The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant’s Search for Her Family’s Lasting Legacy by Gayle Jessup White

Episode Date: December 24, 2021

Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant's Search for Her Family's Lasting Legacy by Gayle Jessup White A Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ family explores America’s racial reckoning through the prism of her ancestors—both the enslaver and the enslaved. Gayle Jessup White had long heard the stories passed down from her father’s family, that they were direct descendants of Thomas Jefferson—lore she firmly believed, though others did not. For four decades the acclaimed journalist and genealogy enthusiast researched her connection to Thomas Jefferson, to confirm its truth once and for all. After she was named a Jefferson Studies Fellow, Jessup White discovered her family lore was correct. Poring through photos and documents and pursuing DNA evidence, she learned that not only was she a descendant of Jefferson on his father’s side; she was also the great-great-great-granddaughter of Peter Hemings, Sally Hemings’s brother. In Reclamation she chronicles her remarkable journey to definitively understand her heritage and reclaim it, and offers a compelling portrait of what it means to be a black woman in America, to pursue the American dream, to reconcile the legacy of racism, and to ensure the nation lives up to the ideals advocated by her legendary ancestor.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Thechrisvossshow.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. Oh, my gosh. It's like a few more days to Christmas appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. Oh my gosh, it's like a few more days to Christmas if you're hearing this. And I don't know if you catch this during Christmas. I'm not sure if we're releasing podcasts during

Christmas. So if you're before Christmas, Merry Christmas to you. And if not, I hope you had a good one and get on that treadmill. Anyway, guys, be sure to see the video version of this. Go to youtube.com forward, Chris Foss. Hit that bell notification.

It's free for an unlimited time. You can take and do that. Also, go to goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Foss. You can see all the amazing books we're reading and reviewing over there as well. You can also go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those places the crazy kids are at nowadays. You want to follow us on all the different shows and everything we do, whether it's the Chris Foss Show or my channels as well. Today, we have an

amazing author on the show. She's got an incredible book that's out, and it really talks about the history of our legacy of this country and how it intertwines with so many people's lives. The book is out. It just came out on November 16th, 2021. So you want to pick that baby up. You can read it over the holiday. How about that? Reclamation, Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant's Search for Her Family's Lasting Legacy. Today we have on the show Gail Jessup-White.

She's going to be joining with us. She's going to be talking about her amazing book that she just put out and some of the contents in it. And we're going to learn a lot of cool stuff about our history, which is really important. The one thing a man can learn from his history is a man never learns from his history. So it's about time we started learning from our history. Gail Jessup White is the Public Relations and Community Engagement Officer at Monticello. Thomas Jefferson's legendary estate.

A former award-winning television reporter and anchor, she started her career at the New York Times. She's written and spoke extensively about her work at Monticello. And she is a direct Jefferson descendant and is also related to two well-documented families enslaved at Monticello, the Hemingses and the Hubbards. And she lives in Virginia. Welcome to the show, Gail. How are you? Thank you, Chris. I am so pleased to be here with you. I really like your show.

Thank you. And we really love having you on. Congratulations on the new book. Did I get the Hemmingses pronunciation? You did. And Monticello pronunciation correct, I think? Absolutely. You absolutely did.

All right. I didn't go to college. I went to Betsy DeVos Public School. I'm trying. That's one of the reasons I like your show. I love your humor. Yeah. So I got my degree from Trump University. Anyway, one of these days. Well, welcome to the show. Congratulations. Thank you. And give us your plugs so people can find you on the internet. Of course, you can always find a lot about me and about the work we do at Monticello, monticello.org. I can be Googled, Gail Jessup White.

I'm on Facebook. I'm on Twitter. I'm not great with social media, I must admit, but I'm really working harder at it now. That's awesome. That's awesome. So what motivated you to want to write this book? Is this your first book? This is my first book, Chris. So

this journey started for me many years ago, decades ago, when I was a 13-year-old girl growing up in Washington, D.C., in a comfortably middle-class family, when I overheard a conversation between my oldest sister, who's 20 years older than I, about 20 years older, and my dad. And I heard my sister say to my dad, and I told them, we're descended from Thomas Jefferson. So I was really shocked to have heard this, as you can imagine, because so many Americans, I certainly hadn't learned that Jefferson owned human beings. So I could not put the math together. It didn't make sense to me that Thomas Jefferson, obviously a white person, and Gail, obviously a black person, could have been related.

So I set my sights on discovering even way, way back then of how this could have been possible. That was one thing that motivated me. The other that really inspired me had to do with my dad. It would have been through my dad that this descendancy occurred. And as I questioned my dad about how this would have been possible, and just to digress for a minute, whereas I have my doubts, I looked at my dad. And my dad was 6'2". He had red hair and freckles. And what I would eventually learn was the Jeffersonian

nose. So Jefferson, of course, was 6'2", had red hair and freckles. So I went to my dad and I asked him about these things and he seemed reluctant to talk about it. And as I learned more about him and about his family, it was because he had endured many losses. And I wanted to bring this story to my dad to help make him whole. And I explain a lot of that in the book. Oh, wow. That's a wonderful, beautiful journey. So give us an overall arcing of the book, and then we'll get into some of the details, if you would, please.

So the book, as I said, starts, actually, the book starts out with Monticello because I end up after so many decades of having a career, raising a family, having a couple of husbands here in Virginia, away from my beloved hometown, Washington, D.C., and working in Richmond. And Richmond's about an hour's drive from Charlottesville. So I eventually ended up at Monticello. But much more than that happened in this journey. I started out as a 13-year-old girl growing up in a predominantly Black city, Washington, D.C., where race really didn't feel like, because it was predominantly Black. And then, of course, I grew up into the world and had different experiences, encountered racism for the first time when I'm 13 years old. But I still, because I was

protected by my family and because I grew up avoiding this topic of race, as so many Americans have, I didn't fully embrace who I was as a person, as a Black person. So the journey took me from discovering this history to where I am today, where I speak openly, honestly about an inclusive story, about what it feels like to be Black in America, about how Black people and marginalized people have been treated in America, about finding solutions where all of us will be treated equally. We were all born equal. We have not all been treated equally. And the goal is to get us all to seeing each other as equal human beings and treating each other with respect. And I talk about those things and I embrace the ideals of the Declaration as applied to all human beings.

And that's been the arc of the story, Chris, and the arc of my life. And you go on a journey to find your history and the arc of life. And you go on a journey to find your history and, and, and the richness of it. And one of the things we found on the show and, and is that history was largely whitewashed. Like I grew up and there was, it was a lot of white people and John Wayne and just a lot of prejudice,

whitewash, racism. And a lot of stuff was left out. A lot of stuff was buried. A lot of stuff was buried a lot of stuff was hidden clearly for the the most obvious purpose and it's been great that so many authors are coming forward doing the research doing the history and the stories are now getting told like what's being done through your book and we're really finding out some of the true flavors of our history the nuances the realities really because some of it, we had some people that talked about the true history of the Alamo one. We're finding out that

it wasn't so pretty. And some of it was spun and PR. So it's great that stories like this, and of course, your personal journey of going through and discovering your past and your history. Thank you. It has been the best journey of my life. The only thing that I've done that I felt was more fulfilling was raising my son. That was a pretty fabulous journey as well. That's awesome. That's awesome. So you went from being on TV and being in news to Monticello. What took you on that journey to want to be there? Was that part of the journey to discover your history and your lineage? It certainly wasn't a straight line getting there. I'll say that. Yes, it was. I didn't know much about Monticello. I write about this in the

book. I was really busy with my career. I was busy with my family, raising my son, as I mentioned, and living in a Washington suburb, an exclusive Washington suburb. And really, oddly enough, still struggling to find myself. But I eventually ended up here in Virginia, as I mentioned, visiting Monticello for the first time about 20 years ago. And every time I went to Monticello 20 years ago, at that point, the guides were talking or at least alluding to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Now, by then, I assumed I was descended from Jefferson and Hemings. So when they came up during the tour, mentioned generally rather briefly, I would raise my hand and I would say, I'm related to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. I'm descended from them.

And the guides would pretty much ignore me. I did this several times. Until 2010, the year my son graduated from high school, and he and I were visiting. He was visiting for the first time. My son was tall already. He was much taller than I when he was 17 years old. And so we're taking the tour. And once again, the guide says, oh, Sally Hemings.

Many historians believe that Thomas Jefferson had children with an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings. And as usual, I raised my hand, this time pointing to my very tall son. We're descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, I said. And the guide opened her arms and she says, your family, your dignitaries, stay after the tour and I'll take you into the dome room, the famous dome room that's on the back of the nickel, the nickel view we call it. Oh my God. And it was the first time after literally years of visiting Monticello

and introducing myself as I saw fit as a member of the family that I was embraced by the researchers there as a member of the family. Wow. And the guy took us to the dome room. I told her my story, what I believed was true, had I heard this oral history passed down, incidentally, from my half-great-aunt, the half-sister of my grandmother, who was related to Jefferson, to my sister,

and ultimately to me, passed down those three generations. And she introduced me to a woman named Cinder Stanton, who was the premier researcher and the foremost expert to this day on enslavement at Monticello. She's retired now. And Cinder Stanton and I got in touch, and I write about all of this in the book. And eventually, she helped me find the connection to my family. And here's what we discovered. And it took years to uncover this, actually. And I became a fellow at Monticello to help uncover this.

I am, in fact, descended from Jefferson and his wife, Martha Whale Skelton, through one of their great-grandsons. So he would have been, one of their great-grandsons would have been my great-grandfather. We knew that. But what we didn't know was who the mother was, the identity of the mother. We continued to do the research using old documents, oh gosh, old records, old letters, and DNA, and eventually discovered that my great-grandmother was a Hemings. She was related and descended from Peter Hemings, one of Sally Hemings' brothers. So I am a Hemings and a Jefferson and a Wales and a Randolph. Oh, wow.

So the history is deep. And adding to that, this tells us so much about enslavement and the way people lived, what some call plantations, some call work camps. There were multiple generations of relations between Jefferson-related family members and Hemings family members. Going back to John Wales, who had relations with a woman named Elizabeth Hemings, my four times great grandmother. She was the mother of the famous Sally Hemings, who had relations with Jefferson, one of Jefferson's sons-in-law after the death of Jefferson's daughter had relations with a Hemings. And then my great grandfather, Jefferson's great grandson, had relations with a Hemings. That's four generations. It's not unique, Chris.

The situation I described to you is not unique. What's unique is that I know about it. And that's the story of what I'm sharing with people, black and white, all people, to understand

a better depth of American history and for black people to see in themselves and their families, their own histories, even though I know mine, theirs is very similar because that's the way it was in America. Yeah. In antebellum America and following the war as well. Did Bonicello have struggle for years over this thing, over these issues and clearly identifying them? I remember seeing in 2017 where they opened up the room where Sally may have stayed.

Did it take them some time for them to embrace this history of Thomas Jefferson? Maybe about 100 years. So a little background on that. The foundation, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, was established in 1923. Sometime in the 1950s, I think it was the 50s, maybe early 60s, the space that is connected to the house that's underneath the house, like a corridor, where the room where historians believe Sally Hemings slept, along with some other spaces, was covered with bathrooms. Now, moving farther through time, in 1998, there was a study called the Foster Study, because there'd been rumors in Jefferson's time that he'd fathered children with an enslaved woman.

A Foster Study presented DNA evidence that Jefferson was the likely father of Sally Hemings' children. Very strong evidence. So at that point, historians had dismissed these allegations that Jefferson had fathered children with an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings. Dusky Sally, the newspapers at the time called her. That was in 1800, the newspapers called her Dusky Sally. Historians began, many historians or some historians began to accept the idea that Jefferson had children with an enslaved woman. Fast forward again to 2018, as you recall, or 2017, when our archaeologists started digging in this space, we uncovered the room that we believe was Sally Hemings's. And we had a big event in 2018, where we commemorated

that discovery and opened that space to the public. That same year, we opened the original kitchen at Monticello, where my ancestor, Peter Hemings, who was a cook at Monticello, was trained by his brother, James, who had been trained as a chef when Jefferson was in Paris. The art of French cookery taught my ancestor to cook. James could be free, whereas my ancestor, Peter, would have remained enslaved as part of a bargain James made with Thomas Jefferson, James Hemings made with Thomas Jefferson.

So again, the stories are so complex and so interwoven, and it's a narrative that has been omitted from American history that Monticello is fully embracing now and telling a much more inclusive story and setting trends because this is happening at sites like this and museums across the country. Yeah. And you guys have an exhibit now of her thing, of her life and showing off different aspects of maybe how she lived. It was interesting because Jefferson didn't speak too kindly about race mixing. And I won't quote what he says here from the Washington Post in this article,

but he wasn't too heavy on it. But the DNA tests are there. They've found that this lineage is true. Yeah, yeah. Jefferson said disparaging, horrible things about black people in the only book he wrote called Notes on the State of Virginia. Wow. Just distasteful and very hard to read and difficult to repeat.

But anybody can. You read them in the Washington Post. And it's shameful, actually. It's shameful. Did Jefferson who wrote All Men Are Equal, I think somebody actually came up with that line that wasn't Jefferson's. So those ideas were circulating, especially in Virginia at the time. So it would have, and it's not fair of me to speak on it because I can't do it eloquently. I can't remember where the words first originated. But Jefferson is the one who immortalized them in the Declaration.

Actually, I believe we just had on the show someone who identified where all men are created equal. And it was actually from a black man during the Civil War? No. The Revolutionary War. During the Revolutionary War. So that was Woody Holton. Woody Holton was on the show just about December 7th. Liberty is sweet in history.

And he said it's traced back to actually a black man in the Revolutionary War who coined the term. And then it was put in a thing. And, yeah, it's interesting the arc of the history of how this mixes. It is. If I could just jump in, though, for clarification. So, it might have been George

Mason, I think, who first wrote it, but it would have been Haynes, I think the man's name was, the black man's name was, who wrote them down after he heard them. They didn't actually originate with him. But he was the first to quote them after hearing them from Jefferson's document. Yeah.

And it's interesting how we founded the country on that term. And, of course, it really wasn't applicable. And I don't think it was applicable to women either initially. But it's been – we talked with, when we had the gentleman on the show, And of course, it really wasn't applicable. And I don't think it was applicable to women either initially. But it's been, we talked with, when we had the gentleman on the show, we mentioned it a second ago. And he talked about how there was a vision that they knew that slavery would probably end someday. And there would be some sort of reconciliation and maybe America would grow out of its thing, Woody Holton's book. And so they left it in there thinking maybe the country might evolve.

That's just speculation. I don't know if that's a true fact. But we talked about it on the show. And it's interesting how those words have become the empowerment to change and evolve the country. And we've still got a long way more to go. But it's interesting how the power of those words is what I'm trying to say. The words were very powerful and have inspired movements, liberation movements, not just in this country, including the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement and the gay rights movement, but liberation movements around the world, including in Haiti, which became the first black democracy in the world and the first successful slave revolt in modern history.

So the words themselves were revolutionary. And yes, at the time the Declaration was written and the Constitution was written, the idea was that there would be amelioration, that enslavement would eventually die out. And Jefferson and his Madison and Monroe and others had the American, conceived the American Colonization Society because Jefferson never thought that Blacks and whites could live close to each other. He never thought that there could be harmony between Blacks and whites. And so the idea was to send Black people to Africa. Well, keep in mind, Black people have been here since the 17th

century. My family has been here since the 17th century, more than most Black white families. So there was no, quote, going back to Africa. They'd never been to Africa. They'd been born in America. But because of the creation invention of the cotton gin, instead of slavery dying out, there became more demands for enslaved, a greater demand for enslaved people. And so what Jefferson didn't imagine and what the other founders didn't imagine was that there would have been a mechanism that would have sped up the need for labor and increased labor. And so rather than pay people to do the work, they used enslaved people to do the work. They used enslaved people to do the work. And Virginia became a source for moving people. One of the greatest migrations in history was moving people from the Upper South to the Lower South to work in those cotton fields. And this is the kind of history, Chris, that people don't know. And people need to know this. America was built on the backs of free labor, built on the backs of enslaved black people.

Woody Holton and I talked about that on the show where the cotton gin actually just made it where they could, instead of growing cotton out on the coast, whatever growing reasons, they were able to move it inland and, of course, go to an industrial scale and then amplify its slavery. Interesting. Yes, exactly. That's exactly right. Yeah. And yeah, our history is ugly. We've talked about this with so many brilliant authors like yourself on the show, going all the way back to the original lie of the Shining Sinai on the hill and some of the different ugliness of the things that we've done across the arc of this country. And a lot of it's been whitewashed. A lot of it's been buried.

Why is this so important that, number one, we reconcile the history of America. We bring out the nuances, the truth. We bring out, we've talked on the show about how one of the different things that white people have an issue with is the shame, the ugliness of it. It's not pretty. If you read the book Cast, it's not pretty. It's very hard. It's very hard sometimes in our history to see how ugly it was. And why is that important? And then I don't know if you want to touch on how that would play into why CRT is important, the thing we're trying to talk about in schools and the big battle that seems to be going on right now over that.

Clarify with CRT, critical race theory. Children are not taught critical race theory. Critical race theory is college level material. From my understanding of it, it's law school material. And it's being used as a catchphrase by people opposed to telling them, and it makes it easy. So people get alarmed when they hear CRT without really understanding what it is. It is essential to know who we are. I can't understand, Chris, why knowing the truth is going to harm people. Black people have dealt with the truth and felt beaten down for generations and are still living with that harm.

Black people are still in a state of trauma from what's happened to us. There's no harm in learning the truth and growing from it. Surely children, white children, who have benefited in every respect from the largesse of this country would benefit from knowing how they came to that largesse. It can only help all of us grow and understand each other better. How will we ever have peace? How will we ever reconcile if we don't understand what precedes? And take the founders off their high horses. Speaking of equestrian visions here, take them down a peg or two or ten.

They were flawed human beings. idea that all men slash women slash humans are created equal was revolutionary and brilliant. Embrace that idea. Make it our own and truly see people that way. We're all created equal. Yeah, and everybody, every human being, I think, goes through their life and questions their, eventually questions their ancestry, usually when they get time, as they get past those years where you're just trying to get out of college and do stuff. But everyone questions who they are and why am I here? How did I get here?

What is my lineage? What is my history? I went through it with my parents, my grandparents, and my uncles, and I was like, who are you people? And what was the struggle to get here? And why am I here?, who are you people? And what was the struggle to get here? And why am I here? And why is this important? And like you say, the history is the fabric of this nation and seeing the full history. Like I've learned so many things by having brilliant authors like yourself on where I'm just like, holy crap, I didn't know that happened. And we didn't know that happened

either. It was buried and we dug it up and it's there and and the validation is there but yeah accepting what's the history of of the reality of this thing because so much of our history is just so whitewashed it's just not even funny and i've learned that more and more the more authors and great books that we've had on who've done the research and and it just enriches the tapestry of our nation when you find out really like a lot of dots start connecting. A lot of things start making sense. And you're like, they really didn't do this for this. They really did it for this.

And actually, really, okay. And that ties into there. And you start understanding some more. And that really helps us, I think, on the look forward to understand where the future of this country is going, where the future of freedom is going, democracy, knock on wood. But it helps us really understand where we're going and address our history and reconcile it. I think maybe reconciliation is the word I'm looking for, being able to reconcile our history in truth

and then be able to map a better future. I don't know. Did you say reconcile nation? Did I hear that? Reconcile our nation? Yes, exactly. Okay.

I thought I heard reconcile nation and I like that as a phrase, reconcile nation. You can keep it. I like it. Thanks. Book number two. I think it's good. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And that's, and that's what I really want people to take away from this book is the idea that we are in fact one nation, that we have struggled with race in this nation. We have not wanted to talk about it until now when I find that I'm not talking about anything else. But we can only grow through this. I also want people, you mentioned knowing who we are. I also hope that this book inspires people, all people to investigate their own history and trace their own genealogy. It's easier now than it's ever been, thanks to companies like Ancestry DNA, 23andMe, et cetera, and the availability of documents that we can access online so easily.

I accessed so many with the help of Cinder Stan and others, death records and not so much church records, but census records. It's there at the touch of our fingertips. And so it has been for me rewarding to discover who my ancestors were and to understand why I do some of the things that I do, what motivates me, why this was important for me. And just to add about the damage that some politicians and educators feel that learning our history can do,

I've heard people question whether Jefferson raped Hemings. He owned Hemings, which is disgusting enough. And some people have asked, how do you feel about your ancestor having raped a woman? It's disgusting, but does it hurt me? No, I don't carry the burden of that. I don't carry the burden of his actions. I'm responsible for myself. We are responsible for what we do, but we learn from the past. We understand who we are from the past. And that's why we should know this history. That's why it's important to teach an inclusive history. No one's asking for handouts. People want recognition and deserve recognition and respect and equanimity and equity and fairness. How many fair words can we come up with in this conversation to bring balance to who we are in this country? And I think you're right. Bringing the humanity of it and that what you mentioned earlier, these people were flawed human beings. There are no unflawed human beings.

Last time I checked, I'm an atheist, but if you believe there's a certain guy in the Bible who's unflawed, well, okay, I'll give you that. But we put these people up on a pedestal and that's okay, but we also need to have the full picture, the full address of that. They weren't perfect people. They were flawed. And to me, that's the texture, that's the fabric. And yeah, it's history is ugly. And the things that we've done in history are ugly. And even up until recently, we found that we weren't bombing well in Afghanistan. We're not a perfect union, but it's the, I think I'm getting that. Who's it? Who's the, the papers?

The anyway, I think somewhere, one of the constitutional writers wrote, we're always in the search for the perfect union and it's probably never going to arrive, but we're, was it Madison? The Federalist Papers you're talking about. Yeah, the Federalist Papers. Speaking of the Federalist Papers. Yeah. Yes.

So maybe James Madison said that. Correct. Or John Jay and Hamilton. Yeah. Constantly in search for the perfect union. Yeah. And it's never a place we're probably ever going to arrive at, especially in 2024. I'm just kidding. I'm not, but we'll see. But I'm worried. But that's going to be the thing. The only thing that got me through the last five years was Obama's, it was one of the

logs I was holding onto when Obama said, sometimes this country zigs and it zags. And it's part of that journey to the perfect union that got me through the last five years. But seeing and waking up to all this stuff, the history is ugly and it's not perfect. And it's not, it doesn't fit nicely into a pretty little box. Like much of it is talked to us. And it's not perfect and it's not it doesn't fit nicely into a pretty little box like and that's okay and it's okay that's as it should be anything else is mythology and we shouldn't build upon mythology you should build upon truths that's how we grow we don't grow with falsehoods we grow with honesty. And I encourage people, not just to, of course, I would love for

people to read my book, but I encourage people to read as much history as they can as possible, and to visit places like Monticello, where we tell the stories, not just of Jefferson and his white family, of Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but of the many enslaved people there. Jefferson

owned, throughout his lifetime, 607 men, women, and children. You come to Monticello, you learn something every time you come. I was just there a couple of days ago. I'm working remotely now. And I heard one of the guides giving a tour called the Slavery at Monticello Tour. And I heard the guide say that Jefferson gave away, gifted 60 of other people's children. So just think about that for a minute. And the guide said, Jefferson was very generous with other people's children. He gave away 60 children. Imagine that. Just imagine that for a moment. You're the parents of one of the children given away. You're the child who's been given away. At that time, it took hours just to travel 30 miles.

So if your child is sent to live on another site, you might see that child once a year. That's horrible to process, but we're better off knowing that because we can move forward, bring history forward, and then move forward to the future as better people. And that's the goal.

And that's what people will learn when they visit Monticello and other historical sites and museums. It's important to do that. It's important to do the work. Yeah. I think one of the most destructive, not the most destructive, but the destructive nature of all this, the splitting of families, the destruction of records, a lot of this stuff wasn't kept historically. I think in

James Monroe's case, the wife ordered everything burned after their death. So they're trying to figure out different things about their history. A lot of it led to, I think a lot of black people have suffered by, who are we and what is our history? And so many families were broken up, destroyed, moved around, like you say. And that lack of identity, I think, really hurts people. I don't know. Of course. Of course it does. But again, that's why it's so important to learn stories in a general sense of who we are as a people and what our contributions have been as a people. Because even though many of us hit that wall once we get past the 1870 census,

which is the first time that Black people were counted as humans and not as property, many of us can't uncover how our families got here, who our families were, what ancestors' names were. But what we can uncover when we visit these sites and read books like mine is what our contributions as a people were. And that will help build our strength and build our dignity and help us feel whole. That's what happened for me, Chris, in this process of uncovering my family and uncovering this history and learning more about Black people and our contributions. It helped make me whole. My dad died before I had a chance to share all this with him. And he was a very strong person. But he was also a very damaged person in many because of so many

losses he experienced and the trauma, the generational trauma that black people have experienced. So I didn't get a chance to share this with him, but I have benefited from myself as has my family. And so many people who are open and who want to hear this story and learn from this story. So I'm really, I couldn't be more satisfied. I'm hesitating because I'm just so moved by people's interest in this and wanting to learn more. It's been very fulfilling for me. The one thing I always say, this is my quote, the one thing man can learn from his history is the man never learns from his history,

and thereby we're doomed to repeat it. With January 6th, seeing the Confederate flag in the, I was having a panic attack, an anxiety attack that day. I finally had to go lay down because I was going to have a panic attack and anxiety attack that day. I finally had to go lay down because I was going to have a heart attack. It was scary, wasn't it? Can you believe that happened in this country? It was scary and my anger too, because we knew something was going to happen. Peter Strzok had been on the show and somebody put a comment on January 4th calling out whatever they wanted on him, the FBI agent, and saying on January 6th,

we're going to fix everything. And I knew something was going to go down. I don't work at the government. I just, we saw it all. And to see the Confederate flag in the rotunda being carried around, it really struck me that, my God, we have not even reconciled the civil war. Like we still are this steeped in racism that we, this thing is still going on. Like what the hell? And it's a real illustration, books like yours and some of the different things that we're still fighting with over the stage, CRT, that you see the big thing with the critical race theory. And just, it's amazing how people are just so against it. And this is

something we're still living with. We're still fighting with Charlottesville and all the other atrocities have taken place for the last four or five years. The hate groups that have grown, you see on Southern Law Poverty Center, the hate watch, it's just extraordinary how much it's exploded. And it just tells us that we need to get to the truth when you get to the bottom and the realness and get to the truth of our history so that we can try and fix it. Everything you said is true. However, looking at the other side of the coin, so to speak, we had the summer of 2020. I live in Richmond, Virginia, where there were, until 2020, there were mammoth statues erected to the memory of American traders. Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis,

Murray, Admiral Murray, to name a few. Jeff Stewart, lining the most beautiful boulevard in this city in which I live. I never thought I'd see the day when those statues came down. But every single one, here it is, 2021, the last month in 2021, and every single one of those statues is gone. Now, that's reason to celebrate. And if we hold on to that, then we can see that there's a future where people who are not celebrating the lost cause and traitors and raising the Confederate flag in the nation's capital, in the Capitol building, that's never going to happen again. We have to make sure that never happens again. And when you think about the summer of 2020, when I think of it, it gives me hope.

Yeah. And I don't know if it was the summer of 2020, but seeing John Lewis go out to where they painted the Black Lives Matter in Washington, D.C., seeing him stand there, what a moment that was. Exactly. It's like going to church. That's my church. I tell people all the time, my ancestors are my church and scenes like that. But you just described, I've forgotten about it, Chris.

Thank you for reminding me. That's my church that inspires us. And that helps us know that we have done better and we will do better. We are going to, we're going to succeed. We're going to make our country whole. I tell people all the time, never give up on America, not giving up on America. We survived five years of darkness, four years of darkness, and I'm still scarred. It was PTSD, no matter what side of the spectrum you're on. We're all suffering from PTSD after those four years. It was horrific. Yeah. And hopefully we don't go back and some of the

things that are going on in legislatures and voting attacks and stuff, but there does seem to be some reconciliation. Yeah. There does seem to be some reconciliation. And hopefully people don't go back into the state they were before where they're like, yeah, everything will be fine. Yeah, we'll have great presidents and they'll do the right thing. Hopefully we get back

to that. Anything more you want to tease out on the book before we go out to encourage people to go out and get it? Thank you for asking that. I would like to comment on that last thing you said where people can become apathetic and say everything's going to be fine. No, we have to fight for these rights. It's always been a battle. It's always been a fight. So we can never stop fighting. When I say never give up on America, what I mean is never stop fighting for justice and liberty and freedom and fairness and equity for all in America. Never stop fighting. John Lewis didn't. He was a dying man when he went on that street in Washington, D.C. But he was such a huge symbol.

And what that told us is that he was never going to give up and we should never give up. Thank you so much for reminding me of that. And thank you so much for inviting me on to talk about these subjects. We had a nice long conversation and it was really stimulating for me and I really enjoyed it. And as for the book, I like to tell people it's part memoir, part detective story and part history lesson. It's not just about my life. It's about the history I experienced in my, at this point, many years of living, about growing, about what it took to become whole, about how so many of us

can experience a similar journey in our own unique way and learn about our contributions. When I say our, the contributions of Black Americans to this country, because that's in the book as well, finding family and what it means to find family. And about Monticello and some of the struggles I had at Monticello, but the growth that occurred there in the now six years that I've been working there. So, yes, please do read the story, not just to read about the history, but to be inspired by the history and to learn techniques, too. There's some technical stuff in there about how to trace your history.

So there's a lot in there. Thank you. Thank you very much for coming on. We really appreciate it. It's been a beautiful discussion, and I'm just honored to have you guys on and learn so much more. I give the front row seat to this. It was great for me. I enjoyed it, too.

Wonderful show. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs, please. So, again, Monticello.org is a great place to go to learn more of this history. And you can always find me there. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Twitter. You can Google me, Gail Jessup White. I respond, especially if you find me on Facebook, I will respond to you. And I promise I'm getting better at my social media.

There you go. There you go. Thanks so much for coming'm, I promise I'm getting better at my social media. There you go. There you go. Thanks for so much for coming on, Gail. We really appreciate it. Go pick up her book, Reclamation, Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant's Search for Her Family's Lasting Legacy just came out November 16th, 21. So be the first in your book club to read it. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be sure to go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss to see the video versions of all of our videos. Also see the cool stuff we're doing for reviewing. We've got a bunch of really cool gear that we're reviewing on the

Chris Voss Show on our tech review side. Also go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss. Go to all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and every place else. Be good to each other. Hopefully you'll have happy holidays, and we'll see you guys next time.