My name is
Ayman Fatima, and I am a sophomore Government and International Politics major.
This summer I am working on the Enslaved Children of George Mason Team Project.
This project was started by Professor Wendi Manuel Scott and Professor Benedict
Carton from the African and African American Studies Program in the Department
of History and Art History. The purpose of this project is to learn more about
the lives of the people that George Mason IV enslaved at his home, Gunston
Hall.
I was
initially interested in this project because I wanted to learn more about our
Founding Fathers and how they treated their slaves because I feel that we often
forget or ignore the fact that the same men who wrote our Bill of Rights and
our Declaration of Independence owned other humans. I think it is very
important to remember this fact because it allows us to have a better
conversation about racism and the roots of racism in this country and it allows
us to find a solution.
So far, I
have had a great experience being a part of this project. The first three weeks
we had reading intensive seminars with our mentors and the rest of the team. We
read lots of existing literature on slavery, and specifically slavery in
Virginia. This helped to establish a good background. After that I spent most
of my time doing individual research trying to answer my own research
question—what household tasks did George Mason, his two wives and their
children assign to enslaved peoples, and how did these tasks shape
the experiences of African Americans bonded to Gunston Hall who also
developed their own relationships with the Mason family? This meant that I
found and read more secondary literature about domestic slavery in colonial and
revolutionary Virginia. I also spent a couple of days in the Gunston Hall
Library looking through archival records, such as tax records and letters.
During an average week, I spend some time searching for sources, whether it’s
through history databases or on site, and then I do in-depth reading of either
secondary or primary sources and finally, I compile my findings at the end of
each day.
I have
learned many very interesting things this summer. One thing I found in the
archival records at Gunston was that George Mason ordered clothes for his
enslaved personal servant, James, from the same person that he bought his family’s
clothes from. This is rather interesting because it is a surprisingly rare that
a slaveholder would buy clothes for the people they enslaved from the same
place they bought their own clothes from.
