Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s Courageous Slave Who Dared to Run Away by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

Abstract

Reviewed by: Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s Courageous Slave Who Dared to Run Away by Erica Armstrong Dunbar Elizabeth Bush Dunbar, Erica Armstrong Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s Courageous Slave Who Dared to Run Away; by Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Kathleen Van Cleve. Aladdin, 2019 [256p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-5344-1617-8 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-5344-1619-2 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 5-9 In 1796, Ona Judge, personal attendant to her owner, First Lady Martha Washington, walked out the door of the President’s House in Philadelphia and onto a ship bound for New Hampshire and, if not to legal freedom, at least to a life of self-determination. Nobody was more surprised than the Washingtons, who believed themselves to be liberal-minded owners, suddenly ill-used (and mightily embarrassed) by their heretofore model “servant.” The only way to reclaim their property involved stretching fugitive slave recovery laws until they broke—certainly not something the president wanted to be caught doing—and so the Washingtons began a years-long campaign of covert extralegal negotiations with acquaintances and acquaintances-of-acquaintances to lure or force Judge back to Mount Vernon. In this young readers’ edition of her adult work Never Caught, Dunbar ably surmounts the challenge of building a gripping, coherent narrative from oblique references and interviews with elderly Ona Judge Staines, while steadily keeping the focus on Judge rather than her high-profile owners. Numerous “probably,” “might have,” and “could have”s pepper the text, reminding readers of the problem of precisely documenting a slave’s life, but they nonetheless direct attention to the unusual circumstances of Judge’s transplantation from rural Mount Vernon to cities with [End Page 204] free Black residents and talk of liberty, which certainly influenced her decision and opportunity to make a break. Prosperity was never to be part of Judge’s story, but readers will be heartened to learn she lived a long life in liberty and died in her own bed, “carried away, not by slave catchers, but by her God.” A bibliography and reproduction of Judge’s late-in-life interviews about her experiences are appended. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois