Love That Boy by Ron Fournier

Author:Ron Fournier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2016-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

HAPPY

“Dream Big, but Don’t Expect Too Much”

Charlottesville, Virginia—From 30 yards or 30 inches, the façade of Thomas Jefferson’s mansion, Monticello, appears to be constructed of sturdy beige bricks. On closer examination, it becomes clear that Jefferson actually built his home of sand-blown wood. Running his hand along a front wall, Tyler says, “Phony.”

We’re here for me to think through the question of what makes a happy child. What better place to begin than the home of the man who enshrined “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence? “We can’t leave here until you tell me what makes you happy, Tyler.”

He slaps me with a tour brochure and jokes, “That’s what makes me happy.”

The 33-room mansion sits atop a dark, narrow tunnel through which slaves would lug platters of food, ice, beer, wine, and tableware for Jefferson and his two or three dozen guests dining just above the secret channel. When the wine ran out, Jefferson would open a panel in the side of the fireplace, insert the empty bottle, and then reach into a hidden dumbwaiter, where a slave had secreted a full bottle for Jefferson to grab with a flourish. Astonished guests also saw plates of hot food mysteriously appear on a revolving door fitted with shelves. Long after dinner, the slaves would walk to their cabins along Mulberry Row, a living hell so well hidden that visitors didn’t know of its existence, just a stone’s throw from their dining table.

In designing the mansion, Henry Wiencek wrote in Smithsonian magazine, Jefferson followed a principle conceived two centuries earlier by Palladio: “We must contrive a building in such a manner that the finest and most noble parts of it be the most exposed to public view, and the less agreeable disposed in by places, and removed from sight as much as possible.”

I’m overwhelmed by the thought of Monticello as a metaphor for parenthood. It is human nature for mothers and fathers to expose only the finest and most noble features of their children to public view—to remove from sight the less agreeable features. But we go further. We create and perpetuate myths about our children: They’re brilliant and gorgeous and popular and successful and damn near perfect, a reflection of their moms and dads. These stories are as deceptive as sand-blown wood and hidden dumbwaiters. Like historians’ portrayals of Jefferson as a “benevolent slaveholder,” parents’ images of their children can be gauzy contradictions in the service of lies.

In this house of paradox called Monticello lived the founding father who wrote “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, and whose first draft excoriated the slave trade as an “assemblage of horrors,” a “cruel war against human nature itself.” And yet, somewhere in the late 1780s and 1790s, Jefferson embraced the economics of slavery—actually calculating in a letter to George Washington that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. He ordered slaves whipped and sold farther south. Historians believe Jefferson was the father of the six children of Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello.

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