blue trane's Journal: Gore Vidal's "Burr"

From pages 252-253:

The Colonel stopped abruptly; pushed aside the various depositions on the baize-covered table.

"Let us turn to less weighty matters. Let us consider the home life of Massa Tom, in the autumn of 1795."

From pages 255-256:

At about ten in the morning toward the end of September, I stood below the hill on which the mansion Monticello was a-building. All was confusion. A large forge manned (or rather boy-ed) by a dozen black children was turning out nails. The apostle of the agrarian life gaily admitted to now being a wholesale manufacturer.

"I have no choice," said Jefferson who greeted me at the smithy. "The crops pay for rebuilding the house. The nails pay for groceries. I calculate at my present rate of production I shall be out of debt in four years." I complimented him. I too have had my nail manufactories which were to get me out of debt. But somehow the nails never do the trick.

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Suddenly Jefferson's horse shied. Savagely he jerked at the animal's mouth till blood came with the foam; all the while using his whip until the poor creature was heavily wealed. It was my first experience of the way he always treated horses.

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We rode through a meadow filled with brick kilns. Slaves were everywhere, hard at work. I was surprised to see how "bright" they were. I do not know if that word is still in use in the south, but in those days a slave with a large degree of white blood was knows as "bright." It made me most uneasy to see so many men and women whose skins were a good deal fairer than my own belonging to Mr. Jefferson.

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From page 257:

"I inherited the bright slaves from my father-in-law John Wayles." Jefferson sighed. "It is no secret - there are no secrets in Virginia - that many of them are his children." Sally Hemings was a daughter of Wayles which made her the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife. Certainly the girl bore a remarkable resemblance to Martha Wayles, if the portrait in the dining-room at Monticello was to be trusted. Amusing to contemplate that in bedding his fine-looking slave, Jefferson was also sleeping with his sister-in-law! One would have enjoyed hearing him moralize on that subject.

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From pages 263-264:

I indicated the small boy who was now perilously climbing a tree. "Your grandson is going to hurt himself."

Jefferson flushed deeply. "That is a child of the place. A Hemings, I think."

Since the child was obviously son or grandson to him, I had seriously blundered and, as in law, ignorance is not a defence. It was a curious sensation to look about Monticello and see everywhere so many replicas of Jefferson and his father-in-law. It was as if we had all of us been transformed into dogs, and as a single male dog can re-create in his own image an entire canine community, so Jefferson and his family had grafted their powerful strain upon these slave Africans, and like a king dog (or the Sultan at the Grande Porte) Jefferson could now look about him and see everywhere near-perfect consanguinity.