Summary
The speaker says that her father's defensiveness about Jefferson might have been rooted in him identifying with Jefferson to some extent. She says Jefferson's remarks may have seemed appealing to her father in certain regards. She describes a later trip with him to Monticello. She adds that now things have changed and she can joke with him about these things, but she does not forget that he does not fully understand her.
Analysis
At its halfway point, the poem takes a turn, as the speaker delves deeper into her personal history. She perceives, later, after this conversation has happened many times, that her father may have felt some connection to Jefferson: "I did not know then the subtext / of our story, that my father could imagine / Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh." She is suggesting, as she later clarifies further, that her father felt that there may have been some truth to Jefferson's perception that white people could somehow offer something to Black people. She quotes Jefferson's racist sentiment in another quoted line: "the improvement of the blacks in body / and mind, in the first instance of their mixture / with the whites." While her father does not seem to think this explicitly, the speaker implies that quotes like this may have had an impact on how her father saw her. She summarizes the idea in the following lines: "that my father could believe / he'd made me better." She thinks he may have believed he contributed to improving her in some way, as he had the supposed benefits of being white.
As she develops this idea further, she writes that it revealed something to her about how the past can trap people: "When I think of this now, / I see how the past holds us captive, / its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye." In the case of her father, she expresses the belief that the false allure of Jefferson's outdated ideas drew him in, offering a worldview that flattered his conception of himself. The phrase "beautiful ruin" highlights how his ideas are unusable but may still hold some abstract appeal, much like the remnants of an ancient city. She imagines her father thinking of this as a much younger man, the "rough outline" of the man he is now. She describes his desire to show her his best qualities: "needing to show me / the better measure of his heart, an equation / writ large at Monticello." This line is a complicated one. On the one hand, it shows her father's hope to demonstrate that he has something to give her. At the same time, the line "an equation writ large at Monticello" suggests that this has to do with the racial math of mixed heritage. She is saying that he intended to give her something positive, however wrapped up in wrongheaded thinking it was.
She comments that this was a long time ago, and now things have shifted somewhat. She recounts another, more recent, visit to Monticello: "That was years ago. / Now, we take in how much has changed: / talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking, / How white was she?" This bizarre comment from another tour participant demonstrates the ongoing questions about race, and the ways more subtle shades of prejudice persist. The speaker reflects that this fractional thinking is part of a strange effort to racially legitimatize her as Jefferson's lover. Their words seek to make her out to be a "quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave."
Later, when the tour guide says "Imagine stepping back into the past," the speaker whispers to her father "This is where / we split up. I'll head around to the back." He laughs, and she knows he appreciates her levity. She is mocking the fact that traveling back to the past holds much less appeal for her than it would for her father. In this moment, she demonstrates the understanding that has developed between them, as evidenced by her ability to make jokes like this. In the final stanza, she notes that though she can make light of the situation, this complicated history still exists as something that separates them: "I've made a joke of it, this history / that links us — white father, black daughter — / even as it renders us other to each other." In these final lines, she is showing how things have shifted between them; but the subject still shows an essential division between them and the histories that they have inherited. The phrase "renders us other to each other" refers to the fact that Jefferson's story still puts a barrier between them, placing them on opposite sides of a racial divide. The poem as a whole shows how history reverberates through both of them, informing their points of view and relationship.
