1 First story: Untold story of a slave
Anthropology Professor Laura Masur says her work — which includes digging for artifacts at sites of former slave plantations owned by the Jesuits — does not lead to "a comfortable or easy history." But in connecting descendants to their ancestors, she finds the rewards that can come with documenting the stories of slaves with dignity.
Henrietta Pike, B.S.N. 1982, grew up hearing fragments of a story from her aunts and mother about an ancestor who "hid in the woods." Even though Pike suspected that she was descended from slaves, a call from a Georgetown University genealogist brought startling news: Pike was the descendant of a slave sold by the Jesuits in 1838 to keep the D.C. university running.
Pike learned that she was the second great granddaughter of Louisa Mahoney Mason, one of the so-called GU272 slaves sold by the Jesuits to a Louisiana plantation. Mason escaped the trip down river by hiding in the woods near St. Inigoes Manor, a tobacco plantation owned by the Jesuits in southern Maryland.
Eager to learn more about her roots, Pike started exploring her family history. On a hot and humid morning last July, she participated in a dig at the ruins of St. Inigoes. Laura Masur, Catholic University assistant professor of anthropology, who was there with a team of students, showed Pike the spot near a pond where she believes Mason's small wood-frame house once stood.
On the horizon, Pike could see Priests Point, near the juncture of St. Inigoes Creek and the St. Mary's River. At that moment, Pike says she felt like she was "coming home and connecting to my past."
Masur's research focuses on the Jesuits and the system of plantations they maintained in Maryland and Pennsylvania to fund their missions and ministry during the Colonial Period and into the 19th and early 20th centuries. Masur was working on her doctoral dissertation about Jesuit plantations when news of the GU272 slaves broke in 2016. She suddenly found herself drawn into the national debate about the role of the Catholic Church in the institution of slavery.
Masur notes in her dissertation that the narrative surrounding the Jesuits and their slaves "is not a comfortable or easy history."
"It is not a story of heroes and villains, but of complex characters who struggled and continue to struggle to come to terms with the relationship between the economic necessities and social values that are integral to the practice of organized religion," Masur adds.
"It is a narrative that all stakeholders — descendants, locals, clergy, and scholars alike — should seek to understand, appreciate, learn from, and identify with, even if they already know the story."
