Myers stressed that Johnson’s and Chinn’s story is not a romance. “Richard was first, last, and always an enslaver,” said Myers. “He was descended from enslavers and plantation owners, he inherited his property, he inherited enslaved laborers from his father and mother. Johnson also never freed Chinn, even though he did make sure that his daughters grew up as free women. He might have made exceptions for Chinn and their daughters in some ways, but he continued to own and sell other human beings.”
Myers also emphasized that history is not only about what happened, but also about why things happened, and how things in the past influenced have influenced the present, and the connections between the two.
“As a teacher, one of the things that my students and I think a lot about is how people around the country perceive or misunderstand what history is—some think of it as static and unchanging, or they think it’s just names, dates, and events you simply memorize,” said Myers. “This idea of reading, memorizing, and regurgitating, to test and forget, is not what the study of history is. What we focus on is helping students learn about analysis and developing an understanding that there are competing understandings, or visions, of history.”
For example, explained Myers, “There’s no such thing as an unbiased primary source, because all sources were created by human beings, and we are all biased in some way, shape or form. Look at a personal diary. People tend to remember and shade things in certain ways. And that is certainly also done in public documents, including court records, census materials, newspaper articles, and so on.”
Historians, she said, teach students to cast their views as broadly as possible, gather sources from a wide variety of subjects, and also a variety of source materials. “It’s critical to balance out biases and get different voices and perspectives from across the spectrum in order to try to get as close to this thing that we like to call the ‘truth’ as is possible. And because sources are always being uncovered over time, or they're being analyzed in new and different ways, we employ different methodological tools and lenses to see as complete a historical picture as possible.”
Myers acknowledges her book may make many people uncomfortable. “White folks aren't going to like what they find here, but neither are a lot of Black folks,” said Myers. “But that's the whole point about being human. We are complex beings who say and do things that are problematic and uncomfortable on a daily basis.”
So how should we look at Johnson and Chinn?
“I say in the book that white supremacy warps and wounds everyone,” noted Myers. “Julia Chinn was not Harriet Tubman. She chose to survive, so that her daughters and grandchildren would grow up to have a better life, to have a proper education, legal marriages, legal freedom. An enslaved woman with few choices, she does a lot of things that we today might find reprehensible in order to make a pathway forward for her children and grandchildren, including becoming the mistress and overseer of Blue Spring Farm.”
Myers concluded , “Do we understand that it was white supremacy that turned Richard into who he was? Can we also see how white supremacy turned Julia into who she became, because her options were scarce? She had to do the best she could with the tools she had, and this meant she made made choices and decisions that we ourselves would like to say we would never make.”