Jefferson's Other FamilyHis concubine was also his wife's half-sister.

Read excerpts from Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello on The Root.

(Continued from page 1)

This "Gordian knot of family relationships" serves as the ligature holding together a remarkable new book, The Hemingses of Monticello. Gordon-Reed, author of a previous work on the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, is just the person to cut through the tangle. The story begins with Elizabeth Hemings, born in 1735 of a white father and an enslaved African woman, who became the property of John Wayles, an English immigrant to Virginia. Wayles married three white women and buried them all before he and Elizabeth Hemings became involved. Hemings went on to have eight children with Wayles, including Sally, the descendant of two generations of white man/slave woman relationships.

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