When poet and creative writer Rachel Jamison Webster attended a cousin's wedding, she was surprised to discover that her family is related to famed mathematician and naturalist Benjamin Banneker.
This news was unexpected, not only because of Banneker's place in history as the first Black person in the U.S. to publish an almanac and for his role in surveying the boundaries for the District of Columbia — but also because the author is white. Thus began an exploration into family, race, and history that would culminate in a memoir-cum-biographical-sketch, Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family.
