‘I saw this project as a kind of vindication of Dinah, and what Dinah went through.’ Photo: Irma Gardner Hammond portrays Dinah in Remember My Name: Dinah’s story.
Household name: Rebecca Hardy looks for a forgotten woman from a famous Quaker home
‘Dinah lies buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Stenton’s grassy six-acre grounds, with a biography still full of holes.’
One autumn evening in 1777, a year after the Declaration of Independence was signed, and with the revolutionary war raging, a British officer stopped by a grand Quaker house near Germantown (now Philadelphia), looking for deserters.
The building was Stenton, the colonial mansion of the Quaker Logan family, and built in c.1730 by James Logan, deputy and secretary to William Penn. While much is known about the colonial statesman – that he was a friend and mentor of Benjamin Franklin, and negotiated with the Lenni-Lenape Nation, for example – much less is known about the woman who opened the door. This then paid housekeeper, Dinah, was just one of the many black Americans who had been formerly enslaved by the owners. It just so happened that only moments before, two British soldiers had told her that they intended to set the building on fire.
With the men now retreated to the barn in search of kindling, Dinah had to think fast. As the men returned from the barn carrying the straw, Dinah told the British officer that these men were indeed deserters, and despite their protestations, the officer believed her and promptly had them arrested.
It is a compelling story that speaks of bravery and quick wits. Yet despite saving the historic house from destruction, as well as the family’s collection of manuscripts, Dinah has rarely received the credit she deserves. With previous accounts referring to her only as an ‘old Negroe servant’, and a 1912 bronze plaque at Stenton noting her as a ‘faithful colored caretaker’, it is only now that she is being properly memorialised by name.
For Stenton as an institution, and Friend David Hicock (an ancestor of the Quaker Logan family), it is high time that Dinah is given the recognition she deserves. ‘My direct Quaker ancestor’s slave – don’t you think we should honour her by name?’ the Quaker from Friends House Meeting wrote to the Friend last month. A recent gift of a cast bronze memorial of Logan, created for the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1939 (in storage since 1969), places Stenton ‘squarely in the current national debate about the validity of public images deemed racist, insensitive or inappropriate’, says the Stenton House website. Meanwhile, Dinah lies buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Stenton’s grassy six-acre grounds, with a biography still full of holes.
‘We have not yet constructed the memorial,’ Laura Keim, curator at Stenton Museum, told the Friend. ‘The design is complete and all the city approvals are in place. We still have $100,000 to raise for completion, and Covid has slowed things down and shifted many funders’ priorities. In addition to the memorial, we worked with a local African American story writer, storyteller, and actress, to tell a new version of Dinah’s story and created a video.’
The plans to memorialise Dinah started when Stenton set up the Dinah Memorial Project, a 2018 initiative that invited community members to submit proposals for the monument. Intended to both inform and challenge its visitors, the winning ‘contemplative space’ was designed by artist Karyn Olivier and features a fountain encircled by two benches. Aimed at provoking rumination on the mysterious, dehumanising lack of detail surrounding Dinah’s life, the monument poses questions engraved on two limestone tablets: ‘Where were you born? How did you get here? What was your greatest sorrow? How did freedom feel?’
‘I’m interested in monuments that confound us,’ said Karyn Olivier, in Atlas Obscura magazine last year. ‘How do I get away from monuments which treat history like a [full stop] at the end of a sentence?… [W]e all know history has to be written in pencil.’
The goal of the project was to not only memorialise Dinah, but to honour her true identity and the colossal struggles she must have faced as an enslaved woman – as well as the enigma that surrounds her. ‘This is challenging history,’ said Laura Keim in a panel discussion about another creative project the house has embarked on: a twenty-minute video retelling Dinah’s story. ‘How much this is touching people’s souls.’
Written by Robert Branch, the film Remember My Name: Dinah’s story covers the arc of Dinah’s life, from arriving at Stenton to her husband becoming ill, to finally asking for her freedom. Even now, Dinah’s backstory is largely unclear; her birthday, her birthplace and even her last name are still unknown. The move to Stenton is thought to have separated Dinah from her husband, though he was later ‘purchased’ by the Logans. Other records suggest that Dinah had a daughter, Bess, who was free, and a grandson, Cyrus, both of whom lived at Stenton. While much of her story is shrouded in mystery, a manumission document kept at Haverford College Library suggests that Dinah was enslaved as a child by the Emlen family of Philadelphia.
‘Dinah came to Stenton as a dower slave property of Hannah Emlen Logan, William Logan’s wife, so she came to the Logans from George Emlen’s plantation, which we think was in West Jersey,’ says Laura Keim, who describes the reenactment as another ‘poetic, artistic and creative way to get into something that is presented as a series of facts, that is just hard to take in’.
Dinah was just one of the many African people enslaved by Stenton’s property owners. ‘Both Quakers [James Logan and William Penn] owned some slaves,’ David Hicock told the Friend, ‘as did most Quakers in Pennsylvania at that period. My entire Welsh, Irish and Scottish Quaker family back in the 1690s, who emigrated with Penn, had slaves. But Penn had promised my ancestor James Logan to free his slaves when he died in his will as Logan and some other family were his executors. But he didn’t. Maybe he forgot. So my ancestors, James Logan and Isaac Norris, had to sell William Penn’s slaves to settle the Penn estate in America for Penn’s awful sons, who had also robbed the Lenni Lenape Indians of their land after Penn passed away.’
According to Robert Branch, who researched Remember My Name: Dinah’s story in consultation with Stenton’s staff and other historical resources, the first thing he wanted to convey was the realness and relevance of the story. ‘Retelling historical stories needs to be real and relevant,’ he says. ‘Real means research, things need to be very solid historically. History is nice, but who cares if it’s not relevant to what is going on today?’
‘There are two things that stood out for me,’ he says, in the panel discussion following the video. ‘When you do historical stories, you start with an idea, and the history is a vehicle to communicate it. Given all the unrest and the problems we have experienced in this country recently, and this idea of the fire, and someone preventing the fire, I really wanted to communicate that idea that we all have a role to prevent fire and mutual destruction.’
‘The other thing that stood out to me was Dinah, the name,’ he adds. ‘One of the first things that I did was to say: where does this name come from? It’s a biblical name. If you look in Genesis chapters thirty to forty, in that story Jacob’s only daughter… is taken against her will, and forced into a relationship. I also looked at the meaning of that name. It means “God vindicates”, and I saw this project as a kind of vindication of Dinah, and what Dinah went through, and so many Dinahs out there whose stories can now be told.’
The story prompted other linguistic questions as well. The word ‘African’ was chosen over ‘slave’, which the panel agreed would both have been commonly used at the time. ‘No one was born a slave, they were enslaved,’ says actor Irma Gardner-Hammond, who plays the ‘old Dinah’. ‘And what people know, these [particular people] were Africans. They came from Africa and other places.’
Actor Marissa Kennedy, who plays the ‘young Dinah’, agrees. ‘These were human beings who had a life before they were brought here. They had a homeland and they had a home, and it’s good to reference that and to remind people that they didn’t just show up here and that’s all that they were.’
Another aim, says Laura Keim, was to break away from the centuries-old ‘faithful slave’ narrative. She describes finding a small almanac at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania that was owned by Deborah Norris Logan, who passed Dinah’s story on through her memoirs of her husband. The notebook records Dinah’s death on 22 February and her burial in the garden at Stenton on the twenty-third. ‘This gave us chills, to read this and to see it in Deborah Logan’s handwriting,’ says Laura Keim. ‘And Deborah actually describes Dinah as “our faithful old Dinah”, and this is language that appears on the 1912 plaque that got this project started. So that idea of “the failthful slave” narrative that we’ve been engaging with throughout the process – and some of the stereotypes that come down to us of women like Dinah as “Mammies” – was something we’ve addressed as part of the programme. It’s interesting to find Deborah Logan using that language in the first decade of the nineteenth century that has kind of carried all the way through.’
Remember My Name: Dinah’s story recounts the struggles of Dinah’s life, through all her many immense challenges. For Irma Gardner-Hammond, playing the ‘old Dinah’ made her appreciate her history even more ‘because she had a life, she had family, she fell in love, she wasn’t just a servant. The bit that stands out to me is when Dinah asks for her freedom. She has nothing else to lose and she is so impassioned about it. “I want my freedom now” – and she is surprised that they can’t believe that she is asking for her freedom. She expresses that this is her birthright, and that she has wanted to do this from the beginning, and her patience has run out.’
Dinah was finally manumitted in 1776, when she sees other enslaved people being freed and, tired of waiting for the Logans to follow, asks them herself. It’s a moving moment for Irma Gardner-Hammond, which speaks of Dinah’s courage and strength. ‘This shows her power, and her vulnerability… because they could have said no. It took some energy and guts and bravery and determination, and she really showed what she really wanted, and was willing to do anything to get that freedom; and that is relevant even today.’
For Marissa Kennedy, however, the most affecting moment comes when Dinah’s husband falls ill and Dinah is forced to ask the family to buy him, in order to save his life. ‘What does it feel like, to know you’re a human being but to know that you’re being treated like a horse or a teacup? A possession?’ she asks. ‘And to say that “I need you to buy my husband, who I see as an individual and who I love”? So that he doesn’t get cast away? It’s heart-wrenching to think about that; the emotions and the thought that’s going on. But it’s also emboldening to me as an individual, because that takes a lot of guts. And it also takes a lot of love.’
Rebecca is the journalist at the Friend. Remember My Name: Dinah’s story can be seen at https://youtu.be/rK8Vjyg_oiU.
