My Thomas

My Thomas (#385) by Roberta Grimes is the first novel in her Letters of Love series, and a re-issue of this book originally published in 1993.  It's an exploration of the life of Martha Jefferson, the little-known wife of Thomas Jefferson in the form of her hidden journal.  Her death after ten years of marriage had a profound effect on Jefferson, who never remarried.

Although much of the book was interesting in its details of everyday life among the upper class in colonial Virginia, I couldn't decide throughout the course of the book whether or not I liked the imagined character of Martha, or Patty as she was known to her family.  She emerged from her first abusive marriage as a young widow and mother determined to manage her own affairs, despite intense pressure from her father and sisters to re-marry.  Thomas Jefferson sets out to persuade her to reconsider, and eventually convinces her to marry him.

Throughout the novel, Jefferson is portrayed as an idealistic and moral man, sensitive and easily wounded.  It was hard for me to imagine him having that much in common with the light-minded bride he married so that she continually describes their relationship as "a perfect communion of minds".  She dreads "the politics" which consume Thomas' life and does her best to dissuade him from participating.  She is constantly surprised that their slaves don't actually love them.  She does come by the time of her death to outstrip Jefferson in his thinking of human rights, especially  concerning slavery, yet she is never able to acknowledge even to herself that the children her slave Betty bore to her own father were, in fact, her half-siblings as much as the daughters of her two despised step-mothers.  I found her dilemma in dealing with this issue much easier to understand than her sudden discovery that god exists outside of any church after she reads The Confessions of St. Augustine.  Suddenly her biological imperative to bear Thomas Jefferson a son is justified as God's Will.  Nothing Thomas can say will change her mind; not the prospect of leaving her living daughters motherless, nor the loss of her companionship to her husband should she die in childbed.  I did not find such willful selfishness admirable.

It's obvious from reading this novel that Ms. Grimes has done her research on Thomas Jefferson.  She is decidedly an admirer of his  (I'm surprised in some ways that she didn't choose to call the book Saint Thomas of Monticello, he is presented as such a paragon!)   Exploring the personal, private side of this complicated man's life with the few materials left which he did not destroy during his own lifetime must have presented quite a challenge.  And lest you think that there is the slightest stain on his reputation, Ms. Grimes makes it abundantly clear that the whole Sally Hemings story was a deliberate calumny perpetuated by a journalist with a personal grudge against Jefferson.  Apparently, Thomas' brother Randolph was responsible for the tell-tale DNA in the Hemings line.  So there!