It was judgment day at the University of Virginia. Michele Cooley, preparing to defend her dissertation before a panel of professors, glanced at the bust of Thomas Jefferson in the school's historic Rotunda. From his image, she drew strength -- for reasons someone looking at her might never have imagined.
As a successful African-American earning her third degree at U.Va., Cooley had made a natural choice for her Ph.D. thesis: She had probed the factors responsible for black students' success. And her conclusions had everything to do with the confidence she found standing near the visage of the country's third president and the university's founding father.
Black students who succeed, she told the panel, are secure in their self-concept and ethnic identity.
They know who they are.
As she explained her thesis and answered questions, she stole a glance out the window of the Rotunda to the university's famous "lawn" and the U-shaped brick village. All around she saw the work of her great-great-great-great-great-great-grand- father.
"I felt a sense of support and motivation having him there," she says now of that day eight years ago.
Since she was 12 years old, Michele Cooley had carried around a side of the Jefferson story that historians had largely ignored: a 38-year relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, that produced seven children.
In 1991, when Cooley was working on her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at U.Va., the knowledge that she was a descendant of Hemings and Jefferson was simply that: something to carry around. If people believed you, fine. If not, so what?
You know who you are.
That was before Daddy started making waves, and the historical organizations started asking him to functions, and the national media got interested, and the Clintons invited him to the White House and Daddy said on national TV that he wanted to be buried at Monticello, in a graveyard with Jefferson himself.
That was before Daddy suddenly died last July, and the Monticello Association refused his wish to be buried there, and her mother and siblings voted to give her the responsibility of carrying on Daddy's quest, and the DNA findings came out indicating Jefferson probably fathered at least one child with Hemings.
And so, Cooley-Quille -- who by now had married Allen Quille Jr. and become an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health -- arrived at Monticello earlier this month to instant media fame.
The Hemings descendants had been invited to the annual family reunion for the first time in its 86-year history -- albeit under threat of public embarrassment. Jefferson descendant Lucian Truscott IV, who invited them, was running around calling his cousins racists for refusing to acknowledge the black blood in their family. At times, rhetorical snarling turned the heady event into farce.
Anyone could have forgiven Michele Cooley-Quille for being angry. She was, instead, the picture of serenity, chatting with newfound cousins and the media -- a striking figure with long black hair and huge dark eyes, 5 1/2months pregnant and draped in an elegant black cocktail dress and matching long-waisted jacket.
So the Monticello Association won't acknowledge Jefferson's second family?
They just don't have enough information, the 33-year-old Cooley-Quille told the media. Only when they are better informed can we judge their motives.
The country, which has lived for more than 200 years with the hypocrisy of race and sex, has heard a lot from the hotheads and, for all the trouble they cause, the hotheads have changed history. This is a story about a coolhead, and how she got that way despite the secrets and the shame that, as Cooley-Quille puts it, have denied her family their rightful legacy.
A shared legacy
In her spacious Baltimore County home the day after her return from Charlottesville, Cooley-Quille sat on a white couch in a family room off the kitchen, legs crossed pretzel-style, her Yorkie snoozing next to her, as she reflected on the weekend's events.
The house, which the Quilles built a year and half ago, has Palladian windows and columns, just like the ones Jefferson built at the University of Virginia and Monticello. Only in those days, it was slaves who did the work.
"Perhaps as a result of this exposure, I gained an affinity for them," she said. "I can't say it was a conscious decision, but perhaps an unconscious one. Or," she added with a laugh, "a genetic one."
Of all the Hemings descendants, Cooley-Quille and her relatives -- the line that descends from Hemings' son, Thomas Woodson -- have, perhaps, the most reason to be agitated.
Despite a strong oral history of their family's descent from Jefferson and documents to support it, last year's highly publicized DNA findings found no match with Woodson descendants.
Those findings are inconclusive, and additional Woodson descendants are now being tested. But the DNA results fueled the argument that Thomas Woodson was not a son of Jefferson, that the Woodson oral history and family documents -- including a published genealogy, wills and affidavits, newspaper articles, Bibles that serve as a family tree, photographs and drawings -- amount to a big misunderstanding.
Historians give varying accounts of Jefferson's relationship with Hemings. But the Woodson story starts with a now-widely accepted view that in 1789, a child was conceived in France, the product of a secret union between Jefferson, then minister to France, and Hemings, who was one-quarter black and the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife, Martha.
In 1790, when Jefferson returned to the United States, he brought Hemings -- still pregnant -- back to Monticello. Hemings, having enjoyed freedom in France -- slavery was illegal -- hadn't wanted to return to Virginia. But Jefferson promised she would live a life of privilege and that he would free her children at age 21, according to Woodson family history and other historical sources.
One version of the story holds that the baby from that pregnancy died. Woodson history, however, says the baby was born in 1790 in Shadwell, Va., near Charlottesville, also Thomas Jefferson's birthplace -- and named Thomas.
Over the years, rumors circulated about Jefferson's liaison with his slave. In 1802, a newspaper reporter, James Callendar, wrote that a young lad of 10 or 12 named Tom was living at Monticello, "and his features are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the president himself."
Jefferson's political enemies took advantage of the story. As a result, Thomas was sent to the farm of John Woodson, a relation of Jefferson's, whose name Thomas later took in rejection of the parent who had rejected him, according to Woodson history.
Thomas Woodson married Jemima (Price) Grant and had 11 children, and so it went for seven generations until 1,400 people in the United States today are their descendants, Michele Cooley-Quille among them.
Like most American children, Michele would learn about Thomas Jefferson in grade school, but not about the secret that would eventually become a crusade.
Discrimination-free life
Cooley-Quille was also born in France, in 1965, where her father, Robert Cooley III, was a lawyer for the U.S. Army.
Just as Sally Hemings had enjoyed freedom in France, the Cooleys -- living in Orleans, France -- had escaped the discrimination that still stifled blacks in the United States of the mid-1960s. Their sense of equality was reinforced by Robert Cooley's service in the military, the first American institution to systematically practice equal rights among races.
So in the late 1960s, when the family returned to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville -- where Robert Cooley attended military law (JAG) school -- they were disturbed to find how little had changed, despite the passage of civil rights laws.
Cooley finally realized it was the color of his skin that made white students leave the table when he sat down to study in the library. He repeatedly turned down invitations to dinner or bowling with his military buddies to spare them the embarrassment of witnessing his rejection from establishments that would not welcome blacks.
The Cooleys worked hard to build their children's inner strength, teaching them to be colorblind and not look for racism in peoples' motives. Though they typically lived in white neighborhoods and rose through the ranks of white-dominated society, the Cooleys sheltered their children from situations where they might be denigrated.
In one apartment complex where they lived in Charlottesville, the Cooleys at first kept their children out of the pool, fearing the trauma they'd suffer if their white neighbors suddenly got out.
Meanwhile, in the early 1970s in Washington, Minnie Shumate Woodson was digging up family history for a book on the Woodsons, and her research led her to theretofore-unknown relatives across the country.
Brought together by the book, five or six lines of the Woodson family gathered in 1978 in a Pittsburgh hotel for the first reunion. "The families didn't know one another until they came together in 1978, and they all had the same story," said John Q. Taylor King, 77, of Austin Texas, a Woodson descendant. "That's why we have such implicit faith in the Woodson oral history."
Preparing to attend the reunion, Cooley decided it was time to tell his three children, Lisa, 13, Michele, 12, and Robert IV, 9, about their lineage. (He had been told the "family secret" at age 8 in the 1940s by his grandfather.)
"We were so ecstatic," Cooley-Quille said. "It's tremendous to find out you're related to someone who wrote the Declaration of Independence and shaped democracy in America."
Black people, Cooley-Quille would learn, had been kept out of the official record, so they kept their own history -- not in hardbound textbooks but in memories passed down orally from parent to child to grandchild, in letters, family books and Bibles inscribed with birth and death records and family trees.
As Woodson family members began to flock to Monticello, historians began to interview them. Cooley-Quille recalls a trip she made as a teen-ager with her family. Standing in Jefferson's bedroom, she wanted to disappear when her father embarrassed the guide by asking where Sally Hemings had slept.
Her high school years were spent in conservative Chesterfield County, Va., where the Cooleys were among few black families. Michele was smart and popular. "I was the first black fill-in-the-blank," she said; the first black varsity cheerleader, first black on the prom court and the homecoming court.
She dated interracially, and sometimes white parents objected, which was painful. But she's quick to turn it around: "Obviously, they had raised their kids right, or their son wouldn't want to go out with someone African-American."
At the University of Virginia, she earned three degrees, undergraduate, masters and Ph.D. -- making her a triple Hoo in U.Va. parlance -- in pursuit of her childhood goal of becoming a psychologist to help children in trouble. And it was there, at U.Va. in 1992, that she attended a panel on Jefferson with her father.
At the conference, when someone mentioned Jefferson's relationship with Hemings, the experts dismissed it, and Robert Cooley couldn't take it any more. He went to the podium and announced he was a seventh generation descendant of Jefferson.
"I was embarrassed. I thought, you don't need to tell everybody; you know it's true," Cooley-Quille said.
"It's a lot of work, and I didn't feel like doing it."
But her father began his quest in earnest: reading, gathering documents and tracking family stories -- though he remained conflicted about Jefferson, who preached equality for all men and still owned slaves.
Soon, Cooley was being invited to historical functions and interviewed by the media. Ken Burns, the noted documentary maker, included Cooley in his series on Jefferson. And, in 1997, President William Jefferson Clinton -- a Jefferson buff -- invited the Cooleys and others from the Burns series to a White House reception.
At one point, the subject of Sally Hemings came up, and a historian pooh-poohed the idea of her relationship with Jefferson. But Cooley spoke up, insisting Hemings was Jefferson's lover -- and that he was living proof of it.
Cooley-Quille recalls her father's moment of triumph: "Clinton turned to Daddy and said, I believe you."
The rest is tragedy mixed with inspiration. Last July, on Sunday morning TV, Robert Cooley said he'd like to be buried in the graveyard at Monticello. When the show aired, he and his wife were in Baltimore visiting their daughter. Michele heard her father make his wish, but didn't think much about it. After all, Daddy, as she calls him, was only 58.
Two weeks later, her father died suddenly of heart complications.
The next morning, Cooley-Quille decided to ask that her father be granted his wish. But when she got the president of the Monticello Association on the phone, she was rebuffed. Instead, Cooley, a Vietnam veteran with two bronze stars, a former federal magistrate and circuit court judge, was buried in the veterans section of a private cemetery in Richmond.
Behind her back, Cooley-Quille's mother and siblings voted to give her the job of continuing her father's efforts.
"Daddy used to say that I have the horsepower," Cooley-Quille said.
Her brother, Robert, will take charge of the book on their family that their father began, in which each member will write a chapter.
Last November, after the DNA results were published that linked Hemings' youngest child, Eston, to Jefferson's uncle, Oprah Winfrey convened a Jefferson-Hemings family meeting of sorts on her show.
It was there that Cooley-Quille met Lucian Truscott IV, who extended the invitation that would stir up so much trouble for the stodgy old association whose meetings were so boring, Truscott said, the main item discussed in previous years was how many gallons of paint to buy for the fence.
A historical day
It seemed a culture shock for the austere mansion and its austere descendants to arrive Saturday evening dressed for church or a funeral and face scruffy reporters, photographers and TV crews asking if they had changed their 86-year-old opinions.
Jefferson and Hemings descendants, with skins of rich chocolate, light cream and many hues in between, listened to speeches by Monticello officials and others that attempted to seize the historic moment, each with its own spin.
Afterward, the cocktail party shared the stage with dueling press conferences just feet apart on the steps of the mansion.
"I think most of the members agree we want to take a long, hard look" at the evidence before deciding which descendants belong in the association, Robert Gillespie, outgoing president of the organization was saying.
A few feet away, Truscott, a Los Angeles writer, was holding court: "If they don't let them in this year, I'll come back next year with 100, then I'm coming back with 150, until finally there will be more black people here than white people."
On Sunday morning, at a private memorial service for his mother, who died last December, Truscott wept as he told family members his mother had raised him for this mission, recalling how she had defended her sons when they beat up a white boy for using a racial epithet against a black friend.
Pointing to a black iron fence on one side of the graveyard, he said "that's the fence I'm going to have moved" to make more room for Jefferson's second family.
An hour or so later, as descendants gathered in the mountain graveyard before a memorial ceremony, small cliques huddled between tombstones, plotting strategy for an upcoming showdown. The Monticello Association would be asked to admit Hemings descendants as members, which would entitle them to burial rights on that very land. It was Cooley-Quille's idea to make the proposal concrete by having Hemings descendants apply for membership, which she and two others did.
The meeting was beset by uncharacteristic confusion. After inviting the Hemings family to the reunion, some association members tried to kick them out after lunch so they could discuss business in private, a proposal that failed by a vote of 33-20.
Gillespie later explained the logic of such a proposal: some members felt there were too many people in the room so it would be difficult to count votes.
As it was, it was hard to distinguish "Jefferson" descendants from "Hemings" descendants because so many of the latter looked white.
"That's what threw them off," Cooley-Quille said, chuckling. "I think they were expecting a bunch of black people, which is so cool. It's so groovy! It shows those banana heads they can't do it on racist grounds. It's the beautiful part of it. It's so American. ... They couldn't identify the regular members. All these people were white!"
In the end, the association said it would study the historical and genealogical data for a year to figure out what criteria to use for admission. Truscott's proposal to admit Hemings descendants as honorary members right away was blocked before it could get to a vote. No rash decisions that day.
Cooley-Quille wasn't pleased, but didn't see it as a failure either. Her membership is pending. And the group accomplished a lot, she said, simply by meeting each other and sharing information.
She dug her heels into the red clay soil of the lush mountain, and said she'll be back next year with a member of the ninth generation, her first baby, due in September.
Someday, she believes, everyone will know what she knows. And still, there will be holdouts. But, hey, that's life in America.
Family squabble
On May 16, the Monticello Association gathered for its annual meeting. Among the items discussed was whether to admit as members the descendants of Thomas Jefferson's slave, Sally Hemings. Seated in a hotel banquet room were association members and relatives of Hemings. The press was barred from that discussion, but The Sun obtained a copy of a tape made surreptitiously by an association member. Here are excerpts:
"I hereby make a motion that we hereby move to executive session, with only the ... descendants of the Monticello Association in attendance ..."
"We have some very important business to discuss, and I think it would be, from a practical perspective, very difficult to determine who is a legitimate member of the association vs.those who are guests. ... No. 2, I am not aware of any job interview that I've been on, not been aware of any co-op that I wanted to be a member of, nor have I ever been involved in a membership committee decision of any private club that I wanted to be involved in, where the membership committee invites the prospective member to participate in this discussion about whether or not I'm going to be a member of that club. ..."
"I am in favor of the motion. However, ... dessert is being served [and] it seems very ungracious to ask them to leave before they have had the rest of their meal. [Applause.] So I would like to pose an amendment to the motion that we reconvene in executive session at 2 o'clock ..."
"I oppose the motion. ... When we sat here and discussed the DNA evidence [last year], when we discussed the issue of admitting the Hemings or not admitting the Hemings ... there were associate, honorary [members] and guests here at that time. No one asked them to leave. ... [Besides] I'm going to walk out there and tell the press everything [that's] said anyway. So it's a moot question."
"This is a family. And when family talks about family, everybody in the family is there. At least that is the kind of family I would want."
"I am the son of Eston [Hemings]. ... First, when I join an organization I like to check them out, too, and see if I want to become a member of them as well. So I am here to see if this is an organization that I can feel honored being a member of ... and not waste my time."
Pub Date: 5/29/99