Jefferson's Pillow

Rating:
Summary: Four Virginian founders, their influences and their legacy
Review: Can we believe in America? The question reverbrates through the lives of many of us. Historian and civil rights activist Roger Wilkins answers with this book. It is a powerful, passionate and eloquent summary of Colonial Era race relations. Our Founding Fathers, indeed everyone in the book, is portrayed as tragically human with all the hope and horror and truimph that we are capable of.

A keen psychological sense of motives and an empathic ear create a reading experience rarely had. Prejudiced readers, both white and black, will not be comforted by this book. The easy view of villians and victims that often corrupts our history into vulgar national mythology is not found here. In its place is a nuanced story interweaving ideology, military and political history, profiles of key players and refreshing personal reflections.

If anything, it is Wilkin's experience as African-American man that propels his prose into the past to find an answer to the troubling question of loyalty. It is a question coiled around the heart of many people of color that with every new racial crisis, squeezes tighter.

Using the telling details of a master historian, Wilkins points to the origins of racism in America through the words of the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson, said his first memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave riding horseback. At his death, the writer of the Declaration of Indepedence owned over a hundred human beings. He was not alone as many of our nation's Founding Fathers lived a life cushioned by slavery.

Unstitching that pillow is Wilkins, rousing his readers from sleep by asking difficult questions. How can an African-American be a patriot to a nation that doubted her or his humanity? How could the Founding Fathers wax eloquent of freedom as a human right when they owned slaves? Can we believe in America?

His answer is a terrifying and beautifal yes. He writes toward the end, "I have made speeches that reeked of hopelessness. People who have heard me in that mood sometimes ask how I manage to keep going. My answer is that my ancestors lift me up when I am low. Some of them never drew a free breath, and others very few of them. I try to live as if I am going to have meet them someday and answer the question "Boy, how did you use your freedom?"

He answers the question of how can we believe in America with the deeper one of what did I do with my freedom? We have the freedom to create the America we want. We have this privelege because many struggled and died for it. Wilkin's book reminds us that the blood of that sacrifice came from everyone's ancestors and it has run together. It is a book of human decency and power, have the courage to read it.

Rating:
Summary: Just one more book in the blame game
Review: I read this book hoping to gain a new perspective of "Black America's" part in helping to create this nation. Instead, I found a book steeped in racial hatred for "White America". The book read as a Political Manifesto for why America's founding fathers' ephagies should be burned at the stakes. The rhetoric of this book would be useful for present day arguments for slave reperations' (as a thinly veiled line indicates in the last chapter), communism, or a socialized healthcare system. If one is to believe the author one might fathom that most African Americans are still physically chained to the ills of slavery in modern times.

Rating:
Summary: A New View of Patriotism
Review: No one doubts that the Founding Fathers, during the American Revolution, and the Constitutional Convention which followed it, produced a remarkable government to institute remarkable ideals of freedom and citizenship. They also did little to abolish the antithesis of freedom and citizenship, slavery. How can black people be patriots if this is so, and how are they to regard their portion of the American heritage? "Can I embrace the founders who may have 'owned' some of my ancestors?" This is the backbone question of _Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism_ (Beacon) by Roger Wilkins. Wilkins has been an Attorney General, won a Pulitzer for his Watergate coverage, and has worked for the cause of civil rights within America and within Africa over several decades. He feels himself to be deeply American and deeply patriotic, and his book provides a guide to why there is no paradox to such feelings. It represents a new and useful way of looking at the founding of the country for both blacks and whites.

The title of the book comes from Jefferson's first memory: being carried on a pillow by a slave riding on horseback. Wilkins accepts that such privileges of culture did shape the ideas of Jefferson, Madison, Mason, and Washington, but he looks at the role of slavery as something not contradictory to their efforts for freedom but as essential to those efforts. "The fact is that without black Americans, including the 40 percent of Virginians who were black, the America that General Washington led into revolution in 1775 would have been a vastly different place - a poorer and weaker place, much less capable of waging a successful revolt. And Mason, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison might themselves have been poorer, better, less conflicted, and more honest. I would argue that they might also have been less learned, less strategically astute, and less politically wise. Blacks and their works were present in the Revolution as essential elements both of its strengths and of the Virginians' greatness." Slaves at Monticello and Mount Vernon, in this view, worked in their own way as partners in the birth of the new nation, and toward eventual extension of its principles even to their descendents.

In a wise book, Wilkins is forgiving of the addiction to privilege. He has capably blended national history, family history, and personal philosophy. He realizes that the Virginia aristocrats about whom he writes are really not to blame for accepting the privilege they had as simply being the natural way of the world. He has felt the same way, for instance, not questioning his privilege of student draft deferment during the Korean War, nor his commuting to work in a "powerful European sedan." He admits he has his moral challenges and his addictions, perhaps not on the moral level of slavery, but present and accepted nonetheless. "To be human is to live with moral complexity and existential ambiguity. I don't need for this nation to be perfect in order for me to love it; I love it because it is home, and because all of the touchstones of my life are here... Whereas some people view America primarily as a place of economic opportunity, I see it as having afforded me the chance to make something of myself by exerting relentless energy in the effort to hold up my end." As a useful primer on patriotism for us all, _Jefferson's Pillow_ represents energy well spent in meditation upon our conflicted founding.

Rating:
Summary: A MEDITATION ON BLACK PATRIOTISM AND FLAWED FOUNDERS
Review: Roger Wilkins attempts to do two things in this book and both within a short, confined space. First, he meditates on the nature of black patriotism. Can a black man truly call himself an American and feel comfortable laying claim to the full American heritage even though the very founding of this country is so inextricably intertwined with the enslavement and commodification of his ancestors? To this question, Wilkins answers a textured and nuanced (but a very definite "yes"). Through the prism of family history and a recounting of blacks (some well-known some not) who even in slavery acted like free men, he shows that the black contribution was integral to the foundation of this country and that without that contribution, America would have been far weaker and poorer in every way.
Second, Wilkins talks about the moral ambiguity of founders like George Washington, who personified freedom and yet owned slaves right through his presidency, Thomas Jefferson, who invented a new language of liberty and yet lived a life of self-indulgent dissipation on slave labor, and George Mason, doughty champion of the Bill of Rights, who also lived off his slaves. And yet Wilkins writes no mere screed. He can appreciate the founders' greatness even as he deplores their base imperfections and corruptions. The prose is measured, crisp, and heartfelt all at once. I subtract 1 star because I think he could have expounded some of these subjects even further in a more developed book. I recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Owning Up
Review: This extraordinary volume shares the virtues of the men that provide its focus. It has the steady, right-thinking leadership of Washington. It has the learning and driving intensity of Madison. It has the cantankerous insistence on truthfulness of Mason. And it surely has much of the crafty elegance of Jefferson. With charity toward all and malice toward none, Wilkins manages the nearly impossible - a fully adult reflection on race and the American project.

The issue of slavery and the founding fathers here is not the occasion for simple-minded evaluation and homiletics. It is the setting off point for a deep, careful, and powerful examination of the practical nature of political progress in the face of genuine human failing. Unflinching and realistic, mature and balanced, this book shames the shallowness of most public discourse and private apathy today, even as it honors the founding fathers with the respect of honest recognition.

In one of the many extraordinary and too little known original writings this book reveals, George Mason wrote of slavery: "By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins, by national calamities." Breaking slavery's chain of national calamity certainly requires today - as it did then - more than words. Yet through the words in this carefully crafted reflection, Wilkins opens the opportunity for us to own our own past as a nation - and that must certainly help compel and direct action.

Rating:
Summary: Owning Up
Review: This extraordinary volume shares the virtues of the men that provide its focus. It has the steady, right-thinking leadership of Washington. It has the learning and driving intensity of Madison. It has the cantankerous insistence on truthfulness of Mason. And it surely has much of the crafty elegance of Jefferson. With charity toward all and malice toward none, Wilkins manages the nearly impossible - a fully adult reflection on race and the American project.

The issue of slavery and the founding fathers here is not the occasion for simple-minded evaluation and homiletics. It is the setting off point for a deep, careful, and powerful examination of the practical nature of political progress in the face of genuine human failing. Unflinching and realistic, mature and balanced, this book shames the shallowness of most public discourse and private apathy today, even as it honors the founding fathers with the respect of honest recognition.

In one of the many extraordinary and too little known original writings this book reveals, George Mason wrote of slavery: "By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins, by national calamities." Breaking slavery's chain of national calamity certainly requires today - as it did then - more than words. Yet through the words in this carefully crafted reflection, Wilkins opens the opportunity for us to own our own past as a nation - and that must certainly help compel and direct action.

Rating:
Summary: Just one more book in the blame game
Review: Wilkins does a good job at demonstating the founding generation from a unique perspective, African Americans. It is funny how the perspective of the story teller impacts the story. The greatness of the key Founding Fathers, along with their faults, are carefully displayed. I often wondered whether the Founders actively decided to continue slavery or was ending slavery never a serious consideration. Sadly the option of ending slavery was considered and rejected. This book shows the poor decision of the Founders with regards to slavery but still maintains that in other areas they made correct decisions. Please read this text to obtain a different perspective about the issue of slavery in this country.