By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait, he was already linked to an affair with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out across the centuries, his lips fixed as if he’s just uttered some final word. The first time I saw the painting, I listened as my father explained the contradictions: how Jefferson hated slavery, though—out of necessity, my father said—had to own slaves; that his moral philosophy meant he could not have fathered those children: would have been impossible, my father said. For years we debated the distance between word and deed. I’d follow my father from book to book, gathering citations, listen as he named—like a field guide to Virginia— each flower and tree and bird as if to prove a man’s pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision. I did not know then the subtext of our story, that my father could imagine Jefferson’s words made flesh in my flesh— the improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites—or that my father could believe he’d made me better.
