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selenakI'm currently reading Annette Gordon-Read's The Hemingses of Monticello, which is absolutely fascinating in the way it reconstructs the lives of several generations of a black, or if you want to get technical mixed race family through colonial, revolutionary and early Republic times; review to follow once I'm done. In the meantime, here's the author giving a lecture at Monticello (or rather, the first part of the lecture, the others are linked via YouTube):
It's chock full of great details, especially on every day life - the avarage wages of servants in prerevolutionary Paris, for example (turns out Jefferson paid both James and Sally Hemings above avarage for what other chefs and femmes du chambre were receiving during their years in Paris with him, plus he paid them monthly wages whereas the usual practice in France was to pay your servants yearly wages; Sally Hemings was inocculated against small pox shortly after her arrival by Dr. Sutton (who'd shot to fame by treating Louis XV., who died of the illness anyway) - the gruesome procedure that was inocculation back then was shown in John Adams when Abigail Adams and her children underwent it, but as Gordon-Read says, undergoing the procedure if you're 15, away from everyone you ever knew and in a country you don't yet speak the language of must have been doubly terrifying), and also great with context (Abigail Adams and her son John Quincy being anti-slavery going hand in hand with them also being horrified at the thought of sexual relationships between the races - Gordon-Reed quotes comments from both of them on Othello which basically amount to "Desdemona had it coming for being perverse enough to fall in love with a black man").
It's such a deeply fascinating and disturbing quintessential paradox.
It's chock full of great details, especially on every day life - the avarage wages of servants in prerevolutionary Paris, for example (turns out Jefferson paid both James and Sally Hemings above avarage for what other chefs and femmes du chambre were receiving during their years in Paris with him, plus he paid them monthly wages whereas the usual practice in France was to pay your servants yearly wages; Sally Hemings was inocculated against small pox shortly after her arrival by Dr. Sutton (who'd shot to fame by treating Louis XV., who died of the illness anyway) - the gruesome procedure that was inocculation back then was shown in John Adams when Abigail Adams and her children underwent it, but as Gordon-Read says, undergoing the procedure if you're 15, away from everyone you ever knew and in a country you don't yet speak the language of must have been doubly terrifying), and also great with context (Abigail Adams and her son John Quincy being anti-slavery going hand in hand with them also being horrified at the thought of sexual relationships between the races - Gordon-Reed quotes comments from both of them on Othello which basically amount to "Desdemona had it coming for being perverse enough to fall in love with a black man").
It's such a deeply fascinating and disturbing quintessential paradox.
