THE OTHER MADISONS
The Lost History of a President's Black Family
by Bettye Kearse
An African American pediatrician–turned–historical detective investigates her family’s history—and, by extension, that of America.
“Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.” So her mother told Kearse, who opens her account with invocations of the West African griot tradition of storytelling and oral history. That tradition found a place in slavery-era America because most slave owners did not allow enslaved people to learn to read and write. James Madison was different: He allowed his mixed-race son, Jim, to linger within hearing of education lessons. Given well-documented events at nearby Monticello, that Madison had such a son is a surprise only because he had no children with his wife, Dolley, which led many scholars to assume that he “was impotent, infertile, or both.” Evidently not. Enriching that history not just with stories, but with more tangible historical evidence, Kearse visits the plantation, speaking with archaeologists, historians, and the descendants of slaves, reading widely, discovering the long-unknown burial sites of ancestors. She also traveled to Africa and Portugal—for, as her grandfather had told her mother, “our history goes well beyond America’s boundaries.” That Jim was educated did not spare him from being sold, always aware that he was the son of a president. So, too, with the descendants, enslaved and then free, who carried the Madison story to new homes, to be incorporated into the narrative of Madison’s life, as Sally Hemings is in Thomas Jefferson’s. On that note, Kearse writes searchingly of Madison’s language in crafting the Constitution, in which the words “slave” and “slavery” did not appear but that spoke of “other persons”—acknowledged as humans, that is, but still left out. “I understood that this omission,” writes the author, “was why oral history was essential to African Americans having knowledge of how crucial we have always been to what this nation is.” A Roots for a new generation, rich in storytelling and steeped in history. (b/w illustrations)