The Getting Word African American Oral History Project preserves the histories of Monticello’s enslaved families and their descendants.
Through over 200 interviews with participants and countless hours of research, remarkable stories have emerged to form an archive of freedom.
“After Years Of Silence”
Mary Kearney wrote a poem as a tribute to all descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.
We Couldn’t Say
Down in the country, on a small mound
Sat a small brick house, down from the town.
The birds sang songs that all birds knew,
Flying and chirping in the late spring hue.
The children all loved this place in the hills,
Working and playing and looking for thrills.
Some folks say this family was great;
There were only a few that showed their hate.
Some others that you thought would never be a friend
Named their children after this famous man’s kin.
But one winter day our father did show
A small brown album with relatives aglow.
“These are your ancestors,” he said to us.
We were shocked and amazed but warned not to make a fuss.
After years of silence, as the world can see,
This famous man was kin to me.
(published in Timeless Voices, a poetry anthology of the International Library of Poetry)
“This Is Something Very Important”
After his father’s death, Ronald Smith found an ancestry chart among his possessions.
Ronald Smith: The stories that you always get, you don’t really hear about. Now if you look at what my grandmother actually put down as Thomas C. Woodson’s father, you won’t see Thomas Jefferson. What you’ll see, you’ll see the name of Thomas Woodson as being Thomas C. Woodson’s father and his mother being a slave woman. That’s all she put down.
See but there were so many taboos. You didn’t speak about certain things. And I don’t know, she said Thomas C. Woodson had a father by the name of Thomas Woodson and a slave woman. That was it that my father put down in the 1930’s. And that was a little piece of paper that I went from in order to try and pick up some things that (unclear) true.
Dianne Swann-Wright: I guess what I’d like to do is to ask you to really think about what it was that your grandmother said to you.
RS: She didn’t say this to me. She said it to my father.
DSW: Okay, well then, tell me about that and tell me what your father said to you.
RS: Now listen. My father really never said anything to me about this stuff. The only reason why I knew, I came across this, I knew he had it and when he passed away in ‘72, I said this is something very important, we should do something about it. He had drawn it up for some reason or another for a brother who died, I didn’t give you the name, had passed away in 1944. It was Karl Franklin Smith, Jr. He had drawn this thing up in the 1930’s for some reason or the other. But Karl Franklin Jr. died in 1942 and I don’t know why he drew it up and I just happened to see the thing and I used it. So it wasn’t, it’s nothing that I ever really spoke to him about or to his mother about. So I really don’t know why he did it. I really would like to know why he would do it back then, he would have done something like that, because you didn’t talk about genealogies then, or a lot of people didn’t know, so you really didn’t know so, an d there’s a lot of other things that were in there that I wish I had known about.
Themes: Jefferson Descent
“Glory! Glory!”
Lt. Col. John Wayles Jefferson reports the long-awaited surrender of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863.
“Vicksburg is ours. Glory! Glory! Glory! I have just returned from the city and actually saw the heads, hides and entrails of mules which the rebels have been subsisting on for days. We all feel so joyful today. Even the poor sickly soldiers in the hospitals seem to revive, and look well again. Congress, at its next session, must be petitioned to add 24 hours to the 4th of July, making it 48 hours long, because hereafter we cannot possibly get done celebrating the day in 24 hours.” (Wisconsin State Journal, July 1863)
Themes: Civil War
