Hiding in Plain Sight

Years from now, perhaps it is the dress you will remember most.

I recall the first time I saw it, at sunrise, on a summer morning in July 2000: it was celestial white, made of cotton and sailcloth, billowing elegantly in the welcome breeze, wrapped around a 30-foot, steel-framed mannequin atop the historic Coal Tower in Charlottesville, Virginia, hard by the railroad tracks. An early riser, I was bringing coffee home that morning when the haunting dress appeared to the east, looming over the surrounding landscape. I had no idea what I was looking at. I didn’t know that the dress had found its way there in the evening of the day before, or that it had been installed with the help of a crane from Richmond that had to have been the quietest one on earth. One had to navigate some rough terrain, strewn with broken glass and old mattresses and discarded syringes, to discover that the dress was a faceless monument to Sally Hemings.

As it happens, the artist, Todd Murphy, was an extremely close friend of mine, but he hadn’t said one word to me about the installation. I know well how superstitious creative figures can be about discussing their works in progress, but Todd’s love of secrecy (and love of control) went beyond his art. When I first met him, in 1996, his studio was a former auto parts store on Charlottesville’s downtown mall; the black curtains that covered the large storefront made bystanders curious, perhaps even suspicious, about what was going on in there. Todd knew exactly what he was doing. He worshipped at the altar of mystique.

The underpinning of our relationship was a passion for sports, a love for our daughters, an odd belief that coffee at high school football games was so bad it was actually good, and an ongoing conversation about Thomas Jefferson and race in America. In 1997, I published Long Way to Go: Black and White in America, and Todd was one of the few people I knew who never questioned why it took me eight years to complete it. He moved from Charlottesville in 2002, but by 2016 we were, once more, both living in the same place—New York City. He had known for a while of my desire to discuss the dress with him, and when he finally did, he did so reluctantly. But in late January 2020, he was dying, at 57, and he must have sensed I might want to write something, an epilogue of sorts, a quiet farewell.

“I wanted to install it quietly,” he said softly, “without fanfare, wanted people to fall in love with the dress, before they possibly had a chance to hate it.” There had been a big art festival the weekend before, and people had come from all over the world. Hemings’s dress, though, was not officially part of it. It was a coda, a pop-up of sorts, and it was intended to stay up on the Coal Tower for an indeterminate period of time. When I mentioned the dress to some people, they professed not to know what I was referring to, even though, as Todd said wryly, “it was hiding in plain sight,” situated, as it was, between Jefferson’s Monticello and his University of Virginia. Those who did discover it were, like me, puzzled at first. But once they learned that it was meant to be an homage to Hemings, and that she was facing Monticello, it was clear to me that Todd intended the sculpture to be a provocative rebuke to those who had not told the truth, who had failed to unfold the whole story of who she was and why she mattered. A silent, artistic shot across the bow for those unwilling or struggling to believe, let alone accept, what had conclusively come to light nearly two years earlier.

On a late October day in 1998, I had lunch with Dan Jordan, the head of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which oversees Monticello. In many respects, Dan was as powerful as the president of UVA or the head of the university’s board of visitors. We were joined in the Dome Room at Monticello by Angus Cameron, a mentor from when I worked as a book editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Angus had edited the first three volumes of Dumas Malone’s biography of Jefferson, and he assured us that Malone “never ran across a fact about Jefferson that he didn’t like.”

Dan and I laughed, but then he suddenly became serious. Since the news was imminent, he decided to confide in us. The following week, an article in the esteemed scientific journal Nature would assert that DNA from the descendants of both Jefferson and Sally Hemings had confirmed what had long been rumored but vociferously denied: that Jefferson had fathered at least one child with his enslaved mistress, who was roughly 30 years his junior. “Most people around here”—by that Dan meant people in Charlottes-ville and at the university, where Jefferson was considered far more alive than dead—“will not be happy about this.” In fact, he went further, things might never be the same.

I had lived in Charlottesville long enough at that point—I had been a student at UVA in the early ’70s and then returned to teach there in 1986—to know, alas, how true that was, how this revelation would be its own form of tsunami, an unwelcome upheaval of the Old Order. Four days later, on Sunday, November 1, the headline of a front-page story in The New York Times read, “DNA Test Finds Evidence of Jefferson Child by Slave.” The reaction from many Black Americans to the news that Eston Hemings Jefferson was Jefferson’s son was merely confirmation of what they considered “common knowledge.” The reaction from white people was mixed. Some expressed full-on, ostrichlike denial. If a story like this had been published 20 years later, they would have derided it as “fake news.” Others, like the historian Joseph Ellis, who had never believed the rumor, did an about-face. Ellis predicted that the “wider world” would welcome this news, would ironically “hold these truths to be self-evident,” and might even be relieved to be reminded that Jefferson was, in many respects, a contradiction, and he would be seen as flawed, and therefore human. This happened to be the view of Jefferson I was always comfortable with. Not in the role of saint, someone beyond mortality. Those things never prove to be true anyway.

That Sunday, I happened to run into Rob Coles, a fellow I played basketball with twice a week, but more important, he was an actual descendant of Jefferson, his fifth great-grandson. Rob lived in an apartment at the former Monticello Hotel and looked so eerily like Jefferson that he was constantly invited to be him at events around the world. This was how he supported himself, and he had all the requisite finery and wigs of the time to play the role of a Founding Father. Knowing that he would soon be deluged with questions, I couldn’t resist asking Rob what he thought. I wasn’t trying to spoil his Sunday, but here we were. He was quiet for what seemed a long time. He stared at me, then stared away into the autumnal distance, in the direction of Monticello, his North Star.

“This DNA stuff sure is interesting, Jonathan,” he said, almost coyly, before turning the conversation in a different direction. I knew him well enough to know that he was likely to discuss the matter with other Coles family members who lived in town and that, together, they would figure out, along with the people at Monticello and in Charlottesville, how to respond in the days to come.

In the autumn of 1998, as in the summer of 2000, when Todd Murphy’s dress appeared on the Coal Tower, Charlottesville was not accustomed to being part of America’s Zeitgeist, and the city’s residents, for the most part, liked it that way. But in the wake of the white supremacist invasion that occurred there in August 2017, after a 15-year-old Black girl named Zyahna Bryant petitioned to remove Robert E. Lee from his pedestal in a park that bore his name—and after a weekend of violence that left Heather Heyer and two police officers dead and 34 others injured—The New York Times stopped referring to the city as “Charlottesville, Va.” In the many articles that followed, “Charlottesville” or “before Charlottesville” or “Battle of Charlottesville” would suffice. The name Charlottesville became its own flashpoint, and in no time, it became a social-media meme, a strange form of levity as a way of coping.

I knew that the almost surreal events of that weekend would not sit well with Charlottesville’s citizens, that the perfect and perfectly horrible storm that ensued—visited on them by “outsiders,” they would insist over and again—would infuriate them and leave emotional scars that might take years to heal. One of those people, who was convinced healing would never come, felt that “the rivers of hate run too deep here.” I had known her a long time, but I had not known this: she was a descendant of Lee’s, and her family was prepared to do whatever was necessary to defend the Lost Cause. I knew of one young woman, a friend of my daughter’s, who wandered the streets barefoot for hours afterward in a daze, not comprehending how such violence could have taken place in her Garden of Eden. I spoke with another who had returned from a summer of leading tours at concentration camps and was afraid to hang her mezuzah on the door of her room on the prestigious Lawn at UVA. And then there was this inescapable fact: two of the prime instigators of the violence were graduates of the university. As it happens, both the city and the university had been given fair warning that trouble was coming and were offered assistance, but they exhibited the same sort of denial that greeted the DNA results, the notion that even if bad things happen elsewhere, they won’t happen here. In the months afterward, how James Fields had managed to drive his muscle car down the street and kill Heather Heyer and injure all those people was the subject of abundant finger pointing. When I came back to town a year later, I had the distinct sense that the studied casualness of Charlottesville was gone, that, as Truman Capote wrote in In Cold Blood, people “viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.”

Charlottesville was a place that had, beneath its surface of implacable cool, worked long and hard and diligently to polish and curate its image. (After all, you don’t get recognized as one of the happiest places in the country, as it was in a 2014 study, without good reason.) The lifeblood of that image is a fierce and unnerving desire not to offend, and a tendency toward being both polite and indirect. To the outside world, Charlottesville emphatically prided itself on being progressive to the bone (though the county of which it is a part is much different politically, and one sees very few African Americans in the restaurants along West Main). When the city was singled out for being such a happy place, the news circulated quickly; there was a palpable air of self-congratulation, of smugness, wherever you went.

The elusive element, though, one that many people will go miles out of their way to avoid, is that the essence of a place—any place really—lies in the gray areas, those uncomfortable pockets where nuance and smudged grace notes and barely noticed gestures reside. Finding your way to those places, those places from which illumination can come, requires hard work. It requires having knowledge and context and a deep sense of history—or at least a genuine determination to acquire those things—and it demands a commitment to tell the truth. Which comes in part from a willingness to reflect and be introspective, to brood and ruminate, to take stock. When Jim Ryan became president of UVA in 2018 (returning to the place where he had once taught and motivated by what had happened the year before), he spoke in his welcome address of how important it was to keep striving to find a way to match aspirations with realities, how important it was that a place with more than its share of secret societies be committed to being far more honest—about everything—than it had been until then. In saying that, he was acknowledging the university’s own complicated history and that of its creator, and he offered an apology to those who—unlike him, he stressed—had been attacked because of race or religion.

In the years since the DNA news, Monticello slowly began to change its story: from saying that Jefferson “might have” fathered children with Sally Hemings, to acknowledging that he had, to then recognizing six children in all. Monticello began to offer a separate “slave tour,” though only one-fifth of the visitors each year actually go on it. Hemings family members began to be invited to Monticello. As for Todd Murphy’s mannequin, the reason it was headless was that no definitive likeness has ever existed of Sally Hemings. As for the dress, vandals (and the weather) repeatedly came for it, and Todd replaced it once or twice before deciding, partly out of pique, that the bare structure itself was even more effective in terms of what Hemings was perhaps trying to say: I am still here. Don’t even think of dishonoring me. Eventually, “progress” would have its way, with the Coal Tower deemed to be an eyesore: it would need to be cleaned up so that townhouses could be built around it. Not long after Todd died, the structure was taken down and moved to Ix Art Park, something Todd’s widow, Liane, learned after the fact. She pushed back—she knew he would not have wanted this—and it now resides, safe and protected from whoever might wish to do it harm, at an undisclosed spot south of town.

In the end, James Baldwin was right: “History is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.”

Correction: An earlier version of this piece misspelled the name of Jefferson’s son.