This is possibly my final post on Reverend James Healy and his family. This doesn’t mean that I’ve covered everything that I think is important about him. For instance, though he’s now referred to as the first African American Jesuit, during his lifetime he never acknowledged that he was Black and that his mother was Black and enslaved. In fact, there’s abundant evidence that he lied about and deliberately distanced himself from his mother’s heritage.
There’s a whole story out there about Eliza Clark’s children and how all but one passed as white by author James O’Toole. See my sources at the end of this piece for more info about the book and a fascinating O’Toole talk.
When I wrote the first blog post on Healy and his mother, I did so thinking that that would be it. I figured it would be a short, sweet, and to the point piece about history and how we inaccurately skewed the Healys. And more specifically how Eliza, the most deserving Healy of them all, gets trivialized and ignored.
Short and sweet? Well, skew that I guess.
Here’s the paragraph, a social media posting from my college’s library, that got me writing all this in the first place:
On April 6, 1830, Rev. James Healy was born in Georgia to an Irish immigrant and a biracial enslaved woman. James and his siblings were sent North to be educated. James attended Holy Cross, and was in the first graduating class of 1849, of which he was valedictorian. He was ordained a priest in 1854, and named bishop of Portland, Maine in 1875, making him the first African American to become a Roman Catholic bishop.
Here’s my initial post on the topic:
https://alwaysatthestartingline.blogspot.com/2026/04/reverend-healys-mother-eliza-clarke.html
Here’s the second post:https://alwaysatthestartingline.blogspot.com/2026/04/a-horrific-power-imbalance-does-not.html
Here’s the third: https://alwaysatthestartingline.blogspot.com/2026/04/reverend-sweet-baby-james-healy-and.html
I’m struggling to write this final bit because it’s been several weeks since I last read all the information I’d been researching. I’ve gotten fuzzy on facts and needed to do quite a bit of reviewing, which wouldn’t have been necessary if I’d just put my head down and kept working back when it was all fresh. Live and learn.
I could probably stop right now, not write another bit, and the earth would somehow find a way to continue turning. It’s a cloudy day here in cornfield land, but the temps are in the low 70s and there’s a pleasant breeze. I could be outside on the deck napping/ pretending to read/ guzzling Chardonnay instead of shifting on this uncomfortable chair, leg bouncing, staring at a half-empty screen with too many open tabs, sipping on cold, milky tea and struggling with typos. Unfortunately, I’m a bit goal-oriented and hate to leave things hanging so, a la Samuel Beckett’s Unnameable narrator, “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Let’s have at it.
Yes, it’s true that Michael Healy, white father of James Healy, sent him and most of his surviving siblings north to be educated. Because the children were part Black and by law slaves it was illegal for them to be educated in Georgia, their home state, so it does make sense that the father sent them away. But why is Michael Healy the one central to the narrative? That’s my issue with all this. Why is all the focus on him and what HE did? Why does no one ask, “What about the mother?”
So, I ask.
What about Eliza and her life? What was her role in all this?
If James left home at age seven – which would in today’s terms mean he was a second grader, someone who still holds an adult’s hand while crossing busy streets, that means his mother Eliza was just 23 years old, the same age that many Holy Cross graduates walk the stage, shake the college president’s hand, and receive their diplomas. That, in my opinion, is heartbreakingly young for both mother and child.
History uses the verb ‘sent’ to describe James’s passage north. But perhaps history needs a lesson in semantics. Why not, after all, say, instead of sent, that he was taken/removed/kidnapped/ stolen/snatched from his mother instead?
I don’t know if he was, in fact, taken from his mother against her wishes. I just want history to put his mother, Eliza, back in the narrative. James Healy had two parents, and Michael Healy isn’t the one who gave birth to those kids.
We know that Healy the father got the idea to send the kids north during a chance meeting with a Catholic priest while he was journeying from New York to Boston on business. We don’t know what Eliza thought of this idea. We don’t know if she had a say. We don’t know how she reacted. Heck, we don’t even know if she had anything to do with raising the kids either. Maybe she was never a part of their lives. Maybe the kids knew her as their maid or cook or something else. We don’t know.
History, accurate or not, has always been about the men. They’re the ones who leave behind the artifacts like diaries, contracts, battle reports. Women, on the other hand, get short shrift because, with a few exceptions and up until recently, they didn’t leave behind those things.
Historian Rosalind Miles writes “Men dominate history because they write it, and their accounts of active, brave, clever or aggressive females constantly tend to sentimentalize, to mythologize or to pull women back to some perceived "norm." As a result, much of the so-called historical record is simply untrue” (From Who Cooked the Last Supper?).
It’s the sentimentalization of Eliza that gets me most, because it takes away her personhood and turns her into a trope. When Eliza does get mentioned, we see nothing of her suffering, hopes, dreams, humanity. Instead, we get sugary dreck like this, from Diocese of Portland, Maine archivist Barbara Miles, “This is a story of absolute love. His mother had to love her children enough to give them away. She had to know that they would be free, even though she never would be,” says Miles. “Eliza lost all of her children to freedom.”
Here’s what’s true about that statement above: Eliza lost all her children.
The freedom part, like all the other words? Debatable because among other things those kids went on to live lives that hid their enslaved mother’s heritage. How can you truly be free if you can’t be who you are?
We know nothing about Eliza. We don’t know if she loved her children. We don’t know if she had anything to do with them once she was born. We don’t know what, if any, role she had in their lives.
We do know this. James never saw his mother again after he left his father’s plantation. He did see his father though. There is plenty of evidence that his father traveled north to visit him and his siblings quite frequently. He may not have seen his mother again because travel would have been dangerous. She was pregnant nearly every year of her life once she gave birth to him. But also, as a black, enslaved woman, it was illegal for her to travel north. What we do know is that once those children left Georgia, Eliza never saw any of them ever again.
But they must have written to her, right?
Nope. There’s no evidence that any of them wrote to her. None.
Perhaps they sent messages to her via many letters to their father? Nope.
Perhaps they asked about her in their many many letters to their father? Nope.
She was wiped from their lives when they left. Yes. I use the passive tense there, though I imagine the act of separating those young Healy children from their home was anything but. I use that tense because we don’t know who was responsible for deleting Eliza Clark from her children’s lives. We don’t even know if she was in their lives BEFORE they left for Georgia either. There’s no evidence of her having or not having any relationship whatsoever with those kids.
Reverend James Healy mentioned his mother exactly one time in one letter. His father had sent him a daguerreotype of her. James wrote back, thanked him for the image, and wrote that Eliza hadn’t changed much since he’d last seen her when he was seven. That’s it.
Anything else anyone writes about any relationship Eliza might have had with her children is wishful thinking and/ or sentimental crap. I think Eliza Clark and all women who suffered as she did deserve better than that. I think history needs to do better by her. I think history needs to do better for all women.
Here are most of the sources I used for all four posts on Reverend Healy and family. I say ‘most’ not all because I think I forgot to note a few. I know. Stupid of me. Luckily, these are just haphazardly written blogposts I felt like writing. Obviously, they’re not for college credit or anything. I’m including these sources – in no particular order by the way, for anyone who feels like learning more about the Healy family and/ or anyone who wants to check my facts and hold me accountable.
I highly recommend the Georgia Archives site, which has phenomenal facts on plantation life during the time Eliza Clark was alive. I also recommend James O’Toole’s talk on the Healy children and how they passed for white. I haven’t read O’Toole’s book yet, but if it’s anything like his talk, it’s likely to be engaging and informative. As always, thanks for reading.
www.Portlanddiocese.org (James Augustine Healy: Slave to scholar to shepherd)
www.Catholicgene.wordpress.com (The first African-American Priest in the USA)
www.Muse.jhu.edu (talk given by author James O’Toole)
James M. O'Toole. Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920. Amherst: U of Massachusetts
www.Irishamericanfootnotes.blogspot.com (The Healy’s (sic): An Extraordinary Family)
www.Thetablet.org (Bishop Healy Vaulted From Slavery to Servant of God)
www.NewtonBeacon.org (Born Into Slavery)
www.AtlantaHistoryCenter.com (Voices of Freedom)
www.HolyCross.edu (What We Know: Report to the President of the College of the Holy Cross, The Mulledy/ Healy Legacy Committee, 18 March 2016)
www.Babel.hathitrust.org (Bishop Healy: Beloved outcaste; the story of a great priest whose life has become a legend
www.Smithsonianmag.com (Born Enslaved, Patrick Healy “Passed” His Way to Lead Georgetown University)
www.Onlinelibrary.wiley.com (Slavery and institutional morality at Georgetown University: Reply to Nelson)
www.Smithsonianmag.com (Maryland Archaeologists Unearth Jesuit Plantation’s 18th-Century Slave Quarters)
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