Run, run, run.
Some days, it feels like that’s all you do. Run the kids to school, dash to work, rush with errands, and run yourself ragged before bed. You’re always on the go, always moving, and in the new book “Never Caught” by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, your breath isn’t the only thing to catch.
Twenty-one-year-old Mulatto Betty must’ve breathed a sigh of relief.
When Martha Custis married George Washington, slaves were shuffled as the mistress moved to Mount Vernon; miraculously and notably, Betty moved and was allowed to keep her baby son with her. She was pregnant, too, by a White man with an “indenture agreement” and an eye for opportunity; their eldest daughter was born in mid-1773, and given the unusual name of Ona Maria.
At age 10, “Oney” Judge was brought inside the Washington household, in service to Martha Washington. There, the illiterate girl learned to care for Martha’s clothing, to bathe the mistress, tend her grandchildren, and soothe anxieties—one of which was that Martha’s husband had been asked to be the nation’s first president, a post that Martha Washington wasn’t keen on—and neither was Judge.
But, of course, Washington did take the position, which meant a household move from Virginia to Manhattan (the site of the first Executive Mansion) for the family and a handful of slaves, including Judge. It’s there, says Dunbar, where Judge most certainly tasted freedom through rare autonomy.
She was undoubtedly unhappy, therefore—but couldn’t speak her mind—when the Executive Mansion was relocated to Philadelphia in 1790.
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