Monticello's main house and South Wing (© Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello)
The physical space where Sally Hemings likely worked and lived with her children is a dark, low-ceilinged chamber. Save for the doorway and the fireplace where Hemings cooked meals and warmed herself and her family, little light seeps into the windowless, arid space; the darkness inside is startling, the gravity, palpable.
Starting June 16, for the first time, the public will be able to see and explore the 15-by-14-foot room in an exhibition housed in one of two side-by-side quarters in the South Wing of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, dating back to 1808.
The display encourages deep reflection on the foundational role slavery played at Monticello, the sprawling Charlottesville plantation designed and occupied by Jefferson but built by the enslaved men, women and children he owned. It opens to the imagination the inner turmoil felt by Hemings, who lived from 1773 to 1835.
The original hearth uncovered in Sally Hemings’ living quarters (© Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello)
DNA evidence links the bloodlines of Hemings’ and Jefferson’s descendants, and many scholars agree with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit that owns and operates Monticello, which stated in a 2000 report that Jefferson likely fathered all six of Hemings’ children. Despite this, some scholars and Jefferson descendents continue to maintain that a sexual relationship never existed between Jefferson and the woman he owned her entire life.
A resident of Henrico County for the last 12 years, Gayle Jessup White is a descendent of Jefferson on her father’s side, and she has confirmed her lineage as the great-great-great-granddaughter of Peter Hemings, a brother of Sally Hemings. White, who is also Monticello’s community engagement officer, will be among the hundreds of Hemings and Jefferson descendants, and offspring of other black families at Monticello, who will converge at the plantation June 15 for the 25th anniversary reunion of Getting Word, an oral history project that reveals and amplifies the stories and family histories of those enslaved there.
“Monticello is more than my employer …it’s my ancestral home,” says White. At the reunion event, she and her family members will be the first to experience the new exhibition.
Niya Bates, a Charlottesville native and public historian of slavery and African-American life at Monticello, works to further the narratives of the enslaved and free people who lived at Monticello through the Getting Word Project, as well as the Mountaintop Project, a $35 million restoration effort that aims to accurately re-create the Monticello of Hemings’ and Jefferson’s lifetimes and present it in tangible, meaningful ways to Monticello’s 450,000 yearly visitors.
Niya Bates (left) and Gayle Jessup White (Photo courtesy Ryan M. Kelly/The Daily Progress)
“We’re asking this room to carry a lot of weight,” Bates says of the Hemings quarters. The new exhibition and the Getting Word Project serve to demonstrate how slavery at Monticello “impacted families for generations, and still does.”
As Monticello faces its history of enslavement, Richmond continues to grapple with properly honoring the untold thousands of men, women and children whose footsteps through Shockoe Bottom led to confinement, torture and auction into a life in bondage. During the administration of former Mayor Dwight Jones, the city nearly paved over the area that is regarded by many African-Americans in Richmond and beyond as a sacred space where their ancestors lived, died and were laid to rest, in favor of building a ballpark.
Although the stadium proposal was dropped in 2015, the city has yet to settle on a comprehensive plan for a Shockoe Bottom memorial. However, since March 2017, a consulting firm has been gathering public input to develop a plan for Lumpkin’s Jail, also known as the Devil’s Half Acre, a site central to the slave trade.
Other projects designed to convey the truth about slavery in Richmond are also underway. Virginia first lady Pamela Northam is leading efforts to study and properly honor the enslaved men and women who worked in the governor’s mansion. And nearly a quarter-century after the discovery of mostly African and African-American human remains at the bottom of a mid-19th-century medical school well at Virginia Commonwealth University, it appears the East Marshall Street Well Project may be moving to the next phase.
The time is ripe for a reckoning with the past, says White. “How many people in Richmond, Virginia, got wealthy on the backs of the enslaved men, women and children here? I want to know — we all should want to know.”
Richmond and VCU could take a cue from Monticello. The revelation of Hemings’ living quarters offers Americans a rare opportunity: collective self discovery.
“These days, you can’t talk about Thomas Jefferson without talking about black people, and that frustrates a lot of folks,” said Annette Gordon Reed, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has studied Hemings’ ties to Jefferson for decades, during an April 27 preview of the new exhibition. “Jefferson embodies the American dilemma ... The best that we’ve been — and the worst that we’ve been — are here, at his home, at Monticello.”
Descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Hemings at the Getting Word gathering in September 2016 (© Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello)
In mid-June, when White meets with 250 of her extended kin at the Getting Word gathering, her 91-year-old cousin, Richmonder Ruth Johnson, will be among them. They’ll witness a historic moment: the biggest meeting of Monticello’s enslaved families’ descendents in modern history. For White, it feels like a homecoming.
“We’re breathing new life into them, the enslaved black people who built and sustained Monticello,” she says. “When I walk along Mulberry Row where my ancestors were enslaved, I embrace that, and I feel I belong here. … I’m buoyed by the work we’re doing here; it’s significant, country-changing work.”
