"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."
- Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"
West Ford, 21 years of age
_0.preview.jpg "West Ford, 21 years of age")
This is a pencil sketched drawing of a young West Ford (artist unknown). West Ford was born abt. 1784-1787, on the Bushfield Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia. His mother, Venus, was a mulatto slave woman owned by George Washington’s brother, John Augustine Washington and his wife, Hannah. West is the son of George Washington per Ford family oral history. Teenage West would leave enslaved from the Bushfield Plantation in 1805, he would be granted his freedom in 1821, and he would be willed land on the Mount Vernon estate in 1829. He would go on to manage the Mount Vernon Plantation for close to 60 years before he died in 1863.
