Malinda,

I've lived in Virginia some forty years now, and my summation of Virginians 
entails a great number of people from a variety of locations and levels of 
education. I think I told you back a year or two ago, about a woman I had a 
conversation with about the civil war and the TJ/Hemings controversy, who 
admired those presidents who were said to pray daily, but did not include 
Lincoln, whom she hated, even though there was the same documentation that 
he prayed. She told me of her daughter's experience going to college "up 
north" where her classmates were decidedly unimpressed by her ancestry and 
questioned her high head in light of the slaveholding of her ancestors. The 
upstart was that the daughter was moved to a college in Virginia. When we 
discussed TJ and Hemings, her response was that TJ was just too saintly to 
have laid with his maid, and the story was simply bogus! When I told her 
that one of my sisters hoped the story was true, since her husband was 
descended from some of the "white" Hemings family and her son was therefore 
a Jefferson descendent. This left the woman without a response - it had not 
occurred to her that the Hemings could have white descendents! At the time 
someone, it may have been you, told me to get a "better class" of friends. 
But the woman I was describing had two degrees, one in education and one in 
law, was a practicing lawyer, and was married to a delegate to the GA. For 
all that, she was indeed a "better class" than most of the people I know, 
but she was a dumb as the rest when it comes to the broad knowledge of 
history.

Anne
Anne Pemberton
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http://www.erols.com/apembert
http://www.educationalsynthesis.org 

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