Not to be “Out of Character”: The Literary Embodiment of Sally Hemings

Abstract

That Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration of Independence, President of the Republic, and representative for the Enlightenment, had a romantic relationship with his quadroon slave Sally Hemings had been hypothesized even in his lifetime. Regardless, for both historians and the general public in the US, Jefferson-Hemings connection is difficult to accept because it is profoundly destructive to the nation's self-image and the ideologies of progress, democracy, and equality upon which the nation continually (re)creates and (re)produces itself. While the DNA findings of 1998 may have confirmed that Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one of Sally Hemings's children, historians and Jefferson advocates continue to strenuously object to an interracial liaison. There is hardly any written record of Jefferson-Hemings connection in official history. If in historical discourses, Hemings's presence is marked by a striking absence, in popular discourses and imagination, Jefferson-Hemings connection is circulated along the axis of race and gender. As the relationship becomes distributed as a scandalous love affair, Hemings is enshrouded with illicit, depraved black female sexuality, and Jefferson's relationship to her as an exceptional romance that lasted over several decades despite overwhelming circumstances. This paper considers how as a fictionalized account of Sally Hemings's relationship to Thomas Jefferson, Barbara Chase-Riboud's novel Sally Hemings (1979) can be a critical intervention in both historical and popular narratives on Jefferson-Hemings relationship. An obvious achievement of the novel is that in the tradition of African American writers who are engaged in the project of "recovery," Chase-Riboud gives life to a figure who has been violently obscured and negated in history. Both the challenge and the accomplishment of Chase-Riboud is that her novel is significantly based on and in History. It is not by refuting historical detail, but by constructing her novel within the dominant terms of master-slave relations in slavery, and her portrayal of Jefferson's romantic relationship to Hemings within those terms that Chase-Riboud resists appropriation of her fictionalized historical narrative as a timeless love story. Through an examination of some of the central scenes in the novel, I argue that while Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings, like her historical counterpart, may fail to overcome the gendered expectations and oppressive rules of slavery, it is through her narrative strategies of her fiction writing that Chase-Riboud attempts to locate moments of agency within the highly constrained parameters of black female enslaved existence.