Books in Brief: Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings, by Barbara Chase-Ri-boud (Viking, 348 pp., SI0.95).

Ever since Fawn Brodie’s biography of Jefferson publicized the existence of Sally Hemings, his slave mistress, it was almost inevitable that a novel would be written about her. The paradox of Jefferson the enemy of slavery and Jefferson the slaveowner surely merits examination, but Barbara Chase-Riboud’s book does nothing to explain it. While her descriptions of scenery and fashions are historically precise and her minor portraits of Abigail Adams, Dolly Madison, and Aaron Burr have bite, Jefferson remains a vague and shadowy figure, never fleshed out into a believable human being. Sally is explored in greater depth, but the way the opening of the book is constructed forces the whole story to be told in flashback, creating an unbridgeable distance between the reader and both protagonists. Caught in her own paradox, loving Jefferson the man and hating Jefferson the master, Sally chooses not to claim her freedom on French soil, nor later to “stroll” (as Jefferson allowed his slave children to do). She is “enslaved by love.” It is the author’s basic inability to define Jefferson which makes this motivation unbelievable. As presented here he is simply not lovable. Sally Hemings lives as wife to a man for 38 years, bears him seven children, stands by him in sickness and health; yet she is never acknowledged, never freed. Jefferson lives a lonely, secret life and dies a man without sons. His slave children live without a father. This is tragedy for all. It requires more than well-meaning prose. It requires that sense of universal pathos which creates art.

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Carole Cleaver

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Sally Hemings, by Barbara Chase-Ri-boud (Viking, 348 pp., SI0.95).

Ever since Fawn Brodie’s biography of Jefferson publicized the existence of Sally Hemings, his slave mistress, it was almost inevitable that a novel would be written about her. The paradox of Jefferson the enemy of slavery and Jefferson the slaveowner surely merits examination, but Barbara Chase-Riboud’s book does nothing to explain it. While her descriptions of scenery and fashions are historically precise and her minor portraits of Abigail Adams, Dolly Madison, and Aaron Burr have bite, Jefferson remains a vague and shadowy figure, never fleshed out into a believable human being. Sally is explored in greater depth, but the way the opening of the book is constructed forces the whole story to be told in flashback, creating an unbridgeable distance between the reader and both protagonists. Caught in her own paradox, loving Jefferson the man and hating Jefferson the master, Sally chooses not to claim her freedom on French soil, nor later to “stroll” (as Jefferson allowed his slave children to do). She is “enslaved by love.” It is the author’s basic inability to define Jefferson which makes this motivation unbelievable. As presented here he is simply not lovable. Sally Hemings lives as wife to a man for 38 years, bears him seven children, stands by him in sickness and health; yet she is never acknowledged, never freed. Jefferson lives a lonely, secret life and dies a man without sons. His slave children live without a father. This is tragedy for all. It requires more than well-meaning prose. It requires that sense of universal pathos which creates art.