| Episodes |
Voiceless No More: An Overview
Listen to "Sally's Humanity the Issue" (14 minutes):
"It's a love story," says African American novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud about her 1979 novel Sally Hemings, and she boldly goes where no man has gone before, to the Hotel de Langeac bedroom where the "immense shadow" of forty-four-year-old Thomas Jefferson, Master of Monticello and Declarer of Independence, looms over the once fearful fifteen-year-old virgin:
Now that he had come, I felt no fear, only an overwhelming tenderness. His presence for me was command enough; I took control of him. I bent forward and pressed a kiss on the trembling hands that encompassed mine, and the contact of my lips with his flesh was so violent that I lost all memory of what came afterward. I felt around me an exploding flower, not just of passion, but of long deprivation, a hunger for things forbidden, for darkness and unreason, the passion of rage against the death of the other I so resembled. For in this moment I became one with her, and it was not my name that sprang from him but that of my half sister.
In this book "Dedicated to the memory of Fawn Brodie," there is no controversy: Jefferson and Hemings "do it." And the "doing it" -- the monstrous miscegenation, the awful amalgamation of such nightmare proportion to Jefferson defenders -- is told with sensitivity (even Virginius Dabney is "grateful" at Chase-Riboud's "definite restraint"), and -- and perhaps this is the most "shocking" aspect of the scene -- told by the hitherto-in-history inarticulate Sally:
Nothing would ever free me of him. Nothing would erase those strange words of love which I had to believe in my weakness. "Je t'aime," he had said. In his terror, he had used that most potent of weapons, the ruler of the mighty as well as the helpless. And I had answered, without any other words passing between us. "Merci, monsieur."
Though the novel was susceptible to sensationalistic advertising by entrepreneurial publishers ("By day she wore the keys to Monticello," one cover teased, "by night she stole secretly to his arms"), something serious and complex is going on in this Literary Guild selection that sold over one and a half million copies and won the prestigious Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, putting Chase-Riboud in the company of such writers as Toni Morrison. That something is the honest voice of a mature Sally Hemings trying to make sense of her life.
In this episode of our miniseries Chase-Riboud brings the modern African American sensibility to the controversy, one whose interest is Sally, and what she stands for, more than Jefferson, and what he stands for. Chase-Riboud's mission is "rescuing Sally Hemings from invisibility," "rehabilitation of Sally Hemings and her family." Chase-Riboud recognized the "conspiracy of silence" fostered by "old-guard Jeffersonians, men with an agenda to protect the good name of Jefferson, by any means and at all costs." She recognized that it was the "taboo of miscegenation" not just the immorality or incivility of a thirty-eight-year affair that was the balking point for the "Jefferson specialists." She wanted to bring a "new point of view" to the "cache of evidence" that had reduced Sally Hemings to "an historical zero." And she wanted to accomplish this mission for the larger purpose of illuminating "our overweening and irrational obsession with race and color in this country":
I would do it through the man who almost single-handedly invented our national identity, and through the woman who was the emblematic incarnation of the forbidden, the outcast -- who was the rejection of that identity.
There has to be "a kind of synthesis between 'black' experience and 'white' experience in America, because they are the same," argues Chase-Riboud, "there is no escape from the influence of one on the other." "Both blacks and whites have to face" miscegenation as "the last big taboo."
In order to achieve this goal, says Chase-Riboud, "fiction was necessary to put 'flesh on the bones' of a person who had literally been erased from history." Fiction enabled her to supply what document-based history could not -- the license, as Bradford Vivian says, "to narrate, through long inner monologues, the psychology and emotions of Sally Hemings. . . . to portray Hemings, for the first time, with a multidimensional persona." "I was determined to present a full-blown, complex, intelligent, highly conflicted woman," Chase-Riboud explains, "a tragic heroine who, trapped in the slave society that was the United States at its birth, clings to the only thing she can claim as her own: her love and allegiance to her 'master,' her half-sister's husband, and her father figure." Sally's tragedy centers on the tension between love and slavery. "Sally Hemings loved Thomas Jefferson," mourns her mother Elizabeth in one of her dying monologues, "That was the tragedy. Love, not slavery. And God knew how much slavery there was in love." But this is no "epic of assimilation," as Susan McHenry says: "during the course of the novel, Chase-Riboud moves Hemings through a maturing of vision and insight into herself, mirroring every woman's journey from pliable male-identified dependency to a womanhood of lingering ambivalence; if not rage."
The fifty-something Sally we see as the novel opens -- "still in mourning," still connected to the dead Jefferson -- thinks she has no past and no future, but in those conversations with the young, white, would-be lover Nathan Langdon, "she was in fact uncovering a person she had never known from a life she had had no sense of. From these afternoons emerged a new Sally Hemings." And this emerging Sally explodes in an "unfathomable, uncontrolled black rage" -- ironically, the only "orgasm" displayed in the book -- at census-taker Langdon who "decides" to unilaterally make her white. "I'm tired of white men playing God with my flesh and my spirit and my children and my life, which is running out," she growls, and Langdon's rape-like actions are enough to permanently disable their emerging relationship. And this enraged emerging Sally patiently commits -- in a series of self-conscious, free, and independent acts -- her picture, her letters, her diaries -- every evidence of "re-enslaving herself" -- into the sacrificial fire, exorcising Jefferson from her life. And "Now, alone," this emerging Sally "faced the truth of her life," an epiphany whelped within the white mob exulting in the martyrdom of insurrectionist Nat Turner: "she had loved the enemy." And, raising a hand in new-born solidarity with Turner, the "nullifier of her [past] life," this emerging Sally recognizes that there's power in surviving suffering and, now "transplanted to another space, another time," prays God to "forgive me for ever loving him."
To write a book about such detailed intimacy with Thomas Jefferson was to invite what a Washington Post interviewer called the "firing squad" of "Jeffersonian purist historians," though a coy Chase-Riboud found it "extraordinary that certified historians are rebutting a novel." Enter again chief executioner Virginius Dabney with both Brodie and Chase-Riboud in his rhetorical gunsights. In his Rebuttal book Dabney, though asserting that "nothing can shake" Jefferson's renown, still finds it "highly desirable" to take 154 pages to make sure that nothing does. Right out of the gate, he dismisses Sally Hemings as "faction," a type of literature known to "indulge at times in extravagant claims to historical authenticity," and he quotes Chase-Riboud herself to make his case: "From the start, I viewed [Sally Hemings] in a poetic sense. The historical veracity of the love affair is less important to me than its symbolic, almost mythical dimensions. . . . It is truly an allegory of the social and psychic drama of the races in America." What precisely Dabney charges Chase-Riboud with in his article with John Kukla is writing "to serve a purpose," writing "in the service of a cause," writing to stimulate public awareness of a "contemporary issue," specifically, writing "amid continued national awareness of the civil rights movement," and thus -- the bottom line -- Dabney's gripe with Chase-Riboud is that such writing makes objective history unlikely. Chase-Riboud has "contrive[d] a sensation" and "a misrepresentation of historical fact," which Dabney demonstrates repeatedly in his Rebuttal book "deludes both authors and readers . . . and impoverishes public debates."
In 1998 Annette Gordon-Reed called Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings "the single greatest influence shaping the public's attitude about the Jefferson-Hemings story." Its intellectual value has grown beyond just that story, however, to include influence on studies of interracial master-slave unions, gender subjection, and enslaved black women's sexuality; and Chase-Riboud herself has been honored for her entire oeuvre (she's an artist and sculptor as well as a writer), as marked by the 2009 special issue of Callaloo devoted to her. Perhaps the most intriguing of the dozen or so significant scholarly studies of the novel is Suzette Spencer's 2006 study of "coersubmission": the simultaneous presence of both "coercion and submission" in scenes of sexual relations, double-edged scenes that appear consensual but are shaped by tender yet dominative force, and thus scenes that combine "both romance and terror."
The early 80s danger that, after Brodie, this second turning point posed to the official narrative of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship crafted in the late 19th century and nurtured through the crisis of the early Civil Rights period, however, can be best be demonstrated by the Jefferson Establishment reactions to proposals to turn Sally Hemings into a film or a television series. An informal coalition of historians, descendants, and Monticello staff led by Dumas Malone rallied to make certain the CBS mini-series never aired. But the seed of Sally's visual birth was planted. In this episode Chase-Riboud brought Sally out of Callender's pig-sty so we could hear her, and she didn't sound like a wooly-headed concubine or a slut common as the pavement. Chase-Riboud gave Sally a voice for the first time in history. Now we wanted to see her. And soon we would.
