Society: Jefferson's Children A descendant of the
author of the Declaration of Independence challenges
his family to embrace the offspring of a slave.

This article originally appeared in Life Magazine, July 1, 1999. It is © 1999, Lucian K. Truscott, IV and is used by permission of the author.

Frank and I would stay for an hour in her bedroom, listening to her stories as she brushed her waist-length gray hair, handing us fistfuls so we could put it on her window ledge for the cardinals to build their nests with. Her grandfather was Thomas Jefferson Randolph. His grandfather was Thomas Jefferson. Thus, Mary Walker Randolph grew up with a man who had spent 34 years of his life with Mr. Jefferson. Between my ears and Mr. Jefferson's lips were only two people, one of whom was sitting in the room with us.

History has all the tension of a cheap Slinky and collapses as quickly when you think of how close we are to Mr. Jefferson, not in years but in human beings and what they have told us. My great-grandmother never told us that her grandfather had told her that Mr. Jefferson had had two families--one with his wife, Martha, from whom we were descended, and one with his slave Sally Hemings. People didn't talk about miscegenation, not in Virginia back when it was still a crime they didn't, and most especially they didn't accuse Mr. Jefferson of the crime of "race mixing." But there was another reason: Our great-grandmother was one of the founders of the Monticello Association, which has clung stubbornly to its oral history that someone--anyone--other than Mr. Jefferson fathered Sally's children.

But what of the oral history of Michele Cooley-Quille or Phyllis Everett or any of the other Sally Hemings descendants who, because I invited them, were accepted as guests by the Monticello Association at the family reunion for the first time in its 86-year history? What of Shay Banks-Young, who told The Washington Post: "My mother's great-grandmother was Jefferson's granddaughter. It wasn't like we had to read a book or see a DNA test to know this." The stories they tell about who they are, and from whom they descended, were passed down from lips to ear, lips to ear, just as Gran passed along her stories to me and Frank.

I'll tell you what separates me and Frank from our Hemings cousins. The oral history of the Hemings descendants has not been accepted by historians because it was a history passed along by slaves. It is a history that has been denigrated and denied by the Monticello Association because many feel that if we come to accept that Mr. Jefferson had a family with Sally Hemings, this somehow damages his reputation.

It's hard for me to understand how you do further damage to the reputation of a man who owned slaves. It gave me hope for Mr. Jefferson's reputation when I learned that he loved Sally, and that he loved their children enough to free them, alone among the 200 slaves he owned in his lifetime. It gave me hope to learn that she loved Tom enough that, for the last nine years of her life after he died in 1826, Sally walked two or three times a week the six-plus miles up the mountain from her home in Charlottesville to the cemetery at Monticello to tend his grave.

It gives me hope that 47 years after Frank and I laid flowers on the grave of Mr. Jefferson, my daughter Lilly laid flowers on his grave not only with her cousins from Mr. Jefferson's family with Martha but with her cousins from Mr. Jefferson's family with Sally. What does not give me hope is this: Sally Hemings is likely buried beneath what is now a Hampton Inn near Mr. Jefferson's beloved University of Virginia, and knowing this, the Association continues to deny membership and burial rights to her descendants in the graveyard she tended so lovingly for so many years.

This is an emotional issue for many of my white cousins because it involves the toxic southern cocktail of land and blood and race. In denying rights to our black cousins, they have demanded documents as proof--birth certificates, even a letter from Mr. Jefferson himself acknowledging paternity. These pieces of paper do not exist: Slaves were not permitted to write or to keep records of births, and Mr. Jefferson did not record the births of Sally's children as his because to have done so would have been to commit political and cultural suicide.

Well, you cannot wish away the emotional entanglements of history any better than you can confirm them with papers and letters and official certificates, and this is how it should be, for a history devoid of emotion has no soul, and a history without soul is a history without meaning.

So we'll be back, Frank and his family, and me and my family, and my sisters and their families. This year we invited 35 of our Hemings cousins. Next year we'll bring 100, maybe more. We'll be back with our Hemings cousins at the Association's annual reunion year after year after year, until they relent. Hopefully, a day will come when this won't be a story about land and blood and race. One day it will be a story about an American family.