How the Word Is Passed

HEADING OUT FROM MY HOME in Washington, DC, in the morning, I drove against traffic, moving from the new condos of an increasingly gentrifying DC, through the single-family-home suburban landscape of Northern Virginia, and into the vast green expanse surrounding I-95 South. As I drove to Monticello, I observed how Virginia is largely a tale of two states. Northern Virginia, those incorporated municipalities that serve as suburbs to the District of Columbia, has always felt somewhat distant from “the South” in the ways I grew up understanding it. But beyond the suburbs, once I started driving past the diners and gas stations with Dixie flags hanging in their windows, I was reminded that this state was once the bastion of the Confederacy.

As I made my way down the highway, finding myself on cruise control—both in the car and in my mind—I saw a sign in my peripheral vision indicating the entrance to a plantation. Assuming it to be Monticello, I put my blinker on and began to turn, only to jerk the car back onto the highway when I realized this was not Thomas Jefferson’s plantation but that of James Madison—Jefferson’s dear friend, confidant, fellow Virginian, and successor to his presidency.

Madison’s Montpelier plantation, less than thirty miles northeast of Jefferson’s, is almost a prelude to Monticello. Not simply as a result of their relative proximity, but because the two men share similarly contradictory relationships to the aspirational documents they ushered into existence while enslaved people worked on their plantations. The Madison family held more than three hundred enslaved people over the course of their time on that property. Both of the men inscribed words that promoted equality and freedom in the founding documents of the United States while owning other human beings. Both men built a nation while making possible the plunder of millions of people. What they gave our country, and all they stole from it, must be understood together. I did not turn into Montpelier, but there was something about driving past it on the way to Monticello that reminded me that Jefferson was not singular in his moral inconsistencies; rather he was one of the founding fathers who fought for their own freedom while keeping their boots on the necks of hundreds of others.

Within a few miles of Monticello, the highway transitions into a one-way road lined with white pines and hemlocks. I pulled into the dirt parking lot and made my way up the concrete stairs to see if tour tickets were still available.

One of the first things I noticed about Monticello was how the vast majority of its visitors seemed to be white. It’s not so much unexpected as it is markedly conspicuous, to see a plantation that has had its ratios reversed. There were a few tourist groups from different Asian countries, but they were the small exception. Two hundred years ago Monticello, like most plantations, was populated largely by the enslaved descendants of Africans, while white laborers and Jefferson’s family were a much smaller proportion of its inhabitants. At any given time at Monticello there were approximately 130 enslaved people, far outnumbering Jefferson, his family, and the paid white workers.

I walked toward the stately mansion, which sat just a couple hundred feet ahead of me. Waves of heat rose from the dirt path, and mulberry trees spread themselves out across the land, creating intermittent pockets of cool respite for visitors. Underneath a lush sugar maple on one side of the house was a group of about a dozen people all sharing what city they had come from. The group ranged in age and geography, spanning generations and state borders.

“And what about you, sir?” the guide said as I scurried under the tree where the rest of the group was standing. I had chosen the tour that began ten minutes after I arrived, one that focused specifically on Jefferson’s relationship to slavery.

“From DC,” I said.

“Right down the road!” he responded, nodding his head and giving a smile that was as courteous as it was practiced.

Before I was able to gather myself and bring my full attention to the group, I was struck by what lay behind us, in the distance. The entire plantation sat at the top of a mountain ringed by a thick cascade of sundry trees, so tightly packed together that I could not tell where one began and the next ended. Behind the first string of trees were rolling hills that went off in every direction, as the silhouette of outlying mountains kissed the clouds resting over their peaks.

David Thorson, our guide, wore a blue-and-white-striped oxford shirt, short sleeved but a size too big, leaving his sleeves fluttering along his elbows when a light mountain breeze passed by. His crisply ironed khaki pants sat high on his waist, impressive creases moving down the front of his pant legs from his belt buckle to his shoes. David’s peach face, reddened from all the hours spent standing in the sun, was clean-shaven and sunk gently into itself around his cheeks. Ridges and wrinkles made their way down his jawbone and onto his neck. He wore large, thick-rimmed glasses and a brown wide-brimmed hat that cast a slight shadow over his eyes. He spoke with a calm evenhandedness that invited people into discussion, like a professor.

I found out later that prior to becoming a tour guide at Monticello, David served for more than thirty years in the US Navy. He had no experience as a teacher and no exposure to anything resembling museum studies before taking his job as a guide. Both of his children had enrolled in the University of Virginia, and he and his wife had fallen in love with Charlottesville during their frequent visits over the years. They loved it so much that they decided to relocate after David retired from the military, even though his children had graduated from the university long before.

“I didn’t want to sit around talking back to the TV set,” he would tell me. “It gets you out where you are interacting with the public, with a broad international audience of people who have an interest in American history, an interest in Thomas Jefferson. So I was interested in sharing the story because I really do believe that you can’t understand the United States without going back and understanding Jefferson.”

While the shadow over David’s eyes gave him a sense of mystery, when he began speaking to the tour group, there was nothing enigmatic about what he was saying. “Slavery’s an institution. In Jefferson’s lifetime it becomes a system. So what is this slave system? It is a system of exploitation, a system of inequality and exclusion, a system where people are owned as property and held down by physical and psychological force, a system being justified even by people who know slavery is morally wrong. By doing what? Denying the very humanity of those who are enslaved solely on the basis of the color of their skin.”

People in the group began to murmur to one another, some with their hands over their mouths.

In just a few sentences, David had captured the essence of chattel slavery in a way that few of my own teachers ever had. It’s not that this information was new, it’s that I had not expected to hear it in this place, in this way, with this group of almost exclusively white visitors staring back at him.

David paused and then said, “There’s a struggle going on here.” He continued discussing how Jefferson’s relationship to slavery was in plain sight because Jefferson maintained extensive records, the best known of which is his Farm Book. In these documents he kept track of the name, birth date, location, and sale of each person he held in bondage. He also kept track of the rations distributed to the enslaved. A typical week’s worth of rations, said David, included “a pack of cornmeal, half a pound of meat, usually pork, occasionally half a dozen salted fish.”

David discussed how Jefferson’s records showed who was bought and sold over the course of decades. Jefferson sold, leased, and mortgaged enslaved people—often in an effort to pay off debts he owed, as well as to preserve his standard of living. (The people Jefferson sold while he was alive were mostly from Poplar Forest, his plantation in Bedford County, but also from Monticello and a smaller plantation in Goochland County called Elkhill.) Having enslaved workers, David explained, helped Jefferson maintain his lifestyle, by giving him the time and space to do what he cared about most: reading, writing, and hosting guests who came to visit.

“Jefferson also gave presents to his kids and grandkids,” he said in a pivot. A moment of respite for those who, within just a few minutes, had begun to see their prior conceptions of Jefferson evaporate away. I felt disappointed, wanting David to continue exposing the parts of Jefferson’s legacy that so frequently remain buried. This was the purpose of the tour, I thought: to excavate unsavory stories and wrestle with them, outwardly, honestly, without pause. But as soon as the thought came, David began the second half of his statement. “Those presents were human beings among the enslaved community.”

David knew what he was doing: the pedagogical equivalent of a crossover in basketball, lulling your opponent in one direction—inducing them into a momentary assurance that they know in which direction things are moving—before promptly switching hands right underneath their outstretched arms, leaving them frozen in place behind you as you drive to the basket.

David continued to refer to the enslaved Black people living on Monticello as “human beings.” The decision to use “human” as the primary descriptor rather than “slave” was a small yet intentional move. He described the games the children played on warm Sunday afternoons (the only day of the week they did not have to work), the songs enslaved workers sang late into the evenings, the celebrations they took part in when someone was married. What reverberated throughout was the humanity of the enslaved people—their unceasing desire to live a full life, one that would not be defined simply by their forced labor.

David, and every other tour guide on the plantation, had to convey this sense of personhood with limited access to stories of the enslaved themselves. Historian Lucia Stanton, who worked as a historian at Monticello for over three decades, has wrestled with this. “To reconstruct the world of Monticello’s African Americans is a challenging task. Only six images of men and women who lived there in slavery are known, and their own words are preserved in just four reminiscences and a handful of letters,” she wrote. “Without the direct testimony of most of the African American residents of Monticello, we must try to hear their voices in the sparse records of Jefferson’s Farm Book and the often biased accounts and letters dealing with labor management and through the inherited memories of those who left Monticello for lives of freedom.”

Even with limited resources, David brought these stories to life. He finished his preamble to the tour: “You know, if you take it all together, those documents, like Jefferson’s Farm Book, the memories from people who call Monticello home, and then the archeology, the story does begin to unfold. Despite the horror and oppression of slavery, those families who once lived here, what are they doing? They’re trying to carve out some kind of a normal life. They are passing on tradition. They are giving their kids a chance to learn, and a chance to play. Maybe they’re even trying to shield those children from the reality.”

I looked around the lawn and imagined what Monticello would have been like two centuries ago. It belonged to Jefferson, yes, but it was not his home alone. It was the home of hundreds of enslaved people, including several large families. Some families were enslaved at Monticello for three generations or more. There were the Gillettes, the Herns, the Fossetts, the Grangers, the Hubbards, and the Hemingses.

I scanned the landscape and imagined the Gillette children running between horses as the animals were groomed and fed, their adolescent voices swirling in the mountain air. I thought of David and Isabel Hern, how, despite marriage between enslaved people being illegal in Virginia, they were wed and remained so until Isabel’s death. I imagined how they might have taken breaks from work under the shade of mulberry trees, whispering and laughing and holding each other in their arms. I thought of Joseph Fossett, who remained at Monticello while his wife was taken to Washington, DC, to train as a cook in the White House kitchen during Jefferson’s presidency. How three of their children were born in the White House. How in 1806 Jefferson thought Joseph had run away, when he had in fact gone to see his wife in Washington.

I thought too of how in 1827, after Jefferson’s death, Edward and Jane Gillette along with nine of their children and twelve of their grandchildren were sold. How David Hern along with his thirty-four surviving children and grandchildren were sold. How Joseph Fossett was freed in Jefferson’s will, but his wife, Edith, and seven of their children were sold. How these families were separated to posthumously pay off Jefferson’s debts.

I thought of all the love that had been present at this plantation, and I thought too of all the pain.

David waved his hand for us to follow him, and we walked from the area adjacent to Jefferson’s home down Mulberry Row, where some of the enslaved families had lived. David found a cluster of benches under a grove of mulberry trees and motioned for us all to take a seat. As he positioned himself between us and the garden behind him, he told the story of an enslaved worker named Cary, a teenage boy who was part of the plantation’s nail-making operation. The enslaved adolescent boys were directed to make close to one thousand nails a day, and they could be beaten if they fell too far behind.