Gayle Jessup White - Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendants Search for Her Familys Lasting Legacy

Courtesy of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation

There are at least two known burial grounds at Monticello, the estate that was Thomas Jeffersons home. One is near the main house and surrounded by an imposing wrought iron fence. It is populated with tombstones marked Jefferson, Randolph, Taylor, and the surnames of other kin. Jeffersons grave is marked by an obelisk adorned with an inscription of how he wished to be remembered:

HERE WAS BURIED
THOMAS JEFFERSON

AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

The graveyard is still in use. It is the only property on the former plantation not owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit that owns and manages Monticello, but by a group called the Monticello Association, whose members are direct descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton. From time to time, members of the association gather for a burial or a wreath-laying ceremony to commemorate their legendary ancestor. Only Jefferson, his white family, and their descendants and spouses are buried there. Only they are welcome. That was made painfully clear a few years after a white descendant invited dozens of his Black cousins to an association reunion. They were guests because they too can trace their origins to the third president.

They were descendants of a liaison between Jefferson and a woman he enslaved, Sally Hemings. In 1999, as the cousins, white and Black, mingled cordially at Monticello and at lunches and cocktail parties, the media followed. The news reports that followed made reconciliation seem possible, even imminent. But three years later when the same white cousin who had orchestrated the reunion sought membership for his Black kin, they were shut out. According to witnesses in 2002 when a vote was taken at the associations annual meeting, a near-riot erupted as white members, fueled by two centuries of denial about who fathered Hemingss children, furiously objected. The episode made the national press. There was my family being racist on the front page of the New York Times, lamented a white descendant twenty years later.

A short walk down the mountain along a gravel path and near the entrance of Monticellos Visitor Center is another gravesite. Bordered by a parking lot, a few trees, and wooden rail fencing is a burial ground for those who were enslaved on Jeffersons plantation. Here are no obelisks or tombstones, only large rocks marking where peoplemy peopleare buried. No one knows the names of those interred there, only that they were enslaved at Monticello.

The burial ground, like much of African American history, was almost lost forever.

What saved it was an oral tradition, which for centuries was how Americas Blacks remembered their past. The story goes that when old-timers who had spent their lives living in the shadows of Jeffersons mountain heard that the graveyard was to become a parking lot, they spoke up. They knew bodies were buried there because their mothers and fathers, who had heard it from their mothers and fathers, said it was so.

We can only speculate about who might be buried there. Perhaps Ursula Granger, whose reputation as a great cook induced Jefferson to purchase her at his wifes request in 1773. It was Ursulas breast milk that saved the life of the couples sickly six-month-old daughter, named Martha after her mother, when her ailing mother was unable to nurse her. Were it not for Ursula I would not be here, because the child she saved would become my great-grandmother four times over. Or skilled worker Cate Hubbard, my four-times-great-grandmother. Two of her sons were among Monticellos few runaways. Or Elizabeth Hemings, who came to Monticello with her ten children when Jeffersons father-in-law, John Wayles, died in 1773. Elizabeths remains might rest near her cabin or the burial ground, but we will never know. Though they were human beings, they were treated like property, passed down to Wayless daughter Martha as part of her inheritance, just like money, land, and livestock. However, the Hemings clan was linked to Martha by an unacknowledged kinship. Wayles was the father of six of Elizabeth Hemingss children, including the infant girl Sally. They were Marthas half-siblings, and in a different world they would have been considered Jeffersons in-laws.

Hundreds of Black people spent their entire lives held captive on a five-thousand-acre plot of mountainous land laboring, as Jefferson put it, for his happiness while trying to carve out some happiness of their own.

Aside from an inconspicuous panel describing whose remains may be inside the fencing of the enslaved graveyard, there is little to indicate that this space is hallowed ground. There have been reports that some visitors, assuming the site is a dog park, have allowed their pets to urinate on the trees next to the graves, oblivious to the history they were desecrating. Yet I am not oblivious to it. I cant be.

The Jeffersons, Randolphs, and Taylors at the top of the mountain are as much my kin as the Hemingses and Hubbards whose remains might be at the bottom. But my heart rests with the souls in the graveyard of the enslaved. It is at their final resting place that I find solace and inspiration. It is their spirit that spurs me forward, even when I am feeling weary and battle-scarred after another day spent fighting for equal recognition of Black history that for many is merely an afterthought.

The gravel path from the enslaved at the bottom of the mountain to the enslavers at the top is less than a mile long. But the chasm this distance symbolizes is as deep and dark as the ship hulls that carried human cargo across the Atlantic during the Middle Passage. It began more than four hundred years ago when the first captured Africans were brought to the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. A complex entanglement between Blacks and whites also emerged, one that has left virtually all African Americans with European DNA.