The Jefferson - Hemings ControversyHistory on trial Main Page

AboutTime LineEpisodesJefferson on Race & SlaveryResources
Episodes
>
>

Barbara Chase-Riboud
http://chaseriboud.free.fr/
Web site of the author of Sally Hemings: A Novel (1979), which has been called, before the DNA results, "the single greatest influence shaping the public's attitude about the Jefferson-Hemings story."
Burgess, Granville. Dusky Sally. New York: Broadway Play Pub., 1987.
Play version of the Sally story about which Chase-Riboud brought a successful plagiarism suit.
Cassells, Cyrus. "Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson." Callaloo 24.3 (2001) 707-10. From Callaloo No. 18 (Spring-Summer 1983): 1-4.
Poem by a Jefferson-Hemings descendant based on the Chase-Riboud novel, Sally speaking, after Jefferson's death, on the day she discovers she's listed as white on the census. Sally's feelings are complicated but the bottom line, literally, is "Nothing could free me from you."
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Echo of Lions. New York: Morrow, 1989.
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. "Slavery as a Problem in Public History: Or Sally Hemings and the "One Drop Rule" of Public History." Callaloo 32.3 (2009): 826-31.
Chase-Riboud applies her one-drop rule (how one drop of black DNA excluded one from joining the human race to the fifth generation and contaminated an entire existence) to our vision of America today (if one drop of DNA makes a black American, then one drop of black HISTORY makes a multiracial America) and demonstrates that this drop in turn adulterates her identity in a white man's country.
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. "The Sally Hemings Case." New York Review of Books 12 June (1997). Reprinted Callaloo 32.3 (2009): 822-23.
Chase-Riboud's response, with historical documents on her side, to derogatory comments made by Gordon S. Wood about her research and creative liberties.
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. "Video Report: Imagining Sally Hemings." Jefferson's Blood. PBS Frontline, 2000.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/video/report3.html
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Hottentot Venus: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Interview in Flora Lewis, "An Author Ponders 'Metaphysics of Race'; 'A Visual Person' Jefferson's Contradictions." New York Times 22 October 1979: C15.
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. The President's Daughter. New York: Ballantine, 1994.
Borrowing the sub-title of William Wells Brown's Clotel, Chase-Riboud writes an historical novel about Sally's daughter Harriett Hemings.
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. "Afterword." Sally Hemings: A Novel. New York: Ballantine, 1994. 345-51.
"I had wanted to illuminate our overweening and irrational obsession with race in this country. . . . I had to find a way to elevate a member of the most despised caste in America to the level of the most exalted. . . . If Thomas Jefferson offers himself up as a surrogate for meditation on the problem of human freedom, then Sally Hemings is available for meditation on terror, darkness, invisibility, dread of failure, guilt, and powerlessness."
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. "Afterword." Sally Hemings: A Novel. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009. 349-63.
The fullest of Chase-Riboud's afterwords: "[Sally] stands there as the ne plus ultra of our fear of invisibility, our dread of failure, our avoidance of guilt. She stands there like our anxiety and our shame. She cannot be excised like the bedroom staircase [at Monticello] or the slavery clause in the Declaration of Independence. She will not disappear at the denial of the denial. She must be recognized as the poignant, tragic, irreducible enigma at the heart of the Jefferson myth."
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Interview in Jacqueline Trescott, "The Hemings Affair." Washington Post 15 June 1979.
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Interview in Susan McHenry, "'Sally Hemings': A Key to Our National Identity." Ms. October 1980: 35-40.
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Sally Hemings: A Novel. New York: Viking, 1979. New York: Avon, 1980. New York: Ballantine, 1994. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009.
Influenced by the iconoclastic history by Fawn Brodie, African American Chase-Riboud portrays the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, as Bradford Vivian says, "from a new perspective, that of Hemings herself." "Fiction," Vivian goes on, "gave her license to narrate, through long inner monologues, the psychology and emotions of Sally Hemings." Further, "the trope of a romantic affair between Jefferson and his slave thus allowed Chase-Riboud to portray Hemings, for the first time, with a multi-dimensional persona."
Dabney, Virginius, and Jon Kukla. "The Monticello Scandals: History and Fiction." Virginia Cavalcade 29 (1979): 53-61.
A predecessor to Dabney's book, this article provides a good summary of the entire controversy, drawing on material from Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, Julian Boyd, and Douglass Adair that Dabney presented in his 1975 William and Mary speech referred to in our previous episode.
Dabney, Virginius. The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal. Lanham: Madison Books, 1981.
Defines the term "faction" as being a type of fiction that publishers and authors claim to have a substantial amount of factual accuracy and applies it to Chase-Riboud's work. Although the term itself is new, the mode has been in practice since the beginning of writing. Dabney, a rabid spokesman for the Jefferson Establishment, explores to what degree Brodie's and Chase-Riboud's work are faction, providing a clear and comprehensive, though polemical survey of the entire controversy. This book is perhaps the most important immediate "answer" to not only Chase-Riboud but to Brodie's work that preceded hers.
Spencer, Suzette A. "On Her Own Terms: An Interview with Barbara Chase-Riboud." Callaloo 32.3 (2009): 736-57.
Interview with Chase-Riboud in January of 2006 in Paris. Highlights her struggle with racism throughout her life and how she became a novelist, sculptor, and poet. Gives insight into what motivated her to write the novel the way she did.
Wood, Gordon. Reply [to Barbara Chase-Riboud's "The Sally Hemings Case"]. New York Review of Books 12 June (1997). Reprinted Callaloo 32.3 (2009): 823-25.
Wood in turn responds to Chase-Riboud's article of the same date, claiming that with a close reading she would have understood that he did not wish to attack her; he merely wished to highlight the novel's inconsistencies with history and truly define a historian. The entire three-part interchange indicates some tension between black and white sensibilities.