You go on a tour of Oregon Caves, you visit the Heceta Head lighthouse, you go to a museum or historical house or battlefield, and a docent will tell you the story behind it all. And then you go to Montpelier, James Madison's home in Virginia,
and you find a storyteller so talented you not only feel the spell of history but leave a little wiser than when you came.
Jeb Gray has a rare ability to feel the thrill of history. "In these very chairs, around this very table, sat the great men: Madison, Jefferson, Adams." To us the life-size cardboard silhouettes gave a simulacrum of a dinner at Montpelier,
but I had the impression that Jeb was seeing the actual people, hearing their conversations and debates about the country they were founding. As he told us about the important role Dolley Madison played in our history – arguably as important as that of her husband, James – he brought her powerful presence into our presence. I had been aware of how important Dolley was, but I never knew it, the way Jeb Gray knows.
One reason his storytelling was so captivating was that he obviously loved his subject – history, yes, but James Madison, as subject, even more. He loved the man. When he told us of James's childhood – growing up on a wealthy plantation in Virginia, learning Greek and Latin and several modern languages before he was eleven – his admiration was palpable.
But Jeb Gray did not let admiration prevent him from seeing truth, and the truth was that James Madison, that great man whose ideas about government by the people were powerful enough to build a nation, owned slaves. Jeb also did not let his esteem for Dolley Madison whitewash the fact that she sold her well-loved slaves, who had served her for decades, to pay the debts of her gambling-crazy son. Nor did he let "the consciousness of the day" excuse such acts. Nor did he stint on making it clear what owning slaves meant, even when the owners were kind, as the Madisons were, because in the end, a slave was property, and property could be sold, whatever the consequences to such "property," the human cost to love and family. In their life-times neither James nor Dolley ever freed a single slave. Without voicing his condemnation, Jeb Gray let hang in the air how reprehensible, unethical, and immoral such behavior is. Even from people he also revered.
It was more than what Jeb Gray was telling us, though, and more than the implications he left for us to understand that made him a docent who could, in his own small-step way, change the world. It was his storytelling talent. In the room in which Madison died, next to the bed in which he died, Jeb told us about that death, spinning images that stuck vividly in our minds. He told us about Paul Jennings, the slave who was Madison's valet, picking him up in his arms and laying him in the bed as he was dying. Then Jeb read Jennings's written description of that death, letting us feel not just the impact of it on the devoted attendant, but the impact of such good writing on us. The account was movingly, beautifully written. Jennings had absorbed his education by being around Madison and could write like that! And was a slave. The impact of slavery sank onto us without Jeb Gray having to say a word about it.
I've heard a lot of docents, but Jeb Gray is the only one who could not only bring the story alive in the imagination of the listener but let the moral significance of that story leave its effect on the listener's conscience. Being a docent seems like a small-impact job, but every one of us in the group tour at Montpelier that day left with a slightly stronger sense of the evils of slavery in addition to the image of a man who did great deeds while still perpetuating that evil. Can a docent change the world? One small step at a time.
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