![\"the](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/the-root1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nApril 4 2014<\/p>\n
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DNA Does Not Lie, and <\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\nNeither Did Aunt Peachy<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\nA black family\u2019s oral history of a link to Thomas Jefferson has been scientifically proved.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n\n\nBY:\u00a0GAYLE JESSUP WHITE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n
\n![\"Eva](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/jefferson-line-03.jpg\")
<\/a>Eva Robinson Taylor \/ COURTESY OF GAYLE JESSUP WHITE<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\nShe couldn\u2019t read or write and didn\u2019t know her own age. By 1942 she was old and without a job. For decades, she\u2019d been a domestic for a wealthy white family, the McKnews, in Washington, D.C., until she suffered a crippling stroke. The McKnew family put her out and ours took her in. For 20 years she was part of the Jessup family. Her name was Virginia, but everyone called her Aunt Peachy.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nAccording to my older siblings, Aunt Peachy helped around the house, gave them pennies to purchase candy, and shared their secrets. I never knew her\u2014she died in the early \u201960s when I was a toddler. But her life had an everlasting impact on mine because it was Aunt Peachy, her nuclear family\u2019s sole survivor, who carried tales from past generations to ours.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nHer most remarkable and often repeated commentary would begin like this: \u201cYou\u2019re descendants of Thomas Jefferson,\u201d she would say. \u201cI\u2019m not related, but you are.\u201d It\u2019s that story, which could easily have died with Aunt Peachy, that put me on the path of discovering my family\u2019s mysterious and tragic history.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nAunt Peachy, born Virginia Robinson in about 1870, was the half sister of my grandmother Eva Robinson Taylor, who died when my dad was 5 years old. Dad, almost 90 when he passed away in 2005, didn\u2019t remember his mother and recalled very little about his five older sisters, all struck down within two years of each other by tuberculosis. Three girls died in their teens, and two were toddlers. Of the children who survived\u2014two boys\u2014Dad became Aunt Peachy\u2019s favorite, and she became his only link to his mother\u2019s past.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nEva and Virginia, the two half sisters, seemed a study in contrasts, according to the few who knew them. They didn\u2019t look alike\u2014one tall, the other short; one light, the other brown. While Eva was remembered as soft-spoken and cheerful, educated and refined, Virginia was described as illiterate and superstitious, kindly and childlike.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nOne of Aunt Peachy\u2019s favorite stories, according to my oldest sister, Janice, was an explanation for pigs squealing during thunderstorms: They saw blood in the clouds, she said, and a man had extracted fluid from their eyes to prove it. No one believed that, but everyone believed her when she said Jefferson was our ancestor. Everyone took the word of an old woman who couldn\u2019t read, write or do math, a woman who believed that pigs saw blood in clouds.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nNow, more than 50 years after Aunt Peachy\u2019s death, DNA evidence supports her claim. According to AncestryDNA, I share a connection with white descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his wife, Martha. The sturdiest link goes back to Jefferson\u2019s daughter Martha. \u201cThere\u2019s a very strong match,\u201d says genealogist CeCe Moore, who is a genetic genealogical consultant for the PBS program\u00a0Finding Your Roots<\/em>\u00a0(produced by\u00a0The Root<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr.). Moore conducted the test and interpreted the results at Gates\u2019 request. \u201cThis provides fairly strong evidence\u201d for the oral history, says Moore.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nGates had seen a story in\u00a0the New York Times<\/span><\/a>\u00a0written by a woman with whom I\u2019d recently connected, Tess Taylor, a white Jefferson descendant, who turned out to be my cousin. I\u2019d reached out to her after reading an online review of\u00a0The Forage House<\/span><\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0her poetry collection largely about the burden of being the descendant of a slaveholder who happened to write the Declaration of Independence. Taylor wrote about meeting me for the first time last year in Charlottesville, Va.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Gayle](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/jefferson-line-02.jpg\")
<\/a>Gayle Jessup White and Tess Taylor \/ COURTESY OF GAYLE JESSUP WHITE<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\nTess and I are probably from the same family line, whose patriarch, J.C.R. Taylor, married Jefferson\u2019s great-granddaughter Martha Jefferson Randolph. It was their son,\u00a0Moncure Robinson Taylor<\/span><\/a>, who likely had a relationship with the woman who is believed to be my great-grandmother Rachael Robinson.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe evidence of family ties is circumstantial: Rachael worked for the Taylor family. She and Moncure were about the same age, and she lived alone with her children near the Taylors. She never married. My grandmother sometimes used the name Taylor on official documents, such as baptismal and death certificates. She named one of her daughters \u201cCary,\u201d a name shared among the Jefferson-Randolph-Taylor clan and the Robinsons.<\/span><\/p>\nThere aren\u2019t enough official documents to definitively make the case, but according to Jefferson scholar\u00a0Lucia \u201cCinder\u201d Stanton<\/span><\/a>, what\u2019s available is convincing. \u201cThe records are still fragmented, but the ones that have been found seem to leap together to confirm the oral history,\u201d says Stanton, pre-eminent expert on Jefferson\u2019s private life, author of two books on Monticello\u2019s slaves and founder of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation\u2019s Getting Word oral history of Monticello\u2019s slave descendants.<\/span><\/p>\n\nMy presumptive great-grandparents, Rachel Robinson and Moncure Robinson Taylor, had several children, most of whom crossed the color line, as did Jefferson and Sally Hemings\u2019. My grandmother did not. She moved to Washington and married Arthur Jessup on Dec. 1, 1901. They had seven children and lived comfortably and happily for many years, until tragedy destroyed their family. I\u2019ve often thought that it was the senselessness and pain of that loss that compelled me to learn more about my grandmother, that discovering Eva\u2019s mysterious past would mitigate my dad\u2019s pain.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nOr maybe I was simply intrigued to learn that we are Jefferson descendants and wanted to know the truth.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThese discoveries have some historical value. According to Stanton, \u201cIt bears on the sexual exploitation of servants and women of color that didn\u2019t end when slavery ended, it speaks to the division in families because of the color line, and it\u2019s relevant to how history is transmitted in families and what is valuable enough to remember.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nThere\u2019s still more DNA discovery ahead. Moore is looking for more scientific evidence that Moncure Robinson Taylor was indeed my grandmother\u2019s father. That means reaching out to his white descendants for their DNA samples. Tess Taylor\u2019s DNA has already been sampled. Meanwhile, my siblings and I are satisfied that the DNA results we have support what Aunt Peachy always said: that we are Thomas Jefferson\u2019s descendants. Not that we ever had any doubts.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n <\/p>\n
++++++++++++++++++<\/span><\/p>\nGayle Jessup White<\/strong> is a\u00a0<\/em>writer, educator and lecturer living in Richmond, Va.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
>via:\u00a0http:\/\/www.theroot.com\/articles\/history\/2014\/04\/thomas_jefferson_s_black_descendant_proves_a_genetic_link.2.html<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n__________________________<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n![\"millions\"](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/millions.jpg\")
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\nMarch 27, 2014<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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Filling the Silences: <\/span><\/h3>\nRace, Poetry, and <\/span><\/h3>\nthe Digital-Media Megaphone<\/span><\/h3>\n <\/p>\n
\nBy\u00a0MICHAEL BOURNE<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n![\"Gayle](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/jefferson-line-04.jpg\")
<\/a>Gayle Jessup White and Tess Taylor.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n1.<\/strong><\/span>
\nLast summer, shortly after\u00a0Publishers Weekly<\/i>\u00a0posted its review of\u00a0Tess Taylor\u2019s<\/b>\u00a0first full-length poetry collection,\u00a0The Forage House<\/i><\/span><\/a>, which focuses on Taylor\u2019s effort to come to terms with the legacy of being a white descendant of founding father\u00a0Thomas Jefferson<\/b>,\u00a0Gayle Jessup White<\/b>, a journalist and educator in Richmond, Virginia, posted the following note in the comments section:<\/span><\/p>\nI am an African-American Jefferson. My grandmother was a Taylor (although her mother didn\u2019t exactly marry into the family!), a direct descendant from\u00a0J.C. Randolph Taylor<\/b>\u00a0and [Thomas Jefferson\u2019s great-granddaughter]\u00a0Martha Jefferson Randolph<\/b>. Tess Taylor \u2014 I wonder if we share great-great grandparents?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"cover\"](\"http:\/\/images.amazon.com\/images\/P\/1597092703.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg\")
<\/span><\/a>When the two women met a short time later, they instantly hit it off, and as far as they were concerned they were cousins, albeit distant ones. But as\u00a0Taylor explained in a recent\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0article<\/span><\/a>, this belief rests on 1870s census records and oral histories passed down through White\u2019s family. DNA tests have\u00a0convinced all but the most hardened skeptics that America\u2019s third president had children with his slave\u00a0Sally Hemings<\/b>, but White\u2019s claim involved a liaison between a later Jefferson descendant and his African-American mistress, and given the state of DNA testing as Taylor understood it when she wrote the\u00a0Times<\/i>\u00a0article, there was no way to prove that she and White were related.<\/span><\/p>\nThe next morning, the 21st century intervened in the form of an email from Harvard scholar\u00a0Henry Louis Gates, Jr.<\/b>, host of the popular PBS series\u00a0African American Lives<\/i>, saying that, thanks to very recent advances in genomic science, Taylor and White might in fact be able to prove they are related. Would they like to take a DNA test?<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cA DNA connection to Jefferson descendants would simply provide more data to support my family\u2019s oral history that we are Thomas Jefferson descendants \u2014 the more information, the better,\u201d White says as she and Taylor wait for the results. \u201cDNA evidence would diminish doubts others might have.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nWhatever the tests ultimately reveal, it will be merely the latest wrinkle in a dizzying multimedia ride that has seen Taylor harness digital media and cutting-edge science to quietly nudge a book of poems published by a small press into the national conversation on race and history. \u201cIt\u2019s a little weird,\u201d Taylor admits, \u201cbecause in a way I was ready to have this Jefferson book done and have put it aside, and yet it keeps growing. This book came out of this sad, unresolved weight that the story of the Hemings [family] left in my family. That was a sad feeling for me, really haunted, and right now I feel like I\u2019m in dialogue with people who are so committed to moving forward. It almost feels like a big weight off [my shoulders] to be part of this conversation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nBut\u00a0how<\/i>\u00a0the story has grown, and how Taylor, a journalist as well as a poet, has shaped that growth says as much about how post-millennial media works as it does about the legacy of slavery in the American South. When writers talk about literature in the digital age, they tend to lay out one nightmare scenario after another: books losing value as they migrate onto screens, publishing houses shedding jobs, readers snuggling up with cable shows on their iPads rather than books.<\/span><\/p>\nBut here is a case in which an energetic, media-savvy poet has used the gigantic megaphone of digital media not only to draw attention to her work, but help fill a gaping hole in the historical record that dates back to the early days of our republic. None of it would have happened in an analog era, not this quickly for a little-known poet in the early stages of her career. All of it, the email from Gates, the DNA tests, the direct communication between distant relatives on the comments page of a web review, to say nothing of the astonishing array of grants and fellowships Taylor racked up as she was writing her book \u2013 all of this is rooted in a technological and literary environment that enables a single lyric voice, if it is pitched just right, to carry all the way across a country\u2019s history.<\/span><\/p>\n2.<\/strong><\/span>
\nI came to know Tess Taylor much the way Gayle White did: by reading about her online and recognizing a piece of myself. Last June, I saw\u00a0an earlier article Taylor wrote for\u00a0The New York Times<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0marking the 50th anniversary of what has come to be known in the history of the Civil Rights Movement as Bloody Monday. On June 10, 1963, firefighters in the cotton-mill town of Danville, Va., turned their hoses on demonstrators standing vigil outside the city jail, where dozens of their fellow protesters were being held for marching against segregation. The city had deputized its all-white force of garbage collectors, and after the fire hoses washed the protesters down a blind alley, the garbage men waded into the crowd with nightsticks and sent more than 50 protesters to Danville\u2019s ill-equipped blacks-only hospital.<\/span><\/p>\nIn her\u00a0Times<\/i>\u00a0article, Taylor examines the small part her grandfather,\u00a0Leigh Taylor<\/b>, played in the story when he wrote an angry letter to a local judge who was preparing sentence the black demonstrators, many of whom had been badly beaten on Bloody Monday, to prison terms. Leigh Taylor, to his shock and dismay, was himself hauled into court and charged with the same crime as the black demonstrators. He publicly backed down and was never jailed, but he and his family were shunned by white society in Danville and his career as a mid-level executive at the local mill stalled.<\/span><\/p>\nI was stunned to see Taylor\u2019s article. My parents grew up in Danville, and my grandmother,Virginia Bourne<\/b>, was intimately involved in the events that led up to Bloody Monday, serving as a go-between in meetings between local white politicians and the black ministers leading the demonstrations. These clandestine negotiations failed, but my grandmother\u2019s efforts, courageous in a time when most liberal-minded whites kept their heads down and went along, became part of family lore.<\/span><\/p>\nI contacted Taylor, and several days of furious emailing ensued. Like me, Taylor grew up near San Francisco \u2014 she in El Cerrito, east of the city; I in Marin County, to the north \u2014 and made regular trips to Danville to visit relatives. Our uncles, it turned out, were friends as children. Our fathers spent their careers at the U.C.S.F. Medical School \u2014 hers as an administrator, mine as a scientist. After her grandfather\u2019s court case became front-page news across the South, my grandmother was one of the few people in Danville to reach out to Taylor\u2019s grandmother, telephoning her to ask if there was anything she could do to help.<\/span><\/p>\nMore than anything, though, Taylor and I share a sense of what it means to carry the weight of a complex and ugly history we ourselves experienced second hand. For most white Americans born outside the South, the Civil Rights Movement is the stuff of history books \u2014 fascinating, but abstract. For people like Taylor and myself, whose families were profoundly shaped by the civil rights struggle before we were born, that turbulent era is acutely personal, and at the same time distant and exotic.<\/span><\/p>\nThis is very tricky literary territory, and many white writers \u2014 myself included at times \u2014 steer clear of it, fearing becoming ensnared in the fraught politics of white writers seeming to claim what has come to be seen as a primarily African-American story. Taylor, on the other hand, appeared to have zoomed straight for it, and succeeded. I wanted to know how she pulled it off.<\/span><\/p>\nThe answer lies in a mix of shoe-leather reporting, career moxie, and canny use of literary form. Taylor networked relentlessly, earning fellowships that gave her access to historical documents and to professional historians who could interpret them. At the same time, she reached out to other writers, white and black, who were navigating similar literary terrain. Once she found a publisher for her book, the widely respected Red Hen Press in Los Angeles, she returned to her roots as a freelance journalist, reporting stories that landed in\u00a0The Times<\/i>\u00a0and journals like\u00a0Virginia Quarterly Review<\/span><\/a><\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0The Oxford American<\/i><\/span><\/a>. Once the book was out, she befriended Gayle White, who had her own connections in the media world, and the two women, one white, one black, complete strangers who in all likelihood are both related to one the nation\u2019s most iconic historical figures, have made for a natural feature story that has found its way onto\u00a0NPR<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Richmond Times-Dispatch<\/i>, among other places.<\/span><\/p>\n3.<\/strong><\/span>
\nThe spark for\u00a0The Forage House<\/i>\u00a0was the shock Taylor felt in 1998 when, still an undergraduate, she first learned of the DNA tests that showed links between her own white Jefferson ancestors and Hemings\u2019s black descendants. By the time she began working on the project seven years later, Taylor had a master\u2019s in journalism and envisioned the book about her family as nonfiction. She quickly found that some members of her family, whom she had counted on to serve as sources, wanted no part of her project. One Virginia relative, upon hearing what Taylor wanted to write, \u201cjust flipped out,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThe idea that I would write about the family, about this legacy, in journalism, was so upsetting to her. I realized I had touched a really, really deep nerve.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nThat summer, as luck would have it, Taylor began the first of two fellowships at Monticello, Jefferson\u2019s home near Charlottesville, Va. Working side by side with historians, Taylor saw first-hand how history treats white and black Americans in the antebellum South. Even as historians at Monticello were compiling a 17-volume edition of Jefferson\u2019s letters, Taylor met archeologists struggling to piece together a portrait of the lives of the plantation\u2019s enslaved residents from old buttons dug out of the ground and references in ancient police rolls.<\/span><\/p>\nHer time at Monticello also helped Taylor find both a working method and thematic focus for her book, which makes use of archival research and the naturally elliptical nature of contemporary poetry to fill the silences, literal and figurative, in the historical record. Putting her journalism training to use, Taylor plowed through archives, assisted in archeological digs, conducted interviews, and tracked down details of hazy family memories. The result is a hybrid literary form, part poetry and part investigative journalism, that Taylor has come to call \u201clyric journalism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nThus, for poems like \u201cOral History 1963,\u201d about her grandfather\u2019s arrest, she dug up old newspaper stories and interviewed protesters who were beaten on Bloody Monday to tell the full story of Leigh Taylor\u2019s run-in with the local judge, which in her family lore had been leached of its broader racial context. In other poems, she incorporates lines from family wills and ancient newspaper ads for slave auctions, as well as descriptions of fugitive slaves, to round out her reader\u2019s image of the enslaved members of her family\u2019s households who were rarely mentioned by their white owners unless they were being bought, inventoried, or punished.<\/span><\/p>\nThe poem \u201cSouthampton County Will 1745,\u201d for instance, opens with a quotation from a will written by an 18-century relative of Taylor\u2019s that she came across at the American Antiquarian Society, where she had a fellowship in 2006:<\/span><\/p>\nI, Etheldred Taylor, of sound mind and body<\/span>
\nin the presence of God almighty amen<\/span>
\ndo deed three things:<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Books Negroes Land<\/i><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\u201cI just remember thinking that\u2019s it: there could be a swap between books and people, that they could each be considered of equal value,\u201d Taylor recalls. But, as happens often in the collection, Taylor turns her focus inward, asking what impact this distant ancestor\u2019s bequest has on her, his modern-day white descendant:<\/span><\/p>\nFrom his dim ghost I inherit<\/span>
\neverything, nothing:<\/span><\/p>\nOne silver teaspoon. Half a name.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"cover\"](\"http:\/\/images.amazon.com\/images\/P\/1597094684.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg\")
<\/span><\/a>Between trips to Monticello, Taylor earned a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers\u2019 Conference in Vermont, where she met two prominent African-American poets,\u00a0Natasha Trethewey<\/b>, now the nation\u2019s poet laureate, andCamille Dungy<\/b>, who was then working on a collection,\u00a0Suck on the Marrow<\/i><\/span><\/a>, published by Red Hen in 2010, exploring her own family\u2019s struggles in slavery during the 19th century in Virginia. Both poets offered counsel and encouragement as Taylor dug deeper into her past.<\/span><\/p>\nFor Dungy, whose work in some ways forms a mirror image to Taylor\u2019s, it was by no means a given that she would help Taylor write about her Southern white ancestors. \u201cActually, most versions of this story that I\u2019ve seen I don\u2019t want to be a part of,\u201d Dungy says. \u201cThat history and these stories have been so mutilated in appropriation over time in the way they are told and by whom. I think the tendency [for African-American writers] to say \u2018Hands off, this is our story\u2019 is earned and valid without question.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nBut fraught as this material can be for white writers, Dungy says, if only African-American writers take it on, some readers will simply ignore it. \u201cThere\u2019s a way in which my story, as important as my story is and as many people as are going to read it, is just not going to reach the same kind of audience,\u201d she says. \u201cThere is a whole swath of readers who [say], \u2018That\u2019s a black story, I don\u2019t need to read that.\u2019 So they don\u2019t pick it up. When Tess does it, they do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nIf anything, Taylor is even more adamant about the need for white writers to examine their own history. \u201cThere\u2019s this intense fear that if white people talk about race, they\u2019re going to get it wrong, and therefore there\u2019s a kind of a default position where white people don\u2019t want to talk about race or racism or racial knowledge,\u201d she says. \u201cThe side effect of not wanting to get it wrong is sometimes just silencing the stories of things that we know and not allowing ourselves to talk at all. I think that silence itself is part of the problem.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nJust as Dungy predicted, when Taylor gently, but insistently broke through that silence, readers listened. Since\u00a0The Forage House<\/i>\u00a0came out in August, Taylor has been a blur of activity, appearing on NPR\u2019s \u201cThe Takeaway\u201d with Gayle White, speaking at churches, and barnstorming both coasts on book tours. In the fall, after years of adjunct teaching and freelance writing gigs, she begins a year as a visiting professor at Whittier College outside Los Angeles. If publishing a book of poetry were an Olympic event, the judges would have to agree that Tess Taylor has stuck the landing.<\/span><\/p>\nIt helps, of course, that the poems are good. It doesn\u2019t hurt, either, that Taylor makes for an attractive messenger, bubbly and approachable, her fierce ambition blunted by an infectious laugh and a well-developed sense of tact. But beyond all that, by employing the tools of the journalist and the historian and by embracing rather than recoiling from the modern media noise machine, Taylor has taken a very old story and made it new again. In the process, she is helping shape a 21st-century poetry that spills out beyond the pages of the printed book into the wider cultural bloodstream.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
A black family\u2019s oral history of a link to Thomas Jefferson has been scientifically proved.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Eva Robinson Taylor \/ COURTESY OF GAYLE JESSUP WHITE<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n She couldn\u2019t read or write and didn\u2019t know her own age. By 1942 she was old and without a job. For decades, she\u2019d been a domestic for a wealthy white family, the McKnews, in Washington, D.C., until she suffered a crippling stroke. The McKnew family put her out and ours took her in. For 20 years she was part of the Jessup family. Her name was Virginia, but everyone called her Aunt Peachy.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n According to my older siblings, Aunt Peachy helped around the house, gave them pennies to purchase candy, and shared their secrets. I never knew her\u2014she died in the early \u201960s when I was a toddler. But her life had an everlasting impact on mine because it was Aunt Peachy, her nuclear family\u2019s sole survivor, who carried tales from past generations to ours.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Her most remarkable and often repeated commentary would begin like this: \u201cYou\u2019re descendants of Thomas Jefferson,\u201d she would say. \u201cI\u2019m not related, but you are.\u201d It\u2019s that story, which could easily have died with Aunt Peachy, that put me on the path of discovering my family\u2019s mysterious and tragic history.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Aunt Peachy, born Virginia Robinson in about 1870, was the half sister of my grandmother Eva Robinson Taylor, who died when my dad was 5 years old. Dad, almost 90 when he passed away in 2005, didn\u2019t remember his mother and recalled very little about his five older sisters, all struck down within two years of each other by tuberculosis. Three girls died in their teens, and two were toddlers. Of the children who survived\u2014two boys\u2014Dad became Aunt Peachy\u2019s favorite, and she became his only link to his mother\u2019s past.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Eva and Virginia, the two half sisters, seemed a study in contrasts, according to the few who knew them. They didn\u2019t look alike\u2014one tall, the other short; one light, the other brown. While Eva was remembered as soft-spoken and cheerful, educated and refined, Virginia was described as illiterate and superstitious, kindly and childlike.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n One of Aunt Peachy\u2019s favorite stories, according to my oldest sister, Janice, was an explanation for pigs squealing during thunderstorms: They saw blood in the clouds, she said, and a man had extracted fluid from their eyes to prove it. No one believed that, but everyone believed her when she said Jefferson was our ancestor. Everyone took the word of an old woman who couldn\u2019t read, write or do math, a woman who believed that pigs saw blood in clouds.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now, more than 50 years after Aunt Peachy\u2019s death, DNA evidence supports her claim. According to AncestryDNA, I share a connection with white descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his wife, Martha. The sturdiest link goes back to Jefferson\u2019s daughter Martha. \u201cThere\u2019s a very strong match,\u201d says genealogist CeCe Moore, who is a genetic genealogical consultant for the PBS program\u00a0Finding Your Roots<\/em>\u00a0(produced by\u00a0The Root<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr.). Moore conducted the test and interpreted the results at Gates\u2019 request. \u201cThis provides fairly strong evidence\u201d for the oral history, says Moore.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Gates had seen a story in\u00a0the New York Times<\/span><\/a>\u00a0written by a woman with whom I\u2019d recently connected, Tess Taylor, a white Jefferson descendant, who turned out to be my cousin. I\u2019d reached out to her after reading an online review of\u00a0The Forage House<\/span><\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0her poetry collection largely about the burden of being the descendant of a slaveholder who happened to write the Declaration of Independence. Taylor wrote about meeting me for the first time last year in Charlottesville, Va.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Gayle Jessup White and Tess Taylor \/ COURTESY OF GAYLE JESSUP WHITE<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n Tess and I are probably from the same family line, whose patriarch, J.C.R. Taylor, married Jefferson\u2019s great-granddaughter Martha Jefferson Randolph. It was their son,\u00a0Moncure Robinson Taylor<\/span><\/a>, who likely had a relationship with the woman who is believed to be my great-grandmother Rachael Robinson.<\/span><\/p>\n There aren\u2019t enough official documents to definitively make the case, but according to Jefferson scholar\u00a0Lucia \u201cCinder\u201d Stanton<\/span><\/a>, what\u2019s available is convincing. \u201cThe records are still fragmented, but the ones that have been found seem to leap together to confirm the oral history,\u201d says Stanton, pre-eminent expert on Jefferson\u2019s private life, author of two books on Monticello\u2019s slaves and founder of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation\u2019s Getting Word oral history of Monticello\u2019s slave descendants.<\/span><\/p>\n My presumptive great-grandparents, Rachel Robinson and Moncure Robinson Taylor, had several children, most of whom crossed the color line, as did Jefferson and Sally Hemings\u2019. My grandmother did not. She moved to Washington and married Arthur Jessup on Dec. 1, 1901. They had seven children and lived comfortably and happily for many years, until tragedy destroyed their family. I\u2019ve often thought that it was the senselessness and pain of that loss that compelled me to learn more about my grandmother, that discovering Eva\u2019s mysterious past would mitigate my dad\u2019s pain.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Or maybe I was simply intrigued to learn that we are Jefferson descendants and wanted to know the truth.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n These discoveries have some historical value. According to Stanton, \u201cIt bears on the sexual exploitation of servants and women of color that didn\u2019t end when slavery ended, it speaks to the division in families because of the color line, and it\u2019s relevant to how history is transmitted in families and what is valuable enough to remember.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s still more DNA discovery ahead. Moore is looking for more scientific evidence that Moncure Robinson Taylor was indeed my grandmother\u2019s father. That means reaching out to his white descendants for their DNA samples. Tess Taylor\u2019s DNA has already been sampled. Meanwhile, my siblings and I are satisfied that the DNA results we have support what Aunt Peachy always said: that we are Thomas Jefferson\u2019s descendants. Not that we ever had any doubts.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n ++++++++++++++++++<\/span><\/p>\n Gayle Jessup White<\/strong> is a\u00a0<\/em>writer, educator and lecturer living in Richmond, Va.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n >via:\u00a0http:\/\/www.theroot.com\/articles\/history\/2014\/04\/thomas_jefferson_s_black_descendant_proves_a_genetic_link.2.html<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n __________________________<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Gayle Jessup White and Tess Taylor.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 1.<\/strong><\/span> I am an African-American Jefferson. My grandmother was a Taylor (although her mother didn\u2019t exactly marry into the family!), a direct descendant from\u00a0J.C. Randolph Taylor<\/b>\u00a0and [Thomas Jefferson\u2019s great-granddaughter]\u00a0Martha Jefferson Randolph<\/b>. Tess Taylor \u2014 I wonder if we share great-great grandparents?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The next morning, the 21st century intervened in the form of an email from Harvard scholar\u00a0Henry Louis Gates, Jr.<\/b>, host of the popular PBS series\u00a0African American Lives<\/i>, saying that, thanks to very recent advances in genomic science, Taylor and White might in fact be able to prove they are related. Would they like to take a DNA test?<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cA DNA connection to Jefferson descendants would simply provide more data to support my family\u2019s oral history that we are Thomas Jefferson descendants \u2014 the more information, the better,\u201d White says as she and Taylor wait for the results. \u201cDNA evidence would diminish doubts others might have.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Whatever the tests ultimately reveal, it will be merely the latest wrinkle in a dizzying multimedia ride that has seen Taylor harness digital media and cutting-edge science to quietly nudge a book of poems published by a small press into the national conversation on race and history. \u201cIt\u2019s a little weird,\u201d Taylor admits, \u201cbecause in a way I was ready to have this Jefferson book done and have put it aside, and yet it keeps growing. This book came out of this sad, unresolved weight that the story of the Hemings [family] left in my family. That was a sad feeling for me, really haunted, and right now I feel like I\u2019m in dialogue with people who are so committed to moving forward. It almost feels like a big weight off [my shoulders] to be part of this conversation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n But\u00a0how<\/i>\u00a0the story has grown, and how Taylor, a journalist as well as a poet, has shaped that growth says as much about how post-millennial media works as it does about the legacy of slavery in the American South. When writers talk about literature in the digital age, they tend to lay out one nightmare scenario after another: books losing value as they migrate onto screens, publishing houses shedding jobs, readers snuggling up with cable shows on their iPads rather than books.<\/span><\/p>\n But here is a case in which an energetic, media-savvy poet has used the gigantic megaphone of digital media not only to draw attention to her work, but help fill a gaping hole in the historical record that dates back to the early days of our republic. None of it would have happened in an analog era, not this quickly for a little-known poet in the early stages of her career. All of it, the email from Gates, the DNA tests, the direct communication between distant relatives on the comments page of a web review, to say nothing of the astonishing array of grants and fellowships Taylor racked up as she was writing her book \u2013 all of this is rooted in a technological and literary environment that enables a single lyric voice, if it is pitched just right, to carry all the way across a country\u2019s history.<\/span><\/p>\n 2.<\/strong><\/span> In her\u00a0Times<\/i>\u00a0article, Taylor examines the small part her grandfather,\u00a0Leigh Taylor<\/b>, played in the story when he wrote an angry letter to a local judge who was preparing sentence the black demonstrators, many of whom had been badly beaten on Bloody Monday, to prison terms. Leigh Taylor, to his shock and dismay, was himself hauled into court and charged with the same crime as the black demonstrators. He publicly backed down and was never jailed, but he and his family were shunned by white society in Danville and his career as a mid-level executive at the local mill stalled.<\/span><\/p>\n I was stunned to see Taylor\u2019s article. My parents grew up in Danville, and my grandmother,Virginia Bourne<\/b>, was intimately involved in the events that led up to Bloody Monday, serving as a go-between in meetings between local white politicians and the black ministers leading the demonstrations. These clandestine negotiations failed, but my grandmother\u2019s efforts, courageous in a time when most liberal-minded whites kept their heads down and went along, became part of family lore.<\/span><\/p>\n I contacted Taylor, and several days of furious emailing ensued. Like me, Taylor grew up near San Francisco \u2014 she in El Cerrito, east of the city; I in Marin County, to the north \u2014 and made regular trips to Danville to visit relatives. Our uncles, it turned out, were friends as children. Our fathers spent their careers at the U.C.S.F. Medical School \u2014 hers as an administrator, mine as a scientist. After her grandfather\u2019s court case became front-page news across the South, my grandmother was one of the few people in Danville to reach out to Taylor\u2019s grandmother, telephoning her to ask if there was anything she could do to help.<\/span><\/p>\n More than anything, though, Taylor and I share a sense of what it means to carry the weight of a complex and ugly history we ourselves experienced second hand. For most white Americans born outside the South, the Civil Rights Movement is the stuff of history books \u2014 fascinating, but abstract. For people like Taylor and myself, whose families were profoundly shaped by the civil rights struggle before we were born, that turbulent era is acutely personal, and at the same time distant and exotic.<\/span><\/p>\n This is very tricky literary territory, and many white writers \u2014 myself included at times \u2014 steer clear of it, fearing becoming ensnared in the fraught politics of white writers seeming to claim what has come to be seen as a primarily African-American story. Taylor, on the other hand, appeared to have zoomed straight for it, and succeeded. I wanted to know how she pulled it off.<\/span><\/p>\n The answer lies in a mix of shoe-leather reporting, career moxie, and canny use of literary form. Taylor networked relentlessly, earning fellowships that gave her access to historical documents and to professional historians who could interpret them. At the same time, she reached out to other writers, white and black, who were navigating similar literary terrain. Once she found a publisher for her book, the widely respected Red Hen Press in Los Angeles, she returned to her roots as a freelance journalist, reporting stories that landed in\u00a0The Times<\/i>\u00a0and journals like\u00a0Virginia Quarterly Review<\/span><\/a><\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0The Oxford American<\/i><\/span><\/a>. Once the book was out, she befriended Gayle White, who had her own connections in the media world, and the two women, one white, one black, complete strangers who in all likelihood are both related to one the nation\u2019s most iconic historical figures, have made for a natural feature story that has found its way onto\u00a0NPR<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Richmond Times-Dispatch<\/i>, among other places.<\/span><\/p>\n 3.<\/strong><\/span> That summer, as luck would have it, Taylor began the first of two fellowships at Monticello, Jefferson\u2019s home near Charlottesville, Va. Working side by side with historians, Taylor saw first-hand how history treats white and black Americans in the antebellum South. Even as historians at Monticello were compiling a 17-volume edition of Jefferson\u2019s letters, Taylor met archeologists struggling to piece together a portrait of the lives of the plantation\u2019s enslaved residents from old buttons dug out of the ground and references in ancient police rolls.<\/span><\/p>\n Her time at Monticello also helped Taylor find both a working method and thematic focus for her book, which makes use of archival research and the naturally elliptical nature of contemporary poetry to fill the silences, literal and figurative, in the historical record. Putting her journalism training to use, Taylor plowed through archives, assisted in archeological digs, conducted interviews, and tracked down details of hazy family memories. The result is a hybrid literary form, part poetry and part investigative journalism, that Taylor has come to call \u201clyric journalism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Thus, for poems like \u201cOral History 1963,\u201d about her grandfather\u2019s arrest, she dug up old newspaper stories and interviewed protesters who were beaten on Bloody Monday to tell the full story of Leigh Taylor\u2019s run-in with the local judge, which in her family lore had been leached of its broader racial context. In other poems, she incorporates lines from family wills and ancient newspaper ads for slave auctions, as well as descriptions of fugitive slaves, to round out her reader\u2019s image of the enslaved members of her family\u2019s households who were rarely mentioned by their white owners unless they were being bought, inventoried, or punished.<\/span><\/p>\n The poem \u201cSouthampton County Will 1745,\u201d for instance, opens with a quotation from a will written by an 18-century relative of Taylor\u2019s that she came across at the American Antiquarian Society, where she had a fellowship in 2006:<\/span><\/p>\n I, Etheldred Taylor, of sound mind and body<\/span> \u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Books Negroes Land<\/i><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cI just remember thinking that\u2019s it: there could be a swap between books and people, that they could each be considered of equal value,\u201d Taylor recalls. But, as happens often in the collection, Taylor turns her focus inward, asking what impact this distant ancestor\u2019s bequest has on her, his modern-day white descendant:<\/span><\/p>\n From his dim ghost I inherit<\/span> One silver teaspoon. Half a name.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n For Dungy, whose work in some ways forms a mirror image to Taylor\u2019s, it was by no means a given that she would help Taylor write about her Southern white ancestors. \u201cActually, most versions of this story that I\u2019ve seen I don\u2019t want to be a part of,\u201d Dungy says. \u201cThat history and these stories have been so mutilated in appropriation over time in the way they are told and by whom. I think the tendency [for African-American writers] to say \u2018Hands off, this is our story\u2019 is earned and valid without question.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n But fraught as this material can be for white writers, Dungy says, if only African-American writers take it on, some readers will simply ignore it. \u201cThere\u2019s a way in which my story, as important as my story is and as many people as are going to read it, is just not going to reach the same kind of audience,\u201d she says. \u201cThere is a whole swath of readers who [say], \u2018That\u2019s a black story, I don\u2019t need to read that.\u2019 So they don\u2019t pick it up. When Tess does it, they do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n If anything, Taylor is even more adamant about the need for white writers to examine their own history. \u201cThere\u2019s this intense fear that if white people talk about race, they\u2019re going to get it wrong, and therefore there\u2019s a kind of a default position where white people don\u2019t want to talk about race or racism or racial knowledge,\u201d she says. \u201cThe side effect of not wanting to get it wrong is sometimes just silencing the stories of things that we know and not allowing ourselves to talk at all. I think that silence itself is part of the problem.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Just as Dungy predicted, when Taylor gently, but insistently broke through that silence, readers listened. Since\u00a0The Forage House<\/i>\u00a0came out in August, Taylor has been a blur of activity, appearing on NPR\u2019s \u201cThe Takeaway\u201d with Gayle White, speaking at churches, and barnstorming both coasts on book tours. In the fall, after years of adjunct teaching and freelance writing gigs, she begins a year as a visiting professor at Whittier College outside Los Angeles. If publishing a book of poetry were an Olympic event, the judges would have to agree that Tess Taylor has stuck the landing.<\/span><\/p>\n It helps, of course, that the poems are good. It doesn\u2019t hurt, either, that Taylor makes for an attractive messenger, bubbly and approachable, her fierce ambition blunted by an infectious laugh and a well-developed sense of tact. But beyond all that, by employing the tools of the journalist and the historian and by embracing rather than recoiling from the modern media noise machine, Taylor has taken a very old story and made it new again. In the process, she is helping shape a 21st-century poetry that spills out beyond the pages of the printed book into the wider cultural bloodstream.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>
\nThe evidence of family ties is circumstantial: Rachael worked for the Taylor family. She and Moncure were about the same age, and she lived alone with her children near the Taylors. She never married. My grandmother sometimes used the name Taylor on official documents, such as baptismal and death certificates. She named one of her daughters \u201cCary,\u201d a name shared among the Jefferson-Randolph-Taylor clan and the Robinsons.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nMarch 27, 2014<\/p>\nFilling the Silences: <\/span><\/h3>\n
Race, Poetry, and <\/span><\/h3>\n
the Digital-Media Megaphone<\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a>
\nLast summer, shortly after\u00a0Publishers Weekly<\/i>\u00a0posted its review of\u00a0Tess Taylor\u2019s<\/b>\u00a0first full-length poetry collection,\u00a0The Forage House<\/i><\/span><\/a>, which focuses on Taylor\u2019s effort to come to terms with the legacy of being a white descendant of founding father\u00a0Thomas Jefferson<\/b>,\u00a0Gayle Jessup White<\/b>, a journalist and educator in Richmond, Virginia, posted the following note in the comments section:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a>When the two women met a short time later, they instantly hit it off, and as far as they were concerned they were cousins, albeit distant ones. But as\u00a0Taylor explained in a recent\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0article<\/span><\/a>, this belief rests on 1870s census records and oral histories passed down through White\u2019s family. DNA tests have\u00a0convinced all but the most hardened skeptics that America\u2019s third president had children with his slave\u00a0Sally Hemings<\/b>, but White\u2019s claim involved a liaison between a later Jefferson descendant and his African-American mistress, and given the state of DNA testing as Taylor understood it when she wrote the\u00a0Times<\/i>\u00a0article, there was no way to prove that she and White were related.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nI came to know Tess Taylor much the way Gayle White did: by reading about her online and recognizing a piece of myself. Last June, I saw\u00a0an earlier article Taylor wrote for\u00a0The New York Times<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0marking the 50th anniversary of what has come to be known in the history of the Civil Rights Movement as Bloody Monday. On June 10, 1963, firefighters in the cotton-mill town of Danville, Va., turned their hoses on demonstrators standing vigil outside the city jail, where dozens of their fellow protesters were being held for marching against segregation. The city had deputized its all-white force of garbage collectors, and after the fire hoses washed the protesters down a blind alley, the garbage men waded into the crowd with nightsticks and sent more than 50 protesters to Danville\u2019s ill-equipped blacks-only hospital.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe spark for\u00a0The Forage House<\/i>\u00a0was the shock Taylor felt in 1998 when, still an undergraduate, she first learned of the DNA tests that showed links between her own white Jefferson ancestors and Hemings\u2019s black descendants. By the time she began working on the project seven years later, Taylor had a master\u2019s in journalism and envisioned the book about her family as nonfiction. She quickly found that some members of her family, whom she had counted on to serve as sources, wanted no part of her project. One Virginia relative, upon hearing what Taylor wanted to write, \u201cjust flipped out,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThe idea that I would write about the family, about this legacy, in journalism, was so upsetting to her. I realized I had touched a really, really deep nerve.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
\nin the presence of God almighty amen<\/span>
\ndo deed three things:<\/span><\/p>\n
\neverything, nothing:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a>Between trips to Monticello, Taylor earned a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers\u2019 Conference in Vermont, where she met two prominent African-American poets,\u00a0Natasha Trethewey<\/b>, now the nation\u2019s poet laureate, andCamille Dungy<\/b>, who was then working on a collection,\u00a0Suck on the Marrow<\/i><\/span><\/a>, published by Red Hen in 2010, exploring her own family\u2019s struggles in slavery during the 19th century in Virginia. Both poets offered counsel and encouragement as Taylor dug deeper into her past.<\/span><\/p>\n