Sally Hemings

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  In 2000, when the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation published its white paper that confirmed the DNA findings and conceded that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s son Eston Hemings and probably, according to corroborating evidence, all of her children, I believed the famous argument settled and won. Yet since 2000, a new wave of Jefferson historians have continued to try to reduce Sally Hemings to an historical zero. Now that her place in history is confirmed, they trivialize its significance and whitewash their previous denial, claiming that they “knew all along” about the affair even as they dismiss Hemings herself as an “unknowable” figure.

  The Missing Family Tree

  This latest generation of Jefferson scholars is seeking a new virginity by denying the denial of those that challenged the conspiracy of silence—from Fawn Brodie’s seminal psychological study of Jefferson to my own “daring leap of imagination.” Whitewash? What whitewash? Where Sally Hemings was once dismissed as fiction, it is now co-opted into cant with footnotes. Thus my literature has become history by default, and as invisible as it was in the days when it was defamed to CBS as pornography and censored by Warner Bros. (see below).

  The historical record, too, has been rendered inert. The research into Hemings and Jefferson has remained basically unchanged for the past thirty years, with no real breakthrough like recovering the only missing Jefferson letter register for the year 1788, spent in Paris; identifying the whereabouts of Harriet Hemings and her descendants; providing insight into the enigma of James Hemings’s suicide; or discovering any revealing letters by any of the female family members, such as Maria or Martha Jefferson or the Carr women. The only significant change is that the “family denial,” the accusation that Jefferson’s nephews the Carr brothers had fathered Sally Hemings’s children, has disappeared from the scholarship, thanks to the DNA evidence that disproved that possibility. The rehabilitation of Sally Hemings and her family is limited to the confines of parochial Monticello, instead of the larger warp and weave of American history.

  THE JEFFERSON-HEMINGS FAMILY TREE

  Amazingly enough, there seems to be a particular reluctance to publish a unified family tree of the complete Jefferson-Randolph-Hemings family, as if the visual integration of the white and black families is just too much to bear. In her presentation, Annette Gordon-Reed reproduces only the Hemings family tree, and that only on the endpapers and nowhere else in the book. And in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory and Civic Culture, which purported to be the results of a 1999 conference on the Hemings controversy, there is no family tree at all!

  In the same book, Gordon Wood claims, ironically, that to rescue Hemings from obscurity one might need to look to fiction. He suggests that the works of the old Southern icon William Faulkner might hold the key to her mystery, even though Faulkner never wrote anything about Jefferson or Hemings—or, for that matter, anything about African-Americans before the Civil War that was not, as Ralph Ellison pointed out, “tinged by … patriarchy and paternalism.” “Faulkner,” Ellison also wrote, “really believes that he invented these characteristics which he ascribes to Negroes in his fiction and now he thinks he can end this great historical action [desegregation] just as he ends [Light in August] with Joe Christmas dead and his balls cut off … and everything, just as it was except for the brooding, slightly overblown rhetoric of Faulkner’s irony.” Here then was Wood, the stern scientific historian, suddenly yearning for interpretation from a novelist when he had railed for twenty years against Sally Hemings, the counter-narrative based on fact that had rescued Hemings from the trash bin of history.

  Peering into the Trash Bin of History

  When I first set out to tell the story of Sally Hemings, I envisioned it as an epic poem about a young slave girl in prerevolutionary France. I presented the concept to my Random House editor, Toni Morrison. She said she couldn’t get me any advance for the project as I had conceived it: “Random House wants a big historical novel.” I protested I was a poet—a sprinter and not a long-distance runner—and knew nothing of writing a full-length novel. I begged Toni to write it herself, but she was busy with her own projects. Then I asked every other writer I knew to take on Sally Hemings. Finally, my writer best friend said, “You have been going on about this woman for a year. Why don’t you just shut up and write the damned thing yourself! How long can it take? Three months of your life?” Instead, I dropped the entire project for over a year.

  The book was saved by a chance meeting on a Greek island with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. During my family’s annual vacation on the Greek island of Speccia, a resort known for having no cars, no hotels, no tourists, and no public beaches, our hosts received their yearly invitation from Jacqueline, my friend’s old school chum, to come visit her on the Onassises’ private island of Skorpios, a five-minute helicopter ride away. For once, everyone accepted her invitation, and I found myself on what Jacqueline laughingly called “The Island of Dr. No,” explaining to the former First Lady the story of Sally Hemings, the former First Mistress. As a half-dozen speedboats with photographers behind telephoto lenses circled the island, we walked on the beach and talked about life in the glaring spotlight of power and fame, life in the back stairs of the White House, and those anonymous players who remain eternally in the background of history. Jacqueline was fascinated. “You must write this story,” she enjoined in her whispering, breathless voice. It was a turning point. I finally reopened my notes on Sally Hemings.

  The project ended up taking me three years of research in the United States, London, and Paris. By the time I finished writing, Aristotle Onassis was dead and his widow had been hired as fledgling editor at Viking Press. She began by calling my agent every day until I turned in the manuscript. Sally Hemings was the first book she acquired as an editor for Viking, and it was never shown to any other publisher. For its part, Viking embarked on a series of perversities that threatened to derail the project. First, it assigned Jacqueline an editorial assistant who was an unreconstructed West Virginian: this woman claimed to “know how to handle these people,” referring to me, the only black writer in the house. (I remember distinctly that a large Confederate flag occupied the wall space in one of the editorial offices.) No sooner had I gotten rid of “the Virginian” (ironically, the title of the French edition of Sally Hemings), then Viking decided, over Jacqueline’s protest, to publish a thriller about a plot to assassinate a third Kennedy: Ted. When they went ahead with the project, Jacqueline quit, moving to Doubleday. She was not allowed to take Sally Hemings with her. Thus began a travail that seemed to have no end.

  I remember huddling in a tiny room at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City with my writer best friend, rewriting. I insisted on paying my friend something for her professional services; I put a pile of greenbacks on the night table by the bed and said, “When these are gone, we’ve finished editing.” We spent a week incarcerated with room service and the manuscript of Sally Hemings.

  Jefferson’s defenders got wind of the novel’s publication—and of the highly publicized sale of the movie rights to Warner Bros. Led by Dumas Malone, Jefferson’s major biographer, and Virginius Dabney, a Virginia journalist and Jefferson relative, they sprang into action, horrified not so much that the novel was garnering the kind of headlines, accolades, and editorials that rarely accompany a first novel, but that the Warner Bros. movie sale meant the general public would soon be privy to the Hemings secret, which the establishment could control in the academic world but not in the real one. They threatened Viking Press and proclaimed the story of Sally Hemings a lie, the invention of a deranged drunkard journalist named James Callender and a vengeful black woman with a grudge against Jefferson for what he did to her ancestors. They wrote letters of protest to the editorial page of the New York Times. They could not, however, find one error of fact in the entire book. Viking panicked nevertheless, cutting the publicity budget for Sally Hemings in half, reducing the full-page ad in the New York Times Book Review, and sla
shing the first print run of fifty thousand. The company’s publicity department issued a disclaimer that the novel was “a drama created by one black woman, not a historical treatise.” I was no longer Viking’s author or writer, I was merely black and a woman.

  Unbeknownst to me at the time, the Jeffersonians also directed their “anti-defamation” campaign toward the president of CBS, Robert A. Daley, whose network had bought the movie rights from Warner Bros, and was already in production on a miniseries version of Sally Hemings. After the scholars dispatched intimidating letters and phone calls and threatened to enlist Virginia schoolchildren in a public letter-writing campaign, CBS chairman William Paley pulled the plug on the production historian Merrill Peterson had labeled “vulgar sensationalism masquerading as history.”

  The Missing Staircase

  Even the staff at Monticello fought to keep Sally Hemings out of the public eye. They refused to allow a CBS News Sunday Morning crew onto the grounds to interview me, until CBS threatened to film in front of the gates and announce the obstruction on the air. But it was not until a later visit, in September 1979, that I discovered the true lengths to which they were willing to go to discredit the Sally Hemings story. I had returned to Monticello with a reporter and a photographer from People magazine. We decided to take the public tour and, to my great surprise, a tiny spiral staircase, which had been visible in Jefferson’s bedroom alcove ever since his house was opened to the public seventy years earlier, and which I had seen with my own eyes on a previous visit, was suddenly gone, and in its place was only a big gaping hole.

  The strange tiny staircase had come to my attention during my research earlier in the decade, when I discovered it in a National Geographic photograph from the 1930s. In the photo, it was built into the alcove behind a narrow door at the foot of Jefferson’s bed, and an accompanying caption wondered if the “mysterious” staircase led to a bodyguard’s room overhead. Wanting to see for myself, I took the tour, waited until the guide had left the room, and ran up the narrow steps to discover a brick passageway that led nowhere and looked down on the room below. I decided to incorporate the staircase into Sally Hemings: in the novel, the staircase is hidden behind that narrow door, and the passageway with the three oval windows above is how Sally Hemings enters and leaves Jefferson’s bedroom without being seen by the plantation’s visitors and other servants. Readers began to come to Monticello to see the “Sally Hemings staircase.”

  But now I found myself in Jefferson’s bedroom staring into the empty cavity of a torn-out staircase. In shock at such vandalism, I asked the guide, who had surely been there since the Flood, what had happened to it. To which she replied, “What staircase? I don’t know anything about a staircase,” trying to hide the unplastered hole with her thin body as the People magazine photographer clicked away. I stormed into the curator’s office, demanding to know why they had torn out the staircase. The reply was that I was being “paranoiac”; it had nothing to do with me. They had decided in February, they said, before the book was even published (but when it was already in circulation and review), to tear out the staircase because it was not “authentic.” What, I asked, had been there before? “Steps” was the answer.

  Years later the screenwriter assigned to the Warner Bros. film project told me that he had been at Monticello on July 3, 1979, and the staircase had been intact. But when he returned July 5, the staircase had disappeared. It seems that on the night of July 3, a national monument had been defaced in a rage of destruction so that at the dawn of July 4, the anniversary of Jefferson’s death, there would be no trace of Sally Hemings to sully his memory.

  Despite the Jeffersonians’ continued resistance, Sally Hemings went on to attract eleven more movie options, one that lasted only for a heated twenty-four hours.

  The book was widely praised and reviewed to critical acclaim. The New York Times said it gave “new luster to the words ‘historical novel.’” It won the prestigious Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best novel by an American woman, which had previously been awarded to both Mary Gordon for Final Payments and Toni Morrison for Song of Solomon. It remained on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for six weeks, and sold over a million and a half copies nationally in paperback and hardcover. It was translated into nine languages and became a bestseller in France, Germany, and Italy; in France it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks and sold over a million copies in eight different editions. In the United States it was a Literary Guild Book Club selection, which meant even more copies sold and more rave reviews.

  Dumas Malone was so incensed by the Literary Guild Selection that he encouraged Virginius Dabney to publish a seething 250-page reply, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal (1981), attacking both me and Fawn Brodie, the Jefferson biographer who had first broached the Hemings affair, with everything they had including the kitchen sink. This despite the fact that Brodie had just died of cancer, harassed to death, I believed, by the infamous treatment she was subjected to as the historical community’s Benedict Arnold. The fact that she could no longer answer her detractors nor defend herself did not deter the gentlemen. The book was a convoluted and vicious tirade of disinformation. Whereas it left Brodie’s personal life alone, it defamed me in great biographical detail.

  “Dusky Sally”

  In 1987 I received a warning from a writer friend in Canada: a play was circulating in the United States that plagiarized Sally Hemings. I remember writing him that anyone could create a play about an historical figure (even one whom the official historical record had disavowed). But I got hold of the published play and was alarmed to discover twenty-four striking similarities to my fictional speculation.

  In 1990, representing myself, I began an almost two-year federal court battle over Dusky Sally that led to a landmark copyright decision. In a twenty-six-page judgment, Judge Robert Kelly found that “the similarity between the two works is so obvious and so unapologetic that an ordinary observer can only conclude that Burgess felt he was justified in copying ‘Sally Hemings.’”

  Just as I had hoped, the 1991 landmark ruling became an important part of copyright case law. It established that creative inventions and fictional elements incorporated into historical novels and plays are afforded the protection of copyright. As Judge Kelly put it in his decision, “It is one thing to inhibit creativity and another to use the idea-versus-expression distinction as something akin to an absolute defense—to maintain that the protection of copyright law is negated by any small amount of tinkering with another writer’s idea that results in a different expression.” At a time when “docudrama,” “faction,” or “fictory” has become a literary genre (thanks in part to Sally Hemings), my victory provides protection for many other writers in America.

  The President’s Daughter

  In 1994, I returned to Hemings, Jefferson, and their children in The President’s Daughter, published by Crown/Random House. I dedicated it to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had died earlier that year. Her words still resonate in my mind: “Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person.” That was the guiding principle in my quest to solve the multiple enigmas of Jefferson and Hemings, and in The President’s Daughter I took the inquiry one step further, exploring identity, ethnic confusion, and the dilemma of passing for white. I also expanded on the original novel’s account of the lives of Eston and Madison Hemings, based on what had since been published about their lives after Monticello.

  This was my Civil War novel, and in it I dared to address the “tragic mulatto” archetype from the historical point of view of Jefferson’s lost daughter Harriet. The title was an homage to William Wells Brown’s eighteenth-century abolitionist novel Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, the first published novel by an African American, which dealt with Jefferson’s daughter as well, but not by name and with much greater melodrama. I invented a narrative life for Harriet closely correlated to the historic events of her life, which I projected into h
er old age, leading up to and including the Civil War. I put Harriet at Gettysburg with two great documents running in counterpoint in her head: her father’s Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It is one of the most complex and best scenes I have ever written, and the book is my most cinematic novel.

  Publisher’s Weekly said, “Like its prequel, this is lushly entertaining history-as-fiction, and just possibly fiction-as-history, that’s going to raise eyebrows—and probably hackles as well.” Which it did, once again. The President’s Daughter raised the same unanswerable questions and evoked the same inexplicable rancor as Sally Hemings, until an obscure Virginia scientist decided to challenge the limits of scientific historiography by testing the genes of Jefferson’s purported descendants both white and black to prove the truth or falsehood of the Sally Hemings story.