We live in an era when Blacks and Whites, despite the end of de jure segregation, tend to live in different neighborhoods, go to different churches and schools, and socialize within their own racial groups. Thomas Jefferson’s world was quite dissimilar. He interacted with African Americans on a daily basis, in the most intimate circumstances, from the beginning of his life to the end. This is because he was born into a slave society. A Black woman was almost certainly young Thomas’s earliest nursemaid, and an enslaved Black woman was likely his wet nurse. Later, when his wife, Martha, had difficulty nursing their first child, the “good breast of milk” of the enslaved Ursula Granger allowed the child to thrive. In his old age Jefferson recalled that his earliest memory was of being handed up on a pillow to an enslaved person on horseback before their family made a journey from their home at Shadwell, Virginia, to Tuckahoe, where they lived for several years during his early childhood. Enslaved people were his primary attendants during …