Black Opera

by Naomi Andre

  Martha and Maria, hands clasped together in the shade of his poplar tree, we skipped and stopped, spied his words on her grave: If in the house of Hades, men forget their dead, yet will I remember my dear companion. Most days I sit with Maria and Martha. … Inside the big house. Outside, Mother’s cabin. … 59

  This felt presence is complemented by the first sighting of Martha as ghost in #6, the end of part 1, and is one of the shortest texts.

  I was carrying a tray when he called me. Sally turn this way. Now hold your face to the light. A little over. Master Jefferson looked whiter than a sheet, whiter than I ever was. He cupped my face in his hands and whispered her name.

  In this complete text for this number, Seaton has given us a glimpse of Sally and Jefferson’s time in Paris when they were falling in love. Seaton shows how it was possible for Jefferson to see Martha Wayles in her half-sister Sally as she grew older and they were away from their familiar surroundings in Virginia. Linking them through the visage of whiteness, we feel the tenderness as “he cupped my face in his hands” and also the complexity when he “whispered her name”—undoubtedly the name of Martha.

  The end of part 2, “My sister ghost” (#11) gets to the heart of what had been mounting in the first half of the work: the awkward, painful, and complicated position Sally assumes as the companion to Thomas Jefferson. In her opening line, she invokes the “sister ghost” and then relates two sightings. “One day I called him Tom. He turned, startled: Now hold your face towards the light. He held me close. The earth belongs to the living.” Not only is this one of the text reminiscences from an earlier number (#6 “I was carrying a tray when he called me”), the music is also brought back (not exactly, but very similar and definitely audible) and a tempo indication in the score refers directly to the earlier song “Tempo of VI” with the same metronome marking (quarter note = 69). In this section the themes for what is at stake are brought together, and we get a palpable sense of how Sally is both her own person and a probable surrogate link to her dead half-sister.

  The second sighting of Sally’s “sister ghost” in #11 appears shortly after the first one. The music to this number (#11) is framed in a 3/2 meter marked “Rich and Warm” (half-note = 46) that surrounds a faster middle section with an eighth-note pulse. With the return of the opening 3/2 meter (measure 52), the pace slows back down. The text reveals the second sighting,

  Her ghost appears once more, stands nearby. … Sister dear, I hold your daughter’s trust. Rather me than a mistress who sets her own standard. Rather me than a stranger. Bloodlines! Bloodlines!

  As in the opening of this number, the 3/2 meter contains a sophisticated rhythmic layering. The left hand moves slowly, with the chords changing on the beat once a measure, or even less frequently with notes tied over. The right hand moves slightly more quickly, but with tied-over syncopations, giving the effect of a misalignment between the right hand (treble clef) in the piano compared to the alignment of left hand (bass clef) with the voice. Consistently, the right-hand accompaniment in the piano seems to be rhythmically off by a half note and for ten measures avoids the metric downbeat (measures 52–62). Combined together in the piano and the voice, this musical hemiola (through the rhythmic displacement) is reflected textually through the haunting of Sally’s sister ghost (the deceased Martha Wayles). Overall, this polyrhythmic structure gives the effect of things happening simultaneously on different time scales—an apt way for evoking the juxtaposition of different worlds in time and space as we see Sally grappling with the blending of her present with Jefferson and past with half-sister Martha.

  The text to the musical score is filled with specific historical details that are all carefully interwoven to fit what we know about the contextual situation—dates Jefferson was in Paris, where he stayed, and people he met; his writings about gardens and the “purple hyacinths,” “wild honeysuckle,” and “narcissus” that are quoted in the text; and the presence of Sally’s mother, her nieces Maria and Martha, and her children Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston.

  As Seaton created this world from her research about the Jefferson family, Monticello, and the period during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Paris and the early United States, her own experience also played into how she shaped Sally.

  My portrait of Sally Hemings is based not only on a study of the growing historical literature on Jefferson and Sally Hemings but also on my own family history. Growing up as an African-American in the South before the civil rights era, I heard many family stories about relationships between blacks and whites outside of the law. Some were love relationships; others were exploitative—some were probably both.60

  Seaton’s work in the two plays Bolcom mentions above (The Bridge Party and The Will) and her work since From the Diary of Sally Hemings has explored these themes around interracial relationships and African American life in the past. In her 1994 play The Will, she brings to life the details around her own heritage and how black-white relationships form the unwritten history of her ancestry. In a carefully detailed story about two families who lived and worked together side by side in the South during the years immediately following the Civil War, Seaton creates two households—one headed by Cyrus Webster, a free black man, and the other a poor white neighbor and son who work on Cyrus’s land. Both families have sons who return from having fought in the Civil War (on opposite sides) but are unable to return to the coexistence they once had; the white son joins the beginnings of the Ku Klux Klan, and Cyrus’s son Israel wants to be treated with the respect due a soldier who supported his country. Throughout the play Cyrus Webster attends to the present situation as his son Israel becomes increasingly hostile toward the white childhood friend who is filled with racial hatred toward him and Cyrus’s other son, who is engaged to marry Patti, a black opera singer, who is based on the historical character of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.61 Around the edges of this main action is the theme of legacy that Cyrus feels both in terms of honoring his own ancestors and the wisdom he tries to pass on to his sons.

  In her “Program Notes” that appear in the Michigan Quarterly Review cluster about Sally Hemings, Seaton writes about a breaking through of this unwritten history in an act of her great-great-great-grandfather Cyrus Webster.

  A gravestone in my hometown in Tennessee describes my ancestor Anna Sanderson as the “consort” of Israel Grant, a white man. The gravestone affirming this relation to the world was put up by their child, my maternal great-great-great-grandfather, Cyrus Webster. According to our family oral history, Cyrus, who lived his entire adult life as a free black, was taken to the basement by his white relatives and taught to read.62

  As Seaton had accomplished before From the Diary of Sally Hemings, we see here in The Will themes from her own family’s past that emerge in her writing, being worked out through the interactions she imagines in the portrayals of her characters. As Seaton weaves together knowledge of the period—in this case Southern history and oral family history—we see a reflection of images from our nation’s past that have not survived. More significant than a focus on what is historically factual is the connection such stories have to us today as we strive to remember and reconstruct what we desire to know of the past for our living in the present.

  In these “Program Notes” Seaton continues to bring the story of Sally Hemings even closer to her family.

  My grandmother often told me stories about my great-grandmother, Emma Hatcher Webster. The child of two teenagers, a local planter’s son and the mulatto daughter of the cook, like Sally Hemings, Emma Webster was a quadroon. Emma was raised at the house as a member of the family, but was given the choice of spending the rest of her life there as a single “white” woman, in a kind of limbo, or leaving the family and marrying a black man; she chose the latter. … After Thomas Jefferson’s death, the census record for the house where Sally Hemings lived with her sons identified the family as white.63

  By telling this story of Anna Sanderson, Israel Gran
t, Cyrus Webster, and Emma Hatcher Webster, Seaton writes her own family into a history that had vanished except for a cryptic gravestone, people’s names, and fading memories—all fragile threads of an oral history so easily lost or forgotten. Honoring these stories as dramatic plays and narratives brings their existence back to life, even if the details will never be confirmed. In this way we all can experience works such as The Will and From the Diary of Sally Hemings not just as creative renderings of fiction but as intertextual documents that bring an imagined past to life for those of us today searching for meaning in fragments and incomplete histories.

  Seaton’s work with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings began with From the Diary of Sally Hemings when Bolcom asked her to write a diary. Yet the richness of her research and her connection to the subject came not only from her own family’s interracial roots, but also from the times when this national news, the aftermath of the results from the 1998 DNA testing, let the world know the Jefferson-Hemings liaison was something to be taken seriously. In a related vein to the diary that Bolcom set musically, Seaton continued with projects on Sally Hemings. In 2003 Seaton wrote a one-woman drama—Sally—set at Monticello in the final days before Thomas Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826. Two years later, in 2005, Seaton wrote a full-length play, A Bed Made in Heaven, also set at Monticello, but this time during Jefferson’s presidency in 1801 in the wake of the accusations made by James T. Callender about Jefferson and Hemings’s relationship. Though the Hemings-Jefferson story definitely had the possibility of tapping into the realm of an eroticized exotic, the scientific DNA evidence helped legitimize the topic so that it began an important conversation the United States was having for the first time with itself—it was the first time black and white people in large numbers were speaking together about the different legacies slavery had from multiple racial, socioeconomic, and gendered vantage points.

  Prior to this time most people had not even heard of Sally Hemings; before Annette Gordon-Reed’s work, Hemings was not mentioned in standard history books. The few who had heard of Sally Hemings were taught to discredit her possible relationship with Jefferson as slander against his name. Mass media and popular culture in the late 1990s seemed to be unsure about the extent of the racist white supremacist views out there and were not sure whether to celebrate or sensationalize their coverage. A central event that capitalized on both strategies was the Oprah Winfrey Show on November 12, 1998, that televised a first-time reunion between the black and white descendants from Jefferson and Hemings. The public demand for more information and exposure to these living relatives that connect back to the past led to numerous interviews and appearances by these newly united family members on radio shows, college campuses, and countless public speaking engagements.

  During the same time that Annette Gordon-Reed published her first book (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy) in 1997 and the DNA testing of 1998, Edward Ball—the descendent of a prominent South Carolina plantation-owning family—published Slaves in the Family in 1998. Winning the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Ambassador Book Award for American Studies, this book added a complementary voice to the Hemings-Jefferson conversation at this time as a white man looked back on his plantation roots to see how to make sense of this history. He opens the book with a chapter titled “Plantation Memories,” and after a few lines, he writes:

  My father, Theodore Porter Ball, came from the venerable city of Charleston, South Carolina, the son of an old plantation clan. The Ball family’s plantations were among the oldest and longest standing in the American South, and there were more than twenty of them along the Cooper River, north of Charleston. Between 1698 and 1865, the 167 years the family was in the slave business, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery to the Balls or bought by them.64

  Ball then writes about how, as he was growing up, this lore was something that was always hovering in the background. His family’s history felt both like it was something that needed to be understood and like a history that existed in fragments that needed a more coherent telling, at least for Edward and his generation in the Ball family. His motives were partially to satisfy his own curiosity, to find out the extent of atrocities or benevolence in his heritage: he found examples of both, as both were part of the economy of the slave trade and plantation business.

  In a related connection to the Jefferson-Hemings story, the Ball family provides another case of hidden interracial relationships that also was cloaked in an accepted denial that later, when probed more thoroughly, was found to be true. Despite the family history that the Ball men never slept with their slaves, Edward found that this happened, even more than he initially suspected.

  In fact I found a considerable amount of evidence that in each generation going back two hundred years at least one of the Ball men had a mulatto family. The evidence came from black families who told me about the existence of their light-skinned uncles and aunts whose fathers were named Ball and also from paper evidence on the plantations where you would find, for example, Ball men leaving money to black women and giving them freedom.65

  As we are now learning, the stories that segregate relationships of men and women by race is a narrative of denial about what happened in the past. The revelation of the “truth” to these relationships is not the most provocative point. What makes these narratives part of a useable past is that these histories are rarely isolated by race, ethnicity, and other identity markers. Instead, the aftermath of slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, the civil rights era, and the passage of time have provided us with a distance that requires multiple lenses to understand the “big picture.” Edward Ball talks about this in an interview after he finished his book.

  I’m trying to bring together black and white history into a shared history. We know a lot about the white South, perhaps too much. In the past thirty years we’ve learned a lot about black Americans and their journey, but we still seem to think of American history as a segregated legacy. We either enter the Native American story or the black story or the Irish story or the WASP story, and we don’t depict American life as it really was lived, which was side by side, ethnicities elbowing and competing with one another.66

  The legacy of interracial relationships during the time of slavery and shaped by the restrictions of that era is exceedingly complicated for everyone today, and anyone can be affected by it in a multiple of ways: white people today can be descended from black people, black people have certainly looked at the consequences of rape and unwanted sexual abuse during this time when black bodies were considered property. It is difficult to find these situations and almost impossible to figure out the consent agreements that were or were not in place. Similar to the Jefferson-Hemings reunion on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Edward Ball appeared in January 1998 on Oprah’s show and met with some of the descendants from the Ball slaves. These were people that he had looked up, gotten to know, and shared the history he was researching about his family. When they were together on the show, Ball apologized to this family. When asked about this in an interview and the possible sensationalistic element of such a public apology, Ball is thoughtful in a way that tries to convey an honesty and move away from something artificial.

  There are, after all, between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand descendants of the Ball-family slaves. If I were to begin apologizing to every one of these families it would quickly become a meaningless act.67

  When he apologized on Oprah to the Roper family, he had gotten to know them. He says, “I happened to do it on national television and in that way this symbolic act was heard by maybe eight million people, which might magnify its importance. I’m not against apologizing again, as long as it has meaning.”68

  In a nuanced fashion, From the Diary of Sally Hemings is a work of fiction that tells the truth about the past and the present. We do not have Sally Hemings’s own words or even know many facts about her. As with many heroic and everyday black people in the United States and
South Africa, she was part of a past that was all about erasing anything that made her unique and denying her any individuality. Yet in her narrative is woven the fabric of earliest U.S. history. Her story powerfully illustrates how life in the United States (and this can also apply to South Africa) brings together black people and white people—and the consequences of such relationships are among the most painful parts of these histories. In the United States Hemings’s story encompasses the Middle Passage, the history of slavery, segregation, and continued inequality. But by uncovering a hidden past, we see another side. This newly revealed history provides a voice that was known by some but denied by most: black people and white people were part of an interwoven tapestry of the nation’s beginning. Though some of these relationships were by force and utterly horrible, there seems to be evidence pointing to the possibility of another side that shows complicated love and longevity in couplings and pairings between black people and white people, in spite of the larger climate of racial hatred and oppression. Even in a time when the dominant narrative presented blacks as “scientifically” inferior (as we see in the contemporaneous life of Sartijie Baartman/Sara Baartman/Sarah Bartmann), there was lived evidence to prove the opposite. Sandra Seaton’s own family, the current generations of genetically linked Hemings and Jefferson descendants, and the interracial children born on the Ball family plantations reveal that these previously hidden stories are surfacing in recent generations. These narratives indicate that there were white people and black people who saw beyond the falsely perceived intellectual, physical, and moral differences between the two races. Such history is critical to know if we ever want to move closer to safer and more equitable living between races: that even in the face of a potent, long-lasting evil, there has been evidence mounting to prove the contrary and show that racial harmony one day might not be impossible.

  Epilogue