Our on-again-off-again relationship started the day I was born in the Martha Jefferson Hospital. The name does double duty, as Jefferson's wife and daughter both bore the name. Hospitals should be embracing, caring places, and feminine names seem appropriate. No one would want to check in to the Thomas Jefferson Hospital, that would be too intimidating.
As I was growing up in Charlottesville, down the hill from the famous house, the Monticello Dairy delivered our milk; special occasions might be celebrated in the dining room of the Monticello Hotel; I saw Gene Autry and his horse Champion at the Jefferson Theater; we had one set of cousins living on Jefferson Street and another on Jefferson Park Avenue.
My father named one of his hunting dogs Thomas Jefferson, even though he had no special love for the third president. "Everything in this damn town is named Jefferson; I can't beat 'em'; might as well join 'em." The handsome liver and white pointer was called Jeff, but my father added names at a whim and encouraged me to do so too. Jeff's official name grew to be Thomas Jefferson Washington Jackson Anthony Airpump Alonzo Anselmo Dynaflow Randolph DeMarkley Garbage Scow Henshaw. my friends in high school used to set us up by encouraging newcomers ask my dog's name.
In the 1950s, residents of Charlottesville were given free passes to Monticello to encourage us to bring our visiting friends and family as paying customers. My mother ferried them up in her big boatlike Buicks. She wasn't particularly interested in Jefferson either, but she liked the old-fashioned flowers in the gardens.
My father wouldn't go: "If I want to see Monticello, I can look on the back of any nickel."
I enjoyed going to Monticello several times a year as a child. I liked the clock that told the day of the week with canon balls, the mammoth bones, the polygraph that allowed the writer to make an exact copy as he wrote, the smokehouse smelling fiercely of hams, bacon, and hickory smoke, the wooden feedboxes for the horses, the circular stone ice house built into the side of the hill. The tour guides were genteel ladies from town, some of them my mother's friends. They had soft, gracious Virginia accents and reverently referred to "Mr. Jefferson," a local cliche that still goes on.
When I got a little older, I was taken in by what I learned at my old-fashioned school. Our own native son Thomas Jefferson was the greatest of all presidents, author of the Declaration of Indepedence, brilliant shopper who doubled the nation's real eastate with the Louisiana Purchase and sent local heroes Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their daring expedition. He was tall, handsome, red-haired, an accomplished architect and musician. Of course there were plenty of other stars in the firmament of Virginia history, but none shined so brightly or cast such a long shadow as TJ.
That's what we called him in high school.
And who was afraid of Mrs. Thomas Jefferson Randolph V? We all were; she was the formidable headmistress of St. Anne's School. She had excellent posture, flashing black eyes, wore her iron-gray hair in braids around her head and well-tailored suits. She was not a warm maternal presence but her school had a reputation for academic excellence. Many Yankee girls came to St. Anne's as boarders, sent to acquire some Southern polish and/or get away from whatever trouble they'd had with boys at home. I suppose Mrs. Randolph's impeccable Virginian name with that Roman numeral after it must have impressed a few parents. Her appropriate first name was Augusta; we called her Gussie behind her back.
And imagine this: my mother had a close friend who was Mrs. Thomas Jefferson Randolph IV: a kinder, prettier, white haired Mrs. Randolph, named Nancy. An artist of sorts, she painted stiff, lifeless oil portraits of my two grandmothers (those from photographs), my mother, and me. These are gathering dust in my barn in Michigan now; no one can figure out what to do with them.
At St. Anne's our history teacher did point out the inconsistency of TJ's status as a slave holder when he had written "All men are created equal..." etc., but she didn't dwell on it. And certainly no one mentioned the rumors about his relationship with Sally Hemings, which had started in 1802. In the '50s that would have been absolutely scandalous; impossible to imagine that the great man was fathering children with a slave, no matter that she was very pretty, only an eighth African, and the half-sister of his deceased wife Martha.
So when the biography Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History was published by historian Fawn Brodie in 1974, I eagerly read it; when the DNA evidence that TJ must have fathered Sally's youngest son Eston was published in 1998, I cheered. TJ finally came off his saintly pedestal and we saw that his feet were stained with Albemarle red clay. He freed Sally's sons but not Sally.
Recently I went back to Monticello. I looked forward to seeing the house again and restored vegetable gardens where the parking lots used to be. And i was curious to hear how the tour guide would handle the Sally Hemings question, if it came up.
The businesslike young woman pointed out a cabinet in TJ's library that was made by master carpenter and slave, John Hemings. She went on to say that this was the brother of Sally Hemings, who was the mother of six of Jefferson's children. No one commented and the guide moved us along into the study. Monticello was more interesting than ever and I was glad to see it all again.
It's unlikely that we will ever know anything substantial about the real quality of the relationship between TJ and Sally, as his children and grandchildren destroyed any pertinent documentary material. The book by Annette Gordon-Reed The Hemings of Monticello: An American Family is fascinating account of several generations of the slave family. TJ died in 1826. But in the census of 1830 she is listed a free white woman living on Main Street in Charlottesville. Where, exactly, on Main Street I'd like to know.
Since my mother's family in Albemarle County dates back to the mid-18th century, I wonder if I could find a connection, even though i knew we weren't related to TJ. Rummaging around in my mother's family tree, I found George Gilmer. He was TJ's personal physician and a close friend. In fact it was to Gilmer that TJ wrote from Paris in an often quoted letter of 1890, "I am happy nowhere else and in no other society, and all my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello." Gilmer's great-grandaughter was my great-grandmother. This was as close as i could come.
Ironically, my great-great-great-great-great grandfather on my mother's side also at least knew Jefferson. Pierre Chouteau of St. Louis accompanied a group of Osage indian chiefs to meet the president in 1804 and another in 1806. But that is another story.
When i moved to Detroit in the '60s, we lived a few blocks off Jefferson Avenue; my son lived on Jefferson Street in Ann Arbor. When someone says, "Let's go to TJ's for lunch," I don't think 'Traffic Jam,' I think the old man has invited us. The blather on the new granola box reassures me that hemp is a fine, healthy ingredient and that TJ himself grew hemp. An ad for rare books on the back page of the New York Times reminds us that TJ was a passionate book collector.
I can't get away from TJ but now he seems like a truly interesting, inconsistent human being.
