A leading academic lineage society places Sea Org survivor Jamie Mustard’s memoir into the documentary record of American captivity — and awards it an unprecedented triple citation.

The Sons & Daughters of the United States Middle Passage, one of the leading academic lineage societies in the world, has bestowed its Phillis Wheatley Literary Award on Jamie Mustard’s Child X: A Memoir of Slavery, Poverty, Celebrity, and Scientology.

The Scientology Money Project can confirm exclusively that the book won citations in three separate non-fiction categories — Historical Event, Family Stories, and Memoir and Biography — a sweep without precedent in the award’s 13-year history.[1][2]

That is the news. But the meaning of the news is larger than the news.

For the first time, a 501(c)(3) academic society dedicated to commemorating the descendants of the Middle Passage has formally placed a Sea Org survivor’s account inside the documentary record of American captivity.

The implications run in two directions at once. The first is genealogical: Mustard’s book is now part of the canon of African-American lineage scholarship alongside Pulitzer winners and Cabinet secretaries.

The second is forensic: an academic body of record has, in effect, affirmed that what happened to children inside L. Ron Hubbard’s paramilitary Sea Organization belongs in the same evidentiary universe as chattel slavery — not as metaphor, but as a documented extension of the same mechanisms of human ownership and erasure.

What the Middle Passage Was

Slave Trade, print on paper by John Raphael Smith after George Morland, 1762–1812; in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The Middle Passage was the forced transatlantic crossing of enslaved Africans to the New World. It was the second leg of the so-called triangular trade — European manufactured goods to West Africa, captive human beings from West Africa to the Americas, plantation commodities back to Europe. Between roughly 1517 and 1867, approximately 12.5 million Africans were forced onto these ships. About 10.7 million survived a crossing that ran anywhere from three weeks to three months in conditions of overcrowding, disease, starvation, and routine violence.[3]

The Sons & Daughters of the United States Middle Passage, founded in Washington, D.C. in 2011, is a hereditary lineage society for descendants of those Africans enslaved in colonial British America and the United States from 1619 to 1865. Membership requires documented descent from a named ancestor.

The Phillis Wheatley Book Award, established in 2013, was created to honor books that illuminate that history.[4][5][6]

A Triple Citation

The 2025 citation for Child X is, on its own terms, unusual. 

Past winners have included Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Harvard professor Vincent Brown’s Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Nikole Hannah-Jones, Renée Watson, and Nikkolas Smith’s The 1619 Project: Born on the Water[9];

And former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis W. Sullivan’s We’ll Fight It Out Here, co-authored with David Chanoff.

The award has historically gone to academic historians, public-health scholars, and Pulitzer-winning journalists. Memoirs have been rare. Memoirs that win across three categories have been unheard of.

To my knowledge, this is the first time a book with Scientology as a subject has ever won a genealogical, cultural, and academic award.

It is also the first time the Phillis Wheatley citation has spanned deep genealogical research, a historical event, and memoir simultaneously. Sullivan’s We’ll Fight It Out Here was previously cited across two categories. Child X is the first to span three.

The Mustard Family: From Henning to Hollywood

To understand why the Phillis Wheatley judges read Child X as Middle Passage scholarship, one has to begin with the family Mustard was born into.

Mustard descends from a prominent African-American medical and military lineage that rose, in his telling, from emancipation in 1865 to inherited Black wealth, agricultural success, and a long line of physicians. His great-grandfather James — the man Jamie was named after — was the Black town doctor in Henning, Tennessee, the same small Lauderdale County town where Pulitzer Prize winner Alex Haley grew up listening to his grandmother and aunts tell the family stories that became Roots.[11]

Mustard’s grandfather Roy Jones Gilmer was a Tuskegee Airman and flight surgeon who served in Burma during the Second World War. His grandparents met at Meharry Medical College, one of the historic Black medical schools, in the late 1930s.

Jamie’s grand uncle, Colonel Thomas J. Money Jr., was also a Tuskegee Airman. He served under General Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., America’s first Black four-star general.

This was the inheritance the Mustard family had accumulated in roughly seventy-five years between abolition and the Second World War. It was also, Mustard says, the inheritance that Scientology took from him.

Born Into the Sea Org

Mustard was turned over to Scientology’s paramilitary religious order, the Sea Organization, on the day of his birth. He has described, and Child X documents, a childhood of severe deprivation: stripped of consistent parental contact, denied a free and modern American education, subjected to medical neglect that left him nearly deaf and, on at least one occasion, nearly dead.

He was put to hard labor in the engine room of the Scientology cruise ship Freewinds — the same flagship at the center of the church’s celebrity recruitment — until he collapsed from heat exhaustion. He signed his first billion-year Sea Org service contract, by his own account, at the age of five, when he still believed in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. His mother’s legal declarations, organized by Scientology, place his age at the time of signing at seven.[12]

On his first escape, Mustard was functionally illiterate — able to read but not write. In a little over five years he would graduate from the London School of Economics, an institution that sits in the top tier of global universities alongside Harvard and Cambridge. The cognitive leap is, in clinical terms, rare. It may be unprecedented.

Reviewing the book, Booklist called it “a vivid, compelling and heartrending memoir.”[13]

Kirkus Reviews praised it as “evocative . . . intimate yet universally resonant . . . a powerful memoir that takes us down the darkest corridors of Scientology.”[14]

In Britain, the Daily Mail summarized it more bluntly: “Non-stop indoctrination . . . reckless indifference . . . a nightmare childhood in the baby factory.”

Child X was also named a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in the general non-fiction category — a category normally contested by Carnegie-nominated investigative journalists, working historians, and academic scientists. Memoirs typically compete in creative non-fiction. Child X was placed against the harder field.[15]

The judge’s citation, written by Evan Hughes, captured the book’s reach: 

Jamie Mustard’s Child X: A Memoir of Slavery, Poverty, Celebrity, and Scientology is a remarkable and moving account of an epic journey, tracing a seemingly impossible climb out of deep privation and an escape from a disturbing captivity in the darkest corners of a warped ideology. As singular as the story is, it intersects with the currents of American history and the universal drive to self-determination. Perhaps most incredible of all is the author’s path from adolescent illiteracy to becoming the author of this book.[16]

Why Phillis Wheatley

The award itself is named for Phillis Wheatley, the West African-born child who was kidnapped, sold into slavery in Boston around the age of seven or eight, and who, by approximately eighteen, had written enough poetry to seek a London publisher. The publisher, Archibald Bell, demanded proof that the work was hers.

In October 1772, Wheatley and her manuscript were brought before a panel of eighteen of the most prominent men in colonial Massachusetts — the royal governor, the lieutenant governor, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, seven ministers — to be examined.

The question on the table was not whether the poems were good. The question was whether a Black girl could have written them at all. The attestation they signed, dated October 28, 1772, was printed as the front matter of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published in London on September 1, 1773. It made Wheatley the first African-American author of a published book.[17][18]

Whether the examination took the form of a literal in-person interrogation or a documentary review remains a matter of historical debate. What is not in debate is that a Black child had to be believed before her words could become a book.

It is a fitting frame for Child X. Like Wheatley, Mustard was a child whose existence and intellectual life had to be vouched for by an authoritative body before they were taken seriously by the larger culture.

Like Wheatley, Jamie Mustard was kept ignorant of the world outside captivity until he was nineteen. And like Wheatley, the question of whether he should be believed has not been an idle one. Memoirs of Scientology’s paramilitary childhood are routinely dismissed as exaggerations — or, more cruelly, conflated with milder forms of countercultural dysfunction. The Phillis Wheatley citation cuts against that dismissal.

Reached for comment, Mustard provided the following statement to The Scientology Money Project: 

What my grandparents achieved between 1865 and 1940, in just seventy-five years, was astonishing — success in business, a long line of Black medical doctors. My grandfather was a Tuskegee Airman and flight surgeon in Burma during World War II. He inherited millions in earned Black wealth made in agriculture after abolition. He met my grandmother in the late 1930s at Meharry, a historic Black medical school.

My uncle, also a Tuskegee Airman and a colonel, served under Benjamin O. Davis, America’s first Black four-star general.

My great-grandfather James, the man I was named after, was the Black town doctor in Henning, Tennessee, where Alex Haley grew up, and was a lifelong friend of the Haley family. That was supposed to be my legacy. Scientology stole that legacy by penning me and animalizing me as a child.

Turned over the day of my birth, with little human touch for the first couple of years of life, I never learned to brush my teeth, was denied an education, and experienced medical neglect that almost left me deaf and then dead. I see this award as an acknowledgment that my enslavement as a child was an extension of colonial slavery — but in my case it was carried out by a fat sea captain in the heart of Hollywood. I have lost so many friends to suicide, drugs, and alcohol. The city of Los Angeles failed us.

This occurred from the 1960s through the 1990s on four continents, with conditions sometimes treating us worse than livestock. The extreme systematic nature of this abuse to thousands of children has not even come close to being told.

The parents and former members of Scientology rarely acknowledge these documented conditions of severed childhood, deprivation, and pain. It is too much, not only for the authorities but for our allies, to believe.

Hubbard once said that if we are too incredible, we will be unbelievable.[19] I can tell you from experience that what the children of Scientology’s religious paramilitary went through was a special kind of physical and psychic torture, and it needs to be acknowledged and remembered. I fear this hidden history might just be erased. I guess I feel that this rare honor says that what happened is true — even if others want to water it down, lessen the unthinkable in a modern American city, or conflate it with far lesser experiences of also-dehumanizing abuse. Like young Phillis Wheatley, I would like to be believed. I wrote the book to reclaim my family history and to restore us to what we were before Scientology broke us. In some way, this does that. The extreme nature of what happened did happen, and this gets us one step closer to bringing it to light.

What the Award Means

The Phillis Wheatley Literary Award is, in effect, the closing of a circuit that has been open for the better part of half a century. Generations of children passed through the Sea Organization. A significant portion of them have not survived to tell the story. Those who did have struggled to be believed.

With this award, an academic lineage society whose entire purpose is the genealogical preservation of American slavery has read Child X and said, on the record, that this is the same history. Not an echo of it. Not a metaphor for it. The same history, carried forward into a Hollywood paramilitary, on four continents, between the 1960s and the 1990s, against children whose families had clawed their way out of literal chattel slavery less than a century before.

That is a finding of significance. It belongs in the documentary record. And it belongs in the running argument over what Scientology was, what Scientology is, and what it owes.

________________________________________
[1]Sons & Daughters of the United States Middle Passage, “About,” https://sdusmp.org/about/. SDUSMP was incorporated in Washington, D.C. in 2011 as a 501(c)(3) lineage society for descendants of persons enslaved in colonial British America and the United States, 1619-1865.
[2]Sons & Daughters of the United States Middle Passage, “Phillis Wheatley Book Award,” https://sdusmp.org/2021conference/2020-book-award-winners/. The Phillis Wheatley Book Award was established in 2013.
[3]Britannica, “Middle Passage,” https://www.britannica.com/topic/Middle-Passage-slave-trade. Approximately 12.5 million Africans were forced onto the Middle Passage between 1517 and 1867; an estimated 10.7 million survived the crossing.
[4] Sons & Daughters of the United States Middle Passage, “Leadership,” https://sdusmp.org/leadership/. SDUSMP was incorporated in Washington, D.C. and started in 2011 by four founding board members.
[5] Sons & Daughters of the United States Middle Passage, “About,” https://sdusmp.org/about/. Membership requires that an applicant “prove direct lineal descent from a man, woman, or child who was of African-descent and was forced into slavery in the United States of America, including its colonial days, prior to the end of slavery as marked by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, effective December 1865.”
[6] U.S. National Park Service, “The Middle Passage,” https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-middle-passage.htm.
[7] Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents won the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in the Historical Research category. See Sons & Daughters of the United States Middle Passage, 2021 Book Award Winners, https://sdusmp.org/conference2021/?page_id=1340.
[8] Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap/Harvard, 2020). Awards listing including Phillis Wheatley Book Award at Harvard University Press, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/.
[9]The 1619 Project: Born on the Water by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Renée Watson, illustrated by Nikkolas Smith (Kokila/Penguin Random House, 2021). 2022 SDUSMP Phillis Wheatley Book Award Winner; awards listing at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/653856/.
[10]We’ll Fight It Out Here: A History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity by David Chanoff and Louis W. Sullivan, M.D. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). 2023 Phillis Wheatley Book Award, Sons & Daughters of the United States Middle Passage. Sullivan served as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under President George H. W. Bush.
[11]The Alex Haley Museum and Interpretive Center, Henning, Tennessee, https://www.alexhaleymuseum.com/. Haley lived in the Will Palmer house in Henning from 1921 to 1929 and returned for many subsequent summers.
[12]Jamie Mustard, Child X: A Memoir of Slavery, Poverty, Celebrity, and Scientology (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2024). Publisher’s awards summary at https://benbellabooks.com/shop/child-x/.
[13]Booklist, review of Child X by Jamie Mustard, quoted in publisher’s promotional materials, BenBella Books, https://benbellabooks.com/shop/child-x/.
[14]Kirkus Reviews, review of Child X by Jamie Mustard, quoted in publisher’s promotional materials, BenBella Books, https://benbellabooks.com/shop/child-x/.
[15]Oregon Book Awards, Literary Arts (Portland, OR). Child X was named a finalist in the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction.
[16]Evan Hughes, Oregon Book Awards judge’s citation for Child X, provided to the author.
[17]Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (Civitas/Basic Civitas, 2003). See also Joanna Brooks, “Our Phillis, Ourselves,” American Literature 82, no. 1 (2010), and the New England Historical Society, “Phillis Wheatley, Boston’s Remarkable Slave Poet of 1772,” https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/phillis-wheatley-bostons-remarkable-slave-poet-1772/. Whether Wheatley was physically present at an in-person examination remains contested among scholars; the attestation, dated October 28, 1772, is documented and was printed in the front matter of her 1773 London edition.
[18]Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: Archibald Bell, September 1, 1773). Wheatley was the first African-American author of a published book of poetry.
[19]Quoted phrasing attributed to L. Ron Hubbard by Jamie Mustard; specific source citation pending author verification.