716: Trail of Tears
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When Lucian Truska tries to explain how he's related to Thomas Jefferson, he says, "Okay, he's 73. He used to visit a great-grandmother who used to visit her or a great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson's grandson." So there was only when I was growing up, but when I visited my great-grandmother, there was only one dead person between me and Jefferson. When Lucian was a boy in the early 1950s, just six or seven years old, when we visit family in Charlottesville, sometimes they would drop him off with his brother at Monticello, Jefferson's home. Lucian says it was before the place had been remade for tourists like it is today. Basically, visitors would pay maybe a dollar and walk through the house. You know, my great answer, they treated the place like it was still the family home. And we had the run of the place. We used to fill our pockets full of pebbles from the walkways up there and go up on the second floor and third floor of the place and crawl out windows onto those parapets that are up around the top of Monticello and drop pebbles on the tourists that were walking around the house. And a social behavior. Yeah. And you're talking to one of the, probably the only person you'll ever talk to in your life that's actually jumped on Thomas Jefferson's bed. I mean, we would play on the bed, we'd go through that little doorway and up the stairs into the closet, which is above the bed there, and sit up there in the closet when tourists came through the room, we'd stick our faces out of the window up there and say, "Boot," and scare them, you know, "We'd hide up there." That's a... There was no adult supervision at all. No, no, no supervision at all. We went through all the bedrooms and stuff up there. And then, of course, we'd play down in the basement rooms, and then, of course, what they call the dependencies, which were the slave rooms that run under the two wings that run out from Monticello itself. It would be decades before the slave quarters were part of the Monticello tour, who she says. "These are just empty rooms under the house, no furniture or anything else in them." He and his brother would explore and run around and, you know, play hide and seek or whatever little boys did. It's amazing to me that the degree to which it felt like a family home. Did it feel the way to you as a kid? You know, I have to tell you that all of this stuff in my family was just taken for granted. These days, of course, nothing about the legacies of the Founding Fathers is taken for granted. Just this week, a special committee appointed by the Mayor of Washington, D.C. caught for removing, relocating, or contextualizing a bunch of monuments to slave-owning Founding Fathers, including the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument, which, by the way, the Mayor doesn't actually have jurisdiction over. Meanwhile, the President, of course, has put his arms around this issue. Right after he began his reelection campaign, he gave his speech at Mount Rushmore to make way that he does not want to remove any monuments or rename any buildings or military bases. But this great, great, great whatever it is, direct to Senator Thomas Jefferson, Lucian
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