won the 2022 Wiley-Silver Prize and was shortlisted for three other awards, including the Lincoln Prize. His writing appears in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Slate, National Geographic, and The New Republic. Waite moonlights in the TV and film industry, most recently as the writer and producer of a six-episode docuseries on the American Revolution for National Geographic and Disney+.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West, and shared the following:
Oh great. This section. That’s what I thought as I cracked open my book to page 99 and confronted a particularly stubborn passage. There weren’t many, if any, sections that I rewrote as many times as I did this one. It describes the various tasks that Biddy Mason performed as an enslaved woman on a remote ranch outside San Bernardino, California in the early 1850s.Learn more about The Boundless Biddy Mason at the University of California Press website.
Mason had been hauled across the continent on a series of forced migrations – from Georgia to Mississippi to Utah and finally to California – over the preceding years. Although California had technically outlawed slavery in its state constitution, Mason and her daughters continued to labor in bondage for about five years after their arrival in 1851. Her owner, Robert Smith, was by this point the largest slaveholder in the American Far West, with Mason and thirteen others under his control.
What did slavery look like in the free state of California? That’s what this passage attempts to describe. Wheat and dairy, rather than cotton and sugar, dictated the rhythms of the day for enslaved people on Smith’s ranch. Mason probably spent a portion of her day with Smith’s herd of livestock, when she wasn’t otherwise harvesting his fields, cleaning his home, or delivering his neighbors' children. (She was a skilled midwife on top of it all.)
What made this passage particularly difficult to write also makes it representative and illuminating. Mason left no records in her own hand, aside from a few legal documents marked with an “X.” Her story, therefore, must be reconstructed from a fragmentary archival base, often the records of those who viewed her as property, not a person. To avoid scrutiny in an ostensibly free state, California slaveholders rarely described their Black laborers in any detail. This passage, then, is stitched together from the observations of others – often hastily rendered in letters or diaries – as well as the tithing records of Robert Smith, a member of the LDS Church.
The aim of this passage is to render visible what others sought to hide. And that, in effect, is the aim of the book as a whole: to illuminate the life of a remarkable woman, who survived a 3,000-mile forced migration, helped launch the largest freedom suit in the history of the American West, and eventually built an empire in Los Angeles real estate that made her the 19th-century equivalent of a multi-millionaire.
--Marshal Zeringue