"The Hemingses of Monticello" is garlanded with so much advance praise; you might pick it up, expecting an autumnal beach book. You'd be disappointed. Early chapters slog through colonial Virginia, and the narrative halts often for musings about law and love, sexual attraction and family dynamics, freedom and slavery.

The tale gains speed whenever Thomas Jefferson and Sarah "Sally" Hemings appear, but this remains a serious history. A professor at New York Law School, Annette Gordon-Reed builds her account like a legal brief instead of a page-turner.

Perhaps that's just as well. It's unlikely that unescorted minors will wander into — and later emerge scarred from — this disturbing and poignant book. So, we're all adults here. Maybe it's time we grappled with this part of our heritage in grown-up fashion.

Gordon-Reed's thesis is straightforward and scalding: that our third president and Hemings, one of his slaves at Monticello, had a 38-year relationship that yielded seven children.

This is a brave position but hardly an unreasonable one. In 1998, DNA tests proved a genetic link between descendants of Jefferson and Hemings. The obvious implication: One of our Founding Fathers established a second family with an enslaved mother.

How historians — and others — greeted these findings charted the racial fault lines under American society. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit that maintains Monticello, commissioned a study by scholars and foundation members. Their conclusion: "the weight of all known evidence ... indicated a high probability that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings, and that he was perhaps the father of all six of Sally Hemings' children listed in Monticello. ..."

In Virginia, where the cult of Jefferson approaches religious fervor, the backlash was instant. A year after the foundation's study, the rival Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society reached the opposite conclusion. Hemings was "a minor figure" in the great man's life, and it was improbable that he fathered any of her offspring. Instead, Jefferson's younger brother was pointed to as the more-likely parent.

Hemings left no letters or diaries; Jefferson left piles of both, but was notably circumspect in his private life. As the liaison first became public in a salacious 1802 newspaper article written by one of Jefferson's political foes, there's a temptation to dismiss the tale as unfounded, or at least unprovable.

Gordon-Reed will have none of that. History, she writes, is "an imaginative enterprise; when writing it or reading it, we try to see the subjects in their time and space." And on this issue, the subjects were not silent — if we expand the circle of subjects to include Hemings' siblings and children, many of whom were literate and wrote about her relationship with Jefferson.

Rejecting slaves' writings and oral accounts as well as accepting their oppressors' testimony or silence is a "racket," Gordon-Reed maintains. Sally Hemings' mother, Elizabeth Hemings, was a slave who claimed that the father of her children was John Wayles, a slave owner whose acknowledged white children included Jefferson's wife. Virginia law obscured or denied his mixed-race family, but surely the historian has no obligation to deny Hemings and protect Wayles.

"This simply reenacts the world of master and slave in the pages of history," Gordon-Reed argues. "It is only through piercing the veil of Southern society's laws, including its fictions about family, that we can take the first step toward getting at the reality of black and white lives under slavery."

That reality, as Gordon-Reed reconstructs it through letters, contemporary accounts and oral traditions, could be punishing to all parties. While damning slavery, she is remarkably compassionate toward Jefferson, who she characterizes as a visionary political philosopher whose humane views collided with the ugly nature of an evil system.

One sad example: On his death in 1826, the former president freed three of Sally Hemings' five surviving children. The other two left Monticello without being formally manumitted because they were light-skinned enough to pass for white. Papers showing that they were black could have embarrassed and even endangered them.

"The Hemingses of Monticello" may stir old passions by taking everything that is documented about this family's tangled, tragic history — and then pushing the tale further. Gordon-Reed's interpretation is provocative and persuasive. Not least, it's also a profound meditation on the fluid and conditional nature of something many Americans have regarded as fixed: our individual racial heritage.

Were the children of Jefferson and Hemings white or black? Both? Neither? In antebellum Virginia, the answers to those questions meant freedom or bondage. In our country, will there ever come a day when those answers mean nothing?

To find out more about Peter Rowe and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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