Arts & Culture
Librarian’s pick of the week: “Hemingses of Monticello”
Coordinator of Reference
University Library
Arts and Culture editor’s note: Librarian’s pick of the week is a new addition written by a member of the library staff in order to engage and educate UW-SP students on diverse types of literature available through the IMC loan program.
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a piece of property? Considered three-fifths of a person by a Constitution that denied you rights?
In the “Hemingses of Monticello,”Annette Gordon-Reed provides a look at a family that was the property of President Thomas Jefferson. Descendants of a union between an English sea captain and an enslaved African woman (whose name is now unknown), the Hemingses became Jefferson’s property through his marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton.
Gordon-Reed focuses on the lives of several members of the Hemings family at Jefferson’s Monticello estate and in Paris, where Jefferson lived for five years while on a diplomatic mission and where the widowed Jefferson entered into a thirty-eight -year relationship with his sixteen-year-old slave, Sally Hemings, his wife’s half-sister who bore him seven children. Gordon-Reed discusses this often-disputed relationship in her book “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” which was published before DNA testing lent scientific credence to their alleged productive liaison.
After returning from Paris, the lives of Jefferson and the Hemingses continued to be intertwined, and members of the family, including his own children until they were twenty-one, remained his slaves until his death, when the family was dispersed as a way of settling Jefferson’s debts.
“The Hemingses of Monticello” gives voice to the voiceless in this reconstruction of slave life by mining Jefferson’s ledgers and other records, as well as extrapolating from contemporaneous events.
Check this book out at the library under the call number E332.74 .G67 2008.
To view video book recommendations by faculty and students, go to BookPointers, located at the bottom of the Library homepage: http:/library.uwsp.edu
