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\u201cAnd who, by the way, was the mother <\/p>\n I.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Our nation\u2019s historical origins began in the revolutionary age of the 1770s, when Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers set forth their protestations against the British crown. In the past 20\u00a0or so years, many Americans have taken it as fact that Jefferson established a long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman, mother to at least six of his children, and his widow\u2019s half-sister. \u201cThe Jefferson-Hemings affair,\u201d writes Clarence Walker, given Jefferson\u2019s place in the pantheon of the Founding Fathers, raises questions about the national identity or racial provenance of the United States . . . At the moment of its creation the nation was not a white racial space but a mixed-race one, in which Jefferson and Hemings, as a mixed-race couple, rather than George and Martha Washington, should be considered the founding parents of the North American republic.<\/span><\/p>\n Race, we are accustomed to thinking, is a fiction\u2014a \u201cconstruction\u201d\u2014a myth older than\u00a0Don Quixote<\/em>. Literacy was not as commonplace when Jefferson and Hemings began their relationship, and Americans have never quite gotten over this textual and cultural illiteracy, a willful blindness, when it comes to matters of citizenship and recognition. Like any fiction worth its weight, race must be read and reread, interpreted, and examined.<\/span><\/p>\n With her 1852 novel\u00a0Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, Harriett Beecher Stowe, \u201cgave black characters a dignity and self-consciousness that paved the way for other writers, including African-American writers, to explore the question of race in America,\u201d as literary historian Philip Gura writes. As fate would have it, in May of the following year Stowe met a man who was soon to become the first black American novelist.<\/span><\/p>\n William Wells Brown was already an inspiring and accomplished man when he met Stowe in London. He\u2019d been born into slavery in Kentucky, the son of a white father and a slave mother, and he\u2019d traveled widely for an individual of the 19th\u00a0century, free or enslaved. Brown escaped slavery, after losing his mother and his sister to slave auctions, and began a career as an author and anti-slavery lecturer.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Brown\u2019s 1853 novel,\u00a0Clotel<\/em>, has for its plot the Jefferson-Hemings liaison that Walker refers to, a relationship that has fired the imaginations of Americans for more than two centuries, ever since James Callender published a scathing expos\u00e9 of Thomas Jefferson in the\u00a0Richmond Recorder<\/em>. Callender had previously outed Alexander Hamilton\u2019s extramarital affair with Mrs. Maria Reynolds, but when Jefferson refused to acquiesce to Callender\u2019s threats of blackmail, he went public with the not-quite-news that Jefferson kept an enslaved woman as his \u201cconcubine\u201d on his Monticello plantation.<\/span><\/p>\n Though Brown was the first American novelist to address the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, Charles Dickens had actually included a reference in his 1844 novel\u00a0Martin Chuzzlewit.<\/em>\u00a0Dickens wrote of Jefferson, that \u201cnoble patriot . . . who dreamed of Freedom in a slave\u2019s embrace.\u201d It is an unattributed quote from the Irish poet Thomas Moore, who\u2019d read Callender\u2019s article in the\u00a0Recorder<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhat better plot,\u201d historian Jill Lepore writes, \u201cthan the shocking story that had animated the pen of Dickens himself?\u201d Brown, according to his biographer Ezra Greenspan, was, like many Americans, long acquainted with the story of Sally and Tom. He\u2019d published Clotel <\/em>well before he met a Hemings family member, Virginia Isaacs, in Boston in the 1860s. A great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Hemings, mother to Jefferson\u2019s Sally, Virginia Isaacs is a distant relative of mine; Sally Hemings\u2019 brother Peter is my ancestor.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n II.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Visiting Monticello in 1796, the duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt claimed to have seen \u201cslaves, who neither in point of color nor features showed the least trace of their original descent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In the summer of 2016, I stood in the back of a line comprised of descendants of Jefferson\u2019s slaves waiting to enter the air conditioned pavilion in Monticello\u2019s visitor center. A family directly before me looked white at first glance. But they are descendants of Sally and Tom, even prouder of their Hemings blood than they are of their Jefferson lineage. We were gathered to eat. It\u2019d be our last meal before a family sleepover that night in Monticello\u2019s slave cabins.<\/span><\/p>\n Inside,\u00a0a buffet table was laid out before us, filled to overflowing with soul food. Iced tea with mint leaves to wash down the fried chicken. Biscuits barely made it into our mouths before melting. The room brimmed with joy. Some nuclear families sat together but I took a seat at a table with Jefferson, Hemings and Gillette descendants. I met Sakeena. She was wearing a purple African print dress, a headscarf beneath her Fulani straw hat. We fell into talking. I was introduced to April, Joan and Stephen, and Sakeena\u2019s brother Gregory. Sakeena and Gregory\u2019s forefathers and mine were given to Jefferson\u2019s estate, after his father-in-law\u2019s death,\u00a0in 1774.<\/span><\/p>\n A presentation began. Any descendants of those pictured were to stand and introduce themselves. A photo of Moses\u00a0Gillete was shown.\u00a0April, Joan, Stephen,\u00a0Sakeena\u00a0and Gregory\u00a0rose from their seats. More photos of the enslaved were projected.\u00a0Cousin Calvin\u00a0kept standing up. He stood when Jefferson\u2019s personal servant Jupiter\u2019s name was mentioned. He sat down only to stand again when Wormley Hughes\u2019 name was called out. Calvin had on a red Washington Nationals ball cap with matching tank top and his teenage granddaughter Jade with him. She wore her thick hair in pigtails. I thought Jade really must love her grandfather to spend a night in the slave cabins with a bunch of distant relatives\u2014strangers, really. Many of us were strangers to her and each other.<\/span><\/p>\n By the time we made it up to the mountaintop, the sun was just setting beyond the hills below. What land! I was transfixed by the view. Monticello is a kind of sylvan grove, and there is a view clear across the creasing hills all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains. A brilliant dusk radiated from behind a cloud like the spokes of a wagon wheel. I\u2019d never seen a sunset like that one. No one at Monticello had either, and they moved to gather us for photographs with that special sky for a background.<\/span><\/p>\n Afterwards, we gathered on Mulberry Row, a tree-lined walk where some of our slave ancestors lived and worked, for a bonfire. We talked quietly in twos and threes before coming together to talk as a family. A debate began with an old question. Calvin asked if any of us thought Sally Hemings could have loved Jefferson. I think they heard Gregory\u2019s cries of dissent way down in Charlottesville. \u201cHell no!\u201d he said. \u201cNothing about a teenage girl and her 40-something master calls out \u2018love\u2019 to these ears! Ain\u2019t no love there!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cShe didn\u2019t have a choice! She was his\u00a0slave<\/em>!\u201d Sakeena said.<\/span><\/p>\n Calvin was pressing the issue. \u201cI know about both those things but she was exercising some degree of power over him, and how about this\u2014each one of her sisters had children by white men. What you make of that?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Sakeena nearly leapt off her log. Gregory held her back\u00a0but she couldn\u2019t be quieted.\u00a0\u201cWhat I make of that?\u201d\u00a0Sakeena\u00a0hollered. \u201cWhat I make of\u00a0that<\/em>! They were raped. They were raped by the white man. They were\u00a0preyed<\/em>\u00a0upon. What\u00a0you<\/em>\u00a0make of\u00a0that<\/em>?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Calvin was slyly smiling beneath his mustache. \u201cI\u2019m only asking the questions we all been hearing for, oh, two-hundred years now. Don\u2019t got to get all worked up like that, cousin.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t know\u00a0what<\/em>\u00a0you trying to do!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cListen. Think about this. You got to think about how much power Sally\u2019s mother had over TJ. She\u2019d raised his wife, who loved her deeply, and she\u2019d raised Sally. And TJ loved\u00a0both<\/em>\u00a0of those women\u2014those half-sisters. To think that Elizabeth Hemings wasn\u2019t exercising some kind of control over TJ is ludicrous. She was playing him like a fiddle.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cShe was a\u00a0slave<\/em>, Calvin.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t care what she was, she got whatever she wanted for her children. And she got whatever she wanted for herself, too. I think of her as the matriarch of\u00a0this entire plantation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cHer daughters were\u00a0raped<\/em>\u00a0by white men.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThey coulda had relationships with these men! TJ and Sally were in a decades-long relationship. Something like 35, 40\u00a0years! When we talking about these \u2018slave women\u2019 we talking about some of the most powerful people\u2014white or black\u2014for miles around. You telling me Elizabeth Hemings, mother of Sally and nanny to Martha, who went way back with the family, didn\u2019t have TJ by the\u00a0wig<\/em>\u00a0I think you smoking something outta the garden down there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cCalvin, you saying the Hemings women had white lovers because their mother mighta arranged all that. What you forgetting\u2014somehow! who knows how you forgetting this\u2014was that they were slaves. And that they didn\u2019t have a choice. By all accounts they were beautiful women, too, and that just made them more easily preyed upon.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just raising questions. That\u2019s all I\u2019m doing. What I\u2019m wondering is if Elizabeth Hemings was making sure her daughters got with the white man. \u2018Cause look at how her grandchildren turned out! They got their freedom through the white man. They were freed, the ones that was the progeny of the white man. And Elizabeth knew full well the benefits of being white cause she was half white herself.\u00a0If she had a little control over TJ\u00a0and his kin or his visitors or what have you, I\u2019m willing to bet she was angling toward having her grandchildren be freed that way.\u00a0That is, after all,\u00a0how Sally got TJ to promise to free her kids.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Sakeena addressed the group, slipping her comments in before either Calvin or her brother could say anything further. \u201cNext time you getting slave families together,\u201d she said, \u201cbring a therapist. We got to have some real counseling here. Our heads all screwed up and these Hemings bothering me!\u201d We were all laughing. \u201cReally! These Hemings bothering me. All anybody wondering about anytime I bring up that we come from Monticello is the Hemings. It\u2019s Hemings this or Hemings that. I\u2019m proud\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0to be a Hemings. I\u2019m a\u00a0Gillette<\/em>. And we came like pendants with Elizabeth Hemings from John Wayles\u2019 Guinea plantation to Monticello. And nobody ever talk about the Gillettes.\u00a0We probably on the same damn ship over here! And nobody talking about us. Hemingses take up all the air in the room. See these tourists traipsing all around here earlier. Only thing they asking about is Sally. Or \u2018the talented Hemings.\u2019 What about everyone else!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n There was much more good cheer than not. But the debates were going to continue all night. Might even continue for another generation or two. I walked to find a place of solitude when I heard the cousins, those who remained by the fire pit, asking one another about escaped slaves. Who\u2019d left? Was he caught? Heard from again?<\/span><\/p>\n The moon rose higher, the night sky awash with stars. I looked out toward the horizon. Down in the blue-night valleys I imagined the ruby glow of long ago campfires. Sakeena joined me. She looked mildly distressed and gestured toward the security guards who were going around turning off the lampposts. \u201cI\u2019m down walking by my cabin to get something and I see these uniformed men in the dark and I thought it was the KKK coming for me! Why they leaving us out here in the dark? Can\u2019t they leave us with some light? They said they\u2019d be taking care of us. Well, I want light to see with! We\u2019re being left out here. But look at those stars!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sakeena had a flair for the dramatic. She\u2019d traveled via Greyhound from New York.\u00a0Sakeena converted to Islam \u201ca hundred years ago,\u201d as she put it, and sometime in the intervening century she\u2019d traveled to Mecca for hajj. We looked out into the night. \u201cThis,\u201d she said, \u201cthis is a pilgrimage all its own. I truly feel that way. I\u2019m coming back to honor my dead.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYou ever feel anything for, you know . . . Africa?\u201d I asked. I\u2019d been prompted by one of the cousins, who said that an aunt of hers said that\u00a0she<\/em>\u00a0had heard from an aunt of\u00a0hers<\/em>, that the Monticello slaves had rubbed oil on their noses. This was supposedly proof that we were descended from some specific African tribe.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWell, we from there somewheres but our lives began right here,\u201d Sakeena said. \u201cDoesn\u2019t stop me from wearing these African dresses, though. And each year I go up to the medieval festival at Fort Tryon Park, I\u2019m the only black person there, and I dress up as an African queen. I treat myself. I\u2019m crazy. And you\u2019re crazy. Why else we here except for us being crazy? Why else we sleeping in the slave cabins? My kids don\u2019t answer the phone anymore when they see me calling. They think I should be put up in Bellevue. I want to talk to someone about all this; it\u2019s just hard to. Not everybody wants to talk about the past . . . And I\u2019m careful who I tell I come from Monticello. You got to be discriminating. \u2018Cause not everyone cares. Actually, most people don\u2019t care. Then they start joking with you. Most of us don\u2019t know our history, so anybody who does they making fun of. In Brownsville they call me Mrs. Jefferson. And that just drives me nuts! Only safe place I\u2019ve found to talk about the past? This plantation. This plantation is the only place I\u2019ve ever found safe enough to talk over everything with everyone. Even if security leaving us in the dark. Out here. In the wilderness. Alone. Damn\u2014we alone out here in the wilderness!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n III.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Before I had any idea who I was\u2014what I was composed of\u2014I knew of a few landmarks in my New England town. We lived in Redding, Connecticut, on a wooded property no more than a mile from where Mark Twain died. The annual Mark Twain Book Fair reminded us all of our indebtedness to him. The town library had been named after him, and his estate, Stormfield, was within an easy downhill jaunt of my home. On the way to the library, a walk I undertook frequently during the summer, we\u2019d pass the \u201celephant walk,\u201d where P.T. Barnum is said to have corralled his elephants. Later, as a young man of about 13, I began working as a farmhand for a family of writers who\u2019d purchased their considerable property from a great-granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. American history, it seemed, was inescapable. And farm chores were inhibiting my full enjoyment of my teenage years. Predictably, when the owners of the farm left for an extended period of time, I threw parties. In honor of Hawthorne, my fellow debauchers and I nicknamed the property \u201cNate\u2019s House.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In Wendy Warren\u2019s 2016 book\u00a0New England Bound<\/em>, the author recounts a visit Hawthorne made to Williams College for commencement ceremonies in 1838. Hawthorne was surprised to encounter free African Americans in New England. There were \u201ca good many blacks among the crowd . . . a drunken negro . . . [a] gray old negro . . . [and] three or four well dressed and decent negro wenches . . . I suppose they used to emigrate across the border, while New-York was a slave state.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cHawthorne\u2019s astonishment,\u201d writes Warren, \u201cat seeing African descent in a New England crowd and in a New England tavern, underscored just how effectively the importance of slavery to the region\u2019s development had been erased from memory.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Hawthorne\u2019s great-great grandfather, John Hathorne, the only judge from the Salem Witch Trials who did not repent of his actions, presided over the courts when an enslaved Indian woman named Tituba, and at least two enslaved Africans, were accused of witchcraft. Some 24\u00a0years after his visit to Williams College, Nathaniel Hawthorne still could not perceive of the long-established presence of African-descended people in New England.<\/span><\/p>\n There is an historical circumstance, known to few, that connects the children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia, in a very singular way. They are our brethren, as being lineal descendants from the Mayflower, the fated womb of which, in her first voyage, sent forth a brood of Pilgrims upon Plymouth Rock, and, in a subsequent one, spawned slaves upon the Southern soil\u2014a monstrous birth, but with which we have an instinctive sense of kindred, and so are stirred by an irresistible impulse to attempt their rescue, even at the cost of blood and ruin. The character of our sacred ship, I fear, may suffer a little by this revelation; but we must let her white progeny offset her dark one\u2014and two such portents never sprang from an identical source before.<\/span><\/p>\n Hawthorne was mistaken; in point of fact, there were several ships named Mayflower<\/em>\u00a0operating in the 17th\u00a0century, and the one that carried enslaved individuals was not the same that carried Puritans. \u201cBut in metaphorical terms,\u201d Warren writes, \u201cof course, he was absolutely right.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n More than a decade prior to Hawthorne\u2019s mistaken assertion, William Wells Brown included in\u00a0Clotel<\/em>\u00a0a juxtaposition of the Mayflower with a slave ship to Virginia: \u201cBehold the May-flower anchored at Plymouth Rock, the slave-ship in James River . . . These ships are the representation of good and evil in the New World, even to our day. When shall one of those parallel lines come to an end?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Despite Brown\u2019s stature as a pioneering American novelist, he goes unmentioned in Clarence Walker\u2019s writing on the mythic origins of the American people\u2014though, of course, this is precisely what Brown was setting forth. Brown is also ignored in Annette Gordon-Reed\u2019s magisterial studies of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, though in a colloquy on Gordon-Reed\u2019s The Hemingses of Monticello<\/em>\u00a0Robert S. Levine stated that \u201cReading\u00a0Clotel<\/em>\u00a0and The Hemingses of Monticello<\/em>\u00a0side by side, one realizes that Gordon-Reed, in her great history of the Hemings family and Jefferson, has written a classic African American novel of the early Republic for the 21st century.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n IV.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s it like to learn about your family in history books?\u201d I was once asked. But the reality is that we all learn about our families through history books and the literary arts. In the writings of Albert Murray and his friend Ralph Ellison, I learn we are each of us engaged in the unconscious reenactment of rituals as old as humanity itself. We eat, pray, make love and procreate, sleep, communicate, and make art. It is this last act that distinguishes human life from other sentient beings. Stories are our domain.<\/span><\/p>\n In a remarkable essay, \u201cHidden Name and Complex Fate,\u201d Ellison describes the power of reading literature: \u201cThe more I learned of literature . . . the more the details of my background became transformed.\u201d When, during one of his first few days in Harlem Langston Hughes suggested he read Andre Malraux, Ellison drank deeply from\u00a0Man\u2019s Fate\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Days of Wrath<\/em>, \u201cwhich led to my selecting Malraux as a literary \u2018ancestor,\u2019 whom, unlike a relative, the artist is permitted to choose.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n With Clotel<\/em>, William Wells Brown describes how the story of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship is representative of our national and personal origins, despite what we perceive to be our racial or cultural differences. Brown takes the story back from the tabloids, back from slanderous rumors, and gives it to us. We return to our writers\u2014like Brown, Twain, Stowe, Ellison, Morrison, and Whitehead\u2014for a view of ourselves and our ancestors.<\/span><\/p>\n It is a human paradox that we derive our liberality, our truths, from fiction. There is sublime magic in stories, and the past is regenerated before our eyes. Our literary artists do not turn away from the past. Instead, they lift for us the veil of time and history so that we may find ourselves. Like a family elder unbraiding the knot of the past for us to better understand, our writers initiate the psychodrama of self-identification. History is not so very far from us, unequivocally ours to hold. We are inheritors of an outrageous fortune.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nof our country?\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/span>
\n\u2013Ralph Ellison<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n
\nand reread, interpreted, and examined.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
\nabout escaped slaves. Who\u2019d left? Was he caught?
\nHeard from again?\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n
\nour truths, from fiction. There is sublime magic in
\nstories, and the past is regenerated before our eyes.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n