Amazon Daily

On her 50th birthday today, Annette Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for nonfiction for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, her epic history of a family whose ties crossed the boundaries of race and slavery, but whose connections, until recent years, were acknowledged by many historians only as rumor. Gordon-Reed has been a law professor at NYU since 1992, and more recently has become a professor of history at Rutgers as well. From childhood, she's been fascinated by Thomas Jefferson (according to her law school bio, she joined the Book of the Month Club at age 14 so she could get Fawn Brodie's Jefferson biography), and in 1997 her first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, examined the evidence of whether Jefferson and Hemings, his slave, had had a lengthy affair and numerous children, and looked at how other historians had treated (or ignored) the question since. A year later, DNA evidence confirmed with near-certainty that one of Hemings's children was genetically linked to Jefferson.

Now, with their relationship generally accepted by historians, she has returned, not only to tell the story of Jefferson and Hemings, but of their whole family, both forebears and descendants, whose family connections went beyond those established by the children they shared. One detail that gives a measure of how common these cross-racial connections were and of how connected Hemings and Jefferson were to begin with: Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife Martha (they shared a father). Gordon-Reed unearths the lives of Sally's mother, Elizabeth Hemings, and those of Sally's children and grandchildren as they grew up, mostly at Monticello, and then made their way out in the world, some living as whites, some as blacks.

I had the chance to ask Professor Gordon-Reed a few questions, just after her National Book Award nomination was announced:

Amazon.com: One stunning element to this story, for someone who might only know its bare outline, is that these families were intimately related across the lines of race and slavery even before Jefferson's union with Sally Hemings: Hemings was not only his slave, but also the half-sister of his late wife, Martha Wayles. (That fact alone could provide enough drama for a hundred novels.) Could you describe the family he married into?

Gordon-Reed: Well, it has been sort of a mystery. Relatively little is known about Martha Wayles and her family life before she married Jefferson, and even after her marriage. A historian, Virginia Scharff, will be writing on this subject soon. But John Wayles, the father of Sally Hemings, five of Sally's siblings, and Martha, has been something of a cipher. I tried finding out about him when I was working on my first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. I broke off the search because his life was not really the focus of the book, but I had to come back to him for this one. It turns out he was apparently brought to America as a servant, and was given a leg up in life by a prominent Virginian named Philip Ludwell. Martha's mother, also named Martha (it gets confusing) died not long after she was born. Then she had two stepmothers who died. The first had three daughters with John Wayles. After his third wife died, Wayles had six children with Elizabeth Hemings, the last of whom was Sarah (Sally) Hemings. Jefferson married a woman who had known a great deal of tragedy in her young life. She had lost her mother, two stepmothers, a husband, and a child by the time she was 23, just unfathomable stuff from a modern perspective.

Amazon.com: Of course, one other source of drama is that Jefferson, at the same time that he was one of the greatest advocates for equality and freedom, also held slaves, including one he was joined so intimately with. How did he reconcile that to himself, if he did?

Gordon-Reed: I don't think this was something that Jefferson agonized about on a daily basis. This is not to say it wasn't important, but it didn't concern him the way it concerns us. I think the Federalists and the threat he believed they posed to the future development of the United States concerned him far more. Jefferson was contradictory, but we are, too. Who does not have intellectual beliefs that he or she is not emotionally or constitutionally capable of living by? I find it more than a little disingenuous to act as if this were something that set Jefferson apart from all mankind. It's always easier to spot others' hypocrisies while missing our own. He dealt with the conflict between recognizing the evils of slavery, to some degree, by fashioning himself as a "benevolent" slave holder and taking refuge in the notion that "progress" would one day bring about the end of slavery. It wouldn't happen in his time, but it would happen. That is not a satisfactory response to many today, but there it is.

Amazon.com: What was Jefferson's relationship with his children with Hemings like? What lives did they find for themselves after his death?

Gordon-Reed: That was one of the most interesting things to research and ponder. There are a series of letters between Jefferson and his overseer at Poplar Forest, his retreat in Bedford County, where he spent a good amount of time during his retirement years. In those letters, he announces his impending arrival. He'll say things like "Johnny Hemings and his two assistants will be coming with me," and depending upon the year, the two assistants were his sons Beverley and Madison Hemings or Madison and Eston Hemings. Poplar Forest is 90 miles away from Monticello. That was a journey of days together. Then, when they got there, John Hemings [Sally's brother], Beverley, Madison, and Eston would work on the house where Jefferson was staying, where they evidently stayed, too. They were there together, in pretty isolated circumstances, for weeks at a time. Jefferson, who fancied himself a woodworker, too, spent lots of time with John Hemings and, in the process, spent time with his sons, who were Hemings's apprentices. Madison Hemings remembers Jefferson as being kind to him and his siblings, as he was to everyone, but said he rarely gave them the type of playful attention he gave to his grandchildren. The phrase Hemings uses is that he was "not in the habit" of doing that. Yet, all the sons played the violin like Jefferson, and one who became a professional musician, Eston, used a favorite Jefferson song as his signature tune. We have little sense of his dealings with Harriet, the daughter. He sent her away from Monticello when she was 21 with the modern equivalent of about $900 to join her brother, Beverley, who had left a couple of months before.

I think a very important, and telling, thing is that none of the Hemings children had an identity as a servant. The sons were trained to be the kind of artisans Jefferson admired the most, builders--carpenters and joiners--and the daughter spent her time learning to spin and weave. Women of all races and classes did that, even Jefferson's mothers and sisters. Harriet Hemings wasn't turned into a maid for his granddaughters, which would have been a natural thing for her but for her relationship to him. The Hemings children were trained to leave slavery without ever developing the sensibilities of servants. Beverley and Harriet left Monticello as white people, married white people, and pretty much disappeared, although they kept in contact with their nuclear family. When Jefferson died, Madison and Eston, who were freed in his will, took their mother and moved into Charlottesville. They were listed as free white people in the 1830 census, and as free mulatto people in a special census done in 1833 to ask blacks if they wanted to go back to Africa. They all said no. Not long after their mother died, Madison left Virginia for Ohio and Eston joined him later. At some point Eston decided that living as a black person was too onerous and moved to Madison, Wisconsin, under the name E.H. Jefferson. He had children by this time, and they all became Jeffersons. As all blacks who "pass" into the white community must do, in later years the family buried their descent from Jefferson. There was no way to claim him as a direct ancestor without admitting that they were part black, which would have cut off all the opportunities their children had as white people.

Amazon.com: Your title emphasizes Monticello, the rural retreat this family shared. What was the household on "the mountain" like for the Hemingses?

Gordon-Reed: Sally Hemings and her siblings along with her mother were personal attendants to the Jefferson family. They worked in the mansion most of the time. The next generation of Hemingses had more varied experiences. They became the artisans working on the plantation. We get some sense from Jefferson's legal white grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, that some of the other people enslaved on the mountain were jealous of the privileges that the Hemings had. Martin, Robert, and James Hemings were allowed to hire their own time and keep their wages. They traveled to Richmond, Williamsburg and Fredericksburg to do this. The only people Jefferson ever freed were members of the Hemings family. They were people who were treated as, and saw themselves as, something of a caste apart from other enslaved people.

Amazon.com: How much of the evidence for this history has been available for centuries, and how much has only become available to us in recent years?

Gordon-Reed: Except for the DNA evidence showing a link between the Hemings and Jefferson families, all of this information has been available. I didn't discover or say anything in my first book that could not have been said or discovered by others, and I haven't found anything for this book that other people could not have found. It's always been there.

Amazon.com: And what are the limits of what we can know about these lives? What have you had to imagine, especially about Hemings and Jefferson's relationship, and how have you done so?

Gordon-Reed: Except for Madison Hemings, we don't have personal accounts from the Hemingses of their lives. Robert Hemings corresponded with Jefferson in the 1790s, but all of those letters are missing. We have descriptions of what Sally Hemings did from others' records--letters, census documents, things like that. As I say in the book, that's pretty much what we have to go on with Jefferson and his wife too, since we don't have any letters from her describing her life. Yet people use what we have to come to a conclusion about the nature of their life together. There's nothing wrong with that. I do the same thing for Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It's a combination of what people said about their lives, inferences from the actions they took, and a consideration of the context in which they were living. Some people have problems with the use of "inferences." I don't, so long as they are reasonable. In fact, I would trust the reasonable inferences from a person's repeated behavior through the years over what they say any day, because people can say anything. I do believe that actions often speak louder than words. Contrary to popular belief, there are lots of actions on the part of Jefferson and Hemings that "speak" about the basic nature of their relationship.

--Tom

I couldn't be at the National Book Awards ceremony tonight (tux at the cleaners; also, 3,000 miles away; also, not invited), but they twittered the event at the NBA site, announcing these results:

• Young People's Literature: What I Saw and How I Lied, Judy Blundell
• Poetry: Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, Mark Doty
• Nonfiction: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed
• Fiction: Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Matthiessen's book had gotten the most attention of the nominees, but mainly because of the question of whether his novel, which was a condensation and reworking of three previous books, Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone, should be eligible for the award as a new work. (It seemed clear to me that he had transformed it so much that it was.) He won an NBA almost 30 years ago for The Snow Leopard, one of the books of nature writing that he has been best known for, although that may finally change now: "I've had a hard time over the years persuading people that fiction was my natural thing," he said at the ceremony.

Gordon-Reed, who turned 50 today, marveled at what a wonderful and surprising November it's been. As it happens, I did a Q&A with her recently and this gives me the perfect opportunity to post it, which I'll do separately. My favorite detail about the Young People's winner (besides its title, one of the best of the year), is the short line in the New York Times account of the ceremony, which captures a career of anonymous work in a few short words: "Ms. Blundell, who has spent most of her career as a writer for hire, said this was the 'first book I put my name on.'"

Videos from the ceremony will be posted at some point in the near future on the NBA site. One reason to come back, according to the Twitter feed: "I can not do justice to Daniel Handler's intro [to the Young People's award], so please watch it on the NBF's website in the coming weeks." If you need something to tide you over till then, here's Dan (Lemony Snicket) Handler's high school graduation speech. --Tom

P.S. There's a typo right now on the National Book Foundation home page that I hope somehow becomes permanent: "National Book Awards Pictures (including 5 Under 53...)." "5 Under 53"? Finally, a young writers award I'm still eligible for...

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we are awash and amok with anticipation (not really, just a little eager to know how it all turns out).

National Book Awards in just a few hours...

Winners of the National Book Awards will be announced on the National Book Foundation website at 9:30 p.m. EST--tonight!

I made it through two of the nominated books for young readers this week. They're both super engaging reads with unforgettable protags, and they couldn't be more different. 

It's a bit of a stretch to talk about Chains, officially a "middle reader" (ages 9-12), in YA Wednesday. But, considering that Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak sort of revolutionized YA fiction nearly 10 years ago, it seems appropriate.

Isabel and her sister Ruth are living on a farm in Rhode Island when their mistress, who stipulated in her will that they would be freed, passes away. Instead they are sold to a Loyalist couple and moved to New York City right around the time of the Revolutionary War battles that nearly destroyed the city. Isabel is resourceful and she works with anyone--revolutionary or British--who might be able to help her secure her freedom. LHA opens each chapter with a quote from an original letter, journal, or historical document, all of which she used to create a realistic picture of the New York City of 1776. Chains is a meditation on freedom in a city that was trying to be free, and yet left 20 percent of its citizens enslaved. Isabel suffers some unbelievable setbacks (it's a book about slavery, after all), but her spirit remains intact, and her story is thrilling.

The Spectacular Now, Tim Tharp's novel about a partying teen just outside Oklahoma City, is also a meditation on freedom--in a very different sense. Sutter, a fun-loving sweet-talker, lives totally in the now, and is the life of every party. In his own words, he "embraces the weird." He falls off two-story houses, parks his car on strangers' lawns, even burns up his brother-in-law's $1200 suit. These are all accidents, which all happen after a bit of whiskey and 7UP, and they don't seem to affect his positive outlook much. While Sutter becomes tiresome to everyone around him, he remains a completely charming narrator throughout. He's driven to have a good time, but he's also driven to help his friends find love or confidence or whatever it is they need. Of course, there's a bit of sadness underlying his misadventures, but the book never goes into rehab territory.  It's more about a teen on the cusp of adulthood, trying to figure out the kind of adult he wants to be.

(The other contenders: The Underneath, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, and What I Saw and How I Lied.)

Quick Twilight links...

You didn't think I'd leave out Bella and Edward with their big screen debut just two days away, did you?

EW.com's Popwatch blog talks about the "shrieking masses" at the November 17 L.A. premier.

AICN reader "Saffron Starlet" posts a very detailed early review of the Twilight movie.

Salon interviews director Catherine Hardwicke. (Responding to the question: Will there be a sequel? "I haven't gone out and bought a new Prius quite yet.")

Next week I'm taking a break at Granny's house. Back on the 3rd. Happy Twilight weekend!--Heidi