In the spring of 2020, when quarantine forced everyone indoors, one of my hobbies became asking Bill Barker questions on Facebook and YouTube livestreams about Thomas Jefferson. Barker was Monticello’s first-person Jefferson interpreter—white-haired, in period dress, holding Jefferson’s language in his mouth and Jefferson’s contradictions in his body. He had spent more than 40 years doing this, 26 of them at Colonial Williamsburg, before Monticello hired him as its first full-time Jefferson in 2019. When visitors asked him about Sally Hemings in character, he would tell them: “Ask her”—and direct them to the exhibit dedicated to their relationship. That was the kind of interpreter he was. That was the kind of place Monticello was becoming.

My hobby turned into a fascination, and the interest brought me to the mountaintop itself. I interned at Monticello in the summer of 2022, encouraged by Barker and the rest of the team. My job, in the plainest terms, was content: social media posts, digital programming, public-facing language about Monticello’s interpretive mission. In practice, it was something harder to name.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation was building toward the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026, and its own centennial in 2023. It had spent a decade shifting the center of gravity away from solely Jefferson-as-genius and toward the full world that existed on that mountain, which meant the more than 600 enslaved people who built it, worked it, and lived there under conditions the old tour had mostly elided. The groundwork had been laid even further back: Lucia “Cinder” Stanton and Dr. Dianne Swann-Wright founded the Getting Word oral history project in 1993, a project dedicated to recovering and preserving the family histories of Monticello’s enslaved workers.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation had spent a decade shifting the center of gravity away from solely Jefferson-as-genius and toward the full world that existed on that mountain.

My job was to help communicate the shift. To write the caption that made a visitor stop scrolling; to figure out how you say, on Instagram, what it means that the man who wrote “all men are created equal” enslaved over 600 people, and that both of those facts must be held at the same time, and that the holding is the point.