14 October 2016 MY NAME IS JAMES MADISON HEMINGS by Jonah Winter and Terry Widener, ill., Schwartz and Wade Books, October 2016, 40p., ISBN: 978-0-385-38342-4

“How many years can a mountain exist

Before it’s washed to the sea?

Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist

Before they’re allowed to be free?”

-- Nobel honoree Bob Dylan (1962)

“When we were playing in his house, we were never to address him as Daddy. All we could do was stand there silently and watch while he tousled the hair of his white grandchildren. He had been married once, and his wife had died young. These were the children of his eldest daughter. They were our age. To them he gave the affection that he could not or would not give us.

“We did receive, however, somewhat special treatment. Our father had promised our mother never to make us work the fields that many others were forced to work. I remember watching them and thinking: Unlike me, you will never be free.

“And yet, my name was written in my father’s ‘Farm Book’--the ledger where he recorded all his property. My brothers’ and sister’s names were also there, alongside the names of all the people he owned, right amongst the pages listing sheep and hogs.”

MY NAME IS JAMES MADISON HEMINGS is a tale of American history and perplexing contradictions involving founding father Thomas Jefferson and his relationship with slavery.

I first learned about Thomas Jefferson as a young reader. Around the time that Dylan was writing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” my grandfather set me up at a card table with a pad of paper, a pencil, and a thick, old Jefferson autobiography. I was encouraged to read and take notes.

Impressed by what I read, I concluded that Jefferson must have been the greatest of the Founding Fathers. More importantly, I realized that one can pursue and master a multitude of interests, a concept that’s had a significant, lasting impact upon my own path.

But history books  did not tell the full story of Thomas Jefferson in those days. The name “Hemings” is nowhere to be found between the covers of that Jefferson autobiography.

Thomas Jefferson’s wife Martha Wayles Jefferson died young, and Jefferson inherited his wife’s enslaved mixed-race half-siblings, sired by his late father-in-law. One of those slaves, Sally Hemings, gave birth to four of Jefferson’s children. One of those children, James Madison Hemings, known as Madison, revealed long after his father’s death that the rumors about Jefferson fathering slave children were true.

As author Jonah Winters explains in his Author’s Note:

“This book is inspired by and partially based on James Madison Heming’s 1873 newspaper interview in which he briefly summed up his family’s story, including the bombshell that he was the son of Thomas Jefferson.” I read that interview, “The Memoirs of Madison Hemings,” online.

Interestingly, we know that this information about Jefferson became available in 1873 when the interview was first published. Somehow it was not widely disseminated. Why, we might prompt young people to ask, was this kept out of history and text books?

In MY NAME IS JAMES MADISON HEMINGS, Jonah Winters employs the facts in that 1873 newspaper interview to create a historical fiction picture book story that is consistent with what is known of Madison Hemings’s life. This powerful tale compels us to see the world through the eyes of a young person who is both son and slave, both privileged and deprived.

One wonders what Thomas Jefferson thought and felt about his own behavior. How could he keep his flesh and blood at arm’s length? Jefferson kept his promise to free Madison and his siblings. He gave Madison the opportunity to learn a craft so that the young man could go off into the world and earn a living. But, as a father, seeing Madison and his siblings accounted for in the Farm Book alongside pigs and crop yields is hard to comprehend.

MY NAME IS JAMES MADISON HEMINGS prompts questions that are more easily asked than answered and sheds light on the perverse institution of slavery. It’s a story that  will move young people well beyond dull, rational discussions of the Triangle Trade.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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