by Naomi Andre
The Americanness of this story is not just because it involves a “founding father” of the nation, but also because it contains intersecting themes that foreground gender in such a way that men’s stories are preserved and told more frequently than women’s histories. This is paired with the socioeconomic power Jefferson held over his slaves such that Hemings was bound to the terms he set and experienced the privileges he controlled. As with many stories wherein gender, race, and socioeconomic elements are combined, the dominant story that emerges reinforces the normative conventions around white patriarchal supremacy. It becomes so common that other possible narratives need to be woven together from existing fragments and creativity in order to become audible.
The central primary evidence for the Hemings-Jefferson relationship includes DNA testing from 1998 and the 1873 memoir of Madison Hemings, son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.1 With these materials, plus the larger context of Jefferson’s other writings, the history we know of life at Monticello, and research about the lives of slaves and other African Americans, the story of Sally Hemings has been reanimated by the interracial collaborative team of composer William Bolcom and playwright/librettist Sandra Seaton. Through From the Diary of Sally Hemings, Hemings has been given a fresh humanity wherein we can hear her imagined voice and view a construction of her interior life. Of course, it is impossible to know what Sally Hemings said: we have no record of her words. Yet she has been envoiced through the text and music that present a new narrative about how her life could have had meaning in its own time—an alternative to the derogatory accounts already out there—and unquestionably creates a new meaning for us today.2 Florence Quivar, noted African American opera singer, commissioned the project and sang several performances of the work. At the Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress, Seaton recalls that forty-five Hemings descendants were in the audience.3
Across the Atlantic: Giving Voice to Sally (Sarah) Hemings and Saartijie (Sarah) Baartman
To put the two sides of the Atlantic in conversation with each other, I bring together two stories about late-eighteenth-century black women, one from South Africa and one from the United States. Both have become emblems for how race, gender, nation, sexuality, and societal position intersect and shape our narratives of the past. They were black women in societies that did not grant them full personhood or allow a space for their voices to be heard. As a result, their stories have been suppressed, revised, and rewritten, depending on who desires to place them in history. They have been resurrected in modern times as curiosities, spectacles, and aberrant deviations to the acceptable social order.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, between the Gamtoos Valley in the Eastern Cape of South Africa; Virginia in the United States; and Paris, France: I open this section in weaving a connective web across two hemispheres by briefly juxtaposing the histories of Sally (Sarah) Hemings with Saartijie (Sara) Baartman, two women with very different fates yet with overlapping stories of how gender (especially in terms of perceived femininity) and race can be articulated.4 Born in the same era, these two women represent extremes of how blackness in its varying physical presentations shaped their opportunities and exploitation. Saartijie (Sara) Baartman, a Khoi-San South African woman, was born before 1790, possibly in the 1770s, the same decade as Sally Hemings.5 Baartman was taken to England in 1810 and then to Paris in 1814 to be exhibited and, ostensibly, to provide visual evidence of the inferiority of darker races based on the physical characteristics of her anatomy. During her European sojourn she was launched as the “Hottentot Venus” and subjected to a manipulative marketing campaign that dodged abolitionist efforts to stop the exhibitions and send her back to Africa. Though this consumed only five years of her life, it was her last five years (she died on December 29, 1815, in Paris), and the created persona shaped by the public circulation of racist imaginations vastly eclipsed the “real” woman, so much so that when modern biographers have tried to recover the life of Baartman, the fragments of history are overwhelmed with the fictive creation of the Hottentot Venus.6
Beyond her death, Baartman’s body and what she had come to represent haunted the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though there were other bodies and bones of people from Africa (and other geographical locations) that were put on display in exhibits, museums, and dioramas, the “Hottentot Venus” became a cipher for racialized discourse. Several wax moulds and a body cast were made of her anatomy. Additionally, “her decanted brain, stiff skeleton and dissected genitalia” were preserved after her death.7 Her skeleton and other parts were on display in the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle until they were moved to the Musée de l’Homme when it opened in 1937. In 1976 Baartman’s dismembered body was put into storage until parts were brought out in 1994 to be exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay; within months, that exhibit was contested and Baartman went back into storage.8
In the late 1990s, issues around how we think about both Sally Hemings’s and Saartijie Baartman’s legacies resurfaced. In 1998 there was DNA testing that provided scientific evidence to something that had been hotly debated on both sides of the issue; the living descendants among the Hemings and Jefferson families were genetically linked. The tests revealed that the Hemings heirs were related to men in the Jefferson family. This finding left the possibility that in addition to Thomas, his younger brother Randolph could have fathered some of Sally Hemings’s children; however, that possibility has not been substantiated, and the DNA testing leads many to acknowledge that children were born to Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Although the issue continues to generate debate at the time of this writing, the larger view that receives the most adherence is that what had been suspected before 1998 is now generally accepted by many: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a long-term relationship that produced children whose descendants live into the present time.9
After the dismantling of apartheid, a campaign in South Africa to repatriate Baartman’s remains began in 1995, leading to her eventual return and burial in the town of Hankey, on the Gamtoos River in the Eastern Cape province in August 2002. Her repatriation and funeral brought dignity to her memory. South African President Thabo Mbeki spoke at the ceremony and presented a model for thinking about how to confront and heal from an unjust past.
A troubled and painful history has presented us with the challenge and possibility to translate into reality the noble vision that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white. When that is done, [then] will it be possible for us to say that Sarah Bartmann has truly come home.10
Mbeki closed his remarks with an extended arm across the Atlantic:
Another African who lived in the Diaspora, this time in the United States of America, for forebears having been transported out of Africa as slaves, sang of rivers. This is the great African-American poet, Langston Hughes.11
Mbeki ended his dedicatory remarks by citing the full text of Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” As Mbeki ended with the poem’s final line “My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” he then added, “May the soul of Sarah Bartmann grow deep like the rivers.”
Sally Hemings and Sarah Bartmann present two accounts of the gendered and racialized injustices that occurred at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries, on two sides of the Atlantic. Hemings’s beauty corresponded with a European standard, and she was praised and given better treatment than her peers; Bartmann’s dark-skinned body was considered aberrant to European norms, and she was exhibited as a curiosity of nature. While London and Paris exploited Bartmann and led to her early death, Paris provided different prospects for Hemings, as she could have had freedom and possibly passed within white society. From what we can tell, both women had little choice or power to determine their own destinies, and both women suffered, albeit in dramatically different ways.12 Bartmann’s life was cut short from illness she contracted while on a circus-like exhibition route. Hemings quite possibly had a protected life that involved special treatment, and she lived into h
er early sixties, but she lived in shadows as an unacknowledged companion to Jefferson and mother of his enslaved children. Both women, who they really were as people, are still shrouded in mystery. Their afterlife has generated much interest: the fragmented body of Bartmann continued to be desecrated in museum exhibits until she was finally buried in her home country; Hemings almost disappeared, though she was kept alive through her children and the stories that circulated underground until DNA evidence made the story unavoidable. In 2002 Bartmann was laid to rest with Mbeki’s eulogy for her soul to “grow deep like the rivers” back home, as a proper heritage for her people. In 2001 From the Diary of Sally Hemings gave birth to an artistic vision of Hemings that began to flesh out a woman with a voice and legacy that tells a new and yet-unheard story of American history.
Who Was Sally Hemings?
In the early years of the United States up through the Civil War, the practice of slavery presented legal consequences for how racial categories were defined. There was no specific legal category that represented the state between freedom and bondage. In South Africa after colonialism, when the apartheid system came into place mid-twentieth century, the categories of white and black were mitigated by the coloured/mixed-race category.13 Yet even for this in-between group, the variations of privilege stopped abruptly when someone was categorized as black. Passing as white in the United States and South Africa (and undergoing reclassification in South Africa) under apartheid were unofficial acknowledgements that the line determining blackness could be blurry. For both the United States and South Africa, race and nation determined what kind of life one would live.
Yet even in a system with sharp edges, a liminal category arises; the story between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson exposes how these fault lines have meaning. Here we have a complicated yet common-enough scenario with a woman born into slavery and the relationships that arise around her physical attractiveness, her ability to have children, the consequences of oppression and domination, and the proximity of living in close quarters. Sally Hemings, the daughter of a white man (John Wayles) and biracial mother (Elizabeth Hemings) was (by all accounts) beautiful, legally one-quarter black, and the half-sister of Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles. When Martha died young, it is not overly surprising that Jefferson might have seen some of Martha in Sally. Sally’s mother Elizabeth was also enslaved and the mother of children by her owner (John Wayles, Sally’s and Martha’s father). Elizabeth was also the daughter of a relationship between Susannah Epps (an enslaved woman) and her owner John Hemings (a Welsh sea captain; see Chart 3.1).14 We have a situation of sexual relationships over the course of three generations (Susannah Epps, her daughter Elizabeth Hemings, and her daughter Sally) between master and slave that involve continual exploitation, likely coercion, and possible love.
At root is the way a private situation challenges the public laws of the land. How can a relationship that involves love, trust, and safety develop in the context of slavery, cruelty, and brutality? The story of love between Jefferson and Sally puts into question the tenets behind how slavery and domination work.15 We have to ask ourselves how a slave could accept someone who was keeping her people in bondage, and possibly love that person, and let him into her heart. We also have to question how a master could fall in love with a slave and still treat her people, and his own children, like chattel. The effectiveness of From the Diary of Sally Hemings is that it allows such conflicting emotions to exist simultaneously. Through the use of language and music, such complexity can be accomplished and represented.
The provocative title of William Bolcom and Sandra Seaton’s dramatic vocal work on Sally Hemings leads the audience to think that there has been a recent discovery—a secret diary kept by Sally Hemings, the slave and companion of Thomas Jefferson. In interviews and in the notes to the recording they are clear that there is no written diary that survives and that the libretto to the work “is ultimately a work of the imagination, albeit an imagination constrained by historical possibility.”16 Seaton has spoken about how she created a voice for the much-discussed and controversial figure of Jefferson’s slave with whom we have evidence he had an ongoing relationship. Seaton writes,
From the Diary of Sally Hemings is first of all a work of the imagination, not a piece of historical research. Although I have done my best to insure historical plausibility, the final test of the song cycle in concert is not the factual accuracy of the words but the human truth and emotional power of the music and words, united in the performance of a gifted singer. … 17
The portrait of Sally Hemings in From the Diary is meant to be suggestive rather than complete. The entries record moments rather than tell stories. The ellipses between entries leave spaces for listeners to complete the portrait for themselves; these spaces indicate my own acknowledgement that the whole truth about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings will never be told, either by historians or artists. … From the Diary is an attempt to allow an imagined Sally Hemings to speak for herself.18
This story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings feels remarkably contemporary as different configurations of family and the growing number of multiracial relationships become more visible. Falling in love across class, race, and/or ethnic lines does not have the same taboo resonance it had in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The once unimaginable facts—that one of the country’s Founding Fathers probably had a long-term (thirty-eight years) monogamous relationship with a woman who was legally his slave feels both shocking as well as remarkably progressive. Such a story brings to light current themes around which one can now construct alternative narratives (for example, how do we ask questions regarding consensual choice and equality in the context of their vast socioeconomic differences?). Moreover, we live in an era wherein the complexity of black-white relationships is given a new visible focus in the racial-ethnic ancestry and upbringing of former president Barack Obama. The stories surrounding the connections between black people and white people are no longer limited to those who might have intimate bloodline relationships or close friendships with people of different racial and ethnic makeups. This present is juxtaposed with the past in the story of Jefferson and Hemings: a president of the United States can now acknowledge a coming together of racial and ethnic backgrounds in ways that were too controversial before. Starting with the present, the national body politic has been led by a person who embodies more of the population than ever before and gave voice to a wider range of our lived experiences.
In this discussion of William Bolcom and Sandra Seaton’s From the Diary of Sally Hemings, racial formation in the United States is brought to the forefront. The construction of blackness hinges closely on the edges of whiteness (and vice versa—the construction of whiteness hinges closely on the edges of blackness). Different views about racial identity in the first days of the nation are immediately challenged when Jefferson’s published ideas about blackness are juxtaposed with his public and private practices. Mixedrace identity is feared rather than explored and denial becomes a part of the nation’s history. The music and its story open up a space for thinking about who Jefferson and Hemings could be or might have been. Historical genre, the presence of those involved with the genesis and creation of this work, and the musical language employed enrich the parsing out of details that have no longer survived.
In January 2012, the month of President Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration, the New York Times ran an article about two exhibitions on slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Music and cultural critic Edward Rothstein refers to Jefferson and writes,
What does it mean that such a man not only held slaves but also devoted considerable attention to their status, their mode of life and, yes, their profitability? What was the connection between his ideals and the blunt reality? These are not just biographical questions; they are national ones.19
In this spirit, I wish to examine how so many things we try to keep separate come together: the pu
blic and the private, the political and the personal, the intimate and the social, the condemned and the condoned. These oppositional pairs are some of the repercussions of what we have now come to understand as the long-term, secret, interracial romantic relationship (possibly a relationship of choice by both parties) between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings.
Thomas Jefferson hardly needs introduction, at least in a general way. Schoolchildren around the world are taught that he was a Founding Father of the United States as it gained its freedom from its colonization by England, the third president of the United States, and actively involved in forming the transition from colonies to country. He was the author of the Declaration of Independence and one of the principal architects of the republic where equality, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness would become a model for European nations, as the French Revolution the following decade would prove.
Sally Hemings has become a well-known figure since the 1990s around the question of whether she was romantically aligned with Thomas Jefferson.20 With family charts, the DNA testing, and reconstructing historical data about where, how, and if Jefferson could have fathered several children with Hemings, the emphasis has been on proving—scientifically and historically—how and under what conditions they were “together.” There is a lot at stake with pairing these two people. How can one look back at the Founding Fathers—a term that hovers on a construction of patriarchy that, on its surface, appears so loving and comforting as one can take pride in Jefferson’s role in nurturing the birth of the United States—and reconcile that sense with the information that Jefferson, along with many of the other Founding Fathers, owned slaves? What does one do with the knowledge that Jefferson lived a double life where he succumbed to, and even needed the economic structure of, owning slaves? Yet on the other hand, strong evidence points to the fact that he had a committed, spouse-like relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, who was also the halfsister of his deceased wife. Hardly anyone could, or even wanted to, believe that such a glaring dichotomy in this beloved historical figure could exist. But the relationship could not lie buried in the past; not even the century-old question that provided the space for this to be a vague possibility was to remain a mystery. Given the developments in science of the 1990s, we now had the (almost) definitive DNA results that substantiated what had previously been a rumor: Jefferson and Sally Hemings had conceived several children together.21 Though there was still a possibility that a relative of Thomas Jefferson (and not Thomas himself) had fathered the descendants of the people who claim a relationship to Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, the DNA evidence was too strong for most people to simply ignore. At this point, the discourse had to change. Now, as Rothstein states above, “these are not just biographical questions, they are national ones.”