Stirring ‘Jefferson’s Daughters’ is our story

The most poignant literature gives a voice to the voiceless. And in Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America (Ballantine, 448 pp., ★★★☆), Catherine Kerrison tells us the stories of three of Thomas Jefferson’s children, who, because of their gender or race, lived lives whose most intimate details are lost to time.

More scholarly than lyrical, Jefferson’s Daughters pieces together letters, oral accounts and biographies to craft a portrait of Martha and Maria, Jefferson’s children with his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and Harriet, whose mother was the slave Sally Hemings. Their stories are shaped as much by the laws and social mores of Colonial America as they are by their father, a man of infuriating contradictions.

Jefferson doted on Martha and Maria, affording them an education at girls’ schools in Paris and the U.S. Martha was exposed to an intellectual ferment in Europe that encouraged political discourse.

But to be an outspoken woman back home was frowned upon. So Martha and Maria found subtle ways to push against patriarchy. Martha ensured that her daughters got an education on par with that of her sons. Maria, meanwhile, asserted her feelings about where she wanted to live, both as a child who had lost her mother and as a young newlywed.

Harriet’s voice is far fainter. As an enslaved black woman, it often was felt her experience was not worth noting. Yet what Kerrison discerns is intriguing, from Harriet apparently being named for one of Jefferson’s favorite relatives, to her brother’s account that when she was freed from plantation life, Harriet decided it would be best to go to Washington “to assume the role of a white woman.”

Kerrison does not sugarcoat the white women’s privileged status nor deny their racism. “It did not matter who her father was,” Kerrison writes. “All the Randolphs had to do was to look past her and, in their willful blindness, deprive her even of her name to ensure she understood her place.”

Jefferson did not give Harriet an education, an inheritance or even papers declaring her freed. But a historical account does say he had his overseer, Edmund Bacon, give her $50 and fare for a coach to Philadelphia — away from Virginia and slavery, forever.

Jefferson’s Daughters is a vivid reminder of both the ties that bind and the artificial boundaries that divide us.