3.6.00
John McCain's Verbal Tar Pit

his past February’s miniseries, Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, marked a turning point in race-based entertainment. It arrived on television with almost no fanfare, did well enough but broke no ratings records, inspired no agonized debates, and raised no fears of ensuing riots.

What a difference 23 years makes. When Roots premiered in 1977, the streets were deserted every night it aired, and you could walk down an apartment hallway and hear it coming from every TV. News shows ran footage of grim-faced patrons in Harlem bars watching the whipping scene, pundits tied themselves in masochistic knots of white guilt, and a resolutely upbeat Joan Rivers, guest-hosting the Johnny Carson show, kept count of the babies named Kunta Kinte and Kizzy born in L.A. hospitals.

I did not expect a rash of newborn Sallys; the name is as “out” as out can be in today’s world of Meaghans and LaToyas. But otherwise the silence is deafening.

Less than two years ago we were roiling in controversy over the DNA report that a “Jefferson male” fathered Sally’s last child, Eston Hemings. When the story broke, the Monticello Association closed ranks, traditionalist Jefferson scholars turned cartwheels attributing paternity to his brother or nephews, and the morning shows bristled with Hemings descendants, including a white one seeking her 15 minutes of blackness. Now comes the definitive movie treating the affair as established fact, and there’s not a peep out of anybody. How come the ho-hum?

It might be our notorious attention span: Having taken in the original DNA news, we are now in “been there, done that” mode.

It might be the power of foregone conclusions, which work in not-so-mysterious ways. About three weeks before the new miniseries aired, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation quietly admitted that Jefferson probably did father all of Sally’s children. It was an uncharacteristic move; ancestral societies are famously inflexible, but with the movie in the can they no doubt decided that it was pointless to go on denying the story in the face of American neo-Cartesianism: It’s on TV, therefore it is.

My own theory is that the movie was too good for its own good. It drew the curtain of charity over the sex scenes to keep traditionalists happy, yet contained enough surprises and Catch-22’s to thwart the guilt-ridden white liberals and race-card-playing black activists who participate in the overwrought debates that get controversies going. There is something here to neutralize everybody.

It opens with a subtle but effective touch. Sally Hemings: An American Scandal cleverly employs a subtitle that de-emphasizes the racial aspect and establishes a certain national affection for the heroine reminiscent of the English attitude toward Nell Gwynn. It’s as if a collective historical voice were saying, “A good sort was our Sally.” Not exactly the kind of white attitude that Al Sharpton & Co. groove on.

The script contains three literary elements, all well done: satire, irony, and parody. The satire rears its head in a bent Roots moment. Once again we see a newborn baby held up in the air, but instead of the slave father lifting it up to a starry sky and sonorously intoning, “Behold the only thing greater than yourself,” a midwife does the honors in broad daylight as the baby’s slave grandmother shrieks, “What color is it?” and Sally’s slave brother replies, “White as snow!”

The irony finds that elusive balance between incongruity and believability. Sally, who was taught to read by Jefferson, reads his own words back to him from the essay in which he expresses his distaste for blacks’ physicality and his belief that they are intellectually inferior. Ignoring his pleas to stop, she presses on, until he shouts, “You’re taking it out of context!” Jostled by the familiar modern phrase, we glimpse the spectacle of a Founding Father trying to spin his way out of a gaffe. The parody disarms attempts to identify the politics of the moviemakers. The parodied figure is James Callender, the gossip-mongering newspaperman who first broke the scandal in 1802. The film Callender is obnoxious enough to please the most conservative media-hater, yet he is played with a touch of prissiness and a soft, smiley way of speaking certain to please the most liberal Ken Starr-hater.

This is not the stuff of lively debates; mouthy commentators would shut off in mid-sentence once they realized what they had gotten themselves into. The Washington assignation goes far to explain why the movie caused no stir. No proof exists that Sally was ever in Washington, but no proof exists that she wasn’t, so to give the story movement the screenwriter takes artistic license and has Martha Jefferson eject Sally from Monticello, whereupon she turns up at the White House and spends the night with her presidential lover. The next morning, his secretary knocks at the bedroom door to remind him of his appointment with a waiting ambassador, but Jefferson says, “Tell him I will be at least another hour” and climbs back into bed with a drowsily smiling Sally. This is déjà vu at its stun-gun best, triggering the time-traveling viewer’s memory of that future day when another president and his inamorata let a foreign dignitary cool his heels while they had at it. Naturally nobody wanted to talk about this movie. It’s the “been there, done that” of Clinton Fatigue.

But you can’t keep a good neurosis down. Trained in displacement and projection by years of code words, we have found a way to talk about Tom and Sally after all. It’s called “deploring the ban on interracial dating at Bob Jones University,” and everybody has put in his two cents’ worth.

The results are in, and it’s unanimous. All Americans approve of interracial dating, so now our attention span can flit on to Protestants vs. Catholics, which is so old it’s new. It’s been ages since we’ve been there and done that.

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