Gordon-Reed, Annette
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
W. W. Norton (New York)
2008
OUR SYNOPSIS: Annette Gordon-Reed illuminates the intergenerational histories of the mixed race Hemings family, expanding the narrative beyond Sally Hemings to track how this entire family related to American slavery. Starting with Elizabeth Hemings, Sally’s mother, in the colonial era, Gordon-Reed works through this story chronologically. She consistently shows that “[Thomas] Jefferson viewed Elizabeth Hemings and all those connected to her in a light different from the one in which he viewed other enslaved people.” (105) He applied European gender norms to the Hemings women, exempting them from agricultural labor. While the Hemings men were permitted to live relatively independently, she emphasizes the inherent structuring of their lives by their enslavement. This continued when Jefferson took James Hemings with him to France. When his sister Sally accompanied Jefferson’s daughter Polly to join them in France, like for James this journey broadened her world while it remained dominated by enslavement. Gordon-Reed stresses that in viewing the archive of Sally Hemings, “one is constantly forced to try to decipher what is happening with her.” She convincingly suggests that is because Jefferson was sexually exploiting her and avoiding publicizing this. Gordon-Reed’s extensive analysis of Sally Hemings’s life despite silences in the archive is phenomenal.
BIG QUESTIONS:
What role did the Hemings play in the building of the American Republic?
As the family’s primary starting point in the U.S., how did Elizabeth Hemings impact her descendants?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“The lives of the various members of the Hemings family, which must include the white men who had children with Hemings women, provide important windows through which to view the development of slavery and the concept of race in the Virginia of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While there was much about the Hemingses that made them unique—Jefferson and Monticello—like other enslaved people, they were subject to all the insecurities and deprivations associated with that condition.” (33)
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