San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Slave mistress gets her due at Monticello
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The room — brick-floored, plaster-walled, empty — is simple.
The life it represents was anything but.
The newly opened space at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s palatial mountaintop plantation, is presented as the living quarters of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who bore the Founding Father’s children.
But it’s more than an exhibit. It’s the culmination of a 25-year effort to grapple with the reality of slavery in the home of one of liberty’s most eloquent champions.
The Sally Hemings room opened to the public Saturday, alongside a room dedicated to the oral histories of the descendants of slaves at Monticello, and the earliest kitchen at the house, where Hemings’ brother cooked.
The public opening deals a final blow to two centuries of ignoring, playing down or covering up what amounted to an open secret during Jefferson’s life: his relationship with a slave that spanned nearly four decades.
To make the exhibit possible, curators had to wrestle with a host of thorny questions. How to accurately portray a woman for whom no photograph exists? (The solution: casting a shadow on a wall.) How to handle the skepticism of those who remain unpersuaded by the mounting evidence that Jefferson indeed was the father of Hemings’ children? (The solution: tell the story entirely in quotes from her son Madison.)
And, thorniest of all, in an era of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo: How to describe the decadeslong sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings? Should it be described as rape?
“We really can’t know what the dynamic was,” said Leslie Greene Bowman, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. “Was it rape? Was there affection? We felt we had to present a range of views, including the most painful one.”
After a DNA test in 1998, the nonprofit foundation, which owns Monticello, determined that there was a “high probability” that Jefferson fathered at least one of Hemings’ children, and that he likely fathered them all. The new exhibit asserts Jefferson’s paternity as a fact.
The “Life of Sally Hemings” exhibit is perhaps the most striking example of the sea change that has taken place at Monticello, as the foundation has increasingly focused on highlighting the stories of Monticello’s slaves.
The foundation has embarked on a multiyear, $35 million project aimed at restoring Monticello to the way it looked when Jefferson was alive. It rebuilt a slave cabin and workshops where slaves labored, and has hosted reunions there for the descendants of the enslaved population, including sleepovers. It removed a public bathroom installed in 1940s atop slave quarters.
And it is phasing out the popular “house tour” of the mansion, which made only minimal mention of slavery alongside Jefferson’s accomplishments, radically changing what’s experienced by the more than 400,000 tourists who visit Monticello annually.
Thanks to a short description given by one of Jefferson’s grandsons, historians believe Hemings lived in the slave quarters in the South Wing.
But they aren’t sure which room.
Curators decided to tell Hemings’ story in one of the rooms. Instead of making it a period room with objects that she might have had, they left it empty, projecting the words of her son Madison on the wall to tell her story.
The 1995 movie “Jefferson in Paris” imagined that Hemings and Jefferson loved each other. But no one knows how they really felt.
Their sexual relationship is believed to have started in France, where slavery was outlawed. Hemings wanted to remain in Paris, where she could have been granted freedom, but she eventually returned to Virginia with Jefferson after he offered her extraordinary privileges and freedom for any children she might have, according to an account by Madison Hemings.
Her children, who all were fair-skinned and named after Jefferson’s friends, were freed when they reached adulthood.
No portrait or photograph exists of Hemings. Even her skin tone remains a mystery, and a source of controversy. Cartoons in the 18th century, which aimed to derail Jefferson’s political career, portrayed her as dark-skinned. But her father was a white plantation owner and her mother, an enslaved woman, was of mixed race. One account described Hemings as “mighty near white.” Hence, curators at Monticello opted not to recreate a physical image of her.
Curators struggled for months over how to describe the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson, and in particular whether to use the word “rape” in the exhibit. The foundation held conference calls and meetings with historians, board members and descendants to discuss the question.
“There are a lot of people who believe rape is too polarizing a word,” said Niya Bates, a public historian at Monticello.
In the end, historians opted to use the word “rape” with a question mark, knowing that some would criticize them for including the word, while others would have criticized them for leaving it out.
The question is asked on a plaque outside the Hemings exhibit titled “Sex, Power and Ownership.” It spells out the power dynamic between the two: Under Virginia law, Hemings was Jefferson’s property.
At reunions of the descendants of Monticello’s slaves, the question of whether Jefferson is guilty of rape has sparked heated arguments.
“I really don’t think slaves had a choice,” said Rosemary Medley Ghoston, a retired hairdresser in Ohio who discovered in the 1980s, through genealogical research, that she was a descendant of Madison Hemings. “Maybe if it was not rape, it was a duty that she had to fulfill.”
But her distant cousin, Julius “Calvin” Jefferson, whom she met at a descendants’ event, feels differently.
“I think it was a love story,” he said, noting that Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife, Martha, whose death had devastated him. “Did she look like Martha? I think she did.”