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  • The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
  • John Lauritz Larson (bio)
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. By Annette Gordon-Reed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. Pp. 608. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.00; Paper, $18.95.)

Here is a book that was not written, cannot be read, and will not be reviewed with the crisp academic efficiency that I usually endorse. Annette Gordon-Reed's collective biography of The Hemingses of Monticello is an epic tale capturing (on the head of a pin, as it were) the enormous tragedy that was American slavery, the staggering complexity of the human heart, the sometimes brutal intersections in our lives of race and sex and power, the sting of unrequited longing to be acknowledged that comes with every instance of denial, the lure of fame, the terror of history, the shame of rank transgressions, the risks (and rewards) involved in dredging it all up anew. It is hard to say when I have read a "bigger" book; no wonder at all that it won the 2008 National Book Award for nonfiction and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for history.

The story starts in the 1730s with the birth in colonial Virginia of Elizabeth Hemings "to an African mother and an English father." It ends with her descendents, ninety years on, keeping watch over the dying body of Thomas Jefferson, a white Virginian whose soaring rhetoric helped crack the shell of race-based slavery and whose personal needs and imperfections kept most of those Hemingses enslaved to his will until his final hour and beyond. In between we meet three generations of enslaved African Americans whose stories upset every one of the neat analytical pronouncements with which we try to put this history behind us. Readers of this particular journal will expect the last word on the "story of Sally and Tom"—and it is here; but as the title correctly insists, Gordon-Reed's book is about the slave family who lived their lives constrained by nested boxes of ownership, race, sex, exploitation, law, love, and loyalty.

Equally at home in law and history, Gordon-Reed has lavished on this family history an exhaustive feat of research, trans-Atlantic in scope, as thorough and creative as all the CSI wizards could imagine, focused not on the famous man who owned the mountain (already the object of way too much attention) but on persons Jefferson labored all his life to erase from the record. As hard as it is to track "life among the lowly" (as Harriet Beecher Stowe styled it), how much harder is it when your antagonist [End Page 730] elides the crumbs as fast as your subjects scatter them? And don't forget the "disinformation" laid on by parties in whose interest it remains to curse the darkness. With rare patience Gordon-Reed conducts a running seminar on research methods, historiography, law and process, formal logic, human psychology, race relations, and the pain of memory as she turns evidence cards face up, one by one, building her case, testing hypotheses, casting about for the next expository move.

But what about the dirt on Sally and Tom? Was it rape? Yes and no. Was it love? Yes and no. Was she almost white? Yes and no. Did that matter? Yes and no. Was he deluded? Self-serving? Hypocritical? Yes and no. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings shared an intimate relationship for thirty-eight years, spanning most of his public life, which produced seven children, four who survived to adulthood, none of whom he acknowledged, all of whom went free (but only two with his explicit blessing). Yet this is not the "Sally and Tom" of James Calendar's slanderous tales. Much of this relationship simply defies complete understanding—because the record is thin or corrupted, and because these two persons (like all persons not invented by historians) were opaque and contradictory. Neither devotees nor critics of the master of Monticello will find smug comfort in this book, but they will all be moved to ponder what we can know—and dare to say—about the human past.

Of particular interest in this tome are the discussions of the Hemingses in...

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