When our family visited Monticello one summer, I was struck by the amazing mind of Thomas Jefferson displayed throughout his home and grounds. The entrance to his house is a museum in and of itself. Rooms show off his inventions and architectural brilliance. The grounds are filled with evidence of his botanical mind. And to see his library is to be reminded of the words he penned at our nation's founding.
Reading The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed doesn't diminish these recollections, but it does draw a much more complicated picture of the master at Monticello. As is well known today, the sexual relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of his slaves, produced several children. Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Martha Jefferson, the president's first and only wife, and from here the relationships grow only more complex. The common-place pattern of white slave-owners fathering children with black slaves produced troubling family arrangements.
As Gordon-Reed writes, "Slavery simply provided families in the South with many more ways to be bizarre than in regions where it never took hold or was abandoned early on. Fathers owning sons, brothers giving away brothers as wedding gifts, sisters selling their aunts. . . enslaved black children and their free white cousins, living and playing together on the same plantation--things that by every measure violate basic notions of what modern-day people think family is supposed to be about. This was one of the myriad reasons why slavery was a horrific thing."
It's enough to make Strom Thurmond turn over in his grave.
And it's enough to make me realize once again what a complicated history we Americans have with race. Slavery is a part of our ancestry, all of ours, and it's no wonder we struggle. The more we understand this history, though, the closer we'll come to understanding the present.
Gordon-Reed's book is an excellent step in this direction.
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