Blood Brothers

ED AYERS: But first, let’s turn to one famous American family that has been caught in the middle for over 200 years– the children of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Hemings, who had three white grandparents, was a slave at Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. She had seven children with Jefferson, four of whom who lived to adulthood.

PETER ONUF: We know the most about their two youngest sons, Madison and Eston, both freed in Jefferson’s will. Harvard University Scholar Annette Gordon-Reed says the theme of passing shaped these siblings’ adulthoods. The two oldest passed so seamlessly into white American that we know very little about them. But Madison and Eston’s life show how fluid the racial line could be for Americans of mixed race ancestry. Our story starts with the death of their mother, Sally Hemings, in 1835.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: And when she dies, they move out to Ohio as colored people, or black people. At some point, Eston decides that things are getting too rough for black people in Ohio. It was not a welcoming environment, even though a number of former slaves went there.

Eston wasn’t satisfied with that, and then moves to Madison, Wisconsin, changes his name to Jefferson. And the family changes its name, and they’re all white. So that’s what happens to that generation of people. Madison remains in the black community, but the other ones go off into whiteness.

PETER ONUF: It’s a fascinating story about the choices the brothers faced. One chooses to remain black and the other chooses to pass into whiteness, but to do so he’s got to move.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Yes, he’s go to move.

PETER ONUF: He has to wipe the slate clear. Nobody can know him if he wants to be white. So that’s one of the things that happens if you pass, is you pass with your past erased.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Yes, exactly. They moved to Madison and they all change their name. In the one sense, it’s the Virginia instance, your son is John Wayles Hemings, then he becomes John Wayles Jefferson. And they don’t want to totally lose their identity, because if you were the grandson of Thomas Jefferson, that would be kind hard not to say ever.

PETER ONUF: Right. So that erasure is not complete.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: It’s not complete.

PETER ONUF: There is a family memory, but it’s in many cases suppressed, and it’s not widely discussed, but it’s something the family knows.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Yeah. Except in that family, once they start to have children, they begin to tell a different story about their descendant from Jefferson. Because they know that most people knew Jefferson did not have legitimate sons with his white wife.

So why is your last name Jefferson? Oh, we are the descendants of an uncle, or another male relative, to keep the connection to Jefferson there but not clear. Because if they told the truth, then they couldn’t be white and they couldn’t be the prominent citizens of Madison that they became if people had known they had any black blood.

PETER ONUF: And that Madison story seems to me extraordinarily interesting, because given the character of racial hierarchy in America and the advantages of being white, in a way, if you wanted to pursue happiness, wouldn’t you want to be white? So how do you explain Madison’s decision not to disown his family and his race.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Well, it’s a matter of personality. He must’ve been a pretty strong personality, we can imagine. And in my first book, I speculated that perhaps it might have been difficult for him. Perhaps he was darker than his siblings. But that turns out not to be the case. He’s described as exactly like his brother Eston who passes for white.

So I think it must’ve been, what his children, descendants say, is that they just had this very, very strong sense of racial pride. It might be better to be white, but how do you reject your mother? So blackness is not color, it’s a culture and you identify with the people who you love.

PETER ONUF: Yeah, and for Madison that’s a choice.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: That’s a choice.

PETER ONUF: Now, I want to ask you about how Madison Hemings would feel about members of his family who passed into whiteness. Is there some sense? Is it fair to say that he would have resented what they did?

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: It’s difficult to channel. But if I’m looking at the recollections, the way he describes his sister, thought it in her interest to live as a white woman, that’s kind of a short description of things. And he had children who went both ways. Some remained in the black community, others chose to identify themselves as white people.

So I think the career of his grandson Frederick Madison Robinson who went to California was the first black legislator, who was very, very much race conscious person, suggests that the notion of racial pride was something that was handed down in that family, even though in meeting later generations of the family who you would not know they were black. I actually had that experience talking to people out in Ohio. And they were saying, well, you know when white people did this and white people did that. I’m sort of looking at them like, OK, OK, OK, but it was a point of pride for them.

PETER ONUF: I think a strong implication for the history of passing is that you can’t generalize, and it’s precisely because of the dissonant pulls. And that family pulls against what we would think would be the logical move toward whiteness and freedom. And that dissonance, that pull in two different directions, then is enormously significant for the kind of choices African American people are going to make, and their very sense of themselves as a people.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: And one thing I want to add, too, is that there’s the pull to whiteness because of privilege, but there’s also some repulsion. There was a twin, a repulsion of not wanting to be white because of what whites had done.

PETER ONUF: Annette Gordon-Reed is the author of “The Hemingses of Monticello– an American Family.” Annette and I also recently collaborated on a biography of Jefferson. That book, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs– Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination,” will be out in April.