This article originally appeared in The New York Times, OpEd Section, November 5, 1998. It is © 1998, Lucian K. Truscott, IV and is used by permission of the author.
ACCORDING to recent news reports, I have a cousin by the name of Julia Jefferson Westerinen who lives on Staten Island. Next year, when the Monticello Association has its annual meeting, I'm going to invite Julia and her family to be my guests. We'll be welcomed to the main house late in the afternoon for a family reception. We'll be able to go upstairs to rooms that have long been closed to the public.
Children will romp across the grassy lawn behind the house. Everybody will stand around drinking Virginia wine and talking about how much the youngsters have grown since last year, the way they always do. That night, the family will have its annual barbeque somewhere in Charlottesville, and the following morning, we'll all gather at the graveyard for a memorial prayer for Thomas Jefferson and more than 100 other relatives who are buried there.
But that afternoon, when the Monticello Association meets in a hotel ballroom downtown, its doors will be closed to Julia and her family, even though as a descendant of Sally Heming's son Eston Hemings Jefferson she is also, according to new DNA evidence, descended from Thomas Jefferson himself. Almost two centuries after Jefferson's death, most members of the association, which comprises 800 descendants of his daughters Maria and Martha, of which I am one, have yet to come to grips with the notion that the great man fathered children not only by his wife, Martha, but by her half-sister, his slave Sally Hemings.
I hope that all that will change in the next year, and Julia and my other cousins who are descended from Hemings and Jefferson will have the same right I have to join the Monticello Association and the same right I have to be buried in the graveyard on a hill behind Monticello.
The excuse that has always been given to deny descendants of Sally Hemings membership in the Monticello Association is that there is not "enough evidence" that Jefferson and Sally Hemings had children together. The association has relied upon reams of "evidence" from historians over the years that such a relationship would have been impossible. It's a sad commentary on the association and on the historians friendly to its point of view that its members have had to be dragged kicking and screaming by the production of DNA evidence into admitting to this possibility.
Members of the Monticello Association and the historians upon whom they have relied have put no value on the oral histories of the families descended from Sally Hemings, which have held that Jefferson fathered children by her. Over the years, there have been two sides to this question -- the "white" side and the "black" side.
On the white side, there is voluminous written material from Jefferson himself, from his friends and relatives, from his journals and records, from contemporaneous histories and records kept by others that establish his whereabouts on particular days and months of various years. On the black side, there is no written material, because slave owners enforced ignorance and illiteracy as powerful tools to keep their slaves under control.
Historians ignored or denigrated the oral histories of the slaves Jefferson owned, while valuing the written histories of him and his contemporaries. There will doubtlessly be defenses of their methodology, now that DNA seems to have proven that an oral tradition of the Woodson family was wrong on the ancestry of Heming's oldest son, Thomas Woodson. Jefferson evidently fathered her youngest son, Eston.
However, the real point is that historians didn't even listen to the voices of the ancestors of slaves in the first place, which is racist. Historians should not be permitted to skate sideways out of the trap they set for themselves with the kind of mea culpa offered by Joseph Ellis, the author of "American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson." While only a year ago Mr. Ellis was declaring a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings to be impossible, he now says: "Now, with impeccable timing, Jefferson reappears to remind us of a truth that should be self-evident. Our heroes -- and especially Presidents -- are not gods or saints, but flesh-and-blood humans."
That truth didn't seem so self-evident to him a year or so ago.
Robert Gillespie, the president of the Monticello Association, has been quoted as saying that Jefferson was not the kind of man who would have children out of wedlock. He was saying that the believed Jefferson was somehow different from the slave-owning tobacco farmer down the road who had his way with female slaves any time he wanted, and different even from Jefferson's own father-in-law, John Wayles, a plantation owner who had two daughters of note: Jefferson's wife, and, with his slave, Sally Hemings.
That it has taken DNA to establish that Jefferson was no different from these men reveals the painfully short distance this nation has come from the days of slavery, and how far it has to go. What Mr. Gillespie should be ashamed of is not Jefferson's sexual history but slavery itself.
Historians like Mr. Ellis have wanted Jefferson to be a more "perfect" exemplar of America and of democracy. Without saying so, they wish he had done the right thing and freed his slaves the morning he sat down to write the Declaration of Independence. They have tried to push aside what Annette Gordon-Reed, the author of "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, " has pointed out so eloquently: that this nation is a family not just in democratic theory, but in blood. They have done so because it makes them nervous that in the matter of Thomas Jefferson, blacks and whites share not just a common history, but indeed a common father.
I have been afraid that nervousness about shared blood between blacks and whites will make it difficult to open up the Monticello Association, and comments this week by Mr. Gillespie bear out my fears. At the last meeting of the association, in May, he announced that "if DNA is authoritatively established, there will be no option but to allow membership." But he seems to have changed his mind since the new DNA evidence came in. He now opposes allowing any descendants of Jefferson and Hemings into the graveyard because the all-white membership of the Monticello Association owns the graveyard, and, alas, we're running out of space. We don't have enough money to maintain a larger graveyard. (Cremations are being encouraged.)
The size of the graveyard has been increased one time already, and it can surely be increased again. We don't need any more DNA analysis. We don't need to split hairs over who is, and who isn't, descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. And we don't need to worry whether further easements will be granted to enlarge the graveyard.
It's hard to imagine that the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which owns the grounds of Monticello, would deny an easement to make room for the descendants of Jefferson and Hemings. Hard to imagine, too, that the Monticello Association, grown larger by its new Jefferson/Hemings members, couldn't raise the money to maintain a larger graveyard.
These are not problems; they're excuses. And they ignore and disrespect the humility and patience of my cousin Julia, and of all my other Hemings cousins who want only to be treated as descendants of Jefferson, the same way I am. "I have four children and two grandchildren," Julia said wistfully. "It would be nice if they decide to let us come in. Even a little stone would be nice."
We've gone on far too long believing the fiction that one of the great Founding Fathers was something akin to a god. He wasn't. He was a man. It is no clear that there is a strong likelihood that after the death of his wife, he fell in love with Sally Hemings and fathered at least one of her children. The fact that the only slaves he freed upon his death had the last name Hemings servers as a further reminder of his attachment to Sally Hemings, her brothers and her children. It's time to put aside the hairsplitting and get on with reconciling ourselves to the fact that this nation was founded on the backs of so many slaves who made it possible.
I have always been proud that I'm a sixth-generation grandson of Thomas Jefferson, but pride in one's heritage has come cheaply over all these years. Now it's time to pay up. Even if Thomas Jefferson did not do the right thing two centuries ago, we can do the right thing now. As members of the Monticello Association we can start by opening our hearts and our arms to Julia, and to all our other Hemings cousins. Hopefully, they'll accept an invitation that was way, way too long in coming.