Word: eston
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Despite the chilly reception at the Monticello Association reunions, one person Lanier met there has turned out to be not just a relative but also a good friend. Julia Westerinen, 69, looks white, but she is descended from Sally Hemings' youngest son, Eston. Growing up in Madison, Wis., in the 1930s and '40s, Westerinen was not allowed to play with black children. "My parents told me to stick to my own kind," she says. Even as an adult, she realized that her friendships with blacks had been superficial. "I thought we were friends, but I never had them over...
Similar DNA tests, as the world now knows, established that the youngest of Hemings' sons, Eston, was Jefferson's child. Yet amid the intense debate about Jefferson that this discovery has caused, more interesting may be its impact on the Hemings clan itself. The descendants of the two Hemings sons whose link to Jefferson could not be established--Thomas and Madison--regard themselves as black but have long assumed that Jefferson is their ancestor. Yet the descendants of Eston, the son proved almost conclusively to be a child of Jefferson and Hemings, see themselves as white and for generations...
After Jefferson's death in 1826, Thomas, Madison and Eston all ended up as freedmen within 25 miles of one another near the town of Chillicothe, Ohio. The brothers were quite fair, being only an eighth black, and Jeffersonian in appearance: tall with reddish hair and gray eyes. But Thomas would become a leader in the black community, founding an African Methodist church. Madison put down roots near a mulatto settlement and also stayed in the black community. "Though we consider it a gift of God, our one enduring question is why Madison chose to stay black when it might...
...Eston took a quite different path. For 14 years he lived in Chillicothe, the 1850 Census listing him as mulatto. But by 1860 he and his wife, who was also part black, were living in Wisconsin, his name changed to E.H. Jefferson, the marking on the Census now white. The family would become successful members of the white middle class, winding up on social registries. For descendants like Julia Jefferson Westerinen, 64, of New York City, there would be no idea of the family legacy. For her a brush with blackness was befriending the maid or disciplining her daughter Dorothy...
...kind of passing that Eston (and two unaccounted-for Hemings children, Beverly and Harriet) did is well known among blacks, most of whom have stories of light-skinned relatives who pretended to be white in order to fare better in society. "It's a way of getting away from the stigma and the suffering," explains New York University African studies professor Tricia Rose. Some urban blacks were able to straddle the fence, black at home and white at work. "You would have neighbors," says Golden. "But when you saw them downtown at the job, you knew not to speak...