​I am wrapping up my second week at Monticello. I am much more comfortable here, it feels much more real at this point - for example, I even slept in until 7 this morning. How very un-Jeffersonian, the sun was up before I was.

This week has been humbling and mind-blowing in the most phenomenal ways, and it is clear to me that I have much, much more work to do. 

Monday and Tuesday were rainy, so I got to close myself up in the library and do some good reading. I got some more storyboarding done, and some good primary resources. ​

Wednesday I spent about an hour chatting with the lovely Niya Bates, who answered every question I had (and THEN some) on the lives of the enslaved people at Monticello. I also have about 30 new books to read. A story I can't get out of my head - there was a particularly skilled young enslaved craftsman, James, son to Critta Hemings. Some time between 1801 and 1805 he was too sick to go to work at the nailery, and the overseer Gabriel Lilly whipped him three times that day, so badly he nearly died. Lilly was known for his brutality and violence, but Jefferson once said it was impossible to find "a man who fulfills my purposes better." That man (and I do hesitate to use that word) stayed at Monticello after this event (and certainly others like it) until his required salary became too high. That day I did not want to hear another word about the noble founding father Thomas Jefferson.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," Jefferson wrote. "That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

And yet, he had the second largest holdings of enslaved people of any Virginian during his lifetime. This was not normal. Plantations where more than 100 people at a time were kept enslaved was NOT common. I have no resolution here, words of wisdom or conclusion. Just have to sit with it.

Something that really amazed me this week was the account of Isaac Granger Jefferson. He was an enslaved tradesman on the plantation who worked as a blacksmith and tinsmith. He did an interview in 1847 that was dictated and kept. There's also a daguerrotype of him from this time (maybe one of the oldest remaining images of an enslaved person?), but you can read the whole account here: 

• Jefferson, Isaac. Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, Sara Dean Link, ed. Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 1951. 

Look at his face. Learn his name. Read his story, by his own account. This is so, so important. All we can do is keep learning. 

The most important part of the whole trip was a sign on the wall in the reconstructed Hemings cabin (there were quite a few Hemingses enslaved at Monticello). "NOT SO BAD?" It reads. Lest you forget, even for a moment. GOOD. Don't.

Off to do more drawing, then. Apparently one of the fellows they had here last month was a chief curator at the Frick. What am I doing here? Oh goodness, back to the library.

I love old buildings, and seeing what different translations of "home" look like. And in so many places, it's pretty damn perfect.

So, here's the first installment: Savannah, GA. Wormsloe Plantation, Pin Point Museum, Broughton Street, (Downtown), Gordonston, Ardsley Park. (Please forgive the cell phone photos from 2011-2012, but look how pretty!)