name Yarrow Mamout suggests he was his mother’s fourth child and born on a Monday.

It is important to understand that both Yarrow and Mamout were given names, and so an individual might use them in whichever order he preferred.

This explains how Yarrow Mamout got his name in Africa, but it doesn’t explain how he was referred to once he got to America. It is rather remarkable though that he was able to keep his African name since most slaves were given a single, Christian name by their American owners.

The name and spelling Yarrow Mamout has come to us in a roundabout way. The name doesn’t appear on the portrait’s canvas which artist Charles Willson Peale painted in 1819 and displayed at his museum in Philadelphia. When the museum finally closed in 1852, his grandson Edmund had all the paintings boxed up and put in storage. The portrait of Yarrow was mistakenly labeled “Billy Lee” because Edmund mistakenly assumed this was a portrait of a servant of George Washington. However, in 1947, Peale’s biographer and descendant Charles Coleman Sellers matched the portrait with Peale’s diary and figured out that the portrait was that of the man Peale had referred to as Yarrow Mamout. The name and spelling, therefore, come from a single reference in Peale’s diary.

We don’t know how Peale learned and spelled the name. He may have asked Yarrow while he was painting him, but Yarrow couldn’t spell his name in English. His signature on a deed to his house seems to be signed “Josi.” So, it’s possible that the name and spelling came not from Yarrow but from Peale’s in-laws, William Marbury and Joseph Brewer, who told him about Yarrow in the first place.

There are other written records of Yarrow’s name. He is referred to as Negro Yarrow in his two manumission documents, in the deed for his property, in the manumission for his son, and in tax records on his property in Georgetown. Tax records after his death indicate the property was owned by the heirs of Yarrow. Writer David Bailles Warden referred to him as Yaro in his book on Washington, D.C. that was published in 1816. Since Warden had served as counsel from France and published the book in Paris, the spelling may borrow from the French spelling.

The will of Yarrow’s first owner, Samuel Beall, contains a bequest of his body servant Jarro that I believe was intended to be of Yarrow since Beall did not own any other slave with a similar name. Moreover, the name Yarrow is commonly found in records of other slaves in early America. There were few if any dictionaries in the colonies to standardize spelling in those days.

The census provides a different view. Census takers typically talked to the individual although lazy ones might take the shortcut of asking a neighbor. The 1800 census records him as Negro Yarrow, but the 1820 census, listing individuals by first and last name, records him as Yarrow Marmood. This suggests either that Yarrow was giving this as his name at this time or that this is how he was known in Georgetown.

But the best evidence available, directly from Yarrow, is that he thought of Yarrow as his last name. An 1803 deed on his property, signed and sealed by him and Francis Deakins, recites that a deed in 1800 which had conveyed the property to Negro Yarrow was wrong. The property should have been conveyed to his son, “Negro Aquilla or Aquilla Yarrow.” Aquilla was fifteen years old at the time and probably living with his father.

Thus, the only document that Yarrow himself signed shows him using Yarrow as a surname. This would be consistent with the naming conventions the sociologists found. A child might be given the name of a respected ancestor or relative. Thus, he might have wanted to pass his own excellent reputation to his son by giving him the name Yarrow. Or, he might have felt that English surnames were like Fulani birth order names and that his Muslim name was more like a Christian name in America. Yarrow certainly understood American naming conventions: The name Aquilla that he gave his son was the same as that of his owner’s brother.

Aquilla Yarrow was called that the rest of his life. His wife took the name and became Mary “Polly” Yarrow and “Mrs. Yarrow.” And she passed it on to a community in Maryland that is still known as Yarrowsburg because it is where the midwife Mrs. Yarrow lived.

In more recent times, there have been suggestions that the proper spelling is Yero Mamoud or a variation because that is the way those names are spelled in West Africa today. But those spellings come from Senegal or Mali, former French colonies, and are how the French colonists heard the sound of the unwritten African word and the sound of the Arabic Mamoud. There is no reason to use the French spelling for the name of a man whose name was surely put in writing for the first time after he was in America. The name Yarrow appears in slave records throughout America. More than thirty years after his death, Yarrow was recalled in a Georgetown lecture by someone who knew him as “Yarrah,” giving us hints of how the name may have been pronounced or at least how the pronunciation was perverted.

In sum, while Yarrow or someone else in Georgetown may have told Peale that the name was Yarrow Mamout and while he or someone else may have given that name to a census taker, the fact that he named his son Aquilla Yarrow seems indisputable evidence that the African understood the naming conventions in the United States and intended Yarrow to be his surname.

The July 2020 issue of The Muslim World is a special issue on Black Muslim Portraiture in the Modern Atlantic. Three of the articles are on Yarrow Mamout. I wrote the first and co-authored the second.

I wrote this article about Yarrow and his family. Rethinking Yarrow Mamout.

Asma Naeem, chief curator of the Baltimore Museum of Art, and I co-authored this article about James Alexander Simpson's portrait of Yarrow and Asma's work in displaying the portrait at the National Portrait Gallery for three years. Two Museums and the Simpson Portrait of Yarrow Mamout.

Carol Soltis, the Peale curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, wrote this third one. Yarrow Mamout and the Charles Willson Peale Portrait of 1819