Prometheus 6   

Interracialism Went Well Beyond the Bedroom
By BRENT STAPLES

Walk the grounds of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello around dawn (before the tourists come) and you enter a 19th-century landscape where you half expect to meet The Founder himself, out on one of those brisk constitutionals for which he was known. These paths and gardens were alive with Jefferson descendants last weekend, for a new version of a family reunion. There were white Jeffersons, descended from Thomas and his wife, Martha. Alongside them � and in some cases looking just like them � were white, brown and black Jeffersons, descended from the children that the nation's third president is now presumed to have fathered with his slave mistress, Sally Hemings.

Old-guard Jefferson descendants are fighting this new reality. But historians at Monticello itself, near Charlottesville, Va., have increasingly rendered them irrelevant by showing that the Jefferson family � and the early world it built � was a mixed-race enterprise, not just in the sexual sense, but at all levels of daily life. It was therefore fitting that the guest list at the most recent reunion did not end with the Jefferson bloodline but sprawled all over the Monticello family tree. Present were descendants of Burwell Colbert, the slave who fluffed Jefferson's deathbed pillows, and Wormley Hughes, the head gardener, to whom Jefferson entrusted his exotic plants. The most talked about ancestor this time around was Sally's half-brother, the master carpenter John Hemings, who had helped to build Monticello and whose last service for Jefferson was to build his coffin.

This new chapter in the plantation's life was masterminded by the historians Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright, who have been working for a long time to flesh out the lives of the slave workers who built and ran the plantation while Jefferson carried out his research in horticulture, architecture and design. The two historians have so far interviewed more than 150 descendants for a documentary project about the lives of Monticello's slaves. When finished and compiled, these histories will provide the sharpest picture yet of how black residents of Monticello lived before and after emancipation.