{"id":56285,"date":"2018-04-24T02:25:55","date_gmt":"2018-04-24T02:25:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56285"},"modified":"2020-01-28T18:23:36","modified_gmt":"2020-01-28T18:23:36","slug":"a-girl-full-of-smartness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56285","title":{"rendered":"A Girl Full of Smartness"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Girl Full of Smartness<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Paris Review<\/a>
\n2017-06-02<\/p>\n

Edward White<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nMary Ellen Pleasant<\/small><\/a><\/p>\n

As an entrepreneur, civil-rights activist, and benefactor, Mary Ellen Pleasant<\/a> made a name and a fortune for herself in Gold Rush\u2013era<\/a> San Francisco<\/a>, shattering racial taboos.<\/em><\/p>\n

They did things differently in the Old West<\/a>. On the morning of August 14, 1889, Stephen J. Field<\/a>, a justice of the Supreme Court, was eating breakfast at a caf\u00e9 in Lathrop, California<\/a>, when David S. Terry<\/a>, a former bench colleague, stopped by Field\u2019s table and slapped him twice across the face.<\/p>\n

This was not unprecedented behavior. Despite having risen to the rank of chief justice of the Supreme Court of California<\/a>, Terry was described by one contemporary as an \u201cevil genius\u201d with an \u201cirrepressible temper,\u201d who once stabbed a man for being an abolitionist and killed a Congressman wedded to the Free Soil movement<\/a>. His gripe with Stephen Field, however, had nothing to do with slavery. In 1883, Terry\u2019s wife had filed a lawsuit (Sharon vs. Sharon<\/a>)<\/em> against the multimillionaire U.S. Senator William Sharon<\/a>, claiming she had been married to him in secret some years ago and that, having been callously discarded by the womanizing senator, she was owed a divorce settlement. After five years the case ended up at a federal circuit court, where Field found in favor of William Sharon; there would be no divorce settlement. Terry was livid and promised to exact revenge.<\/p>\n

It was only the latest twist in what had been a bizarre case. On the first day of the trial, William Sharon\u2019s attorney asserted that his client was the victim of a plot involving an elderly black woman who had used voodoo<\/a> to steal Sharon\u2019s hard-earned fortune. That woman was known to the San Francisco<\/a> public as \u201cMammy Pleasant<\/a>,\u201d around whom sinister rumors had swirled for years. Some accused her of being a murderess, a madam, and a practitioner of black magic who befriended white families only to curse them and bleed them dry; a nightmarish image of \u201cthe mammy gone wrong,\u201d to quote one historian. But just as many\u2014especially among the black community\u2014knew her as Mary Ellen Pleasant<\/a>: an ingenious entrepreneur, pioneering civil-rights activist, and beloved benefactor who broke racial taboos and played a singular role in the early years of San Francisco…<\/p>\n

Even within her lifetime, there were several competing stories about Pleasant\u2019s origins. One version has her born into slavery in Georgia<\/a>; another says she was the daughter of a wealthy Virginian planter who had a fling with a voodoo priestess from the Caribbean<\/a>. In her published reminiscences she claimed to have been born in Philadelphia<\/a> in 1812, to a Hawaiian father and \u201ca full-blooded Louisiana<\/a> negress.\u201d Racial mixing and ethnic ambiguity, themes that would repeat over and again throughout Pleasant\u2019s life, appear to have been part of her identity from the start…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As an entrepreneur, civil-rights activist, and benefactor, Mary Ellen Pleasant made a name and a fortune for herself in Gold Rush\u2013era San Francisco, shattering racial taboos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,8,6462,20,25],"tags":[455,28545,28548,28544,28554,28549,28537,28041,28555,9568,28551,28547,28546,28553,28040,28552,28538,28550],"class_list":["post-56285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","category-women","tag-california","tag-david-s-terry","tag-david-terry","tag-edward-white","tag-lynn-m-hudson","tag-mammy-pleasant","tag-mary-ellen-pleasant","tag-paris-review","tag-peter-hardeman-burnett","tag-san-francisco","tag-sara-althea-hill","tag-stephen-field","tag-stephen-j-field","tag-teresa-bell","tag-the-paris-review","tag-thomas-bell","tag-voodoo-queen","tag-william-sharon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56285"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56289,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56285\/revisions\/56289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}