Delving deep into the history of ‘Sweet Taste of Liberty’
Caleb McDaniel, an associate professor of history at Rice, won a Pulitzer Prize for “Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America” in the history books category. The story follows the life of Henrietta Wood, a freed black woman who was kidnapped back into slavery by Zebulon Ward. She sued Ward in 1870 for damages, and in 1878, a federal jury awarded her $2,500, the largest amount ever awarded by a U.S. court for restitution for slavery. McDaniel, a professor at Rice since 2008, connected over Zoom with Assistant Op-Ed Editor Ana Goñi-Lessan to talk about how he discovered Wood’s story of resilience and what it means for a book about reparations for slavery to win the Pulitzer Prize.
What interested you in Henrietta Wood’s story?
I was amazed that I had not heard of Wood’s story before because her lawsuit in 1870 was one of the earliest attempts to seek restitution for slavery. What really caught my interest was the fact that she won the case, and when I started the research in 2014, it was at a moment when there were a lot of conversations in the public sphere about the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, Confederate monuments in public spaces, Black Lives Matter and reparations. There were lots of cases being made for or against reparations, but this was a largely unknown case of actual restitution that I thought could inform present-day debates. Not every story that historians choose to write about has the bones of a narrative that could interest just anyone. This is a story that illuminated a lot about the time period and the challenges that formerly enslaved people faced in seeking justice after abolition. It was a story that had built-in momentum.
You normally write for other scholars. What was new about writing for a broader audience?
It was challenging for me to think through how to narrate the story that would satisfy academic standards for research but would also appeal to readers who did not know much about the period. It seemed to me that it was a story that could draw anyone in. It has dramatic plot twists, it has an extremely resilient central character. I wanted to inform people who were learning about this subject for the first time, about this history, but in a way that they could relate to a person. It’s challenging, but the same kinds of things that we try to do when we write for colleagues are what we try to do when we write for anyone: explain the stakes, show your work and be accountable to the subject matter and the subjects you’re writing about.
You got in touch with the descendants of Henrietta Wood. What was that like?
That was one of the most humbling experiences of the whole process. The book is dedicated to a great-great-granddaughter of Henrietta Wood, who unfortunately passed away from cancer before the book was published. Her great-grandfather was the son of Henrietta Wood; he became a lawyer in Chicago and died in 1951. She was 7 when he died, so she had some memo
ries of him. To stand in her living room in 2017 and talk about him shows us how close this history is; it’s not the distant past. I was talking with someone who was only one step removed from Wood herself, and it demonstrates that this history still has legacies that are very much present. Another descendant I met toward the end of the writing process shared some documents that were crucial to the story. One was a letter that demonstrated that when Wood returned to the Cincinnati area after the Civil War, she attempted to locate family members she had been separated from by sale at the age of 14. It’s a poignant illustration of the lengths to which formally enslaved people went to reconstruct their families after the devastation of the domestic slave trade.
The Pulitzer winners this year had a theme. Your book, along with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “The 1619 Project,” Colson Whitehead’s book “The Nickel Boys,” and a special citation honoring Ida B. Wells, are about reparations. Ted Cruz criticized the Pulitzer Prize for “The 1619 Project,” saying “The Pulitzer epically beclowns itself,” on Twitter. Have you dealt with similar attitudes about your book?
I’m familiar with some of the criticism that has been lobbed at “The 1619 Project,” but I think the Pulitzer Board was not wrong to recognize women like Wood, Wells and Hannah-Jones. Historically many awards have been given to books about the founding fathers or mainstream national history, and while those are important subjects, too, major awards have not always recognized the important experiences of women, especially black women, or enslaved people. I think Annette GordonReed won a Pulitzer for her biography about Sally Hemings, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich won
for “A Midwife’s Tale.” But many people have been taught American history as the history of men, of white men, the history of well-known figures. I’m honored and pleased that the Pulitzer Board recognized women like Henrietta Wood, like Ida Wells, as significant to American history. Hopefully it will encourage more inquiry into chapters of American history that still need to be written. Ultimately I think that’s what “The 1619 Project” is doing, too.
Houston’s history of racial inequities has gotten some attention in the last few years with the Sugar Land 95, talks of removing the Spirit of the Confederacy monument in Sam Houston Park and Rice University’s Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice. Is Houston actually having a moment where much-needed, yet still controversial, conversations about racial justice and reparations are happening?
I think it is a moment not just in Texas but across the country. Since the shootings at the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C., there’s been an ongoing reconsideration about Confederate monuments in public spaces. We’ve seen this in Sugar Land where we have the remains of people who were victims of historic injustices like convict leasing.
Texas has approved a course of African American history as an elective to be offered in high schools, so that’s another encouraging sign that Texans recognize the importance of telling these stories.
There’s a connection in a way to the Sugar Land 95, to the history of convict leasing in the book. The man Wood successfully sued for restitution, Zebulon Ward, was an architect of early convict leasing systems in Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. He was representative of that system in the 19th century, so when she won this lawsuit, it wasn’t against a random, unknown figure. It was somebody who had become very powerful and wealthy through the exploitation of prison labor in the post-Civil War South. One thing I hope readers of the book ponder is that, on the one hand, she won a significant sum of money that made a material difference for her and her family. But it was also a small amount compared to what Ward could have afforded to pay. So one of the questions of the book is how to think about these sums. She won the largest known amount ever awarded in U.S. court in restitution for slavery, but Ward, on the other hand, passed on a huge estate to his descendants.
One lawsuit wasn’t able to address the larger wealth gaps and racial disparities created by slavery and segregation. One of the challenges for me was how to honor the significance of this achievement while also not seeing it as kind of a Pollyannish triumphant ending because there were lots of aspects of slavery and white supremacy that lived on despite this victory in court.