Around noon, we arrived in Waverly, an old canal town near where Madison settled in the eighteen-thirties. He plied his trade as a carpenter in the area, eventually purchasing a sixty-acre farm. His siblings chose to pass as white after Jefferson’s death, but he remained within the Black community—and, in 1873, when a journalist came knocking, Madison insisted on telling the truth about his family’s life at Monticello. Without the interview, his parents’ relationship might have gone down in history as a rumor.
A building that Madison had worked on around the time of the Civil War—a two-story box of washed-out bricks, with a corrugated roof—was now a Mexican restaurant, with fuchsia doors and Día de los Muertos decorations. We stopped in for a lunch of tacos and guacamole, hoping to see a staircase that a local historian attributed to Madison. Our server told us it was behind a locked door, which she didn’t have the keys to access.
The setback made me think of Madison, locked out of his heritage by a father and a public that didn’t recognize him. After his interview, a response accused him of lying, claiming that the “colored race” was prone to grandiose claims of “illustrious parentage.” (Waverly was a sundown town.) Generations of white historians did the same, treating his words with a skepticism that they didn’t apply to white sources on Jefferson’s life.
A few minutes later, our server returned, and told us that the upstairs tenants could let us in. She led us through a sunny back patio and up a flight of stairs. A windowless hallway with dull gray carpeting provided access to a handful of apartments—and, midway down, the staircase, which was all but concealed by curtains and heaps of junk. We picked our way past boxes, beer cans, and old appliances cluttering the landing, then tentatively made our way upward.
The steps were dusty, and the old brown paint was chipped. But the wood felt solid beneath us. “Looks like he knew what he was doing,” Kossman said, placing her hand on the bannister. It was smooth and shiny, the dark reddish-brown wood softened by graceful curves. “I’m surprised at how well-preserved it is,” Williams said, though, really, it was our finding it here that was the surprise. Looking at the weathered balusters, some of which were missing, I couldn’t help but think of the DNA fragments used in the study—artifacts of our founding contradiction, scattered among families all over the country.
It can’t have been easy for Madison Hemings to tell his story. After all, who would’ve cared to hear it? Probably not his community of freedmen, anxious to escape the stigma of an enslavement that had ended less than ten years prior. Neither can his siblings who passed for white have welcomed the exposure of their origins. Madison’s white neighbors almost certainly didn’t want to believe that a Black carpenter was the son of Thomas Jefferson. Yet thanks, in part, to him, science and history have confirmed the truth of his parents. They are ours, too. ♦
