Marian was not convinced that Thomas Jefferson should be so described and said the relationship was surely consensual. I retorted that, by definition, that was impossible. At that point, she left the room rather than continue the discussion. It's a moment I wish I had back because I would have never intentionally angered her.
I remembered that day vividly when my friend Denise McFadden and I toured Monticello a couple weeks ago. Jeff and I were visiting Scott and Denise while Ali was on her European tour.
Denise and I took Sunday morning to hike up to the plantation, which had just opened a new exhibit that featured Ms. Hemings. Our guide warned our group that unless we were prepared to
hear some harsh words about what the place was really like back in the day -- and some realities of this side of the former president -- we might not want to continue on. We continued on, of course.
It was amazing and troubling and terrible. We were both fighting back tears at the stories that were based on historical research, which included letters and business papers, ads in newspapers and oral history. One documented story was of Jefferson's plan to sell a repeat runaway slave to scare the others into remaining for fear of being separated from their families. "The thing these enslaved artisans and workers feared most wasn't the whippings or the beatings. It was being separated from their family," our tour guide explained.
You couldn't help but think of today's immigration and family separation policy.
It gave us a lot to think about on the two-mile trek back to the car. It's a complex world, full of complicated things that can easily divide us into bitter factions. We have only to look to Thomas Jefferson to know that. This is the guy who wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
Yet he also placed ads in newspapers describing the chained return of runaway slaves and the subsequent punishment they would face. He believed the races were inferior but that you could breed the black out of them.
Sally, by the way, met his 7/8ths ratio, the tipping point he claimed turned a person from black to white. I guess they weren't exactly people to him until then. How can you be so smart about democracy and individual liberties and be so wrong about slavery?
Oh, Sally was also half-sister to Jefferson's deceased wife. She was15 or so when they began their relationship in Paris where slavery was illegal. When Jefferson wanted to bring her back to Monticello, she negotiated her return. She agreed to go back to being a slave (and also Jefferson's mistress) in exchange for a promise that her children would be freed. Quite the bargain, aye?
Oh! One other thing that's still with me. A different tour guide showed us around the house. I don't know her feelings about slavery, but her tour was markedly more optimistic than the other. At one point, after showing us the many things that probably contributed to Jefferson's later bankruptcy, she referenced the day when the auctioneer came to sell off the assets of the property. One of Jefferson's (an 8/8ths white one) daughter's proclaimed it "the saddest day on the plantation."
On behalf of those without her pedigree, I beg to differ.
On the other hand, the vision of a teenager standing her ground with such a powerful man boggles the mind. Or it did mine. She bargained with the only currency she owned. Does that make the relationship consensual? I don't know. She was still a slave. A slave. He never freed her, just her children when they turned 21. He kept using, selling and presumably punished the others, too.
There's no getting around the fact that slavery is a terrible, terrible thing from which many of our founding fathers profited. There were real atrocities that we shouldn't forget or allow to be repeated.
I was thinking about this in context of today's issues that so many of us have such separate views on: environmental regulation, gay rights, how to deal fairly with immigration and those seeking asylum, affordable health care, the list doesn't stop. I couldn't help but wonder if we're a country so divided on these issues that we're heading to internal conflict.
I hope we're not. I hope we can collectively put the brakes on the bitterness and acrimony. I will admit that I started to chuckle at the irony of Sarah Huckabee and her family being denied service at a restaurant because the staff and owners oppose the administration's support for allowing retailers to deny service to gay people its demonstrated practice of lying to the American people and probably other things. I'd forgotten the baker who refused service to Joe Biden. Some of the same GOPers who declared that guy a hero now think the Red Hen folks went too far.
How do we get back to a place of unity? Is it even possible? We can, should and will continue to disagree over things.
But let's be human first. Let's edit those Jeffersonian words and really mean them -- that ALL men and WOMEN are created equal. Giving everyone certain unalienable rights doesn't mean you have to give up your own. We ALL should get them. I don't know what's so hard about that concept.
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