Sally Hemings

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  As the brilliant June light filtered down, flecking the fair hair and the flanks of his mount, Nathan was suddenly invaded by a pervasive, unfounded premonition of disaster, a rising dread as he continued up the mountain to the mansion.

  When he came to the leveled-off clearing at the top of the mountain, he stared in horror at Monticello. It stood naked. The lofty elegant shade trees that had protected and surrounded it for seventy years had all been cut down, the stumps still white, raw, and ugly. Even in his shock, Nathan Langdon’s legal mind registered the fact that he was trespassing. Monticello had been sold last year to a pharmacy shop owner in Charlottesville, the new rising race of a new era: that of the common man.

  Nathan stared at the decaying gray facade. It was deserted. Burwell’s paint had peeled off, Joe Fosset’s iron balconies were rusted and crumbling, John Hemings’ shingles were warped or missing. It no longer belonged to Sally Hemings. Langdon smiled. It no longer belonged to the heirs of Thomas Jefferson. Why did he always think of it as belonging to Sally Hemings instead of the other way around?

  It was now five years since his first meeting with Sally Hemings. Four years since his banishment. He had learned nothing more of her than what he had known from the beginning. He had encountered only evasiveness and omissions.

  Terror seized Nathan. If this is what they had done to what had been Thomas Jefferson’s mansion, what had they done to Sally Hemings?

  Langdon started down the mountain toward her cabin, fighting a rising anguish. Where was she? What had become of her?

  He rode within sight of the tiny cabin but he didn’t dare approach. The old yearning returned, something—as infinitesimal as a rustling branch or a leaf, or the wind, or a pebble beneath his mount’s hoof, or the sound of his own heart beating—held him back.

  In the distance he saw the small figure emerge from the house. She was alive. Who was it, he thought, who had said: … and then consider what mere Time will do …: how if a man was great while living, he became tenfold greater when dead. How a thing grows in the human imagination when love, worship and all that lies in the human heart is there to encourage it. . . . Enough for us to discern far in the uttermost distance, some gleam … in the center of that enormous camera-obscura image to discern that at the center of it all was not a madness and a nothing, but a sanity and a something.

  He watched her as she stood, her arms wrapped around herself. And as he watched her, Nathan Langdon felt the gulf between them. It had grown, he realized, with the years. Even as he stood there unknowing, the distance separating them was a canyon, a bottomless crater, a fissure in the earth, uncrossable, unbridgeable, unfathomable, unforgivable. The sound of summer thunder rolled over the Blue Ridge Mountains, a distant prediction of turbulence to come. What Nathan Langdon did not know is that the turbulence to come, which he would witness in sickness and despair, would claim the lives of three of Sally Hemings’ grandsons. A bitter struggle that would cost five hundred thousand lives. One life lost for every slave freed.

  Sally Hemings stood in the violet rectangle of her cabin, her arms outstretched, her palms pressed against the oak doorframe, the dark shadows framing the still lovely face. She contemplated the cherished and familiar landscape. It calmed her. The lush Southernness soothed her nerve ends, the colors washed over her flesh so long contorted and deep with memory. Memory had no shame. All were equal before it. Then she stepped outside. Her body dove into the languid summer landscape like a swimmer, and her head lifted as if she sensed a presence. She looked toward the Blue Ridge. But all she saw was the dark-green forest and luminous sky and all she heard were the sounds that summer makes.

  She had never reached out beyond her triple bondage. She had clung stubbornly to the only thing she had ever found of her own in life: love, and love had been more real to her than slavehood. And she had survived both. This was the truth of her life.

  Sally Hemings closed her eyes against the sunlight and against the blinding pain in her head. She stood in her own embrace, triumphant; beyond love, beyond passion, beyond History.

  And surrounding the two solitary figures, lost in the vast intractable wilderness of the American landscape, was the infinite chiaroscuro of silence, where all biographies become one.

  She picked up her skirts and started up the mountain toward the safety of her beloved shade trees, just as, with a kind of violence, the census taker turned away and headed back down her road.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALTHOUGH a bibliography would be long and out of place here, I feel I must acknowledge certain published and scholarly works not previously mentioned and without which this book could not have been written. They are not, of course, responsible for any errors, interpretations, or misinterpretations I have made.

  First, Fawn Brodie’s book, Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History, and her two articles published in American Heritage, “The Great Jefferson Taboo” and “Thomas Jefferson’s Unknown Grandchildren.”

  Second, the memoirs of Madison Hemings, of Edmund Bacon, of the ex-slaves Israel Jefferson and Isaac Jefferson, as well as the diaries of Aaron Burr and John Quincy Adams.

  Third, the letters of John and Abigail Adams and the Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, his Farm Book and his Account Book.

  An unpublished paper at the University of Virginia Library by Jean Hanvey Hazelton, “The Hemings Family of Monticello,” must be mentioned, as well as the Jefferson Lectures of Eric Erickson at Princeton University; Cornel Lengyel’s Four Days in July, The Autobiography of John Trumbull and the Nathan Schachner biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.

  Lastly to be mentioned: The Jefferson Papers of Julian Boyd and his article “The Murder of George Wythe,” published in the William and Mary Quarterly; Thomas Jefferson, The Darker Side, by Leonard W. Levy and the catalogue and the exhibition, “The Eye of Thomas Jefferson,” organized by The National Gallery, Washington, D. C.

  My last acknowledgment is to a nineteenth-century novel, Clotel, or the President’s Daughter, published in England in 1853 by William Wells Brown, a runaway slave, considered the father of the Afro-American novel. Although I read the original version only after I wrote this book, I was touched to the quick by the recognition of cadences, themes, wellsprings of feeling that are the roots of Afro-American writing. That the theme of this novel, the first black novel published outside the United States, is the same and was written by an expatriate in the true sense of the word, only brings the circle full round. I would like to thank my editor Jeannette Seaver, the Schomburg Collection of Black Culture, my researcher Rother Owens, my secretary and editorial assistant Carolyn Wilson, Victoria Reiter, my family and my friends.

  SOURCE DOCUMENTS

  Census Entry, Albemarle County, 1830 (Courtesy of the Microfilm Division, The University of Virginia)

  Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Francis C. Gray, 1815 (Writings, Thomas Jefferson [Monticello Edition], Lipscomb and Bergh, Volume XIV, pp. 267-71)

  Passport issued by Louis XVI for Thomas Jefferson, Maria and Martha Jefferson, James and Sally Hemings, 1789 (Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress)

  Description of harvest at Monticello, List of Slave Workers (Thomas Jefferson Garden Book [1795–96])

  Promise of Emancipation of James Hemings, 1793 (Writings, Thomas Jefferson, Philadelphia, September 15, 1793, Boyd, 18 vols., Princeton)

  Two letters from James T. Callender to Thomas Jefferson, 1800 (Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress)

  ”The President Again,” by James T. Callender, The Richmond Recorder, 1802 (September 1, 1802, Archives, The Virginia State Library)

  The Census of My Family, Farm Book, Thomas Jefferson, 1807 (Thomas Jefferson, Farm Book, 1807, Massachusetts Historical Society)

  The Slave Inventory and Advertisement of Slave Auction, Monticello, 1826 (Courtesy of Jefferson Papers, University of Virginia Library, Manuscript Department. Notice from Richmond Enquirer, November 7, 1826, courtesy of Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Monticello)r />
  Excised portion of the Declaration of Independence, 1776 (Manuscript Department, The Library of Congress)

  AFTERWORD

  ”The DNA study, combined with multiple strands of currently available documentary and statistical evidence, indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings’s children appearing in Jefferson’s records. Those children are Harriet, who died in infancy; Beverly; an unnamed daughter who died in infancy; Harriet; Madison; and Eston. . . . The implications of the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson should be explored and used to enrich the understanding and interpretation of Jefferson and the entire Monticello community.”

  —Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings,

  Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, January 2000

  ”Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel Sally Hemings … probably has been the single greatest influence shaping the public’s attitude about the Jefferson-Hemings story. . . . It was the book’s presentation of Hemings’s humanity, by telling the story from her point of view and giving her an inner monologue based on common emotions, that caused the biggest problem for Jefferson defenders. Hemings was portrayed as a person with actual thoughts and conflicts, giving her a depth of character seldom attributed to American slaves or to black people in general. She became real—and the possibility of the relationship became real—once she was taken seriously and presented as a full human being.”

  —Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:

  An American Controversy

  THIRTY YEARS AGO, when my novel Sally Hemings was first published—this reissue is the anniversary edition—many things were very different from how they are today. My first book of poetry, From Memphis and Peking, had just been exquisitely and lovingly edited by Toni Morrison, my editor at Random House. Black studies was in its infancy in American universities, and the name “Sally Hemings” was totally unknown to the general public. Everyone involved with the novel, including the author, underestimated the emotion and controversy that would swirl around a story that gave flesh, blood, and sinew to the much-discussed contention that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a slave family by his mistress of 38 years, the half-sister of his dead wife. This belief had been long held, extending even to contemporaries such as John Adams, who received Sally Hemings and Jefferson’s daughter at the American embassy in London, and Gouverneur Morris, a New York congressman who was with Jefferson in Paris in 1789. And it had been long denied, by the Jefferson family, the president’s biographers (known as “the Jeffersonians”), and the entire historical establishment at large.

  One cannot discuss the writing and original publication of Sally Hemings without also addressing this conspiracy of silence, which concealed the very existence of Jefferson’s mistress for over two hundred years, from 1788 to 1998. It was not only a matter of puritanism, patriotism, and establishment history; it was also a question of miscegenation—race mixing, which was prohibited by law as a felony in most U.S. states until the twentieth century. When my novel walked Sally Hemings through the front door of history, the country’s last miscegenation laws had been abolished only a dozen years before. Had Hemings been European, her history might have long since been written differently

  I had wanted to illuminate our overweening and irrational obsession with race and color in this country. I would do it through the man who almost single-handedly invented our national identity, and through the woman who was the emblematic incarnation of the forbidden, the outcast—who was the rejection of that identity. And ultimately I would use the form of the nineteenth-century American gothic novel, whose very essence is embedded in the national psyche.

  Rescuing Sally Hemings from Invisibility

  I do believe that if this story had not begun in France, where I have lived since the early 1960s, I would never have attempted to unravel the tangle of legend, symbolism, evasion, disinformation, hostility, and false perceptions of almost mythical dimensions that surround it. I don’t know that I myself would have believed the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings if it had begun in a field at Monticello, as many had chosen to assume, rather than in prerevolutionary Paris. And never knowingly would I have taken on the old-guard Jeffersonians, men with an agenda to protect the good name of Jefferson, by any means and at all cost, from their greatest fear—the accusation of race-mixing, or as it was misnamed around 1864, miscegenation, a term that originally had nothing to do with race but referred to the intermixing of heathen and Christian motifs.

  It was the taboo of miscegenation—or as it was called by the Virginians, amalgamation—and the racist laws of the South that would have branded Jefferson an immoral pervert and a criminal. It was not the fact that Jefferson, a widower, had had a thirty-eight-year affair with a woman; it was that this woman was a quadroon slave and as such black in the eyes of the laws of Virginia. Persons who indulged in such crimes faced grand prejudice and ferocious punishment: fines, imprisonment, and possibly death. Many defied the rule, but Jefferson’s defenders could not imagine that he had been among the transgressors. The Jeffersonians protested that the charges were “defamatory,” “ridiculous,” a “lie” begun by a drunkard journalist in 1802 for political purposes.

  As for Hemings, she was categorized as a “healthy prostitute” or jezebel, or a stereotypical slave a la Prissy from Gone with the Wind. I had therefore to find a way to elevate a member of the most despised caste in America to the level of the most exalted, in order to make believable Sally Hemings’s liaison with one of America’s most famous historical personages. Linguistically, I solved the problem by always referring to Sally Hemings by her full name. I felt that neither the author nor the reader had the right to call Hemings “Sally,” much as Hemings dares not call Jefferson “Thomas” until they are equal in love. This subtlety was sometimes lost on my copy editor, who wanted to know what difference it would make if a few “Sally’s” slipped in, but as far as I know, over thirty years (and counting), no one has commented on this styling and its effect—apparently, and gratifyingly, because the technique seems natural to readers. It simply lifts Sally Hemings well out of her role as a slave and helps make a minor historical figure the equal, as a genuine archetype, to Thomas Jefferson.

  In writing Sally Hemings, I was determined to present a full-blown, complex, intelligent, highly conflicted woman—a tragic heroine who, trapped in the slave society that was the United States at its birth, clings to the only thing she can claim as her own: her love and allegiance to her “master,” her half-sister’s husband, and her father figure, Thomas Jefferson. I adhered scrupulously to the historical facts that offered any insight into the real Sally Hemings, including psychological studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Southern women, both black and white; their letters and diaries; the excruciatingly complex Hemings family tree; and the convoluted dynamics of Southern family relationships. And I anchored her story in the larger documented history of the period: the Declaration of Independence, the Jefferson-Gray letter, the “Notes of Virginia,” and the background of the French Revolution and Paris where it all began. I even made reference, in fictionalized form, to the real 1820 census taker who changed Hemings’s race from black to white.

  I felt that this woman, with her passions, her loves, her dangers, her tragedy, her children, blood relations, servitude, and yearning for freedom, had lived a life so dramatic that very few fictitious inventions were necessary to portray her. Yet fiction was necessary to put “flesh on the bones” of a person who had literally been erased from history.

  I also learned that fiction was the only form in which I could tell such a story, so vehemently did the Jeffersonians insist that I lacked the bona fides to touch Thomas Jefferson as a chronicler, being only a novelist (with a grudge). (As Toni Morrison wrote in “Romancing the Shadow,” “There is no romance free of what Herman Melville called ‘the power of blackness,’ esp
ecially not in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, upon which the imagination could play.”) As late as 1998, just two weeks before DNA tests by an unassuming retired Virginia pathologist named Dr. Eugene Foster proved the paternal genetic connection between Jefferson’s and Hemings’s heirs, the disparagement continued. The then-director of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Gordon Wood, had already accused me of defamation and scandal mongering, and in an exchange of editorial letters in the New York Review of Books he now accused me of “shooting from the hip” and asserted that Sally Hemings had nothing to do with Jefferson. Two years earlier, Joseph Ellis wrote in his “Note on the Sally Hemings Scandal” that “within the community of Jefferson specialists, there seems to be a clear consensus that the story is almost certainly not true. . . . After five years of mulling over the huge cache of evidence … on the thought and character of the historical Jefferson, I have concluded the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemings is remote.”

  I, too, had mulled over the same “cache of evidence”—which was anything but “huge,” but which was available to all, even me. I examined the facts, including Hemings descendants in three states, the 1801 electoral campaign and newspaper scandal, revelations of a Washington journalist in Jefferson’s employ (James Callender, who after exposing the story was found dead in three feet of water in Washington, D.C.’s Potomac River), and Jefferson’s own census of his “family.” I brought a new point of view to the analysis, taking into account the long and suppressed history of miscegenation in the United States, the oral history of blacks, the 1873 memoirs of Hemings’s son Madison, and eyewitness commentary from men like John Adams and Gouverneur Morris. I reflected on the families’ sejour in Paris, the fact that not only were Hemings and her brother legally free in France but also Jefferson himself was no longer constrained by the mores of a slave society. Above all, I considered the blood ties between the two families. Hemings was half-sister to Jefferson’s dead wife: Hemings’s mother had carried on a forty-year liaison with Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, and bore him six children, the youngest being Sally Hemings. I began the book with Elizabeth Hemings, putting her role as matriarch into the context of the American Revolution and slavery, and drew my conclusions about truth, love, race, and sex in America. I found that to Jefferson specialists, the idea of American history being influenced in any way by the relationship between the hallowed third president of the United States and his mixed-blood slave family was so repugnant that it trumped all obvious evidence to the contrary.