Annette
Gordon-Reed at the
2008 National Book Award Finalists Reading
CITATION
In the mesmerizing narrative
of Annette Gordon-Reed’s American family saga,
one feels the steady accretion of convincing argument:
Her book is at once a painstaking history of slavery,
an unflinching gaze at the ways it has defined us, and
a humane exploration of lives—grand and humble—that
“our peculiar institution” conjoined. This
is more than the story of Thomas Jefferson and his house
slave Sally Hemings; it is a deeply moral and keenly
intelligent probe of the harsh yet all-too-human world
they inhabited and the bloodline they share.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor
of law at New York Law School and a professor of history
at Rutgers University. She is the author of Thomas
Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,
editor of Race On Trial: Law and Justice in American
History, and coauthor with Vernon Jordan of Vernon
Can Read: A Memoir. Gordon-Reed is a graduate of
Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. She lives
with her family in New York City.
ABOUT
THE BOOK(from the publisher)
This epic work tells the story
of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third
president had been systematically expunged from American
history until very recently. Now, historian and legal
scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family
from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's
dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings
to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson
but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who
shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha. The
Hemingses of Monticello sets the family's compelling
saga against the backdrop of Revolutionary America,
Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790s Philadelphia,
and plantation life at Monticello. Much anticipated,
this book promises to be the most important history
of an American slave family ever written.
Video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QA24_T189U http://www.bookvideos.tv Historian and legal scholar
Annette Gordon-Reed speaks about The Hemingses of
Monticello, which traces the Hemings family from
its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's
dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826.
Video
(Part 1 of 7):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X07opk1g0E
Annette Gordon-Reed talks about her new book, The
Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, and
answers questions at Monticello's Jefferson Library.
Ms. Gordon-Reed explains how and why she began writing
about the Hemingses.
EXCERPT FROM: THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO
BY ANNETTE GORDON-REED
As Jefferson faded, his grandson
Jeff Randolph and the others remembered, “he would
only have his servants sleeping near him.”29 Randolph
makes clear that more than one enslaved person was deeply
involved with Jefferson’s care in his final days.
That is not surprising. There were more than enough
Hemingses to stand watch, and in those intense moments
the attention of the entire place was riveted on the
man who for over five decades had dominated the consciences,
imaginations, and lives of everyone who lived on the
mountain. Randolph did not name all the “servants”
who attended Jefferson, but it is almost certain that
they included, at the very least, Burwell Colbert and
Sally Hemings, the only two people said to have taken
care of his rooms and him. As is often the case with
those on their deathbeds, Jefferson had trouble sleeping,
and people took turns sitting up with him during the
day and at night. He did not want to be alone, and insisted
that his enslaved caregivers make pallets so that they
could sleep in the room with him overnight. Only they
were allowed in his bedroom after dark, and anxious
members of the Randolph family took to making secret
forays into his bedchamber to check on their own loved
one.30
This is what it had come to.
The people who had nursed him from the beginning of
his life, whose energies he had harnessed for his own
use up until this moment, were now called upon to care
for him as he faced his last days on earth—sitting
up with him at night, sleeping on pallets around his
bed to be ready to hear when he called out in need,
in fear, or out of simple loneliness. These African
Americans, whom he had sentimentalized as having the
best hearts of any people in the world, had given their
lives to him—followed him about, cleaned up after
him, no doubt worried about him, for his sake and their
own—slept with him, and borne him children. He
had held them as chattel, trying, in the case of the
Hemingses, to soften a reality that could never be made
soft. While he claimed to know and respect the quality
of their hearts, he could never truly see them as human
beings separate from him and his own needs, desires,
and fears. In the end, all he really knew of their hearts
was what they were willing to show him, and they carried
enough knowledge in their heads to know his limitations
and the perils of giving too much of themselves in the
context of their society. The world they shared twisted
and perverted practically everything it touched, made
entirely human feelings and connections difficult, suspect,
and compromised. What could have been in the hearts
of any human beings living under the power of that system
was inevitably complicated, inevitably tragic.
