Living life out loud

Thomas Jefferson’s descendants at the Monticello reunion in 1999.

I thought I would share with you a comment I received after I testified yesterday that the statue of Thomas Jefferson should be removed from the City Council Chambers in New York City Hall. The Public Design Commission voted yes, and the statue will be transferred to the New York Historical Society by the end of the year.

YOU ARE A DISGUSTING POS AND A DISGRACE TO YOUR FAMILY.

Sent in a private message, it bears all the earmarks of the genre:  Written in ALL CAPS, it contains an abbreviated profanity, presumes to have inside knowledge about my family’s feelings regarding the Jefferson statue and opines that I have somehow disgraced the family name. 

You don’t want to know – or maybe you do -- how many similar messages, emails, phone calls, and texts I have received over the years, beginning with the earliest pieces I wrote for the Village Voice back in the 1960’s.  I’m certain they are in the thousands by now, although I have not kept track, nor have I saved them, much preferring to consign them to the proverbial circular file. 

I received the majority of them during the time I publicly supported my cousins on the Hemings/Jefferson side of the family and invited them to accompany me to the annual family reunion at Monticello beginning in 1999.  The hate mail included more than 100 death threats, which I did hang onto in the unlikely event that any of those brave, anonymous words became action to which I would have been compelled to respond using force.  That never came to pass, however.  People who don’t sign threats are unlikely to carry them out, as my continuing presence on the earth and in the pages of this newsletter confirms.

I learned early on that putting yourself in the public eye makes you a target.  I fondly recall one day after the publication of my first novel had hit the bestseller lists when my friend Norman Mailer took me aside and said, “Well, you’ve done it now.”  I asked him what he meant, and he asked me if I remembered the booth at county fairs where a local figure like a school principal or mayor would put his face through a circular hole in a big canvas and you could pay a dollar to throw a water balloon at him.  (It was always a “him” in those days.)  I told him I did.  “Well, you just stuck your face through the canvas, my boy,” said Norman.  “Get ready to be hit.”

Was he ever right.  Norman had made a career out of picking rhetorical fights with literary or political rivals and duking it out in journals of the time like Partisan Review and others like it, so I knew that he knew what he was talking about.  But that wasn’t my style.  I didn’t write slashing book reviews or get myself invited to be on panels at places like Town Hall to argue the great issues of the day with opponents political or otherwise. 

But stay at it long enough and they will come, especially I discovered when it comes to the issue of race.  Barack Obama grabbed hold of that live wire in 2008 when he referred to people who had lost jobs in “small town Pennsylvania” by saying “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them…”  His remark came during the primary race against Hillary Clinton who called his comments “elitist,” but he was excoriated by Republicans as well.  It took a few years, but we learned in 2016 and ever since how right Obama was, as Donald Trump opened the floodgates to the torrent of hate and racism we’ve seen ever since.

From my experience on the barricades, I would add to Obama’s critique this:  what they cling to mainly is their whiteness.  Everything else, guns and god included, is in service to the essential fear they have that white people are losing control of the power they have had since the country’s founding.

It’s why they cling so tightly to Jefferson, I found.  To acknowledge as I have that he fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings was taboo in a way I had never imagined because it touched on two parts of our history that had been forbidden to discuss for more than 200 years:  slavery and sex between the races.  I’ll never forget the refrain I heard so often from what we might call the “Jefferson defenders,” that he “wasn’t that kind of man.”  I got into a public argument with an amateur historian at one of the Jefferson family reunions at the time I was taking my Hemings cousins with me to Monticello.  He flung that one at me, denying that Jefferson had fathered Sally Hemings’ children:  “He wasn’t that kind of man,” he exclaimed.

“Was he the kind of man who owned slaves?” I asked him.  He knew I was going somewhere with that retort, and he couldn’t quite tell where, so he hesitated, and I asked him the same question again. 

“Yes, of course he was.  It’s established by history.”

“But you claim he wasn’t the kind of man who would have had sex with a slave.  Which is worse?” I asked him.  “Owning a slave or having sex with one?”

“I…I can’t answer that,” he stuttered.

“Well, you just did,” I said.

That’s the kind of thing that has gotten me in so much trouble when it comes to my ancestor, Mr. Jefferson.  For more than a century, historians claimed that Jefferson simply couldn’t have fathered Sally’s children, because to admit that would have damaged his reputation as a “founding father.”  As if any further damage to the reputation of a slave owner would be possible.

But of course Jefferson’s ownership of more than 600 slaves wasn’t part of the discussion and had never been.  I never learned in my study of American history throughout my schooling including my four years at West Point that Jefferson owned slaves.  It just wasn’t said.  Nor was it said that he fathered children with one of his slaves, of course, such an idea being so far out of bounds as to be unthinkable.

Not only thinking the thought but coming out and saying it was like burning the flag.  I learned that the purity and sanctity of someone like Jefferson was not only part of the American myth, it was the soul of the country to the white people who had always thought the country was theirs.  I found that introducing not only the stain of slavery but the blasphemy of race-mixing was seen as a crime against everything America stood for.  The favorite curse heaped upon me in the hate mail I have received ever since I embraced the Hemings family has been “race traitor,” meshing the only crime actually written into the Constitution, treason, with the Great Taboo of the American story, race.

Norman Mailer was right in observing that when you stick your face through the canvas, you’re going to get hit.  When you live your life out loud by saying the unsayable, they’re going to try to make you take it back and wish you’d never raised your hand and said, hey, listen to me.  This is what I believe.

Well, this is what I believe:  we are what we have done as a people and as a country, including the institution of slavery.  It’s like there is no such thing as a little bit of adultery.  It is what it is, and you either admit it and live with the consequences and move on, or the thing you’re trying to save dies. 

Which is where we are today.  We can’t save America if we don’t save ourselves first.  If that means confronting our past, including founding fathers who owned slaves and fathered children with Black women, then that’s what we must do.  It’s not such a big deal.  We had other founding fathers, and founding mothers, too, including Sally Hemings, who even as a slave, even though she was owned by him, spent the last 36 years of Jefferson’s life with him.  You won’t find this in the books written by the white men who have presided over what we call American history, but it is part of the Hemings family lore that Sally was one of the two people at his bedside on the day that he died on July 4, 1826.  The other was his daughter Martha, Sally Hemings’ half-sister.

That is our history – imponderable, complex, contradictory, all of it mixed together. Talk about unthinkable!  When you finally confront it, all of it, is this a great country, or what?

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