Gardiner Hallock, the Robert H. Smith director of restoration at Monticello, and Chad Wollerton, director of digital media and strategy, placed interpretative signage outside the Sally Hemings quarters and exhibit Thursday.
Shannon LaNier, here pictured with his wife and children, visits Monticello two or three times a year. He's a descendant of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.
"Jefferson's Children: The Story of One American Family" by Shannon LaNier
CHARLOTTESVILLE — For Shannon LaNier, there’s pride at being the sixth great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but also residual anger and sadness.
“Jefferson, I felt, could have done more. He could have done more for Sally. He could have done more for this country to end slavery,” LaNier said.
But Saturday, he anticipates nothing but good times among an estimated 300 descendants expected at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello during a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of Getting Word, the groundbreaking oral history of the descendants whose ancestors lived and worked at the plantation.
“It is a family reunion — you take the good, the bad, the ugly,” LaNier, co-author of “Jefferson’s Children: The Story of One American Family,” said during a phone interview Thursday. “There’s always going to be some aspect of drama when you have a family reunion. We choose to celebrate the good and not focus on the bad.
“Yes, we might have come together in circumstances we can’t help, but now we’re a family,” he said. And in a nation rife with division and in need of healing, if they can build harmony from a bitter legacy of enslavement, “maybe we’re a representation of what America can do.”
The weekend at Monticello will also feature the unveiling of new exhibits and restored spaces — most notably, a fascinating digital exhibit on Sally Hemings inside the south wing of Monticello, where she lived. The wing also includes a Getting Word exhibit highlighting the stories of Monticello’s distinguished descendants, such as activist and newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter, California assemblyman Frederick Madison Roberts and Ann-Elizabeth Fossett Isaacs, a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
This weekend marks the culmination of a five-year excavation and restoration initiative known as The Mountaintop Project.
Other exhibits and spaces opening Saturday include an exhibit on the life of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, who died at age 33, as well as restorations of Monticello’s dairy, its textile workshop and its first kitchen, named for enslaved cooks Ursula Granger, James Hemings and Peter Hemings.
Monticello was bustling with activity Thursday as employees prepared for Saturday’s events, installing digital elements at exhibits, installing lights and touching up spaces gashed in the process.
“The secret is that all these exhibits always come down to the last minute,” said Gardiner Hallock, the Robert H. Smith director of restoration at Monticello. “It’s like family coming over at Thanksgiving.”
But Monticello spokeswoman Mia Magruder Dammann said the outcome will add a new dimension to the visitor experience.
“The real significance of this moment is that we’ve had decades of research, a lot of the work’s been there, but for the first time we’re having physical space for people to experience some of these stories. And I think we know that that makes a world of difference,” she said.
“This is a landmark moment. But there’s still work to be done, stories to be uncovered,” Dammann said.
Ruth Johnson, a retired Richmond Public Schools educator, is a descendant of Peter Hemings, something she learned about a year ago.
On Thursday, the 91-year-old was preparing food in anticipation of cousins arriving in Richmond before heading to Monticello and looking forward to connecting with relatives from as far away as California.
“I’m telling you, everyone is quite geared up about all these festivities surrounding the reunion and homecoming weekend,” Johnson said.
Gayle Jessup White, Monticello’s community engagement officer and a Hemings and Jefferson descendant, is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Peter Hemings. “This is actually where my ancestors worked,” the Henrico County resident said Thursday as she stood in the restored kitchen.
It was there, she said, that James Hemings taught his younger brother Peter the art of French cooking — an instruction that was Jefferson’s condition for emancipating James.
Peter would be a cook for 13 years. After Jefferson’s death, he was purchased by a free nephew for $1, under a gentleman’s agreement at the auction that he not be bid on, White said. Peter was freed after the purchase; his daughter remained enslaved.
White described how moving it was to stand in the space where her ancestors stood. But she also acknowledged the inner conflict.
“Of course, it’s hard to process. Your family didn’t have a choice, your ancestors didn’t have a choice. They had to be here. They were held captive here, basically.”
“On the other hand, when I’m in this space, I feel something spiritual. And something — and this is a difficult word to use, because we’re talking about enslaved people — but I feel something joyful. Because when those people were here, they weren’t exclusively enslaved people. They were human beings who had lives and feelings and love and cared about each other. They had passions, they had compassion. They were real. So when I’m in this space, I feel that reality. ... They were enslaved, yes. But that was not their exclusive identity.”
LaNier said this weekend is not only a celebration of his forbears, but also of how far Monticello has come in acknowledging the complete story of its past.
In 1993, Monticello launched Getting Word and began offering slavery-related tours on the mountaintop. In 1998, after the publication of a Jefferson DNA study by Dr. Eugene Foster, a retired medical professor, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation formed a research committee that concluded there was a high probability that Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings and probably all six of Sally Hemings’s children. Lucia “Cinder” Stanton, the groundbreaking Monticello historian, has published several books on the history of slavery at the plantation.
For LaNier, who learned during childhood of his connection to Jefferson as part of his family’s oral history, the research and DNA “helped prove the truth we’ve always known.”
LaNier, a New York-based talk show host, visits Monticello two or three times a year. If LaNier and hundreds of others feel at home Saturday, it’s no doubt in part because Monticello is their ancestral home. A site of subjugation will transform into a place of celebration. Such is the redemptive power of truth and reconciliation.
If this turn of events seems implausible, perhaps it offers us a road map.
“This is important work that will change the way, I believe, people view American history,” said White, a descendant whose community engagement efforts on behalf of Monticello have brought her life full circle. “It gives dimension to people who have been forgotten, people history wanted to forget. No one wants to think about slavery in America. This will force people to do so in a way that gives humanity to those enslaved people.
“That’s a big deal. And yeah, for me personally, it’s a really big deal. Because these are my people.”
