2008 Biography Finalist The Hemingses of Monticello, by Annette Gordon-Reed

by Elizabeth Taylor | Mar-07-2009

Each day leading up to the March 12 announcement of the 2008 NBCC awards, we highlight one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Elizabeth Taylor discusses Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton).

The stuff of daytime television, sneered colonial historians.

Annette Gordon-Reed thought otherwise. She doggedly insisted that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had been lovers for many years and that he had fathered her children.

Gordon-Reed persisted, with a book on the relationship published in 1977. But she had science on her side and the eye-rolling historians were forced to confront the DNA evidence supporting Gordon-Reed’s claims. In one of those life-imitating-art twists, Gordon-Reed was legitimized by the reigning queen of television, Oprah Winfrey, who corralled the Hays and Jefferson brothers, sisters, and cousins on stage in a teary spectacle of a family reunion.

For Gordon-Reed, this troupe was more than just another dysfunctional American family. Moving on from her first book, which set a framework for the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family is a more robust work, bursting with generations of family connections—characters like Sally’s indomitable mother Elizabeth and brother, James Hemings, the reclusive chef who took his own life.

For Gordon-Reed, history is an act of imagination, and she re-creates everyday live and worlds in the eighteenth century, segueing between Paris, Virginia, and Washington. It is as though Gordon-Reed is walking among her characters, introducing us to them as she makes the case that they are brave actors in a great dramatic tale, not merely oppressed victims on the margin of life.

And it made for great television.