Lessie Young was the great-granddaughter of Reuben and Susan Scott, enslaved foreman and domestic servant brought to northern Alabama by Jefferson’s great-grandson William Stuart Bankhead in 1846. She, like her ancestors, worked for Jefferson’s descendants and, for many years, was cook for Bankhead’s granddaughter Miss Cary Hotchkiss. Her husband, Elbert Clay, was farm foreman. Bankhead descendants preserved Lessie Clay’s recipes, heard her talk of her ancestors at Monticello, and recorded her memories in a joint interview with Miss Cary in 1971.
Hemings
Brown Colbert
Brown Colbert lived his first twenty years at Monticello, where he worked as an enslaved domestic servant and a nailmaker. In 1805, he asked to be sold to a free workman leaving Monticello, so that he and his wife would not be separated. Jefferson reluctantly agreed and the Colberts lived in slavery in Lexington, Virginia, until 1833, when they took a momentous step.
In exchange for freedom, they agreed to leave Virginia for a new colony in Africa. Colbert, his wife, Mary, and their two youngest sons boarded a ship for Liberia, leaving behind three grown children who could not be freed. Tragically, only one of the family, eight-year-old Burwell, survived the first weeks in the new land of freedom. He may have lived to see Liberia become Africa’s first independent republic in 1847.
Descendants of Colbert left behind in Virginia include a Union Army soldier, teachers and university professors, and a well-known lecturer and suffragist. The story of their ancestors’ courageous gamble for freedom was evidently not passed down orally but it survived in a family Bible.
Noah Aldridge
Wilmetta Cunningham Austin
Lucille Roberts Balthazar
Lucille Balthazar, only three generations removed from Madison Hemings of Monticello, heard of her connection to Jefferson from her father, William Giles Roberts, although he rarely spoke of it. He participated in the family mortuary business and owned a farm northeast of Los Angeles in the Apple Valley, where he had gardens and orchards. Mrs. Balthazar knew her grandmother, Ellen Hemings Roberts, well and loved to go to dinner at her house. Her grandmother “always set the table beautifully….each of us had our silver napkin rings with our name on it.”
Shay Banks-Young
Shay Banks-Young was a radio and TV personality and poet in Columbus, Ohio. After genetic testing in 1998 established a connection between Madison Hemings’s brother Eston and Thomas Jefferson, she went on the Oprah Winfrey show and met Eston’s descendant Julia Jefferson Westerinen. Following that encounter, Banks-Young and Westerinen brought a discussion of racial issues, titled “A Conversation in Black and White,” to audiences around the country.
Mary Hemings Bell
Mary Hemings was Elizabeth Hemings’s oldest child. After the 1774 division of the estate of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, she was brought with her family to Monticello, where she was a valued household servant. She had six children, the two youngest with white merchant Thomas Bell, who became her common-law husband. Bell purchased Mary Hemings and their children, Robert and Sarah, freed them, and bequeathed them his considerable property.
Jefferson was unwilling to sell Mary Hemings Bell’s older children, Joseph Fossett and Betsy Hemmings, who remained in slavery at Monticello. After Thomas Bell’s death in 1800, Mary—described in one court document as his “relict & widow”—lived with her children and grandchildren in a house on Charlottesville’s main street. She maintained close ties with her still-enslaved relations at Monticello. Her free status and property helped her son Joseph Fossett minimize the fragmenting of his family at the Monticello dispersal sale in 1827.