ABSTRACT
In 1873, John Washington completed his memoir, Memorys of the Past, in which he described his growth from an enslaved child to a Black man who emancipated himself in the spring of 1862. The memoir includes his meticulously drawn map of Fredericksburg, Virginia, United States, identifying places important to his memories of enslavement and, most notably, the location where he crossed the Rappahannock River to freedom. Washington’s map is an example of resistant cartographic practice in both the past and the present. First, it is a nineteenth-century example of mapping as memory work that helped him access his past as an enslaved Black child and young man. As such, it is an example of hidden Black cartographies that had to negotiate with racially exclusive mappings and geographies. Second, Fredericksburg’s city officials and residents are now practising Washington’s cartographic memories as they repair over a century of erasing Black experiences from the city’s heritage tourism landscape.
