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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.
A few years ago, DNA testing established a link between the Jefferson and Hemings families. Other evidence, concerning travels and birth dates, suggests that it was Thomas Jefferson, after all, who fathered Sally Hemings' children.
I'd still like to think that it was love that brought them together. But, sadly, on the subject of race, Jefferson's thinking was sometimes indistinguishable from the mass of men who--some years after his death--would take up arms in defense of slavery and white supremacy.
Genius though he was, Jefferson was fully a white man of his times. In his writings, he coldly, pseudoscientifically assessed the intellect and temperament of African-Americans and found them wanting. He argued in letters that the nation's slaves should be freed, but he never made it a public cause.
For accuracy's sake, I'd like to know for sure that it was Jefferson--rather than, say, his brother--who fathered Hemings' children. But the existing scientific evidence is clear: The Hemings family and the Jefferson family are linked.
The next time I peer into the cemetery, I'll think of that. And I may recall the words of Lucian Truscott IV, a white Jefferson descendant and an outspoken proponent of welcoming the Hemings family.
"Standing together," Truscott says of his black cousins, "we are ancient evidence of the lie at the heart of racism, because in the words of Thomas Jefferson, we were created equal."
Sooner or later, I suspect the rest of the Jefferson clan will begin to see things that way, too. It's a pity Jefferson can't return to set things right himself. I'd like to think he would escort John H. Works Jr. down the hill--with one foot planted firmly on the fellow's behind.
DARYL LEASE, formerly of The Free Lance-Star, is an editorial writer and columnist for the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Fla., where this commentary first appeared.