| Episodes |
Day After Meditation (2): The Descendants
Kristen Dalton
Dalton meditates on the impact of the DNA on the controversy after reading the two main compilations of scholarly responses: Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (1999) and the special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly March 2000.
[1] One way to analyze this phase of the controversy is to look at it in black and white terms, literally. Race plays a huge part in this story, from the recorded memories to the historian hypotheses. But more than anything else, it prevents a family from uniting. That family, now nearly confirmed from the DNA, just so happens to be fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Jan Ellen Lewis talks about the family dynamic in the "The White Jeffersons," in which she acknowledges the importance of a family's narrative as both unique unto itself and universal to many at the same time: "These are the stories of families, of parents and children, of a white family and a black family, of a national family of blacks and white. These are the stories of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, of white Jeffersons and black, of Americans black and white. They are the stories of a family and of a nation."
[2] The problem that Jefferson's descendants face, even today, is that the black side of his family was never acknowledged because the white side of the family was in a perpetual state of denial. This began the moment Jefferson refused to comment on the James Callender story and instead deemed it as a vicious attack from his enemies, even though none of his enemies at the time ever pursued what Callender put into print. "He must have known why the Hemings children looked like him," Lewis explains, "He must have known that all the defenses put up by his political friends and allies were in part or in whole untrue. So far as we know . . . Jefferson's defenders were the first to mount what might be called a derivative family defense." It is clear to see that over time, this has turned into the endless web of lies that historians are forever trying to unravel. And it was the white Jeffersons who were behind all of it, starting with the man himself.
[3] Lewis goes on: "To say simply that those were different timesâ€"the slavery, the racism, he could never have acknowledged it, is finally, too simple. It is to obscure the other facts, that slavery itself, at least in a land that extols freedom, is a kind of lie, for it denies that one person is another's equal; and racism is another kind of lie, the kind that follows in the first lie's train, by attempting to explain and legitimate that inequality. Neither slavery nor racism is a natural fact; rather, both are contingent historical conditions, created by human beings to serve particular needs. So to say that Thomas Jefferson could not have acknowledged his relationship with Sally Hemings, whatever it was, because of race and slavery is only to say that some lies beget other lies, something we would do well to remember."
[4] Lewis isn't buying any of these defenses, especially since the oral testimony of Madison Hemings and from other slaves at Monticello are turning out to be increasingly accurate, even more so than the white Jeffersons, who "never acknowledged that they had black Jefferson kin. The Hemings children, however, knew that they were the disfavored children of a loving and powerful man." Lewis continues that the denial got so bad that "in order to protect the reputation of the family patriarch, some of the white Jeffersons blamed some of the other white Jeffersons for fathering Sally Heming's children. These things happen in families; for some members, the assigned role is to be the bearer of blame. But blame for what?" The lie about the Carr brothers was manufactured within the very family it was trying to protect, and it was carried out and continued by many of the white historians who also believed in everything Jefferson stood for.
[5] Jan Ellen Lewis gives us more perspective than that, however. To conclude her argument, Lewis creates an alternative to the story and invites the reader to consider it: "Perhaps you were Madison Hemings or his brother Eston, you would care for your mother until she died, marry a black woman, raise a family, and tell your children who they were, that is, who their parents were, and their parents before them, and who you wanted them to be. And they would tell their children and their children's children after them, and even though white people would scoff and even say that you were just trying to make yourself into something you were not, one day a scientist would come asking for a sample of your DNA. And it would confirm the story your mother had told you and your father had never acknowledged, except by the ambiguous act of letting you free."
[6] But wait, it gets better: "Then, a century later, that lie, like the ones before, becomes part of the public record. White cousins whose names otherwise would have been lost to history are now known as scoundrels. Black children are written out of their family, their claim upon it dismissed by history as ‘the Negroes' pathetic wish for a little pride.' And so the lie begun in the family becomes part of the national lie of race, which is itself a kind of truth, a fiction that orders the national life much as the moral impossibility of Jefferson's interracial liaison ordered that of his white kin."
[7] What a story, right! Incredible.
[8] Historians Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright decided to investigate a little further. In their "Bonds of Memory," they share their experiences of sitting down and interviewing descendants on both sides of the color line. It was called the Getting Word project, sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. But, first, let's take a look at what Swann-Wright, a black female, and Stanton, a white female, define as the very color line to which they are analyzing:
[DSW] Most historians can complete W.E.B. DuBois's quotation, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the __________." I wonder if DuBois realized how true his declaration would prove to be. For me, the color line is more than a division, separating those with power and privilege from those without. For me, the color line is a hard unhoeable row.
[LCS] My response reminded me of the white travelers in the nineteenth century who realized the injustices of slavery only when they saw men and women as white as they were being taken down the Mississippi to the New Orleans slave market for sale. I still have difficulty visualizing the color line. It appears nebulous, shifting, at times a barricade guarded by gun-toting white men, at times a mist, a white mist into which people disappear.
[9] It is clear to see how different a white person and a black person think of color: one is a hard place where growth is impossible, and the other is a permeable and flexible mist into which people disappear. Think for a moment how historians interpret the story of Jefferson and Hemings based on their skin color. Though the DNA has given more concreteness to the story, it is no surprise that a divide still remains as to the still-missing facts. This is the place where the stories from both sides of the Jefferson family come in handy.
[10] What became clear very quickly was how white Hemings's children appeared. Eston and his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he adopted a new name and a new racial identity, becoming Eston H. Jefferson: "His northwestwardly course, from slavery to freedom and, finally, to whiteness and its associated privileges in Wisconsin provided his children with choices and considerations he had never had before." By doing this, his children would be able to escape the economic and social prejudices that were upheld up the "black laws" in Ohio. But "unlike most who passed for white, who closed the door on their past and created new family histories, Eston Hemings risked exposure by adopting this well-known surname and sustaining the memory of his tie to Jefferson. This seems to indicate a strong identification with the man he knew as his father."
[11] Madison didn't take the same approach, however. He never took Jefferson's surname, nor did he feel connected to him in any way. Many times he refers to Jefferson's unbroken promise to his mother. In his eyes, he was different from the other "white folks" he knew: "Equal in importance, both parents appear in his 1873 recollections to a white journalist and in the stories told his children. They and succeeding generations were left to pass it on or to deny it according to their own racial and personal identities." Madison and his descendants chose to identity with their black heritage and deal with the social prejudices of the times. Furthermore, it is interesting that the DNA evidence did not reveal conclusive data the same way that it did for Eston, who chose to pass as white and cut ties:
While Madison Heming's descendants who remained black could openly identify with their slave ancestor, in order to erase their racial origins, Eston H. Jefferson's descendants had to hide or deny their existence. It is apparently no accident that Dr. Eugene Foster, in pursuit of DNA samples, could find exclusively male-line descendants of Eston Hemings Jefferson but not of his brother, Madison. . . . The male markers of Madison Hemings's descendants seem to have disappeared as some men made the choice to pass for white and left no traces, while the women who remained behind never forgot Sally Hemings. The genetic markers in each line thus match the markers of memory.
[12] Imagine the identity crisis this family is dealing with, with one side in complete denial, and the other side desperately trying to grasp its racial heritage: "This pattern of brothers and sisters leaving continued in the next generation. Descendants of Madison's oldest daughter Sarah Hemings Byrd have many stories of families fragmented by passing. Even though many of those who passed remained in southern Ohio, ‘we never heard from them,' said one. Her cousin, conjuring up images of amputation, said: ‘They tended to cross over to the white community and not maintain any connection with the rest of the family. It was just sort of cut off.' Important life passages like births, marriages, and deaths became painful reminders of family division, and only those remaining in the black community came to family reunions." The division that Jefferson created by ignoring his black children and favoring his white has now increased exponentially among all of the descendants who may or may not even know they are a part of the same family.
[13] Stanton and Swann-Wright note that "Sally Hemings's children and their descendants had been changing, reconstructing, or reinforcing their racial identities through all the generations from the time of slavery until the present. The light-skinned offspring of miscegenation in slavery had maintained their distinctiveness by marrying others who shared their physical appearance and its accompanying social status. In this way, subsequent generations of Sally Hemings's descendants continued to resemble their famous ancestor, who was described as ‘mighty near white.'" America has witnessed the evolution of one family struggling to find their roots and the truths behind them. At the same time, they have become a symbol of interracial sexual relationships in the United States today. Thanks to the DNA, we are now asked another question: What do our interpretations of this age-old relationship tell us about cultural relations in our country now?
