Jefferson cousins revisit secret past

Two women sat together in the corner of the Student Commons’ Capital Ballroom before their program began. They conversed like they were old friends but no one could have guessed they were related. One woman is white and the other is black.

The two women are cousins and their great-great-great-grandfather was the famous Virginia patriot and America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson.

They didn’t know each other early in their lives, but in the 1990s they were forever linked by scientific evidence.

In 1998, the scientific journal “Nature” published the DNA test results to finally answer the relationship between a president and a slave that started more than two centuries ago. The tests concluded that Jefferson fathered at least one of his slave’s children and quite probably all six she bore.

Then the cousins states that the rest of the nation discovered the second life of one of our beloved founding fathers and his longtime affair with his slave girl, Sally Hemings.

Julia Jefferson Westerinen, who is white, is a former educator turned businesswoman and her cousin, Shay Banks-Young, who is black, is a preventive health trainer and a poet.

The cousins came to VCU to help raise the consciousness of their family’s story and the racial issues surrounding it.

“We want to bridge racial harmony,” Banks-Young said to the audience.

The two women were guest speakers at the Feb. 4 forum: The Affairs of Race in America, A Conversation in Black and White. VCU’s Office of Multicultural Student Affairs co-sponsored the event with the Activities Programming Board Lectures Committee.

“All of us have a story. Tonight we’re going to hear a very, very unique story,” said Roderick McDavis, provost and vice president for academic affairs.

Joyce Belton, assistant to the director of the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, said, “It is African-American history and American history. In memory of Sally Hemings, it is her story.”

During the program the pair sat on stage and spoke candidly about race relations and the Jefferson-Hemings affair.

“There are always two sides of the story and we’re here to tell the other side,” Banks-Young said.

She began the discussion by asking the audience to close their eyes and imagine they were a free girl in Africa who was taken from her family. In graphic detail, she told the story of an African girl forced into slavery in America after a grueling sea voyage.

Then the cousins detailed their family tree to the audience. They said their family began with two less known people in history, Capt. John Hemings and a female slave. The couple conceived Elizabeth “Betty” Hemings, who later had six children with her owner John Wayles. Their youngest child was Sally Hemings.

John Wayles and his wife had a daughter named Martha, who married Jefferson. Sally Hemings and her family came to the Jeffersons’ plantation as part of an inheritance from Martha’s father.

An oversight, Banks-Young concludes, was that the descendents of Sally Hemings and Jefferson were also blood related to Jefferson’s late wife, Martha. After all, Sally Hemings and her siblings were half-siblings to Martha.

After 10 years of marriage, Martha died. Thus, this is when the controversy, rather the affair began.

“Jefferson took Sally as his concubine,” Westerinen said.

In 1787, Sally went to Paris, where Jefferson was serving for the U.S. government as a diplomat, for two years to assist Jefferson’s youngest daughter, Mary. Banks-Young said an affair began between the 14-year-old slave-girl and the 44-year-old Virginian.

Questions were raised. “Did he love her?” Westerinen asks. “Did she love him?”

She said she did not know and no one would ever know if he did.

“I think he loved property, I think he loved value. And I think Sally was one of his greatest possessions,” Banks-Young said.

It was said that Sally had similar facial features as her half-sister, Jefferson’s late wife, Martha. “She was beautiful,” Banks-Young said.

Westerinen said Sally returned to Monticello with Jefferson. The two had six children, but only five survived, including Westerinen’s and Banks-Young’s great-great-grandfathers, Eston and Madison.

Banks-Young said America is fascinated by the scandal because there are white people going back to black descendents, and black people going back to white descendents.

The two affirmed that Westerinen’s great-great-grandfather, Eston, and his family passed as white while Young’s great-great-grandfather Madison stayed in the black community after they were granted their freedom. Eston Hemings changed his last name to Jefferson.

Banks-Young always knew she was related to Jefferson.

“I learned through family oral history,” she said.

Westerinen, however, didn’t know until another Hemings’ family member came to her and told her.

“The way I found out, it was by accident,” she said. “I knew we were related [to Jefferson] but I didn’t think directly because Jefferson had two daughters with Martha. I was surprised we came through the black side.”

As the cousins went through the family tree they chronicled the lives of their descendents. The two articulate women discussed the differences and similarities they share, but mostly the differences.

Westerinen grew up in the middle class of Madison, Wis. Banks-Young grew up poor in Columbus, Ohio.

Young said that she doesn’t see her cousin as white.

“To me, she’s a black woman. She’s still my cousin. We may be different in our culture, but it is about character,” she said.

It was by testing Westerinen’s DNA that she was linked to Jefferson. Most of Jefferson’s descendents from his daughter by his marriage to Martha, do not accept the DNA testing.

“The Monticello Association voted last year that it wasn’t enough evidence,” Westerinen said.

Banks-Young does not care about the Jefferson family members and their rejection of the Hemings’ family. She knows who her and her cousin’s ancestors are.

“I love Julia. We’re one and we’re sisters,” Banks-Young said.

Many members of the VCU faculty, staff, students and community said they enjoyed the history lesson. Tessa Gwathmey, a junior art education major, said she came because she had been following the story since she was a child. She came to follow the story’s progress and any new developments.

“They were very good. We have such a rich testimony in these two individuals,” Gwathmey said.

Dr. Imad Damaj, a faculty member in the School of Medicine’s department of pharmacology agrees that it was a rich experience.

“I came because I was interested in the racial dialog,” Damaj said. “It was excellent.”

Rondle Edwards, a retired school superintendent came to hear the truth.

“I have read and learned so much of the story that I wanted to hear from them in person,” Edwards said. “We must know the truth to decide about the past, present and future.”

A PBS documentary titled “Jefferson’s Blood,” affirmed Jefferson and Sally shared 38 years together between Paris and Monticello. And on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826, Jefferson, 83, died. In his will he freed Madison and Eston Hemings.

Sally Hemings was not immediatly freed. She received her freedom two years after his death.

Two other children, Beverly (a son) and Harriet Hemings, were allowed to run away. They passed as white and are lost to historians. The first son, Thomas Woodson, was sent away, when he was 12-years-old and later freed.