Sometimes, forgotten information about important historical figures and their connections turns up in surprising places.

A little-known essay by William Dean Howells (1837-1920) is one of those places. Howells, a white writer later known as the Dean of American Letters, published “Mrs. Johnson” in The Atlantic in 1868. “Mrs. Johnson” was the pseudonym Howells gave to his family’s Black housekeeper, Mary Lewis (1816-1868), whom he called “a subject of unique interest.” But it seems neither Howells nor his wife fully understood just how uniquely interesting Mary Lewis was.

Mary Lewis was the widow of Robert Benjamin Lewis (c. 1802-1858), author of the first ethnology written by a Black American. She was also the mother-in-law of William F. Johnson (1822-1903), the superintendent of the Howard Orphan Asylum, a noteworthy institution in Weeksville, Brooklyn. And because Howells wrote about her and her family, we now know that Mary Lewis was a formidable person herself. 

In 1836, R.B. Lewis published Light and Truth, From Ancient and Sacred History. New editions were published in the 1840s and 1850s under the title Light and Truth: Collected from the Bible and Ancient and Modern History, Containing the Universal History of the Colored and the Indian Race, from the Creation of the World to the Present Time. At a time when most Americans read the Bible as more or less literal history, Lewis wrote that the text of Genesis posited that Eden was in Ethiopia, “and the first people were Ethiopians, or blacks.” Adam and Eve’s descendants were therefore black; so were most of history’s great figures, or at least not white in the sense his contemporaries or ours would understand the label. He also wrote that Native Americans were “Israelites—Indians who came out of Egypt,” a not uncommon belief among white U.S. theologians of the time.

Contrary to the university-endorsed “race science” that Black and Indigenous Americans heard in most white churches, read in white newspapers and magazines, and were taught in white-run schools, Lewis’s version of history gave readers of African and/or Indigenous descent an argument that their destiny was not subject to the wickedness of their current oppression. This oppression was temporary; the destiny of the “Colored and Indian race,” rooted in its people’s ancient and recent history, was freedom and greatness. 

There is evidence that Light and Truth was distributed and read widely. Physical copies survive today in the rare books collections of Harvard, Yale, and other institutions. And it wasn’t purchased and read only by Black or Native American readers: the copy in the Boston Athenaeum is inscribed “Nathaniel O. Chaffee, 1849.” Chaffee was a white Unitarian pastor at a number of Massachusetts and Maine churches.

Yet we still know relatively little beyond skeletal facts about R. B. Lewis. He was born in Maine of African and Indigenous heritage. He married twice and had a large family with his second wife, Mary Freeman Heuston Lewis. He spent much of his life at sea. While on land he earned a living painting houses, cleaning and repairing household furnishings, and selling “Arabian” hair oil. He was also issued three patents for inventions related to his trades. The sole known portrait of Lewis, probably commissioned to promote his book, indicates he was a freemason. He went on regular lecture tours with Light and Truth. He died in Haiti while employed as a ship’s cook. But, other than his obvious intellect and energy, we have little sense of what he was like as a person.

We knew even less about his wife, Mary Lewis. At least, until recently.

Researchers had already found in vital records and newspapers that Mary Lewis’s family, the Heustons, was well-known and respected in its hometown of Brunswick, Maine. Like R.B. Lewis, they were also of African and Indigenous heritage. Her father owned a large farm, and the family sheltered refugees from slavery; in 2013, the Heuston family cemetery was added to the National Park Service Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. Recently, Alexandra Peters, a sampler collector and conservator, linked a large, beautiful sampler headed “GENEALOGY” that lists names in the Swain and Heuston families to Mary Lewis. Either Mary or one of her sisters stitched the sampler, which displays not only their needle skills, but also their education. But what was life like for someone in Mary Lewis’ situation, that is, a well-educated Black woman with close family ties, married to an entrepreneurial intellectual activist, mother of a large family, living in New England? How did she see the world? It seemed she hadn’t left any of her own words behind, except possibly the sampler.

But she had. W.D. Howells and his wife, Elinor Mead Howells (1837-1910), moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1866 as Howells took up his position as assistant editor at The Atlantic. “Mrs. Johnson,” also the first essay in Suburban Sketches, published in 1871, relates the history of the Howells’ hiring of Mary Lewis and their increasing familiarity with each other.

Howells’s disguise of the Lewis family as the Johnsons is rather flimsy. His description of Mrs. Johnson’s late husband— a man who had died in the Caribbean while working on a schooner and “a man of letters, [who] had written a book to show the superiority of the black over the white branches of the human family…[who wrote] that humanity was first created of that color”—lines up with what we know about R.B. Lewis. Turning to volumes of the Howellses’ letters to see whether he was indeed talking about R.B. Lewis and had employed Mary Lewis, multiple references to “Mrs. Lewis” and her daughter Esther, whom Howells calls “Naomi” in the essay, can be found.

For a white man of his time, W.D. Howells was relatively forward-thinking about issues involving race. He and his father had been committed anti-slavery newspapermen in Ohio, and the Howells family defended John Brown and then helped Brown’s family after his execution. In 1909, Howells signed “The Call,” the document that began the organization of the group that would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), for which he was later praised by W.E.B. Du Bois. However, to a reader today—and surely to Black readers of the time—the “Mrs. Johnson” essay is disgustingly disrespectful of Mary Lewis, even as Howells’s affection for her is obvious. But if we peel back the mockery and condescension, Howells provides some texture to the bare-bones facts previously known about the Lewis family as well as a springboard of hints about where more information might be found.

If the timeline in “Mrs. Johnson” is accurate, Mary and Esther Lewis arrived at the Howells household in April 1867. R.B. Lewis clearly knew people in Boston, and Mary Lewis had been in Boston at least long enough to marry him there in 1835. Howells reports that “She and her late partner were the parents of eleven children, some of whom were dead, and some of whom were wanderers in unknown parts. During his life-time she had kept a little shop in her native town; and it was only within a few years that she had gone into service.” The 1850 federal census shows the couple in Bath, Maine, with nine children, and the 1860 census shows the widowed Mary Lewis still in Bath with her eldest son, Benjamin, and her four youngest children. By the time of the 1865 Massachusetts census, she was in Dorchester, today a part of Boston, with Esther, her youngest, in the home of white bookseller Charles Augustus Clapp. We don’t yet know how she met Clapp’s family, although the Clapps were members of an extended family of abolitionists and they may have had acquaintances in common.

Howells writes (in a disturbing passage) that after their difficulties convincing young Yankee and Irish women to stay working for his family, the family decided to hire a Black woman. They therefore went to an “intelligence,” or employment, office in the West End/Beacon Hill section of Boston, then the heart of Black Boston. He writes: “It was in this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs. Johnson; and it was from a colored boarding-house there that she came out to Charlesbridge to look at us, bringing her daughter of twelve years with her… her manners were so full of a certain tranquillity and grace, that she charmed away all our will to ask for references.” (At about this time, Clapp moved to New York with the publisher E.P. Dutton, so Mary Lewis may have moved to a boarding house in consequence.) Howells makes it clear that Mary Lewis was interviewing them rather than the other way around.

From day one in Cambridge, Mary Lewis reveals herself as a brilliant and creative cook, willing to try new recipes and able to reproduce dishes the Howellses missed from Venice, where Howells had been U.S. vice-consul. She asserts her self-respect in a way Howells finds amusing in a Black woman but nevertheless accepts. She makes clear she is an employee, not a servant—she is “a lady who had for thirty years had a house of her own” and so will hear of no rules because she knows how to behave and how to run a house properly. She also lets the Howellses know she would have no difficulty finding another position if she chose to leave—indeed, she tells Howells she has had many previous positions, easily finding new employers when she’s decided to leave unsatisfactory ones.

Howells also relates that Mary Lewis “had not a flattering opinion of the Caucasian race in all respects,” no doubt in part from personal experience, but mostly because she is deeply familiar with the research and arguments her husband put forth in Light and Truth. And she reveals further beliefs shared with her husband not found in his book: “[S]he often developed its arguments to the lady of the house; and one day, with a great show of reluctance, and many protests that no personal slight was meant, let fall the fact that Mr. Johnson believed the white race descended from Gehazi the leper, upon whom the leprosy of Naaman fell when the latter returned by Divine favor to his original blackness. ‘And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow,’ said Mrs. Johnson, quoting irrefutable Scripture. ‘Leprosy, leprosy,’ she added thoughtfully,—‘nothing but leprosy bleached you out.’”

Elinor Howells’ letters reveal a relatively easy-going relationship with Mary Lewis, lending credence to W.D. Howells’ characterization of Mary Lewis’ willingness to share her opinions. These opinions, like the theological arguments just mentioned, reflect familiarity with debates then current in the Black community. Mary Lewis tells the Howellses that, when she attends church, she attends only white churches, not Black churches. Howells portrays this as reflecting mixed feelings about not being white. But at exactly this time, many local Black activists—who would have known her husband—opposed the establishment of Black churches in the North, sin the North, believing they would reverse progress the Black community had made toward social and civil equality.

Beyond this evidence of the Lewises’ intellectual affinity, Howells signals their emotional closeness. He includes an anecdote about Mary Lewis replacing a steel-framed pair of glasses he had bought her with a gold-framed pair: “…their purchase was in fulfillment of a vow made…in the life-time of Mr. Johnson, that, if ever she wore glasses, they should be gold-bowed.” She kept this promise to her husband even ten years after his death, revealing a loving bond between the two as well as a sense of the family’s self-worth.   

Howells also portrays two of the Lewises’ children and a son-in-law. Esther (1856-1871) appears as “Naomi.” Elinor Howells’ letters speak fondly of Esther. According to W.D. Howells, she was, like her mother, a strong character and full of energy. He writes of her resistance to schooling but facility with music and Italian, which she learned from a visitor to the house: “She taught the Garibaldi song [with Italian lyrics], moreover, to all the neighboring children, so that I sometimes wondered if our street were not about to march upon Rome in a body.” It’s not clear from the essay or the letters why Esther wouldn’t go to school—nor do we know whether this was even true—but given Mary Lewis’s own level of education, she certainly could have successfully homeschooled Esther. Howells also states that Esther attended Sunday school and took instruction in the evenings from Elinor Howells.

Near the end of the essay, “Hippolyto Thucydides” arrives on a visit to his mother, having left off sheep herding in New Hampshire. In real life, this is likely Victorinus Lewis, who appears with his family in the 1860 census as eight-year-old Victoren. Howells portrays him as comically wayward and a bit strange. Today, he comes across more as depressed, perhaps disturbed, but definitely displaced from home after his father’s death and now forced to make his way as a young Black man in post-abolitionist New England. His mother arranges for him to stay in various boarding houses, but he frequently goes missing before reappearing at the Howells’ house. According to the essay, “Hippy’s” waywardness leads to the departure of the Lewis family from the Howellses’ home. As Howells makes clear throughout the essay, Mary Lewis was devoted to her children, and at the point when she must choose between staying with the Howellses or caring for her son, she chooses her son. Records for Victorinus after 1860 have not yet been found.

Among the most startling and specific passages in “Mrs. Johnson” is an incident in which Elinor Howells comes home one day to find Mrs. Johnson’s “son-in-law, Professor Jones of Providence,…[in] the dining room…at pudding and tea there,—an impressively respectable figure in black clothes, with a black face rendered yet more effective by a pair of green goggles. It appeared that this dark professor was a light of phrenology in Rhode Island, and that he was believed to have uncommon virtue in his science by reason of being blind as well as black.”

This was in fact William F. Johnson, who had in 1860 married Mary Augusta Lewis, the Lewises’ eldest child. It seems W.D. Howells truly didn’t know who Johnson was and he may not have thought it brazen to use Johnson’s surname as Mary Lewis’s fictional surname. Elinor Howells hadn’t heard of him before. On June 16, 1867, she wrote to W.D.’s sister that Mary Lewis had prepared a wonderful meal for one of their Cambridge friends, the writer Henry James. When Elinor Howells went into the dining room later, a man wearing green glasses was sitting with Mrs. Lewis: “Mrs. Lewis immediately introduced him to me as ‘Proffessor [sic] Johnson’ her son-in-law. He is Prof. of Phrenology, having studied with Fowler. You must send long messages to Mrs L. as she is always very particular to know just what you say.” Although she didn’t know of Johnson, it’s clear she knew who “Fowler” was—Orson S. Fowler (1809-1887), a well-known phrenologist. But it is likely that some number of The Atlantic’s older, white abolitionist readers and contributors—not to mention many Black readers—knew Johnson personally.

Often billed as the “eloquent blind lecturer of Ithaca, N.Y.,” Johnson had been born free in Baltimore, raised in Ithaca, and educated at the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind in New York City. He may have studied with Fowler at the Institute and may also have taught there. He toured the East Coast and upstate New York giving anti-slavery magic lantern lectures and phrenology demonstrations. One source says that abolitionists thought Johnson’s lectures important in part because the spectacle of a blind man talking about images attracted some white attendees who were then exposed to anti-slavery arguments.

But Johnson wasn’t just a spectacle—as a man and as an advocate, he was well regarded. For example, in March 1852, he spoke at an anti-slavery convention at the courthouse in Canandaigua, NY, along with leading abolitionists William Cooper Nell, Sallie Holley, Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, and others. He also displayed the influence of R.B. Lewis, even before he married into his family. As recorded by Nell, Johnson “presented a historical sketch of the genius of the early Africans, stating that Memnon, who invented the first letters of the Alphabet, and Euclid, the mathematician, were both Egyptians; and while a copy of the latter’s famed ‘elements’ remained in the libraries of Canandaigua, the exclusion of her school-children for complexion’s sake was, to say the least, a strange commentary. The effort of Mr. Johnson, blind though he is, clearly evinced his mental optics to be keenly active when the rights of his race are in question.”

Soon after his visit to his mother-in-law in Cambridge—where they no doubt discussed political developments in addition to family news—Johnson was appointed head of the Howard Orphan Asylum in Weeksville, Brooklyn, which he would successfully run for the next thirty years. This was then one of the few institutions for Black people in the country managed and operated entirely by Black people. Mary Augusta Lewis Johnson worked as the Orphan Asylum’s treasurer in addition to serving as William Johnson’s sturdy assistant in all things professional. She had graduated from the high school in Bath, Maine, in 1856. During the 1860s, before William Johnson took his position at the Orphan Asylum, Mary Augusta Johnson taught school at Weeksville’s Colored School No. 2, which was in fact integrated at the time.

We still don’t know whether Howells actually understood who Mary Lewis and her family were, understood their educational background and community connections, or emotionally understood how the death of a Black husband and father could lead to the scattering of a previously stable and settled family and reduce a homeowning housewife to housekeeper in a stranger’s home. He casts doubt on Mary Lewis’s boasts that one of her sons (probably Euclid, b. 1846) who had gone to sea was a “prodigy of intellect”; yet given the Lewis parents’ intellectual engagement and his sister Mary Augusta’s education and later career, not to mention Esther’s quickness, one would expect the Lewis children to be bright and well-schooled. He mocks the names she had given some of her children—“it is impossible to give a full idea of the splendor and scope of the baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson’s family”—but the Lewises had named Euclid and Esther, as well as Artemisa, Hypatia, Europa, and Victorinus, after historical figures in Light and Truth, probably to give them pride in their African heritage.

Howells also states that “Mrs. Johnson could not show us her husband’s work (a sole copy in the library of an English gentleman at Port au Prince is not to be bought for money)…” His implication is that the book was likely either never written or never published; it may instead be a figment of Mrs. Johnson’s desire for affinity with the Howellses: “…we knew that she did not regard us as quality…. Yet she had a sufficient regard for the literary occupations of the family, Mr. Johnson having been an author. She even professed to have herself written a book, which was still in manuscript, and preserved somewhere among her best clothes.” Of course, the husband’s book was published in multiple editions and can still be found by anyone looking for it; maybe the wife’s manuscript, like the sampler made when she was a girl, will also be found one day.  

“Mrs. Johnson” appeared in The Atlantic in January 1868. On March 29, Mary Freeman Heuston Lewis died at not quite fifty-two of “inflammatory fever” at 80 Phillips Street, back in the heart of Black Boston. Did the Howellses know? Esther died in Charlestown, aged not quite sixteen, in 1871, the same year Suburban Sketches was published. Had the Howellses kept in touch with her?

We don’t know how many people reading “Mrs. Johnson” when it appeared in The Atlantic or Suburban Sketches recognized the Lewises and William Johnson. Howells didn’t make much effort to disguise them. As offensive as the essay is—and, we can assume, was to some of its contemporary readers—Howells has inadvertently given us, more than 150 years later, valuable information about an important but nearly forgotten family and its networks.

 

Further Reading:

For suggestions of where more hidden information concerning the Lewis family might be found, click here.

Bay, Mia. The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Ernest, John. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Goldman, Susan, and Carl Dawson. William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Merrill, Ginette de B., and George Arms, eds. If Not Literature: Letters of Elinor Mead Howells. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1988.

Nell, William C. William Cooper Nell: Selected Writings 1832-1874, ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2002.

Piola, Erika. “Rev. W. F. Johnson: Blind Phrenologist, Abolitionist, and Picture Show Lecturer.” Beyond the Reading Room (blog), Library Company of Philadelphia, September 30, 2015, http://librarycompany.blogspot.com/2015/09/rev-wf-johnson-blind-phrenologist.html.

Pitts, Reginald H. “Robert Benjamin Lewis.” In Maine’s Visible Black History, edited by H.H. Price and Gerald E. Talbot, 235-40. Gardiner, Maine: Tilbury House, 2006.

Rusert, Britt. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2017.

Wellman, Judith. Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The Free Black Community of Weeksville, New York. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Wells, Kentwood D. “The Magic Lantern in American Churches before 1860.” The Magic Lantern Gazette 27, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 3-33, https://www.academia.edu/40298208/Kentwood_D_Wells_2015_The_magic_lantern_in_American_churches_before_1860_The_Magic_Lantern_Gazette_27_4_3_33. 

 

This article originally appeared in May 2025.

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Leslie Brunetta is a member of the Cambridge Black History Project and has published a number of articles on forgotten Black history in that Massachusetts city. She is also co-author, with Catherine L. Craig, of Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Sitting, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating (Yale University Press).