Black Opera
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Yet more biography is in order before we move on to implications for the nation. Though the narratives of these people’s lives have been told and retold in history books and biographies, I relate the facts here now in reference to getting a larger picture of how living situations between whites and blacks (owners, slaves, and those relationships that seem to fall in between these two categories) were constructed—especially in Thomas Jefferson’s immediate family experience. While a large part of the story of how we see Thomas Jefferson and his relationship with Sally Hemings has been reshaped since the 1990s, the incomplete and selective (yet factually substantiated) biographies below are limited to thinking about the societal master-slave and familial bloodline relationships between these people in order to gain a quick overview of who is connected to whom.22
Chart 3.1: Black-White Relationships around Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
John Wayles (1715–1773) was born in England and came to Virginia most likely in the 1730s. He was a planter, slave trader, and lawyer in the Virginia colony. His first wife, Martha Epps, was the mother of Martha Wayles, who became Thomas Jefferson’s wife (hence John Wayles was Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law). John Wayles survived three wives and later had a relationship with his slave Elizabeth Hemings. With Elizabeth Hemings he fathered six children, one of whom was Sally Hemings.
Elizabeth Hemings (also known as Betty) (1735–1807) was the daughter of John Hemings, a Welsh sea captain, and an enslaved woman born in Africa (possibly Hausa from Nigeria), called Susannah Epps. Elizabeth and her mother Susannah became the property of Martha Epps (who married John Wayles). After John Wayles’s death in 1773, Elizabeth and her ten children (six of whom are said to have been fathered by Wayles, including Sally Hemings) became the inherited property of Martha Wayles and Thomas Jefferson.
Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson (1748–1782) was a young widow (her deceased first husband was Bathurst Skelton) with no surviving children in 1772 when she married Thomas Jefferson. In her life she had seven children; her only child with Skelton died at the age three. Of her six children fathered by Jefferson, only two daughters—Martha (called Patsy) and Maria (called Polly)—lived into adulthood. Martha was the only wife of Jefferson. She was the half-sister of Sally Hemings (they shared a father in John Wayles).
Sarah “Sally” Hemings (1773–1835) was one of six children of John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings. Though born to the Wayles household, she and her mother moved to Monticello (sources differ about when this happened—sometime after 1773 but by 1776) when Martha Wayles Jefferson inherited her father’s slaves at his death. Sally was a nursemaid and companion to her half-sister’s (Martha’s) children (Patsy and Polly) after Martha died. Sally accompanied Polly to Paris (1787–1789) when Jefferson was the U.S. Ambassador to France, and she helped attend to Polly as well as Patsy (who came to Paris later) when they debuted in Parisian society. It is thought that during this time in Paris, Sally and Thomas became intimately involved. Evidence supports that they had six children together, four of whom survived into adulthood.23 These four children were all freed.24
As we explore this story, it is evident that the character of the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson had precedent in early American history. The household Thomas Jefferson married into when he married Martha Wayles Skelton provided a strong model for his later relationship with Sally Hemings. Martha’s father John and (later) her husband Thomas, it seems, both turned to long-term relationships with their slaves that each produced several children. Additionally, there is evidence that Elizabeth Hemings (Sally’s mother) also had a similar ancestry. Elizabeth’s African mother, Susannah Epps, was taken as a type of companion by the sea captain John Hemings from Wales and became the property of Martha Epps, the mother of Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson’s wife). Martha Epps, brought Susannah and her daughter Elizabeth (Hemings) as part of her dowry when she married John Wayles. So, among multiple generations (John Hemings and Susannah Epps, John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings) it was not uncommon for a man to father children and have various types of relationships with chosen black female slaves.25
Rather than seeing these situations as anomalous or unheard of, From the Diary of Sally Hemings asks us to think about such circumstances as fitting into a larger context that makes room for such occurrences to happen.26 In her notes to the recording, author Sandra Seaton takes a pragmatic stance in her portrayal: “the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings could never be a love between social and political equals.”27 Yet Seaton immediately goes on to present another complementary vantage point when she writes, “Contemporary African American historian and NYU law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, one of the leading authorities on the relationship, cautions contemporary readers against assuming that any relationship between a white man and a woman legally his slave could be more than power and submission.”28 The music and text to From the Diary of Sally Hemings present multiple views of this relationship that is hidden in mystery and yet speaks uncannily to the present as interracial relationships continue to be haunted by the specter cast by slavery and furthered by Jim Crow, segregation, and ongoing racial biases and discrimination.
As someone who is thoroughly involved with how the history of the Jeffersons and Hemingses has been revealed, Annette Gordon-Reed’s extensive research and writing on this topic has had a marked focus less on the actual outcome of the debate (Were they involved or not?) and more on how this history has been told. She writes,
The more important feature of the Jefferson-Hemings debate, I believed, was what it said about the views of Americans—and it must be said, some white Americans—about the proper relationship between blacks and whites. This was not just on the sexual front (not even mainly on the sexual front) but in terms of the proper power relationship between the two groups overall.
The treatment of the story well into modern times is evidence of the continuing grip that the doctrine of white supremacy has on American society.29
It is this angle to the story—its telling and retelling of the past up to the present—that makes From the Diary of Sally Hemings so important today. One aspect of this significance is the way things are still rather similar—at least in terms of the resistance people in the late eighteenth century up through the early twenty-first century have had to the image of a Founding Father of the United States being involved in an interracial relationship. Gordon-Reed rightly points out that though this was a story about an event in the past—centuries old—it represents relevant feelings a nation continues to have about itself.
Today most mixed-race people face a similar situation as that of Sally Hemings and her offspring. We know from the memoir that Sally Hemings’s son Madison Hemings wrote in 1873 that of the four children who survived into adulthood, two lived in white society and two lived in black society; Beverly and Harriet married white spouses and assimilated as white people, while Madison and Eston married “colored” women and lived in black communities.30 Despite the passage of 150 years since the end of slavery, in the United States a person’s identity and how one is treated are still determined by an alchemy of how you look and behave in relation to racist ideology. Though it is a bold statement, for society at large in the United States you are either black or pass as white. Today, while one might claim an interracial/biracial identity, in reality—as it seems to most people—you are classified as “other” or “mixed,” with the implication that you are other than white or black, or you are mixed from black and white. Though relationships between black people and white people are no longer illegal, the social constructions around interracial identity are still in some sense troubled, as there is no comfortable space, wide social acceptance, or shared understanding of mixed racial heritage.31
Who Tells This Story: Composer William Bolcom and Writer Sandra Seaton
From the Diary of Sally Hemings is an interracial collaboration between Pulitzer Prize–and Grammy-winning c
omposer and pianist William Bolcom and decorated writer and playwright Sandra Seaton. Bolcom (born in Seattle, Washington-in 1938) was educated both in the United States and Paris. He was part of the mid-twentieth century progressive scene at Mills College and attended the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen.32 Hailed as the 2007 Composer of the Year by Music America, Bolcom has a long list of honors and awards for his work in classical art music (including symphonies and operas) and popular musical styles (especially cabaret songs). A distinguishing feature of Bolcom’s music is his ability to encompass a style that feels up to date and current in a popular sense as well as to create music that is considered “classical” and at home in the concert hall. It is this feature that has allowed him to write in a wide variety of styles that come together smoothly and sound relevant to his contemporaneous audiences.
Along with a few other composers in the late 1960s, Bolcom was part of a revival of ragtime music that popularized it outside of strictly jazz circles. Bolcom, white himself, was also a strong supporter of the dignity of other types of African American music—notably jazz—before the mainstream concertgoing and academic publics deemed such music worthy of a true “art” status. It was through his work on the 1921 black musical Shuffle Along that he first met Sandra Seaton. Shuffle Along was among the first all-black musical works on Broadway; its music and lyrics were by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, and it contained an interconnected plot (about a mayoral race) written by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles.33 Shuffle Along was both exceedingly popular (it had a run of 504 performances) and helped launch the careers of Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, and Florence Mills, and included William Grant Still and Hall Johnson in the orchestra. Seaton, a descendent of Flournoy Miller, sought out Bolcom when she learned he had published a book about the musical.34 Bolcom writes in the notes to the recording of From the Diary of Sally Hemings, “The dedication of the cycle, in memory of Flournoy Miller, is in gratitude for his posthumously bringing Sandra’s work to my attention.”
Sandra Seaton (born in Columbia, Tennessee) is an African American writer and playwright who grew up in Tennessee and then on Chicago’s West Side in the 1940s and 1950s, when her family moved north during the Great Migration. She has written more than ten plays and worked in fiction and spoken word. Her degrees are in the liberal arts and creative writing, and she has received research grants and held creative arts residencies at prominent universities and artist colonies.35 Her works have been performed in cities throughout the United States including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
The collaboration between Bolcom and Seaton began with Florence Quivar (born 1944 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), one of the leading opera singers at the time, who was interested in Sally Hemings. Bolcom writes:
In 1999 Florence Quivar, the celebrated mezzosoprano, asked me to compose a song cycle on Sally Hemings. At first I was inclined to say no, because I had seen so many sensationalized portraits of Sally Hemings that I couldn’t accept her as anybody real. This is not because I doubted, as quite a number of people still seem to, that Thomas Jefferson both had a long relationship and fathered children with her; I had always been fairly sure the story was true.”36
Bolcom goes on to express his concern about finding someone who could represent Sally Hemings well in words. He mentions meeting Sandra Seaton in connection with Reminiscing with Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake and becoming familiar with her work. “The quiet forcefulness of the character portraits in the two plays of hers that I had seen, The Bridge Party and The Will, had impressed me mightily. I couldn’t imagine anyone who would understand Sally better.”37 Bolcom continues, “Seaton’s own plays deal penetratingly with the world of the African American middle class in a refreshingly nonstereotypical way, and I felt that she would understand Sally Hemings better than anyone else I knew.”38
Bolcom writes about approaching Seaton to get involved with this project:
“If you don’t want to do this,” I said to Sandra, “I’ll say no to the project.” Happily, she said yes to my idea of reconstructing a diary of Sally Hemings, and the work which follows—a longer version of the text I set to music—gave me a Sally Hemings I could believe in, one that sings.39
The speaker in the text—not surprising, as it was constructed as a diary—is that of Seaton writing in Sally’s voice. Much of it is first-person narrative, but there are sections that narrate events and quote other people. Seaton includes quotations from Jefferson’s writings at points and indicates this through the use of italics.40
Exploring the Verbal Text
My discussion of the text includes two related and very similar versions. There is the text that is in the notes to the recording (which is the same as the text in the published piano vocal score) and there is the slightly longer text that appears in the Michigan Quarterly Review, which devoted a cluster of articles to From the Diary of Sally Hemings when the work first came out.41 The journal cluster contains three parts: A “Preface” written by William Bolcom; the text “From the Diary of Sally Hemings,” by Sandra Seaton; and “Program Notes,” also by Seaton. In the Michigan Quarterly Review, the text is slightly longer (only a few lines were omitted in the final version set to music) and is the one Bolcom refers to in the preceding quotation. The longer text is laid out in fifteen sections, as opposed to the four parts with eighteen songs in the musical work. Nothing is contradicted between the two versions of the text in that the general shape of the narrative is the same. The most common difference is a shifting of a few lines of text within a section or between different sections.
The text in the Michigan Quarterly Review is slightly different from the text in the piano-vocal score (and recording, which has the same text as the piano-vocal score); this is the longer version of the full text that Seaton gave Bolcom as he was composing.42 Though not indicated in the score and recording, the text we see in the Michigan Quarterly Review includes a few dates and places that position the diary in historical time and location. The opening sections (comparable to the individual songs) contain neither date nor place, but near the end of section II we have “1788 Paris.” Just after section III we see “Hôtel de Langeac,” which refers to the townhouse that Jefferson moved into in 1785, probably after his elevation to the minister to the Court of Versailles, replacing Benjamin Franklin.43 The next and final reference to a date is at the beginning of section V, “December 23, 1789,” with the text “Back home, at Monticello. …”44
Perhaps the most telling portion left out of the musical work is the reference to “Calendar” in two lines: “Calendar’s warning: ‘Marry a woman of your own complexion’” and “Another bawdy line. ‘Take to bed your Sally.’”45 James T. Callender is a historical figure known for a relationship with Thomas Jefferson that was at first friendly (where Jefferson gave him money, primarily as acts of charity) but then grew estranged when Callender demanded that Jefferson make him postmaster in Richmond, Virginia, and Jefferson refused. As a journalist, Callender then worked against Jefferson and “made the first public allegation that Jefferson had been involved in a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings.”46 Though some of what Callender wrote in the Richmond Recorder in 1802 was most likely true, the manner in which he reported it was so indecent that it lost most of its effectiveness because of his own reputation and because he undoubtedly offended many of his readers. As historian Joshua Rothman notes, “Callender’s reports of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings have been casually and categorically dismissed as unreliable—the libelous rants of a scandal-mongering, drunken, and disgruntled office-seeker.”47 The fact that Callender does not appear very much in one version of this text and then is completely cut out of the final version shows that both Bolcom and Seaton were not interested in giving voice to this sensationalist side of the story. The portrayal we get of Jefferson and Hemings is a sympathetic one, yet also complex, one that focuses on an inner world between the two of them, the larger issues and daily p
roblems they could have encountered, and less on how others judged them.
The musical world Bolcom creates for Jefferson and Hemings has sections that are quite tonal as well as dramatic sections that are dissonant and descriptive of the text.48 In the program notes to the 2010 recording, Bolcom wrote about his musical approach: