Mixed Race Studies

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2008
800 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-06477-3
6.5 × 9.6 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-33776-1
816 pages
6.1 × 9.2 in

Annette Gordon-Reed, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History; Professor of History, Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University

Winner of the National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize

In the mid-1700s the English captain of a trading ship that made runs between England and the Virginia colony fathered a child by an enslaved woman living near Williamsburg. The woman, whose name is unknown and who is believed to have been born in Africa, was owned by the Eppeses, a prominent Virginia family. The captain, whose surname was Hemings, and the woman had a daughter. They named her Elizabeth.

So begins this epic work—named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times—Annette Gordon-Reed’s “riveting history” of the Hemings family, whose story comes to vivid life in this brilliantly researched and deeply moving work. Gordon-Reed, author of the highly acclaimed historiography Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, unearths startling new information about the Hemingses, Jefferson, and his white family. Although the book presents the most detailed and richly drawn portrait ever written of Sarah Hemings, better known by her nickname Sally, who bore seven children by Jefferson over the course of their thirty-eight-year liaison, The Hemingses of Monticello tells more than the story of her life with Jefferson and their children. The Hemingses as a whole take their rightful place in the narrative of the family’s extraordinary engagement with one of history’s most important figures.

Not only do we meet Elizabeth Hemings—the family matriarch and mother to twelve children, six by John Wayles, a poor English immigrant who rose to great wealth in the Virginia colony—but we follow the Hemings family as they become the property of Jefferson through his marriage to Martha Wayles. The Hemings-Wayles children, siblings to Martha, played pivotal roles in the life at Jefferson’s estate.

We follow the Hemingses to Paris, where James Hemings trained as a chef in one of the most prestigious kitchens in France and where Sally arrived as a fourteen-year-old chaperone for Jefferson’s daughter Polly; to Philadelphia, where James Hemings acted as the major domo to the newly appointed secretary of state; to Charlottesville, where Mary Hemings lived with her partner, a prosperous white merchant who left her and their children a home and property; to Richmond, where Robert Hemings engineered a plan for his freedom; and finally to Monticello, that iconic home on the mountain, from where most of Jefferson’s slaves, many of them Hemings family members, were sold at auction six months after his death in 1826.

As The Hemingses of Monticello makes vividly clear, Monticello can no longer be known only as the home of a remarkable American leader, the author of the Declaration of Independence; nor can the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president have been expunged from history until very recently, be left out of the telling of America’s story. With its empathetic and insightful consideration of human beings acting in almost unimaginably difficult and complicated family circumstances, The Hemingses of Monticello is history as great literature. It is a remarkable achievement.

Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative

Indiana University Press
2007-12-04
272 pages
30 b&w photos, 6.125 x 9.25
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34944-6
ISBN: 0-253-34944-3

Michael A. Chaney, Associate Professor of English
Dartmouth College

Analyzing the impact of black abolitionist iconography on early black literature and the formation of black identity, Fugitive Vision examines the writings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Harriet Jacobs, and the slave potter David Drake. Juxtaposing pictorial and literary representations, the book argues that the visual offered an alternative to literacy for current and former slaves, whose works mobilize forms of illustration that subvert dominant representations of slavery by both apologists and abolitionists. From a portrait of Douglass’s mother as Ramses to the incised snatches of proverb and prophesy on Dave the Potter‘s ceramics, the book identifies a “fugitive vision” that reforms our notions of antebellum black identity, literature, and cultural production.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Looking Beyond and Through the Fugitive Icon
• Part 1. Fugitive Gender: Black Mothers, White Faces, Sanguine Sons
  1. Racing and Erasing the Slave Mother: Frederick Douglass, Parodic Looks, and Ethnographic Illustration
  2. Looking for Slavery at the Crystal Palace: William Wells Brown and the Politics of Exhibition(ism)
  3. The Uses in Seeing: Mobilizing the Portrait in Drag in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
• Part 2. Still Moving: Revamped Technologies of Surveillance
  1. Panoramic Bodies: From Banvard‘s Mississippi to Brown’s Iron Collar
  2. The Mulatta in the Camera: Harriet Jacobs’s Historicist Gazing and Dion Boucicault‘s Mulatta Obscura
  3. Throwing Identity in the Poetry-Pottery of Dave the Potter
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index