[April isn’t
just National Poetry Month; it’s also National
Arab American Heritage Month. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the
many compelling Arab American stories & figures I feature in the final
chapter of my book
We the People, leading up to a
weekend post on contemporary Arab American writers!]
On the Early
Republic figure who became an iconic image of the new nation.
As I mentioned in
yesterday’s post, a significant portion of enslaved
African Americans were Muslim, many of them from cultures that would also
be defined as Arabic (especially North African ones like Morocco and Tunisia). While
there is great value in remembering that historical community as a whole, the
vast majority of those Muslim and Arab Americans, like the vast majority of all
enslaved people across the more than three centuries of American slavery, are
unfortunately not specifically or individually remembered. But as the United
States moved into the Revolutionary era and its aftermath, collective histories
began to be produced more regularly, and thus individual Americans to be
highlighted more frequently. That’s true of a number of Arab Americans who fought
in the Revolutionary War, a list that includes Bampett Muhamed, Yusuf ben Ali/Joseph Benhaley,
and Joseph
Saba. And it’s true of one of the more famous individuals from the post-Revolution
Early Republic period, Washington, DC’s Yarrow
Mamout (also known as Muhammad Yaro).
Like most Early
Republic figures, Mamout
had been in America since well before the Revolution: he was sold into
slavery in the West African nation of Guinea in the early 1750s (when he was around
14 years old) and brought to Annapolis, Maryland. For the next
half-century Mamout was enslaved on both the Samuel Beall plantation in
nearby Takoma Park and at Samuel’s son Brooke Beall’s home in the Georgetown
neighborhood of Washington; over those decades Mamout developed a reputation as
a skilled handyman and brickmaker. Thanks to the gradual earnings those trades
brought him, in the late 1790s he was able to purchase his freedom from the Beall
family, and he subsequently bought
his own home in Georgetown; the neighborhood had become home to a sizeable African
American community in the Early Republic period, and Mamout would serve as
one of that community’s most prominent investors, financiers, and community leaders.
Better remembering impressive individuals like Mamout, after all, likewise
helps us better remember such communities, which even when they were located in
the nation’s capital during that formative period have too often been
forgotten.
Mamout himself
might have been forgotten after his 1823 death if it were not for his
connection to another prominent Early Republic figure, the painter Charles Willson
Peale. Peale painted renowned portraits
of many of the framers and Revolutionary icons, and in 1819 he learned of
Mamout and sought him out as another potential subject. He did end up painting
a beautiful
and deeply human portrait of Mamout, and during their sessions learned a
great deal of Mamout’s story and life, which Peale documented in his
meticulously kept diary. That account has become an important primary
source reference for biographers of Mamout, but it also reflects Mamout’s
presence and role in the broader communities of Georgetown and the Early
Republic US. As Peale writes, “Yarrow owns a House & lots and is known by
most of the Inhabitants of Georgetown. … He professes to be a mahometan
[Muslim], and is often seen & heard in the Streets singing Praises to God.”
Both the portrait and this prose description are images of Mamout, snapshots
into an identity and life that spanned the most formative three-quarters of a
century in American history—a period in which Arab Americans like Yarrow Mamout
played compelling and important roles.
Next Arab
American story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Arab American figures or stories you’d highlight?
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