“We really can’t know what the dynamic was,” said Leslie Greene Bowman, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. How to accurately portray a woman for whom no photograph exists? (The solution: casting a shadow on a wall.) How to handle the skepticism of those who remain unpersuaded by the mounting evidence that Jefferson was indeed the father of Hemings’s children? (The solution: tell the story entirely in quotes from her son Madison.)Īnd, thorniest of all, in an era of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo: How to describe the decades-long sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings? Should it be described as rape? To make the exhibit possible, curators had to wrestle with a host of thorny questions.
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