Jefferson's Children
The Story of One American Family
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Now available in ebook format--one of the important books that marked the beginning of the ongoing conversation about slavery and our nation's history.
From the sixth great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson and enslaved woman Sally Hemmings comes an anthology of Jefferson's living descendants.
Told in the style of a family photo album—with a combination of photographs and interviews—Jefferson’s Children is the riveting story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemming’s sixth great-grandson, Shannon Lanier’s, travels across the country to meet his relatives from both sides of the family. The profiles contained chart the multiple perspectives of Jefferson’s and Hemming’s descendants, from those who embrace their heritage to those who want nothing to do with Jefferson’s legacy. A fascinating picture soon emerges, one that begins with a pairing of two individuals with vastly disparate levels of power—on the one side, the third president of the United States and the author of the Declaration of Independence; on the other, the woman who was his property—and that ultimately represents America’s complicated history with issues of diversity and race and the unusual ways in which we define family.
An ALA Best Book for Young Adults
“The portraits that emerge are as generous and jumbled as America itself.” —The New York Times
“A book about American history, racial identity and the bonds of family that will help young people navigate these difficult areas.” —Black Issues Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"My name is Shannon Lanier. I am a twenty-year-old descendant of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings," begins this thought-provoking, handsome volume designed to resemble a family photo album. Earnest and energetic, Lanier, Jefferson's fifth great-grandson through Sally Hemings's son Madison, brings both these qualities to his anecdotal narrative as he introduces descendents through both family lines and affectingly conveys the tension that surrounded some of his encounters. Describing the first Jefferson family reunion to which the Hemings relatives were invited, at Monticello in 1999, Lanier writes: "There were Jeffersons there who threw their arms around me, and one woman who looked at my outstretched hand and actually shuddered." Those responses are reflected in the profiles here, too, from Jane Floyd's (a descendant of Sally Hemings's and Jefferson's eldest son) articulate discussion of black history including the forming of the NAACP, to Jane Randolph Schluter's flat refusal to believe that Jefferson fathered Hemings's children ("In my family, it was always referred to as a rumor propagated by the Hemings family"). Not surprisingly, some of the subjects are more eloquent and have more compelling stories to recount than others (and some detail their family trees to such a degree that youngsters may get lost in the branches). But this makes a strong teaching tool and springboard for discussion on subjects as varied as understanding one's own genealogy and the devastating results of racial prejudice. Archival photographs supplement Feldman's crisp and candid black-and-white shots, which capture the essence of each subject. Ages 10-up.