| Episodes |
1) This year, rules were passed barring guests from the graveyard and limiting to two the number of guests a member could invite to the reunion. I did not attend the meeting, but my sister Ginny was there. When she rose before the crowd to ask the purpose of the rules, Nat Abeles, the association president, replied that I had abused the privilege in 2001 by inviting 26 guests, conveniently omitting to mention that all of them were Hemings cousins. (It's worth noting, too, that the association bylaws do not limit the number of guests one can invite.) When Ginny pointed out that he didn't explain why guests were banned from the graveyard, another cousin grabbed the microphone. What he said, according to Ginny and three other people who were in the room, was that he had no interest in associating with the Hemings received, he blurted out what must have been on nearly everyone else's minds. The members of the Monticello Association have spoken clearly about who they want to associate with, and which values they hold dear. They've made their choice, and now I'm going to make mine. I will not be going to Monticello Association's annual family reunion again.
Lucian K.Truscott IV, "The Reunion"
2) The writer James Baldwin once said love between unequals is always perverse. No doubt it is true. But it is also true that the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings appears to have lasted over 30 years. Pregnancies came regularly until Sally was past child-bearing age. And from their first child till Jefferson's death, there is no record or even suggestion of another woman. Perverse or not, there had to have been real affection and loyalty between these two people. To acknowledge this is not to sanction slavery but to point out how irrepressibly human we are.
Shelby Steele, Frontline: Jefferson's Blood
3) Thomas Jefferson is my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. My grandfather told me about it when I was 10 years old. He called me into his living room in Pittsburgh and he said, "Son, it's time for you to learn about your heritage." And my grandfather was the president of the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society, and he said, "You're a special person. You're part of a special family. You, through your mother and me, and my mother and so on, are a descendant of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States." I was 10 years old at the time. I was very precocious, too. I was a graduate of high school at the age of 15 and college at 19 and I was a JD at the age of 22. But I knew who Jefferson was. I didn't know who Sally Hemings was but I knew who Jefferson was. And, for a moment, I was very thrilled by that revelation.
Robert Cooley, III
4) When I met the Hemings descendants, I was impressed and taken by their warmth and immediate acceptance of me, even if I did not share the same opinion about Sally and Thomas. They accepted me without judgment and shared that same need to be part of a family that I had often felt. Now I can't wait to get to know them as family.
Jane Randolph Schluter, a Jefferson descendant, in Lanier and Feldman 77
5) Sally was, without a doubt, Thomas Jefferson's mistress, lover, substitute wife, for 38 years. No question about it. Oh, we know it because Sally was a very articulate woman, contrary to current characterizations. She was very articulate. She was very educated. She told us. She told her son Thomas, and Thomas told others in his family. And so, in my family, I have the benefit of 200 years of consistent, solid oral history. And this history was carried on by representatives of at least five different sons and daughters of Thomas Woodson, and later by people who didn't know one another. There were families in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, in Texas, and in Tennessee. We didn't know one another, but each of us had virtually the identical oral history.
Robert Cooley, III
6) To reconstruct the world of Monticello's African Americans is a challenging task. Only six images of men and women who lived there in slavery are known, and their own words are preserved in just four reminiscences and a handful of letters. Archaeological excavations are unearthing fascinating evidence of the material culture of Monticello's black families and, since 1993, steps have been taken to record the oral histories of their descendants. Without the direct testimony of most of the African-American residents of Monticello, we must try to hear their voices in the sparse records of Jefferson's Farm Book and the often biased accounts and letters dealing with labor management, and through the inherited memories of those who left Monticello for lives of freedom.
Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day 15-16
7) Scandal is not the centerpiece, and certainly not the foundation, from which America can learn and grow. The focus here is the integrity of American history. For if we cannot agree on who we are and where we have been, there is no basis for harmony and only a bleak outlook for the future. The true legacy of the Monticello plantation, presented here, exemplifies the racial interconnections that marked America's origins. If it brings Americans closer to realizing that we are one people, the book will have surpassed its objective.
Byron Woodson 5
8) All of the new data would seem to bear out the contention of Madison Hemings in his memoir that "we were the only children of his by a slave woman," indicating that Jefferson was not the callous débaucher of slave women suggested by some abolitionists but a man devoted for thirty-eight years to a single woman whom he could not acknowledge or marry lest he suffer social and political ostracism.
Fawn Brodie, "Grandchildren"
9) The Monticello Association met in May 1998, when the test results were due to be released within six months, and Robert Gillespie, then the Association's president, announced that if the DNA tests were "authoritatively established, the Association will have no option but to allow membership" of the Hemingses. I was shocked by that negative choice of language. It could easily have been phrased differently--for example: "If the DNA results are at all positive, we shall be pleased to recognize descendants of Sally Hemings as descendants of Thomas Jefferson and welcome them into the association."
Lucian K. Truscott, "Children"
10) In 1998, after the DNA evidence was released linking Jefferson to Hemings, my sister Mary and I went on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" with about 25 of our Hemings cousins. On the program, I invited the Hemings descendants to be my guests at the annual reunion of the Monticello Association, the family group that owns and maintains the graveyard at Monticello. (The group, which has about 800 members was founded by three of my Randolph relatives, including my great-grandmother.) Several dozen Hemings descendants have been the guests of my immediate family at our reunion every year since then. They attended services for my parents when they were buried in the Monticello graveyard. Friendship between the Truscott family and our Hemings cousins has grown richer every year. You would think that we would not be alone, that after five years of family reunions the two sides of Jefferson's extended family would have drawn closer. Instead, things have gone from bad to worse. Hemings cousins have told me about racial epithets hurled at them by Monticello Association members. Last year, a vote was taken banning Hemings membership and refusing rights of burial in the graveyard. Voting against the Hemings were 75 Monticello Association members.
Lucian K Truscott IV, "The Reunion"
11) This racelessness, this living without the consolations of identity has always been the special burden of the Hemings family, their legacy from Thomas Jefferson.
Shelby Steele, Frontline: Jefferson's Blood
12) Empathy for him [Jefferson] and the problems he faced had always been a part of her [Sally's] life. Her manner of acceptance of his moods and his desires without any trace of resistance had become her custom. This was the first time since their return from France that his actions had cut into her very bosom. She saw no way to respond with total acceptance. Tom was more dear to her than her very life.
Minnie Shumate Woodson 22
13) It means a great deal to me, to my family. There are 1,400 of us. I'm only one of 1,400. And we're scattered around the world and throughout the United States. We're all. . . . We know who we are. And I think it's quite significant not only to us, but to America and to the world. This relationship that Jefferson had with Sally extended beyond the two of them. It highlighted the contradiction that Jefferson was all about. He was Mr. Contradiction. He wrote those wonderful words. He held slaves as he was fighting for his freedom from England. Nonetheless, he had a relationship with this woman. She was very beautiful. She was meaningful to him but, nonetheless, from a different race. And so, while he was saying one thing, he felt obviously something else. And considering the words that he wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia, the life that he actually lived is significant in relation to the problems and the issues that we're facing today. It's about race relations, about the contributions that blacks have made to America's development and growth, about everyone's desire for freedom, and about the power of love. It's just an amazing amalgamation.
Robert Cooley, III
14) Two hundred years after the allegation was first made, four years after DNA evidence backed it up, three years after I invited the descendants in question to be my guests at the annual reunion, and two years after historians at Monticello found that Thomas Jefferson was most likely the father of Sally Hemings's children, the descendants of Mr. Jefferson have spoken. On May 5, the Monticello Association, which separately owns and administers the graveyard at Monticello, voted 74-6 to deny family membership and burial rights to the descendants of Sally Hemings. The vote to reject the Hemingses is an act of desperation. No living descendant of Sally Hemings has asked to be buried in our graveyard, and only two of literally thousands of Hemings descendants have bothered to apply for membership, and yet Jefferson's family acted like they were under assault.
Lanier and Feldman 150
15) All Hemings family authors, when it suits their cause, rely heavily on Madison's "Reminiscences" for much of the family history. Scoffers have pulled them apart by saying that the articles by Madison and another former slave from Monticello, Israel Jefferson, could not have been written by them as they could not have been that educated. Madison, Israel, and Christopher Brown were interviewed, and the speech patterns and style in any article are those of the writer, combined with those of the speaker. These stories are oral histories written by the editor of the newspaper.
Judith Justus 79
16) Family has been the one theme common to all our interviews--the strength of its bonds as well as the harsh realities of American society that can break them. The severing of ties when runaways like James Hubbard left Monticello were echoed years later in the families split by the departure of members who chose to improve their lives by crossing the racial border. Not all the stories we heard have been positive ones, for the descendants of Monticello's African Americans have carried the burden of slavery through the generations. The economic and social discrimination that followed the legal injustice of bondage brought frustrated hopes and blasted dreams as doors to educational opportunities and suitable employment remained closed.
Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day 162-163
17) Ultimately, however, the Hemings/Jefferson controversy will not be resolved on the front page on the Washington Post or with a bogus headline in Nature, not at a press conference called by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, not on CNN, and certainly not by the History Department at the University of Virginia. It was not resolved by the Sally Hemings TV miniseries that properly placed Thomas Woodson in the storyline. It will not be resolved by this book. It will be resolved by people with names like Michele, Lucian, Shay, Julia, Nick, Anne, Mary, Joy, Shack, Shannon, Marla, Colonel Truscott, and Colonel Woodson. It will be resolved by a family--my family.
Byron Woodson 251
18) Sally Hemings died in obscurity in 1836, aged sixty-three or sixty-four. What had happened to her children? Tom had disappeared early from Monticello, apparently after the scandal of disclosure, which was sporadically aired in the Federalist press from 1802 to 1805. In 1805 he would have been fifteen. Beverly and Harriet had been permitted to "run away" in 1822, and the fact was noted in Jefferson's Farm Book. Madison and Eston had been freed in 1826 by the terms of Jefferson's will. All of these children then disappeared into the "historical silence" that was engulfing hundreds and thousands of other slave children fathered by white men.
Fawn Brodie, "Grandchildren"
19) Monticello is owned and operated by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation; the graveyard, though on the grounds, is independently owned by descendants of Jefferson and administered by their Monticello Association. I am the Jefferson descendant and member of the Association who invited the descendants of Jefferson and Hemings to be guests at the last two Monticello family reunions. I have been a member of the Monticello Association since reaching adulthood 35 years ago. But I didn't invite the descendants of Sally Hemings to be guests at the reunion until the controversy came to a full boil after the release of DNA findings two years ago--and until I met my Hemings cousins in person.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, "Children of Monticello"
20) My feelings about Jefferson are ambivalent. On the one hand, I remember what he wrote about black people...said that we were inferior in reason, and these other things that he wrote. But I must admit, he wrote these before he met Sally. So I don't forgive him for those things. I don't forgive him for slaveholding. I don't forgive him for his failure to end slavery. On the other hand, I'm proud to be a part of Jefferson. There's a secret ambition inside to do two things: to make sure that I prove Mr. Jefferson wrong about his feelings about black people, and yet I understand that he's still my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, and there is a sense of pride that's there too.
Robert Cooley, III
21) Illegitimacy haunts the black identity. Our blackness made our humanity unacknowledgeable. The quest for acknowledgment became built in to us, a part of what it means to be black in America. But think of what it has always meant to be white in America. Jefferson represents a classic white problem -- how to live with an open evil and yet maintain a sense of one's own decency. For Americans the answer has usually been a mask of innocence, some arrangement of appearances. But having chosen relations with Sally Hemings, Jefferson would have known that his innocence was a mask even as he arranged it.
Shelby Steele, Frontline: Jefferson's Blood
22) As soon as he heard the knock on the door, he [Jefferson] opened it. Sally stood in the opening. Her beauty radiated. Undimmed by the loose gray muslin frock chosen by his daughter and by the effects of sorrow, the warm peach tones of her skin and her provocative gray-green eyes still captured his attention. Her manner was calm. Jefferson smiled. She had never caused him to regret his love for her. Even now when other women would be hysterical, he could count on her composure.
Minnie Shumate Woodson 20
23) I have considerable reservations about Thomas Jefferson. There's a hypocrisy about him that irritates me. Yes, he wrote the Declaration of Independence, but he was also a slave owner. Not a little slave owner, either. He had many slaves who served him. Now, how do you square with this? One question I ask myself, you hear people talking about "good slave owners." Can you be a good slave owner? I'm more proud of what my relatives on the Hemings side accomplished than the accomplishments of Thomas Jefferson, who had all the advantages. He came from rich parents and had a fine education, whereas our ancestors came from scratch, so to speak.
Edgar Forrest Love, in Lanier and Feldman 94
24) There are those that say that you have to have legal proof, that you have to be able to prove it in the courts--and this is true, particularly when you talk about the graveyard, where there is a legal deed restriction involved. But part of me wants to say that slavery was legal first. There is no possibility of having a legal document, because Jefferson and Hemings could not have been married. How can you have legal proof? Don't you have to take that into consideration when you're trying to figure out what evidence is enough?
Joy Rotch Boissevainm, keeper of the family graveyard at Monticello, in Lanier and Feldman 121
25) Monticello has been noted as the finest example of American architecture. Mr. Jefferson received the highest award from the American Institute of Architects. But black people built this building. And so we have a share in that celebrity. We have a share in America. We were the bulldozers. We were the ones who built the building, who made the gardens that Mr. Jefferson loved so much. It's time for us to have some recognition and for that fact, for our partnership, to be acknowledged.
Robert Cooley, III
26) While fears of exile to Georgia or Louisiana were allayed, the fragmentation of families by the sale was undiminished. Wormley Hughes and Joseph Fossett, whose freedom would not become effective until the next July Fourth, had to watch their wives and children sold to many different bidders. . . . The fragmentary records of the Monticello sale indicate that several eight- and nine-year-olds, in addition to the children over ten, were sold separately from their families.
Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day 144
27) To have acknowledged his octoroon children would have meant special suffering for them, since they would have been singled out publicly thereafter and denied the advantages of secret admission into the white society. The only way he could save his surviving slave children was to lose them.
Fawn Brodie, "Grandchildren"
28) She must have conducted herself discreetly, since the outside world knew so little of her. But she was no nonentity. Any woman who, willing or unwilling, held the close interest of Thomas Jefferson for at least 10 years, and probably well more than twice that time, was no casual light o' love.
Pearl Graham 101
29) I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that the cemetery at Monticello turned into a flash point in a 200-year-old controversy. At first, I blamed racism for the opposition of Monticello Association members to the Hemingses. But over the last two years, my opinion has changed. While racism explains the intransigence of a small percentage of members, it doesn't apply at all to the far larger majority. So if racism isn't to blame, what is?
Lucian K. Truscott, "Children"
30) And so what are we to take away from all of this? I'm afraid that what I have to say may sound simplistic and perhaps redundant, but it bears repeating. Frank and I were taught (and so were our sisters, and so have we taught our children) that we were not better than the kids around us simply because we were lucky enough to have white skin. That's what Mr. Jefferson was writing about in the Declaration of Independence: that if we're all equal, then luck has nothing to do with it. While he failed to carry out this marvelous ideal in his own life, we have learned much from Mr. Jefferson, and we have much to thank him for, but in the end his most profound teaching may have been that, by his actions, we have learned he was just a man.
Lucian K. Truscott, "Tom and Sally"
31) "It [a statement in a Monticello pamphlet] really shows an attempt to pour sand over history. Truth crushed to the earth will rise again." Jefferson found a personal solution [to the problem of slavery] when he accepted Sally Hemings, Jackson said. He just couldn't find a political one.
Jesse Jackson
32) What makes us confront someone over a 200-year-old racial wound or defend a great-ancestor that even our grand-parents didn't know? I think this happens because our racial and family identities tie us to our group's past. They fold this past into us as individuals so that we can feel yesterday's wounds almost as powerful as today.
Shelby Steele, Frontline: Jefferson's Blood
33) Hopefully, a day will come when this won't be a story about land and blood and race. One day it will be a story about an American family.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, in Lanier and Feldman 83
34) I can't forgive him, because he should have done something for us. He didn't do it. No, I can't forgive him for that. But he is my great-great-grandfather. And so I have to temper my feelings for him in that respect.
Robert Cooley, III
35) Many questions linger about Sally Hemings. What is known as fact is that she was a slave and that she was owned by Thomas Jefferson. The beautiful Sally Hemings enjoyed experiences rarely afforded a slave. She traveled, learned a second language, apparently could read and write, and was given specialized training. She bartered freedom for her children and died a free woman. Unfortunately, because Sally lived most of her life as a slave, what she thought, felt, and valued was not recorded--except through the stories handed down by her descendants from generation to generation.
Lanier and Feldman 39
36) It is clear that the Hemings family members lived a distinctly different life from other Monticello slaves and seem to have been, in effect, a caste apart. Betty Hemings and her daughters were spared the annual task of helping to harvest the wheat, when virtually every other able bodied person was drafted. Her sons were exceptional as the only slaves allowed to hire themselves out to other masters for their own benefit. As house servants, whose tasks were performed within view of Jefferson's family and Monticello visitors, the Hemingses received clothing that distinguished them from the rest of the enslaved community.
Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day 105-106
37) DNA? If you have this genetic marker, you're lucky, but if you have that one, you're not? Is that what separates us? No. Prejudice separates us, and it always has. That's why the recent DNA evidence about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, while fascinating and historically significant, will probably end up one day as a footnote to a story that is much, much larger than whether or not they had children, and which of their children's descendants is or isn't a "real" Jefferson.
Lucian K. Truscott, "Tom and Sally"
38) Jefferson was now a compromised man where slavery was concerned. And more and more a fatalism crept into his thinking on the subject. He had brought America's racial divide into his own family. He would spawn two lines of descendants -- one legitimate, one not. And this bastardized part of his family would be driven by a sense of incompleteness. Some would take up the convenience of passing for white. Others would be driven back through time to establish that connection with Jefferson himself, to put the lie to bastardization.
Shelby Steele, Frontline: Jefferson's Blood
39) Sally had chosen not to stay in Paris even though she knew the child she was carrying and all of her children would be born slaves. Her master had explained to her the law passed in 1785--the law that classified all of her children as legally white since neither their mother nor grandmother was black or pure African. Foolhardy or not she had had such hopes; their love for each other was certain to overcome the barriers of slavery. She was sure he would see that their children would not suffer her fate. The freedom promised to all of them when each reached the age of twenty-one had seemed attainable until he became the President of the United States. Now Tom had become a victim of politics and his future questionable.
Minnie Shumate Woodson 38
40) One thing I really resent, and this is a personal opinion, is being told that we're doing this just to be politically correct. I was trained as a scholar and a historian, and I've always believed that if you want something to be accurate, it has to be inclusive. You can't pick and choose and tell only part of a story. At Monticello, scholarship drives the mission.
Dan Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation which owns and operates
Monticello, in Lanier and Feldman 113
41) You look at his children. We are . . . we are phenomenal. In this family of mineâ€"I'm just a part of itâ€"but we have college professors, we have military generals. I've got a three-star general who's a cousin. We've got UN diplomats. We've got teachers, businesspeople. We are an absolutely awesome family.
Robert Cooley, III
42) As a researcher and scientist, I understand that you have certain biases. You can manipulate. And you are biased by who is involved and who the funding agency is. I'm not disputing their integrity. I'm disputing who's involved and what controls have been placed. I can't vouch for the entire study. I just can't. But look who was positive. Eston's line. Eston was one of the last kids. Eston comes when Jefferson was an old man and totally out of political office, after he had finished doing most of his major writing. So we can go around and around about what Dr. Foster's team's motivations might have been, and I can't say that the test's not accurate. If they had taken DNA from my brother, then I would believe it as representing me, but they didn't. The point is we know who we are.
Michelle Cooley Quille, in Lanier and Feldman 49
43) Eston Heming (1808-1856) seems to present the most intriguing pattern of denying miscegenation (mixture of races). In Thomas Jefferson's third codicil to his will of March, 1826, he apprenticed Eston to his uncle, John Hemings. "Daddy John," the slave carpenter, was to retain him until he became twenty-one, in 1829. His unusual first name is the middle name of Jefferson's son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph's brother-in-law, Thomas Eston Randolph. Eston, the product of a quadroon woman and a white man vacillated between being listed as white (Virginia), mulatto (Ohio) and then as he moved further west, "passed" into white society.
Judith Justus 89
44) There is no way to recover the true circumstances surrounding the acts that produced so many nearly white slaves at Monticello. The extreme imbalance of power in a slave society made the whole idea of consent, when it concerned a female slave and a free white man, especially if he owned her, an absurdity. Nevertheless, it is apparent that interracial sex in Virginia and elsewhere in the south took every form from the most cruel exploitation to the most enduring affection.
Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day 115
45) I was devastated. I had believed the DNA test would give the Hemings/Jefferson/Woodson families a platform from which we could all tell our side of the story. After all, had we not participated, there would have been no test. The Washington Post is read by network television newsrooms, NPR, and the rest of the journalistic world. I knew others would follow the lead of the Washington Post and the New York Times. Had I known we would be ignored by the newspapers of record, I would not have provided a blood sample.
Byron Woodson 210
46) I pray that we will be fair to our cousins and to ourselves and to our history and to the memory not only of Thomas Jefferson but of Sally Hemings, and that we will do the right thing. Standing together, we are ancient evidence of the lie at the heart of racism, because in the words of Thomas Jefferson, we were created equal. We are Jefferson's children. We are a family.
Lucian K. Truscott, "Children"
47) I say yes, he's a racist. I think any slaveholder is a racist. Well, sociologists may try to make some distinctions, but clearly Jefferson was what we call in the black community "colorstruck." If a person was not of a certain hue, if a person's skin color was not a certain coloration, he wouldn't have any relationship with them. And, from that standpoint, yes. Denying people freedom just because of their color is racism in the highest form, in my judgment. And that's represented by slaveholding.
Robert Cooley, III
48) It makes no sense to me [Shelby Steele] why someone who is 3/4's white should be considered entirely black. But this old Virginia law wasn't after common sense. Its goal was to make whiteness itself a source of power. 18th century America was both a nation and a racial identity. The nation was committed to freedom, while the racial identity was a formula for power and exclusion. In the story of Thomas Jefferson and his descendants is a story of racial identity and its cruel exclusions played out in one family over 200 years.
Shelby Steele, Frontline: Jefferson's Blood
49) Tom wasn't dismissed, so he remained standing there watching his father [Jefferson] as he walked over and pulled the sash then walked up to him, put a hand on his shoulder, sighed, withdrew his hand and then with a troubled frown said, "Tom we can't always live as we should like to, if there were not other people . . . Well, I hope you have a safe trip."
Minnie Shumate Woodson 232
50) All graveyards are sacred ground, the one at Monticello no more sacred than any other. As an acknowledged descendant of Thomas Jefferson, I have the birthright to be buried in the family graveyard at Monticello near the spot where we buried my father last year and my mother the year before. Yet in the sadness of returning to Monticello time and again over the years to visit the graves of relatives or to bury one of them, even as I have grown older and become more aware of what an intimate and powerful place a family graveyard is, I have not until recently recognized how sad it is for a family with a history reaching back as far as my own, a family to which I am in fact related, not to have a graveyard of its own or the right to share ours. While my fifth great-grandfather and great-grandmother and great-uncles and aunts and my own parents are buried in a family plot visited by more than a half-million people a year, the family of Sally Hemings, with whom Thomas Jefferson had a relationship for 36 years after the death of his wife, has no known graveyard.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, "Children of Monticello"
51) In November 1998, DNA all but confirmed that Thomas Jefferson had a long relationship and children with a woman who was his slave. DNA subjected this great man to a kind of fall. . . . Jefferson thought more deeply about slavery, understood its evil more clearly, than any other statesman of his generation. He was 100 years or more ahead of his time. . . . Now black descendants are pressing for inclusion in the Jefferson Family Association and the right to be buried in the family's graveyard. DNA had made both the dead and the living accountable in new ways. . . . This is the story of Thomas Jefferson, his descendants, and the mysterious power of race. Is Jefferson still heroic? Are his descendants black or white? Does race make family impossible for them? Or can they comprise a family despite race?
Shelby Steele, Frontline: Jefferson's Blood
52) Her life meant nothing. She [Sally] thought of herself as a tool. It was her children who would be freed to live as she had always wished she could live. Somehow she hoped they would let her know of their lives after freedom; let her share in the dreams she had built for them; sacrificed for them.
Minnie Shumate Woodson 210
53) This year, rules were passed barring guests from the graveyard and limiting to two the number of guests a member could invite to the reunion. I did not attend the meeting, but my sister Ginny was there. When she rose before the crowd to ask the purpose of the rules, Nat Abeles, the association president, replied that I had abused the privilege in 2001 by inviting 26 guests, conveniently omitting to mention that all of them were Hemings cousins. (It's worth noting, too, that the association bylaws do not limit the number of guests one can invite.) When Ginny pointed out that he didn't explain why guests were banned from the graveyard, another cousin grabbed the microphone. What he said, according to Ginny and three other people who were in the room, was that he had no interest in associating with the Hemings received, he blurted out what must have been on nearly everyone else's minds. The members of the Monticello Association have spoken clearly about who they want to associate with, and which values they hold dear. They've made their choice, and now I'm going to make mine. I will not be going to Monticello Association's annual family reunion again.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, "Children of Monticello"
54) I think that one of the things that all the progress in DNA technology is going to show is that, of course, everybody is related to everybody. We share 99.9 percent of all our DNA; it's the same from one person to the next throughout the world. So, sure we're related. And we're also related to worms! And everything else! That's why this biological aspect of the story to me is the least important. It's classical science--every answer opens more questions than it answers.
Dr. Eugene Foster, in Lanier and Feldman 52
55) Despite Jefferson's flaws and contradictions, his legacy is of immense value. To examine his life is to examine the most difficult and challenging aspects of American culture. He was at the center of the birth of this nation. He continues to be at the center of its development as we ponder how we came to be the people we are today.
Lanier and Feldman 31
56) In the light of my family story, Mr. Jefferson becomes even a greater man than we know. Because, you see, as the historians have presently sculpted his history, he was something of an impossibility. He was a god. And that makes his accomplishments, then, less human. But when you put into the equation the human side of Jefferson, and the fact that as a man he had the same frailties, the same desires, the same emotions that all men have, then when you look at what Jefferson has accomplished in his lifetime and what still reverberates through the centuries, you say, "My God, this man was a giant."
Robert Cooley, III
57) It was in the main house, where Sally Hemings and her relations worked, that the daily lives of black and white were most inextricably linked. There, intimate secrets as well as knowledge, stories, and music must have been shared. Monticello's domestic servants, almost all members of a single family, had the greatest opportunity to learn from and influence Thomas Jefferson and his children and grandchildren.
Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day 101
58) The "Tom didn't exist" school of thought has moved into the new millennium, albeit in a modified version. A new generation of Jeffersonians, including Dianne Swann-Wright and Joshua Rothman claim that Tom didn't exist, but most of them take the position that, while Sally Hemings did give birth to a son in 1790, the baby died in childhood.
Byron Woodson 206
59) She is thought to have been buried behind the house, somewhere on the acre hers sons owned. Freed slaves usually held no community-owned land that could have been used for a church or a graveyard and thus often buried their dead where they lived. If indeed Sally was interred behind her sons' house, her body today lies beneath the parking lot of a Hampton Inn.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, "Children of Monticello"
60) You know the bond we have. Within these walls you [Sally] are my wife and I [Jefferson] am your husband. I wish it could be a public commitment. You know that I love you. My life would be nothing but a shell without you.
Minnie Shumate Woodson 21
61) She was a wonderful woman. Sally Hemings was bright. And you may say, "Well, how do you know that?" Well, we know that her son James was a chef. Now, Mr. Jefferson would not have entrusted his cooking to a dummy. But James was very bright. Robert, her brother, was a great cabinetmaker. Sally, we know, was tutored in French for nearly two years. I was in France when I was in the army and walked the very streets that she did, the Champs Élysé és and others. I know the feeling of freedom there. This was in the '60s when I was there. And I also speak French. I know that you must have some degree of intelligence to be able to master French. Sally was sensitive. She knew who she was. She knew that her sister was ultimately the First Lady of America. She was very sensitive. She did not like slavery. She was free in France. And I don't mean to demean Mr. Jefferson, but the fact is that he was holding slaves in France, which was illegal. But it didn't appear to bother him one bit. Nonetheless, the relationship there was different. She had freedoms. She was introduced to society. She was tutored. She learned music. At that time, Sally Hemings was a cultured person.
Robert Cooley, III
62) [Robert H. Cooley III's] dying wish, as a proud descendant of Thomas Woodson, was to be buried in the Monticello graveyard, a request that was denied. The incident started the dialogue as to whether or not the Hemingses should be accepted as legitimate descendants of Thomas Jefferson.
Lanier and Feldman 43
63) It is the fate of her children that reveals most about Sally Hemings. No other enslaved woman at Monticello achieved what she did--the freedom of all of her children, at an age when they could set the courses of their lives. Madison Hemings's allusions to the promises Jefferson made to his mother to persuade her to leave France evoke a woman who, although limited by her race and condition, exercised a measure of control over her own destiny. The several references to Jefferson's "promise," "treaty," and "solemn pledge" even suggest Sally Hemings's strength and agency at other times in her life, condensed for the sake of transmitting a story into the single negotiation over the return to Virginia.
Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day 117
64) I wanted my family's oral history to be substantiated, but I also wished to prevent the controversy from haunting me for the rest of my life. I wanted to accept whatever seemed to be the truth and hoped for a credible process.
Byron Woodson 202
65) I know where my ancestors are buried, going all the way back to Mr. Jefferson himself. But what about Sally Hemings? Where is she buried? Well, more than 200 years after slaves labored and were born and died at Monticello, the location of the slave graveyard is still unknown.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, "Children of Monticello"
66) And so what are we to take away form all of this? I'm afraid that what I have to say may sound simplistic and perhaps redundant, but it bears repeating. Frank and I were taught (and so were our sisters, and so have we taught our children) that we were not better than the kids around us simply because we were lucky enough to have white skin. That's what Mr. Jefferson was writing about in the Declaration of Independence: that if we're all equal, then luck has nothing to do with it. While he failed to carry out this marvelous ideal in his own life, we have learned much from Mr. Jefferson, and we have much to thank him for, but in the end his most profound teaching may have been that, by his actions, we have learned he was just a man.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, "Tom and Sally"
67) The other thing that motivated Mom's [Minnie Woodson] research was the fact that all of us feel something about race. My mother felt a lot of pain. She always wondered, "Why is there all this hatred?" That was her perspective.
Lanier and Feldman 40
68) In 1992, my father, Robert Cooley, stood up before eleven Virginia historians at a University of Virginia conference and proclaimed, "It's no story. I am a living descendant of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson." Not a single one of them called Daddy a liar. He knew more about what he was talking about than they did. They couldn't refute him. Not one person there said, "Shut up and sit down. You don't know what you're talking about." You would expect someone to challenge what he was saying. Even after the seminar, nobody even wrote or called or said anything to refute his claim. Daddy has always known who he was.
Michelle Cooley Quille, in Lanier and Feldman 44
69) If Mr. Jefferson had imposed himself upon her by taking unfair advantage of his position, then I would say, yes, it would have been wrong for him to have slept with Sally. But I don't believe that that is what occurred. It is certainly not in our history, in our own family's history, that that happened. We've been told that it was an honest, loving, wholesome relationship that existed between the two of them. So I don't see that as being wrong.
Robert Cooley, III
70) All the Hemings descendants I have met--over the last two years I have met hundreds--share a strong oral history, a powerful sense of family going back through the generations. As my cousin Shay Banks-Young has said to those who have questioned her being descended from Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, "No one has to tell me who I am descended from. I know who I am." But as strongly connected as the Hemingses are to one another and to their shared history, neither they nor any other descendants of slaves from Monticello have had the same sort of intimate tie to the place that we whose ancestors are buried just down the hill from Mulberry Row, the dirt path where slave quarters once stood, have enjoyed.
Lucian K. Truscott, "Children"
71) The real victory has been that we began a dialogue, and that's how you break stereotypes. That's how you end animosity, by sharing ideas and sharing commonalities. You find out how similar we are and that we have a common goal. I also think, for Shannon's generation, that you need to recognize that just being against the system doesn't do anything. You have to first learn the system and then work within it.
Michelle Cooley Quille, in Lanier and Feldman 47
72) The controversy over Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is not about whether yet another president had sex with a woman who was not his wife. The issue is about race, because what is at stake is whether or not our nation's history will include the history of African Americans, including the oral histories passed down by slaves. Our Hemings cousins have taught us a truth that is clearly uncomfortable to some: that there were more "founding fathers" than we had thought. Some were indeed the men referred to in common history texts, but some were slaves who gave up their sweat and their blood laboring in bondage, and some of the founders, of all things, were mothers. One among many was Sally Hemings. The vote by Jefferson's descendants to deny our Hemings cousins is a failure not only of history but of courage. If we cannot stand up and admit that in the end, despite his great accomplishments, Jefferson was a man like any other, if we cannot admit to the imperfections of a great nation and acknowledge the contributions of slaves to its founding, who will?
Lanier and Feldman 151
73) This is not just a family squabble. That the stakes are very high is reflected in the story of the two most recent family reunions at Monticello. The last two years have left us with questions that we must answer at the 2001 reunion. When we meet this May, the decisions reached by my side of the family will reverberate far beyond the hotel banquet room in Charlottesville where speeches will be made and votes taken. We all are aware that the world is waiting and will be watching what we say and what we do, as we determine the future of that half-acre of hillside.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, "Children of Monticello"
74) I think that if you grow up with the belief that you are a descendant of whomever you admire, then that will have shaped your cultural heritage, your attitudes, and many other things about your life. I think that's the case with the Woodson family. They know that they are descendants of Thomas Woodson--Sally and Thomas's first child--maybe not biologically, but it doesn't matter, because they're certainly spiritually and intellectually related to him. That's much of what makes them who they are.
Dr. Eugene Foster, in Lanier and Feldman 51
75) The graveyard became an issue two years ago, after the death of Robert Cooley, a fourth-generation great-grandson of Thomas Woodson, Sally Hemings's first son. When Cooley died, his daughter Michele called the then president of the Monticello Association and asked permission to bury her father at Monticello. Robert Cooley had spent his lifetime working to get the descendants of Sally Hemings recognized as descendants of Thomas Jefferson, and it had long been his wish to be laid to rest at Monticello. The president of the Monticello Association sent a brief reply saying no.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, "Children of Monticello"
76) There were, of course, some people on both the Jefferson and Hemings sides who wanted to fight. But that ain't cool. That ain't what's good for America. That just keeps racism going. Here we are, the young people of America coming up--the descendants of this great man--and we're going to keep racism going? That isn't what he would've wanted.
William Dalton, in Lanier and Feldman 107
77) I have something special to tell you." With those words, uttered one spring day more than 20 years ago, Robert Cooley III beckoned his three children into the master bedroom of their rambling Victorian home. Cooley was a remarkable man. He had earned two bronze stars in Vietnam and become Virginia's first African American federal magistrate and general district court judge. Now, Cooley told his children-- Lisa, 13; Michele, 12; and Robert, 9--something remarkable about their own history. They were the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of Thomas Jefferson. They were descended from a man named Thomas Woodson, who was the oldest of five children born to a slave named Sally Hemings and fathered by Jefferson.
Michele Cooley-Quille, qtd. in Hendricks
78) Monticello . . . his home. Whenever he [Tom Woodson] thought of Monticello, he sank into the valley of his lonesomeness and the confusion of his youth raked his nave. Monticello and yes, his mother, were still his hub; the umbilical cord had not yet been severed. His banishment had scarred him, leaving him unfinished, lonely, and insecure. He craved his return even though he was repulsed by the idea of seeing Mr. Jefferson again. Mr. Jefferson . . . his father? Was he?
Minnie Shumate Woodson 4
79) The Woodson family history states Tom Hemings was sent to the Woodson plantation in Goochland County in 1803. This was in the middle of President Jefferson's terms, just before re-election. The reason was due to Callender's "Black Sal" story being public gossip and that this tall thirteen year old young man looked too much like the Jefferson family members.
Judith Justus 39
80) I had to overcome racism because I was brought up in a prejudiced environment. But after many years, with the help of my wife, I've shed that skin, and I've learned to take a whole different view: that people are people. This Hemings thing is history. The Jeffersons have to learn to live with it. You're not going to change history no matter what you do. But I'm proof that the cycle of racism can be broken.
Daniel Hemmings, in Lanier and Feldman 70
81) I mean, what exactly separates me and Frank and our sisters or our mother and father or our grandparents from Julian, the descendant of Monticello who wrote the accompanying piece, or from Julia Jefferson Westerinen, one of those descendants of Sally's son Eston, or from the late Robert Cooley, the descendant of Thomas Woodson, another of Sally's sons, or, for that matter, from the descendants of any of the eighty-three slaves who were owned by Mr. Jefferson at Monticello on the day when he wrote these words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…"? DNA? If you have this genetic marker, you're lucky, but if you have that one, you're not? Is that what separates us? NO. Prejudice separates us, and it always has. That's why the recent DNA evidence about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, while fascinating and historically significant, will probably end up one day as a footnote to a story that is much, much larger than whether or not they had children, and which of their children's descendants is or isn't a "real" Jefferson. This story isn't about DNA, and it's not about luck. It's about slavery, and it's about the rank prejudice that has contaminated our land with a racial fallout that has had a very long and dispiriting half-life.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, "Tom and Sally"
82) The stories from Sally Hemings' family are now written down so as not to be lost in the passage of time. The evidence presented from the Fosset, Woodson, Isaac, and Hemings families is a written recapitulation of their oral histories coupled with research. It is significant that the oral history has been preserved down through fourth and fifth generation family members. These members are variable productive members of society, ones that are labeled as high achievers. Whomever their ancestors were from the extended Jefferson family that orchestrated this classic case of miscegenation, the survivors have proved that the amalgamation was a positive one. Their stories matched on many points, and leave the way open for other families from Monticello to bring forth their stories.
Judith Justus 133
83) We know from the historical and the DNA data that Thomas Jefferson can be neither definitely excluded nor solely implicated in the paternity of illegitimate children with his slave Sally Hemings. The simple fact is that the DNA eliminated a long-held belief in the oral history of the Woodson family that they were grandchildren of Thomas Jefferson by having no match between Jefferson and Woodson. The Carr brothers were also eliminated by no match. Now, there was some Jefferson/Eston Hemings match--just some, not Thomas. So in the absence of any other Jefferson to suspect, guess who is left to blame: TOM. When in fact it could have been any one of eight Jeffersons including Thomas.
Herbert Barger, in Lanier and Feldman 55
84) That is why the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is so important. It shows us that the truth of our racial past has been right before our eyes all along. All we have to do as Americans is to wake up in the morning and go outside. Around us walk people who proudly present to the world their faces in a rich mix of colors. Their pride is all the evidence we'll ever need that race mixing is as American as apple pie, motherhood, and stock car racing.
Lanier and Feldman 7
85) The fact that the major player in the story is also a major player in the founding of this country has made the story all the more fascinating but at the same time very, very difficult for the historians and the defenders of Jefferson's legacy within my extended family, which is to say within the Monticello Association. For reasons that I think are clear to all of us now, they have sought to cling to a rather peculiar version of Mr. Jefferson. While hobbled by Mr. Jefferson's conflicted ideas about slavery, their version of him has held on to the fiction that he was unlike the other men who owned plantations and slaves, unlike even Mr. Jefferson's own wife's father, who had fathered Sally Hemings, Martha's half-sister. Now to the horror of the historians and Jefferson worshipers, DNA has reached around and bitten them in the ass. That we've finally had to discover the truth about this man in a test tube is the most dispiriting thing of all, for deep inside I think most of us have known the truth all along while remaining either unable or unwilling to admit it.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, "Tom and Sally"
86) The reflection her [Sally's] children cast in the new territories of Ohio and Wisconsin was concocted from empathy for their fellow man, interwoven with religious ideals and conviction. Her mirror image floats today in the large family of ministers, nurses, doctors, diagnostic medical personnel, engineers, computer experts, lawyers, writers, actors, political leaders, teachers, professors, secretaries, armed forces personnel, scientists, musicians, business men and women, Sunday School teachers, pharmacists, and other professions. This all commenced with her inspiring words to her five living children five generations ago. Her hundreds of living descendants in the Afro-American and Caucasian communities owe her a debt of gratitude for the work ethics, positive attitudes, and love of family that she instilled in her children.
Judith Justus 131
87) Yes, I have great hopes for this family--and for the greater extended family that is America. As with all families, communication is the key. We hope in some way the story of my family can inspire dialogue and communication in our greater American family. I urge everyone to take the journey that we have taken, to travel around and meet your family, to talk to your elders and hear their stories, to tap into the richness and variety that every American family holds and that we all have in common because we are, through our common history and our common blood, truly one American family.
Shannon Lanier, in Lanier and Feldman 139
88) On a bitterly cold day in January, the dismantling of Monticello began. . . . Six months of preliminaries led up to this moment, brought about by the enormous debt left by Jefferson at his death. His executor and grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, assumed the burden of responsibility for repayment of obligations in excess of $107,000. Respected local men were called in to assess the property on the Monticello plantation, which included the two quarter farms, Lego and Tufton, as well as the home farm. The appraisers assigned modest figures to the horses and mules, cattle, vehicles, axes and saws, hoes and plows. The 126 men, women, and children in the three inventories accounted for 90 percent of the $31,400 total appraised value of Jefferson's Albemarle County property (land and furnishings were not part of these inventories). In his advertisements Colonel Randolph described the slaves as "the most valuable for their number ever offered at one time in the State of Virginia."
Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day 141
89) It can never be minimized, the horror, the stigma, the fact, the act of slavery. I've read some of Mr. Jefferson's orders to his overseer while Jefferson was in Washington. And he had slaves out there in the Rivanna River trying to build a dam. They were trying to knock a mountain down. Jefferson . . . they say, "Oh, Mr. Jefferson was benevolent." That may have been, but he worked those people. He wrenched every ounce of energy that he could. He was...he may not have had them physically whipped for reasons of economics, because he needed them to work, but he worked them. Jefferson was not a very...he was not a milquetoast by any means, when it came to slavery. No sir. . . . But all of his life he's been surrounded by black people who have waited on him, who have supported him. And under those conditions, he was free to pursue his education and his writings. He didn't have to physically remove himself from those pursuits to do the mundane things in life because we did those for him. So, yes, we're partners with Jefferson. And that parallels America's development too. Black people from the 1600s have been in lockstep with colonists in America and we together have developed this great country.
Robert Cooley, III
90) Good afternoon. Welcome. (Applause.) Welcome back, Thomas. (Laughter.) Senator Warner and Senator Allen, it's good to see both. Congressman Goode, welcome. The First Lady of the Commonwealth of Virginia, it's good to see you again. And I want to thank all the descendants of Thomas Jefferson who are here. I want to thank the Jefferson scholars who are here. I want to thank my fellow Americans who are here. Welcome to the White House. . . . Jefferson holds the American imagination because he articulated the American creed. We declared our independence with his words, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. Jefferson is the poet laureate of American freedom. Our world echoes with Jefferson's ideals, even though Jefferson did not always act as if they were true. The same Thomas Jefferson who wrote the original ordinance banning slavery in the Northwest Territories lived on the labor of slaves. The same Jefferson who denied racial equality spoke ringing words of equal rights. . . . No wonder America sees itself in Thomas Jefferson. He was what we are: marked with faults, inspired by strong ideals. Thomas Jefferson still inspires us. . . . Like many great men, Thomas Jefferson leaves behind a complex legacy. Tomorrow would have been his 258th birthday. On his 358th birthday, Americans will still be debating his achievements and his faults, his words and his deeds.
George W. Bush
91) To pass out of a race always requires one to pass out of a family.
Shelby Steele, Frontline: Jefferson's Blood
