This Land

March 31, 2008

Atop a Hallowed Mountain, Small Steps Toward Healing

By DAN BARRY
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.

The members of the 2:20 tour follow their guide up the front steps of Monticello, past those iconic white pillars and into the domed building’s aura of wonder. The wooden floor creaks like the knees of an aged host rising from his seat to explain a few things.

The guide speaks in present tense of the home’s most famous occupant — Mr. Jefferson, as he is often referred to around here — while leading the tour into the family sitting room, where his daughter Martha supervised the slaves who worked as household servants.

And there it is again, the great American complication: Mr. Jefferson, who rocked civilization with passionate words about inalienable rights for all, also owned hundreds of slaves.

The guide, Liz Tidwell, who became so enthralled with Monticello that she left Texas years ago to be near it, segues to the And That’s Not All moment. You may have heard of a Monticello slave named Sally Hemings, she says, and of the “great controversy” about a relationship between Mr. Jefferson and Ms. Hemings.

Several people nod tentatively, as if admitting to such knowledge might be deemed traitorous on these hallowed grounds. For the mention of Sally Hemings resurrects more than just a sexual relationship between servant and master. Her name evokes what Barack Obama recently called “this nation’s original sin,” slavery, and the tragically slow movement toward healing, if not entirely cleansing, the mixed-blood national soul.

But where better for incremental movement to be made than on this mountaintop, where there is still felt the presence of the white master who grieved for so long over the death of his young wife, and of the black slave who may well have been the half-sister of the master’s dead wife.

For several years now, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Monticello, has held the position that the third president of the United States probably had one if not several children with Hemings, based on DNA analysis and persuasive circumstantial evidence; namely, that Jefferson seems to have been at Monticello whenever Hemings conceived.

As a result, the tour-guide talking point for the centuries-old gossip about Jefferson and Hemings has changed from the “possible but not likely” of a decade ago to the “highly likely” of today. Even so, guides are careful not to proselytize; Ms. Tidwell deftly suggests that those interested in more about Sally Hemings can visit Monticello’s Web site “and read all about it.”

The members of the 2:20 tour pose no questions, in keeping with the trend of recent years. Maybe this reflects discomfort, or maybe some baby step toward acceptance. Gliding along, Ms. Tidwell soon leads her group to Mr. Jefferson’s bedchamber, where certain things are left unsaid — just as certain things remain unresolved.

Halfway down the mountain sits the Jefferson family cemetery, owned by the lineal descendants of Thomas Jefferson and overseen by the Monticello Association, which is made up of some of those descendants. Proud names call from tombstones behind the locked gates: Randolph, Taylor, Eppes, Coolidge. But no Hemings.

No one knows where Sally Hemings rests, by the way. She might be in an unmarked grave on Monticello; then again, she might be buried beneath the Hampton Inn on West Main Street.

In 2002 the association voted overwhelmingly not to extend membership to the descendants of Sally Hemings, arguing that some scholars had found insufficient evidence of a Thomas Jefferson blood connection but inviting them to apply again should further evidence surface. That vote led to charges of racism, denials of racism — a kind of family quarrel.

Still, relationships have developed. Last year about 250 people with ancestral ties to Monticello — including some Hemings and Jefferson descendants — met at the homestead for a reunion of sorts that was rooted in the belief that community transcends bloodlines.

Before the gathering, one of its organizers, a descendant of Jefferson named Prinny Anderson, attended a meeting of the Monticello Association, of which she is a member, to ask whether those coming for the event might be allowed inside the Jefferson graveyard. Ms. Anderson, of Durham, N.C., says she made no mention of Hemings, “although that was the elephant in the room.”

Her request was overwhelmingly denied, she recalls, on the grounds that “it would damage the grass. And I say that with a straight face.”

Steve Moyer, another Jefferson descendant and the president of the Monticello Association, confirms that grass was a central concern, though other worries included the fragility of tombstones. The grass had taken years to grow, he says, and to have 250 people tromping through there in hot and dry July was “the last thing we needed.”

“The feeling was, we’re already damned,” Mr. Moyer says. “The Hemings family had already called us racist, even though we gave them reasons that were not racist.”

But how important is a place reserved for the dead?

Diana Redman of Gahanna, Ohio, describes herself as a descendant of Madison Hemings, the “second-youngest son of Sally and Thomas Jefferson, her partner, her mate, whatever.” One of the organizers of last year’s gathering, she says fighting for admission to a graveyard, no matter how prestigious and symbolic, isn’t worth the energy.

“We should be beyond that,” she says. “I’ve decided I’ve got to be nice to everybody because I’m probably related to them somehow.”

That is a powerful sentiment here in Charlottesville, where, for example, Chuck Lewis, a wealthy local developer, has African features, light brown skin and distinctive gray eyes that he would be the first to say are constantly searching.

He grew up with nothing, in a tiny black community near here that no longer exists. He believes his surname traces back to slave owners who were relations of Jefferson. He joined the Army at 15, and later wound up in New Jersey, where in Maplewood he was called the n-word for the first time, and where in Cranford he fell in love with a white woman named Kathy Jotz.

Against her parents’ wishes and then without their knowledge, the couple married. At a small party, a friend blackened the face of the groom statuette on the cake.

Eventually they moved to Charlottesville. Within a decade they were the parents of two children, the owners of a successful produce company — millionaires. But Kathy died in 1989 after a late-night asthma attack; she was 42.

In the two decades since, Mr. Lewis has had relationships with other women, expanded his real estate business, groomed his children as his successors, done things he is proud of and embarrassed about. But he has never quite gotten over the loss of Kathy.

Living all these years in the virtual shadow of Monticello, Mr. Lewis, 67, has thought a lot about what happened up on the mountain. “I think Thomas Jefferson did the best he could,” he says. “I think Sally Hemings did the best she could.”

He has come to see parallels between Jefferson’s life and his own: the mixing of race, the search for meaning, the imperfections, and, most of all, the protracted grief over a beloved spouse. Things that bind us.

Online: An archive of Dan Barry’s columns can be found at nytimes.com /danbarry.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company