"Why is the idea that Jefferson might have loved Hemings so dangerous? The likely answer is sex and race--and more particularly miscegenation."

Of Racism and Remembrance
Aaron Garrett

Part I | II | III

Fortunately a recent collection of essays does a surprisingly good job at drawing out many of these issues and questioning them, if not offering ultimate solutions. Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville, 1999) is a set of papers given at a conference in March 1999 in the wake of the DNA testing and Annette Gordon-Reed's book. All of the essays in the collection say something fruitful about the problem of discussing a figure like Jefferson, his legacy, and race in America. And they provide a range of perspectives, from putting the Jefferson-Hemings affair in historical context to considering its meaning in terms of Jefferson's legacy, the practice of history, cultural memory, and the weight of the present.

A particularly noteworthy example is "Bonds of Memory: Identity and the Hemings Family" by Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright, both of whom work at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in Monticello. "Bonds of Memory" interweaves the authors' very different autobiographical experiences as black and white Americans with a narrative about the fate of the Hemings family on either side of the color barrier and an affirmation of the legitimacy of oral history. Stanton and Swann-Wright pull off an almost impossible task in producing an essay that is profound, historically precise, not at all self-indulgent, and signals the inseparability of our contemporary experience of race from our historical apprehension of it.

In effect, Stanton and Swann-Wright illustrate that how Jefferson looks to us is not determined entirely by the man himself. Our response to Jefferson varies according to the impact his hypocrisies and declarations have had on our lives. I would perhaps view them differently if I were white, or black, passing successfully (like some of Sally Hemings's children), barely passing (like some others living in fear of being unmasked as blacks), newly discovering I was passing (like some of those who discovered they were descendants of Sally Hemings's unions with a Jefferson, whether Thomas or Randolph, and were deeply confused by their identities), or someone who doesn't fall so neatly into the bipolar disorder of contemporary American race.

This range of autobiographically influenced responses to Jefferson is well illustrated by the fact that, although there was apparently considerable agreement at the March 1999 conference about Jefferson, "considerable controversy was generated by the question: Within the social and cultural contexts of their day, what sort of relationship could Hemings and Jefferson have had?" Gordon-Reed had argued that we have little basis to claim that there was no love in the relationship and we should be careful in how we describe it given the lack of evidence. There is a popular cultural tradition, in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings (New York, 1979) and most recently in the CBS miniseries Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, which represents the relationship as a kind of antebellum West Side Story. Gordon-Reed argued that the persistence of this tradition--and the way it rankles intellectuals-- means it should not be so quickly dismissed. (Dumas Malone, Jefferson's most famous biographer whom Gordon-Reed showed to be one of Jefferson's most corrupt defenders, even campaigned against the airing of Chase-Riboud's book as a made-for-TV-movie.)

Why is the idea that Jefferson might have loved Hemings so dangerous? The likely answer is sex and race--and more particularly miscegenation. Clarence Walker opens his "Denial is not a River in Egypt" by describing his college students' great discomfort whenever the issue of miscegenation arises. This kind of discomfort is part of what makes the issue so loaded. And defenses of Jefferson as a man incapable of an "illicit" affair with a slave sometimes seem to mask a Jeffersonian horror at the fact that blacks and whites were often not as "distinct" as whites might have pretended.

That DNA evidence hasn't resolved the question of Jefferson's relationship with Hemings is, perhaps, fitting, since it's not even clear what the question is. What was Jefferson guilty of: Rape? Love? Hypocrisy? Being a typical member of the Virginia planter class? Being an atypical bundle of contradictions?

What then to say about the consequences of the Jefferson-Heming's affair for Jefferson's meaning for democracy and liberalism? Jack Rakove takes this topic on circuitously in his not entirely successful essay, "Our Jefferson." Rakove attempts to assess what is valuable in Jefferson's legacy and to examine to whom that legacy belongs. But in doing so he lapses into apologia: that Jefferson's Notes on Virginia should not be read too harshly, that Jefferson himself was conflicted in racial matters, and that "Jefferson was born into a world that was only beginning to understand that slavery was an evil of a kind radically different from the other wrongs of life."

In forging "Our" Jefferson, Rakove argues that owning Jefferson as a forebear is far more than an affirmation of the joys of democracy and the wages of hypocrisy and moral responsibility. As another ruminative essay, Gordon Wood's "The Ghosts of Monticello," shows quite successfully, the difficulties of dealing with a symbolic figure like Jefferson are always changing, as the present places different pulls on their legacy. Although the last few years' debate about Jefferson hasn't solved any problems or come to many agreements, it offers an opportunity to look at a man about whom we know a great deal (although perhaps not as much as we'd like) and a woman about whom we know hardly anything. The mysteriousness of their relationship for their progeny on both sides of the color line and for those of us who are attempting to understand it is made more apparent, which is perhaps all one ought to ask for. While Jefferson's white family decides who can be buried in the family graveyard, it is likely that absolute standards will be asked for in areas where there are few. Meanwhile, we might remember that, although we know much about cradle and grave (and perhaps less about cradle than we might like), it is what was in between that is far more interesting.

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