English Visiting Speaker Seminar: Professor Jennifer Putzi, William and Mary, USA The 1872 Diary of Mary Virginia Montgomery

This lecture will introduce the audience to the diary of Mary Virginia Montgomery (1850-1920), a twenty-two-year-old African American woman whose family was enslaved by Joseph Davis, eldest brother of the President of the Confederate States, prior to the Civil War. By the time Montgomery begins her diary in January 1872, she and her family own the plantations upon which they were enslaved. Her daily writing practice and her documentation of her own work with the land present a critique of the intimate connection between the place of the plantation and the theft of Black freedom and humanity. In the role of gardener, especially, Montgomery reclaims the geographical spaces of the plantation that were historically used to oppress and control African American women. Virginia's garden, likely constructed in the same space as that of Varina Davis, Jefferson's wife, allows the diarist to assert her creativity, her intelligence, her education, and her independence—all denied her by the institution of slavery.