RECLAMATION

A Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson fashions a straightforward memoir about her life and struggles.

Born in 1957, Jessup White, now the public relations and community engagement officer at Monticello, grew up in the middle-class suburbs of Washington, D.C., the daughter of a teacher and a civil servant. As she writes, “I grew up ‘Negro rich.’ It meant that my family was well-off for Black people.” Her father’s family, according to a vague understanding (“that’s what they say”), had descended from Jefferson. By her teens, the author began to question her father about his ancestry, although he never knew his mother, who died early of tuberculosis, and was unsure about his grandmother’s family name. Some of her relatives, she writes, passed as White. The author graduated from Howard University, worked for the New York Times and in TV news, and married and had children, all before she first visited Monticello. In 2010, she contacted historian Lucia Stanton, “an expert on slavery” who was at the estate researching the descendants of people enslaved by Jefferson. Using Stanton’s diligent research as a launching pad, they unearthed documentation that identified one of Jessup White’s ancestors who was the great-grandson of Jefferson. The plot thickened when they discovered that the author’s great-great-grandmother had descended from the Hemings family line, the best documented of all the enslaved people and their kin who figure in Jefferson’s bloodline. In this serviceable account, Jessup White chronicles how strange it was to meet her White relatives, members of the so-called First Families of Virginia (among them Taylors and Randolphs), who, she observes, weren’t thrilled to know about her either. In 2014, DNA tests confirmed their research: Jessup White was indisputably a Jefferson descendant. Through her account, the author fleshes out many of the genealogical questions concerning Jefferson that have emerged in recent decades.

From Colonial Virginia to today’s Black middle class: Jessup White tells a story that will be meaningful to many readers.