Date published: 6/3/2002

SARASOTA, FLA.--On more
than a few occasions, I've made
the trek up the hill to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and peered over the fence surrounding his grave and the graves of his family members. I haven't been there in a while, but I wouldn't mind checking in now to see if there's any spinning going on.

Recently, the Monticello Association--a group of 700 or so descendants of Jefferson and his wife, Martha--voted down a plan to allow relatives of the slave Sally Hemings to join their ranks and, among other things, earn the right to be buried in the family cemetery.

The association also rejected a proposal to create a new group to find ways to honor and educate the public about the Monticello slaves. A third plan, to establish a separate graveyard for the Hemings descendants, languished without a vote.

"Our intent was to kill this forever so it doesn't come up again," John H. Works Jr., a former president of the association, said. "This should do it."

To make himself perfectly clear, Works e-mailed a proponent of the membership proposal--a picture of a black man with a zipper across his mouth. Nobody missed the point.

As a kid growing up in Virginia, I used to hear bits and pieces of the stories about Jefferson fathering a child with Hemings. It seemed like a daring act--a white man, a president no less, and a black woman falling in love, in defiance of custom and law.

As I grew older, though, I began to see the nuances more clearly. If Jefferson did father one or more children with Hemings, was it by force? And, even if their union was consensual, how pure could it have really been, given the nature of their relationship as master and slave? How much of a "choice" could she possibly have felt she had?

Eventually, I stopped giving the stories much thought at all, even on my treks up the hill. I figured the Hemings family lore was true to a degree, but that--as some Jefferson scholars said--the father was someone else in Jefferson's family.

Before we were married, my wife and I visited the Monticello gift shop and bought a copy of a ring Jefferson designed. It's on my left hand now. Mostly we liked the looks of it, but it held an additional meaning for me because I'd cultivated an interest in Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom, one of three accomplishments he asked to be noted on his tombstone.

The statute was a brilliantly simple (and revolutionary) document that said, among other things, that "our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions." James Madison helped get it passed into law, and he later incorporated it in the First Amendment.

Date published: 6/3/2002