“Jefferson didn’t believe that Black people grieved the way white people did,” the tour guide told us. That could be a description, or to some an epitaph, of America at its most profoundly lost. Because Jefferson surely knew the depth of grief. His beloved wife, Martha, died at age 33 and Jefferson spent the rest of his life grieving for her. And when he wasn’t mourning Martha, he had no qualms about having a sexual relationship with one of her three enslaved half sisters, Sally Hemings, who bore Jefferson six children — children who were, like Hemings herself, relegated to the basement-like quarters beneath Monticello, and one of whom, John, built Jefferson’s coffin.
To spend an entire lifetime, from cradle to grave, surrounded by people who held you in their arms, from the nanny scooping you out of a cradle to a lover who embraced you in a bed in Paris, the city to which Jefferson brought Hemings (a city in which she was, all too briefly, free), and to deny their ability to grieve requires a special lack of imagination, a peculiar drain of empathy. It was a lack of imagination that Jefferson (and his class of countrymen) held in endless abundance, even as he helped create a new branch of architectural style and designed doors that opened as if by magic and helped design an entire system of government with a paradox of freedom at its core. After all, if you believe a subset of humanity can’t grieve, you can put on their shoulders every manner of grief imaginable.