I was deep into middle age before I discovered that everything I thought I knew about George Washington's teeth was balderdash. As a child I had picked up the piquant lore that Washington had wooden teeth, a historical tidbit strange enough to lodge itself in my mind. But a few years ago, I came across the fact that Washington's dentures were made out of ivory and human teeth. And who supplied those teeth? This is subject to some historical debate, but we do have an accounting book recording Washington's household paying for teeth from enslaved persons. These were purchased teeth from purchased persons, a not uncommon if gruesome practice in Washington's lifetime. The reasonable conclusion is that when the first American president flashed his choppers, he was showing off a smile that once belonged in an enslaved individual's mouth. Or, if Washington didn't wear the teeth of the enslaved himself, someone in his family almost certainly did.
American history is like that, once you start studying it in a serious way. Slavery and its heirs, Jim Crow segregation and racism, are to be found in every nook and cranny of the American experience. The tidal force of slavery and racism pushed along not just epic events like the Civil War or the struggle for civil rights but were felt in more hidden places, in the architecture of the White House that was built by enslaved people, in the endowments of venerable universities that received their seed money from the slave trade, and perhaps in the very teeth of the man still worshipped as the father of his country.
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