By Annette Hinkle
Anyone who has encountered historic re-enactors at sites like Colonial Williamsburg or Plymouth Plantation knows the drill well. Characters in period dress portray people from history by pretending to be aware of nothing that has transpired in the centuries since their death. We ask them questions hoping they might slip up, but they rarely do and instead, administer a well researched history lesson.
It’s fun, it’s enlightening and it puts the past in context … then we go home.
But imagine for a moment what might happen if you were to encounter an actor at a historic site only to discover it wasn’t an actor at all. What if, in fact, it was one of this country’s most famous founding fathers — and you decide to take him on a road trip.
That’s the premise behind Peter Boody’s new novel, “Thomas Jefferson, Rachel, & Me,” a piece of time travel fiction that literally brings Jefferson to life for Jack Arrowsmith, a history teacher, and his traveling companion, Rachel, a young woman who just might be a descendent of Jefferson by way of his slave, Sally Hemings.
This Friday, July 13 at 7 p.m., Boody, a North Haven resident and editor of the Shelter Island Reporter, will be at the Shelter Island Public Library to talk about his new book. Though in it, his main character teaches history, Boody notes it wasn’t expressly his intention to do the same with the novel.
“I didn’t want it to be a history lesson at all, and I was aware of the danger of it becoming a history lesson,” says Boody. “Jack is a history teacher and Jefferson is someone who wants to know what has happened, so they’re bound to talk about things. For Jefferson, it's not history at all … it’s his life.”
Boody understands that readers just might end up learning something about America’s origins by reading the book. Ultimately, he admits, that’s a good thing, but still, Boody laments the general ignorance many Americans have about the basic tenets of this country’s beginnings.
“I heard NPR do a piece on the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” says Boody by way of example. “I was aware that younger people – anyone under 45 now — had been through an educational system that did not teach them basic things we had to learn before and which made us part of the community we are.”
“This book very gently introduces people to think about things that have to do with our country that our education system doesn’t give them, and the nature of the country doesn’t allow them to think about anymore,” he adds. “I understand the book is useful to give people an awareness, if not a lesson, on some of the things about how this country was founded in Thomas Jefferson’s eyes. But the biggest thing I wanted to do was bring Jefferson to life as a person so you could relate to him as something other than an iconic static figure frozen in time in a painting.”
“That’s what I find fascinating about history, getting into the context of it,’ he says “Whether it’s ancient Rome or the American Revolution, to flip the switch that connects us so history doesn’t feel so far away.”
For Jack Arrowsmith, the story begins during a twilight tour of Monticello. Jack has recently suffered the deaths of both his wife and his grown son and in the midst of his personal grief, has returned to Monticello, a place they once enjoyed as a family, on something of a pilgrimage. He first encounters Jefferson in the flesh while exploring a quiet part of the property and soon comes to realize this is no re-enactor.
So he returns to Monticello on a subsequent night, this time with Rachel, his late son’s bi-racial girlfriend, in tow. She knows a thing or two about Jefferson herself and has plenty to confront him on, given her own family history and that of slavery in the United States. Eager to see for himself what has become of the country he helped found, Jefferson conspires to join Rachel and Jack on a 21st century road trip and leaves the confines of Monticello behind.
Plopping a founding father into the middle of modern times makes for endless comedic possibilities. But Boody notes that if readers were willing to take the initial leap of faith that brings Jefferson to life in the book, it was important that he maintain the lines of plausibility by keeping Jefferson true to what he knew of his nature and avoid the kind of low-brow humor that is intrinsic in buddy movies.
“Once you get him going, if you can carry readers through the suspension of disbelief in strength of dialogue and story, what do you do with this guy?” asks Boody. “You have a blank check to do a whole lot of shtick. But if you succumb to that you turn the book into a gag.”
“The purpose of the book was to bring Jefferson to life for entertainment because it's fun,” explains Boody. “I think he’s fascinating and complicated. He’s not the guy he presented himself to be to the world. He was impulsive, had a temper he kept mostly under control, though it cracked regularly under stress. He also had chronic diarrhea and migraine headaches, and was always running off with one or another and constantly felled from it.”
Television, cars, planes, trains, recorded music and the Internet are all devices that intrigue Jefferson and provide endless fascination for him in the book. He is also eager to visit “Washington City,” wander the campus of the University of Virginia, which he founded in 1819, and see what has become of the Louisiana Purchase since he sealed the deal in 1803.
But this is not just a sight-seeing trip and in his book, Boody also exposes the third president to the reality of race relations in the modern age. Jefferson is astounded to learn there is an African American president and is frequently called to task by Rachel for his seemingly racist views and his contradictory stance on slavery in his public versus his private life.
“There was a lot more to this guy then we are led to believe,” says Boody who notes that many of those details run counter to the public image of Jefferson and include stories historians have been reluctant to tell, or even admit.
It was Annette Gordon-Reed’s book “The Hemingses of Monticello” that Boody credits with putting him on the path to writing this own novel on Jefferson. That book, which won both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, was the first to really delve into Jefferson’s relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and tell the story of the offspring he sired as a result of their intimacy.
“In that book, she takes risks as a historian that I think are successful and pay off,” says Boody. “In the ‘90s she took the historical academic community to task for dismissing these stories about Sally Hemings — the black man in Ohio who said he was Jefferson’s son — the patronizing way they dismissed whatever black survivors had to say. So much of the record from the Hemingses side is fragmentary and oral, but she does a brilliant job at looking letters and getting inside his head in a way that’s convincing.”
“It really brought him to life and that inspired the idea for a story I thought could work,” says Boody.
The structure of the novel also allowed Boody to offer parallels throughout that link the characters, despite the centuries that separate them. Like Jack, Jefferson suffered great personal loss, including the early death of his wife, Martha, and all of their many children, except for his youngest daughter. And Rachel bears a striking physical resemblance to Sally Hemings, who was actually the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife.
“A lot of the parallels are subtle, but there’s something about the way our brain works where comparisons and linkages between one story line and another add power to each,” says Boody. “It helps things come alive in our heads. I wanted that in this book.”
But also adding depth to the story are details that reveal his subject in a range of lights. Boody spent a year researching Thomas Jefferson before writing a single word of his book and was bound to uncover things he had never known about the man. And while those details he may not have always made Jefferson more likeable, they certainly made him more human.
“I tend to look for flaws in people,” he says. “I wondered what the flaws were in Jefferson — and I found them.”
Peter Boody’s “Friday Night Dialogue’ begins at 7 p.m. on Friday, July 13 at the Shelter Island Public Library, 37 North Ferry Road, Shelter Island. Call 749-0042 for details.
