Sally Hemings in Paris, 2025, part 1

 

I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago for a few days. Long story short, this was my third trip, we meant to be there longer, but other things intervened, so we only had one full day there before we had to move on. I had two things that I really wanted to see, and one was the location of the Hotel d'Langeac, where Sally and James Hemings lived while they were in Paris. That is, Thomas Jefferson's residence that also served as the de facto United States embassy as the French Revolution gained steam. 

The address is on the corner of the Champs Elysée and Rue de Berri, just as in the eighteen century. You can even get a sense of the size of the property by walking down Rue de Berri to Rue de Ponthieu, also there in the eighteenth century. The original house, outbuildings, and gardens were torn down long ago, but nineteenth-century building stands in its place contain a Zara and a We Work. 

Walking along the walls of the current building, I imagined the ghosts of Hotel d'Langeac rooms on the other side: the dining room, the servants' stairs, the gateway into the courtyard. I even went inside for just a moment, just to see. White and beige everywhere, like the ghosts of furniture covered while the occupants were away. There is a basement level. 

In the early twentieth century, University of Virginia students, all male and all White, had a plaque place on the corner of the building to note that this was the residence of Thomas Jefferson during years in Paris (he actually had another, two, in fact, but this was the most famous).

You can see it there between the tall, arched doorway and shorter, square doorway.

On closer inspection, however, you can see this:

Young women from Tuskegee University in Alabama, USA, have created and placed their own marker beneath the one to Jefferson. 

"Here lived Sally Hemings, witness to history and symbol of resilience."

They also added "I love Sally in Paris!" and "Women's History" with a happy emoji, and left Hemings a bouquet of flowers. As the young people say: they gave her her flowers, both figuratively and literally!

That teenager, trying to survive extraordinary circumstances to these women who love her for her "resilience." Such awesome beauty in that connection across time. 

Sister Sarah; or, what became of Sarah Bailey

On a sidequest of a sidequest of a sidequest, I discovered that Ancestry.com now has ship manifests of the New Orleans slave trade. Out of curiosity, I started tossing in names of people who I suspected had disappeared in that direction. Up popped "Sarah Bailey" in an 1845 manifest from Baltimore.

Douglass had a sister Sarah who disappeared from the record around 1832-ish. She was misidentified for a long time as Sarah O. Petit because Petit had addressed Douglass as "brother" in a letter decades later. Petit meant "brother" in either a larger, figurative sense, or in a fraternal order sense, but not a literal sense. When I researched Sarah O. Petit, years ago, her history indicated that she could not have been Sarah Bailey, daughter of Harriet Bailey and brother of Frederick Bailey who became Frederick Douglass.

The Sarah in this record comes from Baltimore and is four years older than Douglass's sister. Baltimore would have been the main port of exit, so that isn't any problem to believe. The age is another matter. Frederick wasn't sure about his own age and could date himself by events in Baltimore. He actually thought that he was a year older than his actual age for most of his life. Is a difference of four years believable for Sarah? Or would someone else have been estimating her age and got it wrong? After all, Anna Douglass's age fluctuated wildly in the census.

Hester Bailey below her could be the cousin Hester, but Aunt Hester was born in 1810 and the Hester in the manifest is fifteen years younger. That seems a stretch. -- Wait! There was a cousin Hester born around 1826! Perhaps that could be her?

In any case, this is an interesting coincidence.

The Probable Next Project; or, Going to Get My People (if I can figure out how)

 

Last fall I finally saw the National African-American History Museum of the Smithsonian. Quite a stellar collection and permanent exhibit (although we were disappointed that they had rotated out Nat Turner's Bible). You have a lot of feelings going through the building. Horror, joy, rage, shame -- at least, shame if you are White. At one point, a little Black girl, maybe six or eight (I can never determine children's ages), saw a mural using a historical etching depicting a slave auction. A white man pulled a baby from a crying mothers arms in the image. "Why is he doing that?" she asked her mother. 

That was a million pound weight.

Yet, that still had a distance. My skin had a culpability, but in historic terms. Then I came to this tiny book, the size of Beatrix Potter books, small to fit in a child's hands: Little Black Sambo. That exact book (if not artifact) lived in our house growing up, in my Maw-maw's house, too. The tigers running in circles and becoming butter, the shoes on the tigers' ears, the tiger holding the umbrella by his tale. When my brother was little, he had a version that had a larger book in a record sleeve so that he could read along as the story -- with songs --played along on the record player. There was even a Denny's style restaurant called Sambo's with a small gift shop selling dolls and postcards and storybooks. 

Time folded. Past and present slammed together. I suddenly felt deeply implicated. This bit of racism, depicting what was originally supposed to be a Desi boy as African then depicting the African boy in the worst stereotypes. This was all entertainment as a child. In fact, I desperately wanted those dolls for my collection. The casual, "of course," of wanting those dolls, of the record, of the book,  of no one ever stopping to consider that these images taught children like myself about other children with dark skin, that of course those children would buy it. 

If you read To Kill a Mockingbird, which I loved as a teenager, you might think that children are wise in their innocence and that, with wise adults, will be guided toward good. Mockingbird was a later draft. The first draft (not that the publishers wanted to frame it that ways, instead marketing it as a long-lost sequel") is more honest. Go Set a Watchman shows you Atticus Finch as a Klansman, Scout as a northern educated White girl returning home (in that southern novel cliche) to discover how much she has changed and that maybe Jim Crow ought to go, even if she thinks Civil Rights is an outsider movement going too fast, which was the way many nice White liberals actually thought then.

Many Southern readers felt betrayed. "No! No! MY Atticus wouldn't be a Klansman!" An Alabama small town attorney in the 1950s and 1960s? Yes, he would. maybe pull the beam from thine own eye.  This was us White people, even the well-meaning, nice White people. Watchman is not a good book, but it's a more honest book. Children read Little Black Sambo because it was considered "harmless." They seldom sat in the same classrooms as their Black peers, who were tracked into "low level classes." They were told the bogyman stories of having to wake up EARLY and MISS CARTOONS, hop on a bus, ride all the way across the city -- BEFORE THE SUN CAME UP -- take their classes with Those People who carried weapons, and ride all the way back, getting home after dark and MISSING THEIR CARTOONS AND LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE!!!! (Guess which parts resounded with me?) 

"Black" became something unrecognizable to even the people labeled "Black," but children raised to believe it as real. I was raised to believe it as real. When I start to pick it apart, in my actions, my scholarship, my point of view, my assumption, the very air that I breathe, language that I use, stories that I tell. I still ask, "am I still that? Am I overcompensating to prove that I am not that?"

At Thanksgiving, my family and I went to the Louisiana Museum of Culture and Life, home of the reviled "Uncle Joe" statue. The museum had a nice exhibit on slavery in the local sugar planting. Our ancestors through my father and his mother -- French Acadians (not Cajun, my M'amie insisted, but that's another, and yes they were) -- were slave holders along this stretch of the river down around the German coast. I'm pretty sure that they were involved in the uprising there -- on the wrong side, of course. We were always the Bad Guys. Anything from St. Gabriel in the museum has some connection to our family. A hearse there took our ancestors from the church to their mausoleums. Theriots, Le Blancs (along with every other person in south Louisiana), Loupe, some vague connection to Landrys, a Mather through marriage. 

My nephew, now in college, was studying the exhibit on slavery. He's a fierce one, with a strong sense of wrong and right. I asked him if he had learned about slavery in his classes. He grew up in Florida and goes to college there, so it's a crap shoot. He said yes. I wanted to tell him about our family as slave holders here, but I wondered what I wanted him to take from that. 

I remembered my dad always thinking that learning about slavery was some political ploy to make White people feel guilty. He changed later in life and became curious, less defensive, wanting to learn. He and my mother wouldn't let me watch Roots when it first aired while I was in 4th grade. They watched it, of course, and my bedroom was positioned adjacent to the living room so that I could either listen through the wall or stand in the hallway and watch through the door with their back to me. My homeroom and social studies teacher, Mrs. McMearn was the only Black teacher in our lily White (and some Hispanic, which I later realized that I classified as White in my head) school. She talked about it in class, and the rest of the students didn't have parents quite so squeamish as mine. This all naturally fueled my interest. I'd beg for details of the plot at recess the way the boys did for details about someone's dad's dirty magazines.

Can you imagine that? Texas parents being liberal on race? (Of course, now that I think about it, the majority of them supported Carter rather than Reagan in 1976, so...what the hell happened?)

When Roots re-aired while I was in 8th grade, I would do my homework in my parents' room while I watched their tiny black and white t.v. I was fascinated to see it -- and the Roots: the Next Generation which aired around that time, I think -- I remember watching it. Anyway, the point was that my father passed through, pointed at the t.v., and said, "you don't need to feel guilty for that." 

"Oh," I said, because I didn't know what else to say. "Ok." I wasn't feeling guilty. I was fascinated, engaged in the story, sympathetic with Kunta Kinte, Fidler, Kizzy, the whole life outside of the Big House that seemed a revelation to me. In fact, guilt never seemed the appropriate word. Guilt is when you do something bad yourself. I've done a lot of racist shit in my life, micro and not so micro aggressions. Said mean things just to be mean. What LBJ said about convincing a poor White man that he's better than a Black man is true. I do feel endlessly guilty for that. Guilt is about your own actions.

Participating in racism is another level. It makes you culpable, complicit, and responsible, sometimes in ways that you didn't even ask for because we are all caught up in these systems larger than ourselves. I have responsibility in this system. The racism was bred in me, it came with the skin and the family history.

I said nothing to my nephew because I wasn't sure what I wanted him to know or what he should do with that information. I didn't know what lesson he should take, or what responsibility he should be aware of. I'm still working through that myself. 

I do know that my next magnum opus will not be about Black people. I now feel that I am trespassing. Sally Hemings taught me so much, but the main thing that she taught me was that her story was not mine to tell. I'm the wrong person. More on that another time. Now, I need to turn the mirror on myself, on people like myself, on the artifacts like the Little Black Sambo book. This project may never get farther than this blog, but so what. I am beholden to no one anymore (certainly not after next May, fingers crossed.)

What does it mean to be White, not rich White, but privileged enough, to be sure? To be a historian? To have been brought up in the South with this history of time, place, family, the things that I gravitated toward for entertainment? Those are part of my Big Question.

Why HER?

 "Why would you waste your time on her?" someone asked me when I began my work on Sally Hemings. Sure, he said, she had some importance; but, in the end, "she was just a privileged slave owned by Thomas Jefferson who had his children. There isn't anything much to say about her."

I told this story a few days ago to a class and a few of the students visibly grimaced (a good sign from the normally affectless freshmen). One or two rolled their eyes as if to say, "what idiot would say something so blatantly wrong?!" 

The person asking the question had a point, at least from his point of view. He's an excellent historian, and his work really helped me in mine. His body of research reconstructs the intellectual world of Jefferson and allows readers to get a sense of the way Jefferson thought. You can sympathize with Jefferson while also growing to intensely dislike him. As I told the students, "you get inside Jefferson's mind, haunted house that it is."

This historian took quite a lot of flak, too, for having been one of the "deniers" before the 1998 DNA tests proving that Hemings's descendants were also Jefferson's descendants. He was lumped in with the deniers who thought that Jefferson was "too pure" to sexually exploit a slave when, in fact, this historian believed that Jefferson was too racist to -- to put it crudely -- get it up for a Black woman. He accepted the DNA as well as Annette Gordon-Reed's revisiting of Sally Hemings's appearance. New information can cause people to revise their ideas. That's the whole point of learning.

I would also add that few people considered Jefferson's behavior as serial rape, meaning rape in its most violent sense as, say, depicted in the film Twelve Years a Slave. A  man does not have to be attracted to behave in that way. That said, everything known about Jefferson indicates that he seldom inflicted violence  himself. He ordered whippings to be done by overseers, but other types of confrontations he approached obliquely.

But, I digress. The point being...

This historian that I'm talking about approached Sally Hemings through Thomas Jefferson. In writing Thomas Jefferson's life, Hemings figured very small. She gave him sex. She kept his room, clothes, and person clean. She became the source of an inconvenient and scandalous story that he refused to acknowledge. Otherwise, in writing about Jefferson's life, she played a tiny fraction of a role -- a non-speaking, walk-on part.

This is not particularly evident in other work about Hemings, I don't think. First of all, because the paucity of sources about her tends to result in studies that place her in the context of other people like her -- enslaved people at Monticello, her Hemings family, women in Jefferson's life. She also serves as an example in books about sex, race, gender, and concubinage. Second of all, because most of the people who write extensively about her tend to come from a study or an admiration of Jefferson and (much like my adoration of Douglass) that tends to affect their interpretation. Jefferson is the pole star. The resulting narrative means that he takes up more words.

I wanted Sally Hemings to be the pole star, which led to an interpretive and narrative shift that did lessen Jefferson's appearance. Yet, still, when you tell Hemings's life, Jefferson constatntly looms. Even if she were not Jefferson's "concubine" who gave birth to his children, he manspread himself into the narrative.

That gap between the small space that she takes up in his biography and large space that he takes up in hers is the point: it shows the vast power differential between the two. This differential is not simply one of Tom and Sally but one of men and women, black and white, age and youth, access to opportunities and none, and where they all intersect. 

In some of the books about them, there is a fixation on love, as if him loving her, a Founding Father loving the woman he owned as he owned all of her family, somehow changes the arc of history. That misses the point. The point is the power difference that existed then and that is embedded in their biographies both lived and written.

The point also is that this is the reason that history must be studied from many different angles and points of view, otherwise you only get one, flat, dimension that explains nothing about then or anything subsequent. 

IPPH Defining Fathers Legacy Series: Frederick Douglass on September 14, 2024

 Just when you think the 15 minutes of fame is long over, you get an e-mail that you don't think is supposed to be for you, but it is. You also have a wonderful talk with one of the planners.

On September 14, 2024, the Institute of Politics, Policy, and History will hold the next in its "Defining Fathers Legacy Series" focusing on Frederick Douglass at the Frederick Dogulass National Historic Site starting at 11:30. The panel will include former D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt (a Democrat) and Michael Steele (a never-Trump former head of the Republican Party) asking quetions of Pulitzer Prize-wining Yale historian David Blight (who has always been a good friend to me) and little ole me. 

Alas, I do beleive that they are sold out, now -- or would be "sold" if the tickets weren't free. 

 

It should be fascinating because of the other panelists and fun for me. Also, the event includes another chance to tour Douglass's house, which is always a treat.

Four Years Later

 So there was a pandemic, then teaching in a pandemic, then the death of another parent, then writing another book through it all, which brings us to now. The new book!

Sally Hemings: Given Her Time from the Lives of American Women series edited by Carol Berkin for Routledge Press. Alas, Routledge seems uninterested in moving product given their pricing schemes. The series intended for professors to assign to their large surveys or for gift shops to sell to tourists at relevant historic sites will never ever ever reach their destinations because Routledge has priced the book so high that I am embarassed to do any promotion myself.  (Buy from their website, linked above, if you must. It's far less expensive there than from any other site.)

For highlights listen to this interview that I did with Gerald Horne for his "Freedom Now" progam on KPFT that aired September 7, 2024, at 11 am Pacific Time.:  https://archive.kpfk.org/mp3/kpfk_240907_110000freedomnow.mp3 

 If you like what you hear and want to know more, send me an e-mail. I'll send you a present.

In any case, I wrote it for my mom, because she told me to write it when I was offered the opportunity and because she always loved Sally Hemings. She, too, was a mother, and her mother, and her mother's mother, form the spine of this story. 

I also wrote this for my students who wanted to know more about her, and I will give my book to my students for free. Mom won't get to read this book, but they will.

 For the longest time, I was a bit embarassed to be ding it because the topic never felt like it was mine in the way the Frederick Douglass and women did. I felt like I was a usurper, treading on someone else's territory. Then, I felt ever more self-conscious as a White woman daring to imagine a Black woman's experience. Now, I feel that I did bring a perspective (and, I hope, respect) to her life. She saw the limits of the nation at its birth, and she is worth knowing. 

Marshall Center Webinar on Frederick Douglass, Sept. 24-25, 2020

 

This Thursday and Friday, September 24-25, 2020, the Marshall Center in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond will host a Frederick Douglass Webinar. This was originally scheduled as a conference last spring, but the pandemic caused a change of time and venue. That allows more people to attend.

The webinar begins on Friday night at 7pm with the keynote by the fantastic David Blight, who will speak on his book Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Questions from the audience can be submitted in the chat section in writing, as tends to be the case with webinars. 

Thursday morning, at 11 am, begins with the panel "Frederick Douglass's America," followed by a lunch break. Then, at 1 pm, "Statesmanship in Douglass's Life and Thought," and, at 2:30 pm, "The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass." 

After a thirty minute break, Blight returns with Edward Ayers to conclude with closing remarks and dialogue. 

Each panel on Friday has three speakers, and questions can be submitted in the chat section in writing. David Blight and I are the historians amid political scientists, and I really still haven't figured out how to speak to political scientists. I always feel a little silly telling my stories while they are up there making big idea arguments, although I know that my stories are neither silly nor little and actually contain big ideas. So much so that fifteen minutes cannot contain them all and another fifty minutes ends up on the cutting-room floor.

I do know, after working on a bibliography for Oxford University Press, that the political scientists are doing some great work integrating Douglass's early abolition with his later political positions. The usual narrative describes him as having become conservative or falling away from his radicalism during his later decades, but they show a consistency of principles and ideology across his work. The really good political scientists work in that area where philosophy and politics overlap, where we lay people usually find the philosophes of the Enlightenment, which moves into the questions and problems of putting ideology into action. I usually think of it as a spectrum of ideology, activism, and operational politics -- that is, from your ideals on one hand and how to get things done on the other. 

Anyway, the program is here: https://jepson.richmond.edu/conferences/marshall/douglass-schedule.html

The registration form is here: https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventReg?oeidk=a07eh9z9lse8a29f176&oseq=&c=&ch=

More on the Marshall Center Lecture Series here, with links to the registration form and webinar on the page, in case the above links don't work: https://jepson.richmond.edu/conferences/marshall/lecture-series.html

Park, Teaching, Research, etc.

 This semester started well. The preparation, on the other hand, became an ever-moving nightmare of rearrangement of planning, each part of which required ten steps, each step of which required....well, you get the picture. Rearrangement wasn't just a matter of saying, "ok, we won't do this, we'll do that." Rearrangement was a matter of saying, "ok, we won't do this. We have to tear it all down and rebuild something new that will have to be torn down again when they change the plans yet again." My end result, which differs from other schools, has me in the classroom one out of every four meetings with my students. Each meeting is with only half of the enrolled class at at time, every other week. Since they have 100/200 level classes on one rotation, and 300/400 level classes on another, and I teach two 100 and one 300 level courses, I'm on campus every week.  I can't think about the schedule too hard or I get confused. I just have to roll with it.

This is the current state of educating students.

So, that ate into a lot of Hemings time. Then, the research trips planned with NEH grants kept getting pushed back because of library closures and travel restrictions until, now, maybe, if lucky, might take place over Christmas, Spring Break, and next May. Might. Maybe. If lucky. All of which pushes the deadline for finishing the book back. Fortunately much of the book requires contextual reading or is online. Maybe this pandemic will lead to more funding for digitization projects, if it doesn't lead to the collapse of libraries, archives, and schools entirely.

This is the current state of research. 

Last night, however, I had an interesting insight into one adaptation of theater for the immediate future. The Capitol Historical Society broadcast a reading of Jean Parvin Bordewich's play Now's The Time, about the ratification of the 14th Amendment. She focused on conversations among Thaddeus Stevens, William Fessenden, Lydia Smith, and George T. Downing, the latter being an ingenious inclusion since he joined Frederick Douglass in agitating to Andrew Johnson for black male voting rights and ran the restaurant at the capitol, which made his meetings with Stevens and Fessenden natural within the action of the play. Listening, and to some extent watching, the reading of the play seemed somewhat akin to listening to a radio play. 

Later this month, the Marshall Center at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at University of Richmond in Virginia will be doing roughly the same thing with a Frederick Douglass Conference (or "webinar"). David Blight will speak on the evening of September 24, 2020, and others (including myself) throughout the day on September 25, 2020. The conference was originally scheduled last spring, right as the pandemic hit. So, they postponed their plans them moved them online. Normally, I loathe Zoom, but this will be much different from holding a meeting or a class. It might be more like that play.

Alas, during that spring conference, I had hoped to spend the weekend in Richmond to see an exhibit on Sally Hemings at the African American museum there, then drive up to Charlottesville. That seems like years ago!

Meanwhile, down in Maryland, the governor appears to have taken up the movement for Frederick Douglass Freedom Day (I know I have an old post about that on this blog somewhere) by naming September "International Underground Railroad Month." Massachusetts and New York should get on that, too. Then, on the Eastern Shore, a Frederick Douglass Park has opened on Tuckahoe Creek, with wayside markers telling the story of his and of Anna Murray's youth there. This is quite a far cry from when I first visited there back -- oh, goodness, when was it? -- back in the early 2000s when all that I could find was an odd marker and a pamphlet for a self-guided driving tour, so I used Dickson Preston's Young Frederick Douglass and Douglass's own Narrative of the Life to flesh it all out. 

That, at least, is a better current state of something.

Frederick Douglass Airport Soon

 My goodness, time flies. These days, as the semester approaches, and the college administration sends e-mail that update e-mails to which half of the recipients have hit reply-all to ask the same question asked in half of the previous reply-all (replies-all?), and everything having to go online or hybrid with the reasonable expectation of going online, and -- oh, just thinking it is exhausting. So, with all of that, Sally Hemings has had to fight for attention. 

My last post dealt with Beverly Hemings flying a balloon, an image that continues with me as one of peace and hope for some reason. Indeed, that night, when I returned to finish reading Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, Stephen O'Connor used that very same incident as one of the final scenes. He almost matched my own imagination, possibly because we both constructed it from Annette Gordon-Reed's research in The Hemingses of Monticello.

Because all roads lead to Frederick Douglass here, the news in Douglassness this week reported that the Rochester city airport will soon carry his name. The petition had been going around earlier this summer, and I confess to having added my name. Still, I seldom expect much to happen as a result of anything these days, such is my Gen X fatalism, cynicism, and pessimism. What a joy to be wrong! 

That's the upside of being fatalistic, cynical, and pessimistic. You are seldom disappointed, and occasionally surprised. 

Douglass did not live long enough for air flight, but his curiosity about new inventions like the camera and the phonograph, as well as his poetic sensibilities, makes me think that flight might have attracted him enough to try it at least once. 

Many years ago, I had a pilot friend who would take pretty much anyone willing on flights as he earned hours for his liscence. We flew over to Easton's airfield -- I think it was Easton -- had lunch in the diner at the airport, and flew back. 

The flight plan was hilarious because we had to chart a route that skirted around St. Michaels. You see, different areas, especially around D.C., have cones of airspace restrictions above them for a variety of reasons. St. Michaels had a short cone, but high enough to force Cessnas flying into the nearest airfield to plot a roundabout course in order to avoid it. Why? Because Donald Rumsfeld owned property in the area. Edward Covey's old property, if I remember correctly. Make of that what you will.

That's not the point of the story here. 

On our return journey, I had my face pressed against the window looking down thinking vague thoughts about Douglass having lived down there and wondering who all owns the properties now, and wishing I had thought to bring a map, when the landscape suddenly seemed familiar. I realized that we flew right over Wye House, the plantation where Douglass lived as a little boy and that he described in his autobiographies. 

What would he have thought of that view? What would he have thought of sitting in a machine that allowed him that view? Now he has an airport named for him. 

I'd like to think that would make travel easier for him if he was alive today, but he was a big man and would not fit very comfortably in seats these days. What do you think would be his opinion of  Zoom?

Beverly Hemings, the Balloon Man

Too much has interfered with my musings here. I started chapter 1 in earnest. I had a birthday, which I always believe should be celebrated over a week, at least. Then  there was, for lack of better term, just plain bullshit. If you are alive you know what I'm talking about because you probably have your own brand that interferes with doing anything worth doing, generally kills your joy, and then leaves you with a whole mess of catching up to do.

Chapter One is doing fine, in spite of the bullshit. My birthday brought an interesting present from my husband, the Eminent Historian, in the form of the novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, by Stephen O'Connor, that deserves its own posts. The rest is still in clean-up mode. As that continues, here is a short, sweet image.

In Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, Annette Gordon-Reed points out a passage about Beverly Hemings in Isaac Granger Jefferson's memoir. Beverly was the oldest child of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson to survive to adulthood. Isaac Jefferson had been an enslaved artisan at Monticello, a tin and blacksmith, and one of the many children of Ursula and Great George Granger, who were one of the other extended and respected families there. His recollections were recorded in at his home in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1842 (right about the time that Frederick Douglass first began speaking as an abolitionist in New England, if we keep All Road Lead to Frederick Douglass going). 

Isaac Jefferson told the interviewer about the Hemingses at the beginning of Chapter 2, and mentioned that "Sally had a son named Madison, who learned to be a great fiddler. He has been in Petersburg twice: was here when the balloon went up -- the balloon that Beverly sent off."  

That is such an interesting detail, and Gordon-Reed investigated it (which is one of the reasons that I love that book so much). She noted that Beverly had departed Monticello in 1821 and, according to Madison, passed over the color line. Madison himself was free by the terms of Jefferson's will in 1826, but his mother died in 1835, so he took his family to Ohio in 1836.  With that window, she went searching for any evidence of a balloon ascension in Petersburg. She found it in the July 1, 1834, issue of the Petersburg Constellation. 

I wanted to see it for myself -- not because I disbelieved, but because I just wanted to see, in the same way nerdy way that you want to see historic sites or the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives. None of the databases to which I have access have the Constellation.* One, however, did have a Salem, Massachusetts, that mentioned the notice. For what reason, I have no idea, and that may be a story for someone to investigate, too.  Whatever the reason, here it is:

"The Petersburg Constellation gives notice that a balloon man is about to visit that place, and the editor says he augurs a hearty welcome to him. The editor may put up his instrument, for these itinerant skylarkers are bore enough of themselves."

Well, someone's grouchy pants were on a little tight in the editorial office that day!

Gordon-Reed found that the balloon ascended from Poplar Lawn, a park with a large field bordered by Jefferson Avenue. Is that not poetic? Although this particular notice may not have definitely been the one that Isaac Jefferson mentioned, Isaac Jefferson had connected Beverley Hemings to an interest in balloons, one that Gordon-Reed pointed out paralleled his father's interest in Paris half-a-century earlier. 

Sally Hemings was in Paris, too. Madison's memoirs suggest that she told them of her time there. How could she not?  Well, I'm sure there are reasons, but imagine her putting her children to bed and telling them stories. What better stories than of a city across an ocean? Of a contraption full of air that lifted a man in a basket into the sky? What a feeling of freedom to be lifted above the earth and to see the world from the perspective of a bird.

That puts me in mind of Douglass, who at the moment that Beverly's balloon may have been ascending, stood on the shores of the Chesapeake watching the sails of ships pass by, wondering why he, too, could not sail as free as them. 

Beverly as the oldest, did not have other siblings' experience before him from which he could follow. He had only his mother's trust in his father to reassure him that his freedom would come. I can see an image of flight appealing to someone in that position. 

Then, he just disappeared from the record. What became of him and his ballooning? Maybe someone will fall down that rabbit hole of research and find out.

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*Little known fact: we who toil away as "lesser" schools such as non-elite liberal arts colleges, directional universities, urban universities, two-year colleges, and so forth, work with obstacles that people at major universities do not when we research our books because our libraries are not as flush with funding nor deemed as central to our missions as at flagship state, elite private, and ivy or ivy-adjacent places. When we put out books or articles, we've done so with more teaching and more effort in obtaining the tools we need.