Hello, my friend.
It's good to have you back.
Last time, I told you about Jane Manning James --- a woman who walked across a continent in the wrong season, with nothing but faith and stubbornness to keep her moving. I've been thinking about her since. About what it takes to keep going when the road offers you nothing but more road. About what a person carries inside them that the world cannot touch.
I think about that a lot, actually. I've had a long time to think about it.
And today I want to tell you about another woman who had that same quality --- that same capacity to keep moving, to keep building, to keep teaching --- no matter what the world around her said she was, or wasn't, or couldn't be.
Her name was Betsey Stockton. She was born enslaved in Princeton, New Jersey, near the end of the eighteenth century. She died free, in that same town, sixty-seven years later --- having sailed to Hawaii, crossed to Canada, and taught three different peoples on three different shores in between.
I was there for some of it. I want to tell you what I saw.
I have seen a lot of libraries.
I was in Alexandria when they built the great one --- when the scrolls came in by the shipload and scholars argued in the hallways about things that would take humanity another thousand years to figure out. I stood in the cold stone rooms of Irish monasteries where monks bent over vellum by candlelight, copying words they only half understood, preserving them anyway. I have watched, more times than I can count, the moment when a human being reaches for knowledge they are not supposed to have.
It always looks the same.
There is something very quiet about it. Very still. A person alone with a text, and the world outside the room receding, and something inside them opening up that was not open before.
I saw it in Princeton, New Jersey, sometime around 1815.
There was a girl in that house --- a girl who had been enslaved since birth, transferred like furniture when her first enslaver's daughter married a minister, installed in a household that ran on theology and propriety and the unspoken assumption that some people were meant to serve and others were meant to think. The minister was Reverend Ashbel Green. He was, at that moment, the president of the College of New Jersey --- the institution that would become Princeton University. His library reflected that. It was serious, deep, and full.
And somehow --- through curiosity, through opportunity, through sheer relentless hunger --- Betsey got into those books.
Latin. Greek. Theology. History. Religious texts in languages most of the college's own students couldn't read. She didn't have a tutor and a timetable. She had whatever light was available and whatever time she could find.
Here is what I want you to understand about that.
The books belonged to the house. The house belonged to Green. Everything in it, including Betsey, was his by the law of that time and place.
But what happened inside her mind when she read --- that belonged to no one but her.
You cannot enslave an understanding. You cannot deed it to someone else or take it back when it becomes inconvenient. Every page she read was hers. Permanently. Irrevocably. Whatever happened next, no one could reach inside her and take out what the library had put there.
She was becoming free before anyone granted her freedom. The legal fact, when it came, was just the world catching up to something that had already happened.
I've seen that too, more times than I can count.
It always looks like a person alone with a book. Quiet. Still. Something inside them opening up.
Let me tell you the shape of her life.
Betsey was born around 1798 in Princeton, New Jersey. We don't know the exact date. We don't know her mother's name, or her father's. The records that survive are other people's records --- account books, diaries, letters written by the people who held power over her. She appears in them the way a piece of furniture appears in an inventory. Present. Noted. Not quite seen.
When she was still a child, her enslaver Robert Stockton gave her away. His daughter had married a minister named Ashbel Green, and Betsey went with the household goods. That is how she came to live in the home of the man who ran one of America's most prestigious colleges --- not as a student, not as a guest, but as an enslaved child in the kitchen and the hallways and, eventually, the library.
Green's diary mentions her from time to time. Reading those entries is an uncomfortable experience. He writes about her the way a man writes about a problem he is managing --- with a kind of proprietorial concern that never quite becomes care. When he felt she needed more discipline, he sent her away. She went to the household of his nephew, a Reverend Nathaniel Todd, and something interesting happened there. She flourished. Whatever the Todd household offered --- more freedom of movement, more access to learning, a different quality of attention --- it suited her. She came alive in it.
But financial circumstances brought her back to Green's house in 1816, and that is where she was when the revival came.
It swept through Princeton like weather. These things did, in that era --- sudden, communal eruptions of religious feeling that moved through a town and left people changed. Betsey was among them. She made her decision at a meeting led by a preacher named Eliphalet Wheeler Gilbert, and it was a real decision --- not the conversion of a frightened person seeking comfort, but the commitment of someone who had been reading theology for years and had arrived at her own conclusions.
She was admitted as a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton in 1817. She was also, around this time, granted her manumission by the Greens. She remained in the household as a paid domestic servant --- the economics of her freedom were still constrained --- but she was free.
And then she chose her name.
This is the detail I keep coming back to. She called herself Stockton. The name of the family that had first enslaved her. Some historians have suggested it may reflect something about her parentage --- that a white Stockton may have been her father. Perhaps. But I think there is also something else in it. Something deliberate. She took that name and made it hers --- not their property, not their legacy, but her signature on the world. I was here. I am still here. And I have named myself.
In 1822 she heard about a young missionary named Charles Stewart who was preparing to sail for Hawaii --- the Sandwich Islands, as Americans called them then. He was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, known to the Green family. He and his wife were going, and Betsey wanted to go too.
She petitioned. She was commissioned. And her contract with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions contained a phrase that stopped me when I first read it --- a phrase that had to be invented because no existing language was adequate to describe what she was.
She would travel, it said, neither as an equal nor as a servant, but as a humble Christian friend.
On November 22, 1822, she walked aboard a ship called The Thames in New Haven harbor. The voyage to Hawaii would take five months. She was, as far as anyone can determine, the first unmarried African American woman to cross that water as a missionary. She was twenty-four years old, or thereabouts. She carried everything she knew in a mind that had taught itself Latin and Greek in somebody else's library.
The ocean, I remember, was very calm that morning.
I want to stay with that phrase for a moment.
Neither as an equal nor as a servant, but as a humble Christian friend.
Read it slowly. Let it sit.
In 1822, that sentence was doing something almost impossible. America in 1822 ran on hierarchy the way a mill runs on water --- it was the organizing force behind everything. Race. Sex. Class. Station. Every relationship had a rank built into it, and the rank determined almost everything: who spoke first, who deferred, who sat where, who was seen and who was invisible. The social order wasn't just a set of customs. It was, for most people, the shape of reality itself. The way things simply were.
Betsey didn't fit.
She was a free Black woman traveling with a white missionary family. She was educated beyond most of the people she would meet on that voyage. She was commissioned by the same board that had sent the Stewarts, under terms that explicitly said she was not their servant. And yet the world she was sailing into --- and the world she had left behind --- had no ready category for what she was.
So the contract invented one.
I've been thinking about what it takes to write a sentence like that. Someone had to sit down and look at the existing options --- equal, servant --- and decide that neither one was true, and that the truth needed its own words. That is not a small thing. Categories are powerful. They tell people what to expect of each other, how to behave, where to look. Creating a new one, even on paper, even in a legal document, is an act of imagination about what human relationships could be.
Betsey didn't just accept that category. She lived it.
In Lāhainā, on the island of Maui, she opened a school. And here is the thing about that school that matters most: it was not for the chiefs. It was not for the missionary families' children. It was for the common people of Hawaii --- ordinary men and women and children who had never been offered the assumption that their minds were worth educating. In that culture, at that moment, knowledge was stratified as carefully as it was in Princeton. The idea that it belonged to everyone was not obvious. It was radical.
She taught history. English. Latin. Algebra. She also served, informally, as a nurse and doctor to people in the community --- because the need was there and she had the knowledge and she did not wait to be asked twice. She trained native Hawaiian teachers to carry the work forward after she left, which tells you something important about how she understood her role. She was not building a monument to herself. She was building capacity. She was making herself unnecessary, which is one of the most generous things a teacher can do.
I watched her in that classroom. I want to tell you what I saw.
I saw someone who had been told, implicitly and explicitly, for the first twenty years of her life, that she was not the kind of person who got to know things --- sitting at the front of a room and telling everyone within reach the opposite. Not with speeches. Not with declarations. With lessons. With Latin conjugations and algebraic problems and the steady, daily insistence that the person in front of her had a mind worth cultivating.
She knew what it felt like to be the one the world had decided didn't need to know. She had been that person. And she seems to have made a quiet decision, somewhere along the way, that she would spend the rest of her life on the other side of that equation.
She didn't wait for Hawaii to be ready for her. She didn't wait for America to resolve its contradictions. She didn't wait for the world to produce a category that fit her before she started working.
She just started working.
The school she opened in Lāhainā still has a descendant. Lahainaluna High School stands today on the ground where Betsey Stockton first gathered students who weren't supposed to be students. I think about that sometimes --- about how a room full of common people learning algebra in 1823 left a mark on the land that is still there two hundred years later.
That is what it looks like when someone practices fellowship instead of waiting for it.
She came home in 1825.
Harriet Stewart's health had broken down in the Hawaiian climate, and the family needed to return. Betsey came with them. Five months out, five months back, and a world in between that she carried inside her for the rest of her life.
She taught for a while in Philadelphia. An infant school --- young children, the kind of teaching that is mostly patience and presence and the willingness to start from the very beginning. Then a missionary named William Case reached out, looking for someone to establish a school on Grape Island in Canada, among the Ojibwe people there. He asked Reverend Green's advice. Green recommended Betsey.
She went.
I want you to notice the pattern that is forming. Hawaii. Philadelphia. Canada. Three different places. Three different communities. And in each one, the same thing: people who had been told, one way or another, that education was not for them. Common Hawaiians. Infants in a Philadelphia neighborhood without resources. Indigenous people on a Canadian island. She moved toward them the way water moves toward low ground --- not because anyone required it of her, not because it was the prestigious assignment, but because that seems to have been how she understood the work.
She returned to Princeton in 1835, and she stayed.
She taught at the Witherspoon Street School for Colored Children for the rest of her life --- thirty years, give or take, in the same town where she had been born enslaved, in a school that served the community the town had always pushed to its margins. She was assessed, by those who observed her, as an excellent teacher. I believe it. Excellence in teaching is not a performance. It is the result of knowing, in your bones, why the thing you are teaching matters.
In 1835 the Presbyterian church building burned down. The congregation of color that had been worshipping there decided, in the aftermath, to form their own church. Betsey was among them. In 1840 she helped found Princeton's First Presbyterian Church of Color, which would be renamed in 1848 the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church. She built institutions, not just lessons. She understood that the work outlasts the worker, and she planned accordingly.
She died on October 24, 1865. The Civil War had just ended. The thing she had been born into --- the legal architecture of American slavery --- had finally, at enormous cost, been dismantled. She lived to see it. I don't know what she felt about that. The record doesn't tell us. But I think about the fact that she had not waited for it. She had not organized her life around the hope that the world would eventually become just. She had organized her life around the practice of acting justly, right now, in the conditions that actually existed.
That is the thread I want you to hold onto.
Three continents. Hawaii, Canada, America. Three communities the world had decided were not worth educating. One woman, moving between them, carrying the same quiet conviction: that the person in front of her had a mind worth cultivating, and that this was true regardless of what the law said, or the custom said, or the social order said.
She never escaped the structures around her. Let me be honest about that. She carried the name of the family that had enslaved her. She moved through a world that never fully made room for her --- that had to invent new contractual language just to describe her status on a missionary voyage. She taught in schools for people of color because that was what the segregated world offered. The injustice was real, and it was constant, and she knew it better than most.
But here is what she added to the tapestry --- and I have been watching this tapestry for a very long time, so I want you to hear me when I say this.
She added proof.
Proof that fellowship across difference is not a reward that arrives after justice is achieved. It is not a utopian condition that requires the world to be fixed first. It is a practice. It is something a person does, daily, in real classrooms, with real students, under real and unjust conditions. It is available in Princeton in 1835 and in Lāhainā in 1823 and on Grape Island in 1829 and in whatever room you happen to be standing in right now.
Betsey Stockton practiced it for forty years. The tapestry holds her thread. I watched her put it there.
I want to talk to you about right now.
Not 1822. Not 1865. Now.
I know what the world feels like at the moment you are listening to this. I have been watching long enough to recognize the particular exhaustion that comes when history feels like it is moving backward. When the things people fought for --- bled for, walked across continents for, opened schools for --- seem fragile in ways they weren't supposed to be fragile. When the past feels heavy and the present feels unresolved and progress feels like a word that belongs to someone else's era.
I hear it. I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong.
But I want to tell you something that Betsey Stockton's life makes very clear to me, after all this time.
The practice was never contingent on the conditions.
She did not teach in Hawaii because America had sorted itself out. She did not open a school in Princeton because the legal and social structures had finally caught up to human dignity. She did not found a church because racism had ended. None of those things were true. All of those things were as unresolved in her lifetime as the hardest things feel unresolved in yours. And she got up in the morning and taught Latin to children who weren't supposed to know Latin, and she did it again the next day, and the day after that, for forty years.
That is not optimism. I want to be careful here, because optimism is not what I am describing. Optimism requires things to be going well, or at least trending that way. What Betsey had was something different. Something older. Something I have watched in human beings across every era I have witnessed, and it never stops moving me.
It is the capacity to act as though the world you believe in is already real --- not because you are naive about the world that actually exists, but because the acting is itself the point.
She met her students as people whose minds mattered. Not because the world agreed. Because she had decided it was true, and she acted on it, and in the acting she made it true --- in that room, on that day, for those students.
That third category --- neither superior nor subordinate, but friend --- has always been available. That is what I need you to hear. It was available in a Princeton household where an enslaved girl read her way into freedom. It was available on a ship crossing the Pacific with a missionary family and no adequate word for what she was. It was available in a classroom in Lāhainā and on an island in Canada and on a street in Princeton called Witherspoon.
It is available to you.
Not after the arguments are settled. Not after the legislation passes or the court decides or the culture shifts or the other side finally understands. Now. In the conditions that actually exist. With the people who are actually in front of you.
This is not a call to ignore injustice. Betsey Stockton did not ignore injustice. She knew exactly what had been done to her and to the people she served, and she named it by living in opposition to it every single day. Recognizing the failure of the world and continuing to act within it --- those are not contradictions. They are the whole practice, held together.
You are not required to wait for a better world before you start building one.
You are not handicapped by the past --- not even a past as heavy as hers. You are not trapped by the present --- not even a present as complicated and painful as the one we are living through together.
The practice is available. It has always been available. A formerly enslaved woman from Princeton, New Jersey, proved it on three continents, in three languages, over four decades, without anyone ever quite having the right word for what she was doing.
I think we can find the word now.
She was being human, at the full height of what that means.
Before we go, I want to ask you something.
Not a hard question. Just something to carry with you.
Is there someone in your life who doesn't fit the existing categories? Someone the social order around you hasn't quite made room for --- who shows up in your world as a problem to be managed, or a situation to be navigated, rather than a person to be met?
Betsey Stockton spent her whole life being that person. And what I noticed, watching her, was that the people who served her best weren't the ones who solved her situation. They were the ones who simply --- met her. Saw her. Made room, even when the room wasn't supposed to exist.
The Todd household. The missionary board that invented new language rather than forcing her into the wrong category. The Hawaiian students who came back to teach after she had gone.
Small moments. Ordinary decisions. People choosing, in the space of a single interaction, to treat someone as a friend rather than a function.
You will have that choice today. Maybe you already have, before you finished listening to this. Maybe it will come tomorrow, in a form you won't immediately recognize --- a conversation that could go two ways, a moment where the easier path is to let someone remain invisible.
I am not telling you what to do. That is not my place. I am just telling you what I have seen, across a very long time, in a very great many places.
The moments when human beings chose the harder, truer thing --- chose to meet each other as friends across every difference the world had constructed between them --- those moments left marks. They left schools on hillsides in Hawaii. They left churches on streets in Princeton. They left students who became teachers who became something the original teacher never got to see.
You don't have to cross an ocean.
The practice is right where you are.
Next time, I want to tell you about a woman who also built a school.
Her name was Mary Elizabeth Lange. She was born in Saint-Domingue --- the island that would become Haiti --- in the middle of a revolution that shook the entire Atlantic world. She fled with her family, made her way through Cuba, and eventually arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, where she opened a school for Black children in her own home because the city had decided, as cities did, that those children didn't need one.
That alone would make her worth knowing.
But Mary Elizabeth Lange did something else. Something that required a different kind of courage entirely. She took vows. She put on a habit. She founded the first African American Catholic religious congregation in the United States --- the Oblate Sisters of Providence --- and she led it through poverty and racism and institutional indifference for the better part of a century.
She was declared Venerable by Pope Francis in 2023.
I have things to tell you about her that the official record leaves out. I'll save them for next time.
For now, I want to leave you with the image I started with today. A girl in a house in Princeton. Candlelight, or whatever light she could find. Books that weren't hers, knowledge that was. The world outside that room telling one story about who she was and what she was worth. The words on the page telling another.
She believed the words.
She spent the rest of her life proving they were right.
That is the thread, my friend. That is always the thread. Quietly running through the fabric, through every era, through every impossible circumstance --- the insistence that every human being has a mind worth cultivating and a soul worth meeting.
Betsey Stockton knew it. Now you do too.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.