How do we explain human beings?

Annette Gordon-Reed, the author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, is a lawyer as well as a historian. The two avocations mesh well, especially in trying to give coherence to seemingly incoherent ideas. As pointed out in Newsweek, for example, people have floundered in the face of the seemingly inexplicable, including “the idea that Jefferson, a lifelong proponent of emancipation, could own slaves and sustain an intimate relationship with a woman who was not only his property but his dead wife’s half-sister.” Gordon-Reed’s training as a lawyer is the ideal preparation for developing persuasive explanations for what seems “crazy” because when it gets down to it we’re all a bit crazy:

“‘The first thing you learn in law school is people are crazy,’ says [Gordon-Reed], who also teaches history at Rutgers and law at New York Law School. ‘They’ll come into your office and explain their motivation, and it will be totally a lie. They don’t even understand themselves what their motivations are. It’s not all going to fit.’ Historians may think that because their subjects are dead, ‘you don’t have to deal with the consequences of their shattered lives if you’re not for real.’ Lawyers don’t have this luxury. ‘We’re training people to deal with people’s lives. Somebody’s going to go to jail, somebody’s going to lose a child. You have to be for real.’ Which may be how Gordon-Reed takes the stuff of Sally Hemings’s life-the quotidian and the epic-and makes it indelibly real.”