*Use this link to join our virtual
program: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89513092265?pwd=aFk1WXc
0QzJaSDlRWVQ1RFpqUzNlQT09
Meeting ID: 895 1309 2265
Passcod
e: 855502
Harriet Hemings was the second of Sally Hemings&rsquo\;s four surviving children. \;Sometime in 1822 she left Thomas Jefferson&rsquo\;s Monticello\, boarded a stagecoach bound for Phil adelphia\, and all but disappeared from the historical record. More than f ifty years later\, her brother\, Madison Hemings\, publicly told the famil y story of his parents\, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson\, and of his t hree siblings. Harriet\, he said\, passed as a freeborn white woman\, &ldq uo\;married a white man in good standing in Washington City. . . [and] rai sed a family of children.&rdquo\; Her enslaved origins were never discover ed in her lifetime. This talk pieces together clues from such varied sourc es as the &ldquo\;Farm Book&rdquo\; (Jefferson&rsquo\;s plantation records ) and interviews given by Jefferson&rsquo\;s slaves a decade after the end of the Civil War\, to reveal a life lived in the shadows. Even with all t he gaps in the documentary record\, a dramatic story unfolds of an enslave d girl who grew up to claim the right to shape her own life\; who refused to be limited by the options her father&rsquo\;s world presented to her\; who weighed carefully the gains and chose to suffer the losses of passing\ ; and whose secret may have died with her. \; \;
\nThis prog ram follows her childhood and documents the detective work to try to locat e a woman determined to disappear from the historical record. It uses imag es to help imagine her life at Monticello\, Washington\, and Philadelphia. It also illuminates the historian&rsquo\;s craft\, opening doors to city archives\, census records\, marriage and baptism records &ndash\; even a t rip to a graveyard. \; \;
\nThis presentation opens up the v exed questions about Jefferson&rsquo\;s families\, white and black. \; But it also tells a much larger story - \; that continues to our own day &ndash\; about race\, gender\, and citizenship.
\nThe tale of Ha rriet Hemings makes plain the perniciousness of racial categories: \; the utter futility of attempts to maintain rigid racial boundaries in a na tion where white men controlled the bodies of black women\, even as they i nsist on institutionalizing those boundaries in every other way (political \, legal\, economic\, and social).
\nHarriet Hemings also shows us t hat\, however baseless these theories of race are\, they nonetheless impos e great pain on the lives of people governed by them &ndash\; even when th ose people could pass for white.
\nPresented by: Catherine Kerrison who is a Professor of History at Villanova University\, where she teaches courses in Colonial and Revolutionary America and women&rsquo\;s and gende r history. She holds a Ph.D. in American history from the College of Willi am and Mary. \;She is the author of several scholarly articles and tw o books. \; Her first book\, "Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South\," won the Outstanding Book Award from t he History of Education Society in 2007. \; Her second\, "Jefferson&rs quo\;s Daughters: Three Sisters\, White and Black\, in a Young America" (2 018) won the Library of Virginia&rsquo\;s 2019 Literary Award for Nonficti on and was a finalist for the 2019 George Washington Book Prize.
\nA
t the conclusion of the program please feel free to take a brief online su
rvey here:
h
ttps://www.projectoutcome.org/responses/52165
* Virtual programs work best with the current version of the browsers listed below:
\n