“It is, quite simply, impossible to tell an adequate history of the mountain without including the Hemingses,” says Annette Gordon-Reed in the introduction to The Hemingses of Monticello. Bound to the mountain as Thomas Jefferson’s slaves, the Hemings family provided the labor that made their master’s blueprinted dreams a reality. But for Reed, the titular pairing of the family and the plantation at Monticello derives its significance from more than the inextricability of the slave family’s narrative from those of the property they cultivated and the masters they tended. In her attempt to construct a biography of the Hemings family and their relationship to the land and landowners of colonial Virginia and early republican America, Gordon-Reed takes on a project as ambitious, ceaseless, and fraught as Jefferson’s obsessive, continuous construction of his home on “the little mountain.”

As she acknowledges, Gordon-Reed’s decision to write a historical biography of the Hemingses is “problematic in the context of slavery.” While biographical writing is inevitably plagued by gaps in available primary documents that sometimes require the biographer to perform imaginative leaps, the historical reconstruction of a life generally evolves from those narratives produced during the subject’s life. Letters, diary entries, and official documents — the dots that a clever biographer can connect through historical detective work — are rarely available for the chronicler of the enslaved. American slaves were rarely encouraged to tell their own stories, and those official documents that deal with slaves directly (such as the records of slave vessels and ledgers like Jefferson’s “Farm Book” that kept track of domestic activity on a plantation) do little to diminish their anonymity.

It is from this anonymity that Gordon-Reed hopes to pluck out one of the countless families whose destinies were determined by the early American slave trade. She turns to the Hemings family, about whom comparatively more is known and recorded, in order to put a face to the story of colonial and early republican slavery. Due to a “sad paradox” that she readily admits, Gordon-Reed is able to humanize and narrate the story of this particular family only because they were owned by Thomas Jefferson. While she works mightily to tell the Hemingses story in its own right, her narrative never escapes Jefferson’s long, white shadow.

Most refreshing is her unwillingness to cast Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson as lovers caught in a tabloid-worthy liaison. It is obvious that Jefferson’s presence in the text is something of a necessary evil: Gordon-Reed does not want the book to be about him or the validity of his historical reputation, but she relies heavily on his records and remembrances. Similarly, while the affair between Sally Hemings and Jefferson is acknowledged as a major formative influence on the family, it is not the focus of this biography. Indeed, it becomes just one of many instances of social and sexual miscegenation that determined the genetic makeup and privileged social status that light-skinned Hemings descendants used to navigate white society. Rather than presenting us with the all-too-familiar story of a politician engaged in an illicit affair, Gordon-Reed explores the sexual politics of early plantation life in terms of all the complicated relationships among gender, parenthood, and property that necessarily emerged.

Though the historical documents available to Gordon-Reed were penned largely by white men, she downplays the large swaths of text that she devotes to these figures by organizing the narrative around Elizabeth Hemings, whom she considers the “matriarch” of the family. Unlike many other members, Elizabeth was not born at Monticello, the plantation that would shape her family’s destiny. Rather, she was owned by John Wayles, a man who fathered both her children and Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha. As Martha’s property, she was eventually moved to Monticello, where Gordon-Reed speculates her role as the mother of Martha’s half-siblings induced Jefferson to treat the Hemings family better than many of his other slaves.

By focusing on Elizabeth and her descendents, Gordon-Reed emphasizes the peculiar gender relations influenced the slave trade in early Virginia. While white men owned both their slaves and their children, slaves often moved among plantations as members of white women’s prenuptial agreements. Further, the status of a black female slave as a privileged mistress — and eventually, a matriarch — often affected the way that a family was treated in the social system of the plantation. What the biographer lacks in firm detail and written record she makes up for in the structure of her narrative. While she often asks the reader to consider an event in terms of how Jefferson might have perceived it (“imagine Jefferson in such a role…”), she just as often asks the reader to occupy Elizabeth Hemings’ subjectivity as she plays the role of slave, daughter, mistress, wife, mother, and grandmother.

It is this willingness to engage in responsible historical speculation — and to invite her reader to do the same — that allows Gordon-Reed to give voice to a family once silenced by racism and bondage. Like Jefferson’s architectural devotion to Monticello, Gordon-Reed’s biography is fueled by her attention to detail. The several-hundred page volume refers to hundreds of letters, diary entries, official records, and newspaper articles. At some points she wields her historical tools overzealously, overwhelming the reader by trying to quote or summarize every obscure text she has discovered, yet her imagination, affable authorial presence, and formidable storytelling ability help her biographyto transcend its genre. The Hemingses of Monticello, like Jefferson’s home on “the little mountain,” stands as a monument to an American narrative that we must struggle mightily to uncover: those voices silenced by oppression and by history that helped to create the nation in which we live today.

Clare Ploucha ’10 is a junior in Quincy House. She concentrates in American History and Literature.