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Day After Meditation (3): Omissions and Reflections
Kristen Dalton
Dalton meditates on the impact of the DNA on the controversy after reading the two main compilations of scholarly responses: Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (1999) and the special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly March 2000.
[1] Part of understanding how the DNA evidence acts as a mirror to America's modern-day society is the ability to understand the process of interpretation for many of these historians.
[2] "The extraordinary coverage of the DNA results in the mainstream media confirms Jefferson's unique status as the dead-white male who matters most. Every network and cable news program, every national news magazine, all the major newspapers , and many of the syndicated talk shows featured the story," Joseph Ellis points out in "Jefferson: Post-DNA," which appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the leading journal for early American history. In 2000, the journal published a series of articles regarding the Jefferson-Hemings saga. Ellis's essay was his first in the Post-DNA era and quite a turnaround since the four-paragraph revision in his American Sphinx book. Instead of defending Jefferson as a man, he investigates what all of these interpretations mean for our culture today.
[3] "Jefferson has always been America's most resonant and ideologically promiscuous icon, fully capable of levitating out of his own time and landing on all sides of the contested political turf up here in the present," says Ellis, "While historians talk responsibly about the ‘lost world' of Thomas Jefferson, and the inherent ‘pastness' of the eighteenth century, Jefferson lives on in the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans as a contemporary presence who best embodies the competing truth at the center of our ongoing arguments about the meaning of the American promise. Jefferson has become the great American Everyman, less important for what he said and did when he walked the earth from 1743 to 1826 than for the meaning we can project onto him."
[4] In this same series of essays, Annette Gordon-Reed published "Engaging Jefferson: Blacks and the Founding Fathers," which takes a look at how modern-day race relations have affected how people interpret the age-old story full of "contradictions that make Jefferson seem problematic and frustrating" (173). How do we relate to the features that some people have denied while other have accepted? Gordon-Reed believes that Jefferson remained a mystery to whites but was heavily accessible to blacks who found "his conflicted nature a perfect reflection of the America they know: a place where high-minded ideals clash with the reality of racial ambivalence. As this combination daily informs black lives, Jefferson could seem no more bizarre than America itself. He is utterly predictable and familiarâ€"the foremost exemplar of the true American spirit and psyche."
[5] It is true that traditional Jefferson scholarship has been "white-oriented," as Gordon-Reed suggests and supports with evidence of slave narratives and black oral history that was deemed inadequate as evidence by white historians -- while the DNA has reversed the evidence they have provided in defense of Jefferson's character. "But there is another, deeper reason for blacks to accept the truth of a liaison between Jefferson and Hemings," she says, "There has been an automatic assumption that ‘they,' meaning white people, were hiding the truth or being deliberately obtuse about it to serve a purpose. The suppression of the Hemings story was simply another example of white supremacy at work."
[6] But this example is not an isolated incident and can be seen today, though highlighted in the 1960s: "The pattern is all too familiar. The exclusion of black people creates a value. An activity, a good or service, a neighborhood, a clubâ€"all become highly prized by whites when no blacks are present to have their share of the good. Those items instantly become less attractive when blacks gain accessâ€"black involvement is equated with degeneracy." Why is it that white Americans are so threatened by people of a different skin color that they know not how to share and enjoy things together? Gordon-Reed shows us how and why history can repeat itself.
[7] Let us be reminded that the main themes in this story are race and sex. The only two things that complicate these finite facts are the questions of love and character. These are intangibles, and the very things historians are trying to figure out but are often left to rely on their imaginations. The mistakes with covering this story in the past have been mistaking these proposals for facts. There is an emotional gap that needs to be filled, and one way has been to believe that the relationship was a loving one.
[8] Andrew Burstein says in "Jefferson's Rationalizations," another WMQ article, that even before the DNA, scholars and journalists were implementing late twentieth-century ideals of a racial harmony existing in an eighteenth-century world: "This romantic scenario could not exist without an image of Sally Hemings as physically appealing and sexually alluring. For this notion to make any sense at all, her beauty would have to elevate her status from slave to romantic partner, replacing her historical evidence with a universalization of human desire. Beauty, however, is culturally constructed, based on changing expectations placed on women's appearance; it is not a universal constant. . . . And yet, since the DNA findings were published, more people have sought to make up for the lack of evidence by suggesting that if Sally was beautiful, or if she resembled Jefferson's late wife, his attraction to her could reasonably be thought a natural heterosexual response. This is an inadequate and ahistorical position. Sexual attraction does not necessarily lead to romantic love."
[9] Gordon-Reed sheds light on this issue when she looks at it within the race boundaries that have continued to surround much of this story. She notes that "whites who believe Jefferson and Hemings had been involved with one another, are more likely to cast the relationship as rape or to emphasize that it must have been totally impersonal. Blacks are more likely to see it as having been based on affection." This is especially interesting when looking at historical interpretations, but what the scholars leave out is any explanation as to why this has always been the case.
[10] Gordon Wood, also appeared in WMQ, further comments on this missing piece to the puzzle, taking Gordon-Reed's argument of race one step further. Wood says, "some black Americans welcome the Hemings relationship because it was part of a black tradition long denied, and it represents an assertion of black humanity and at the same time makes Jefferson humanly accessible. But unlike whites, they seem less willing to celebrate the relationship as a way of easing race relations in America." Though this story gave America a way to reach in to black relations that had never been seen as anything other than slavery, it was counterproductive because the mixing of races could very well lead to an erasure of black heritage: "They understandably resist the implications of miscegenation and interracial marriage, fearing that racial assimilation will lead to the weakening if not the disappearance of black culture and identity." This is a terrifying thing for an entire culture to come to terms with, especially when they are just trying to figure out their value and worth outside of the world of slavery: "Many white Americans, on the other hand, seem to welcome these implications. These whites yearn for an end to our racial problem and see in interracial marriage the ultimate solution." Who knows if this is what Jefferson was thinking? Was he really that far ahead of his time? Or, as Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright point out, "this yearning is undoubtedly an example of the ‘tendency of whites to want to make the rules about race.'" Alas, a new avenue of interpretation has been opened!
[11] However, there are a few questions that remain unanswered. I'm not sure if this is done purposefully by the historians, who all seem to know what questions still exist, and simply refuse to propose a possible explanation on the chance that a new piece of evidence will surface and turn everything on its head again -- as happened in the case of Joseph Ellis. No one is willing to risk going out on a limb anymore now that the DNA provided fairly conclusive data that Jefferson was a father to Sally Hemings's children. The main question that remains is what kind of relationship was this? Was it loving or was it rape? Annette Gordon-Reed and Andrew Burstein acknowledge this question and provide insight to patterns of historian behavior surrounding it, but provide no answer themselves. For now, they seem, as do many other historians, to be satisfied with the unknown.
[12] The DNA provides historians with proof that a sexual relationship existed so it will be hard for anyone to argue against this point from now on. The romantic aspect of the relationship is the likely focal point of future historian hypotheses, even though right now they still seem to be working on it. Furthermore, the implications of slavery are still being felt in society today, with the help of this legacy as a reference point to something. Whatever that something is, though, has yet to be determined and not ventured by any historian because it would pivot to a commentary on modern-day America and away from the mystery that still captivates us all. Gordon-Reed says that "This is a difficult business because, at some level, when thinking about the matter, one has to decide just what Jefferson did with or to Hemings. While the Hemings affair may make Jefferson more accessible in some respects, it necessarily stirs complicated feelings. Was he a rapist? Could there have been love between the two of them? Should that matter to us? It matters now, it always has, and probably always will."
[13] The tragedy of all of this is that the truth will most likely remain unknown and the details always a mystery. And it is the details now, which are the most important thing that Americans are trying to figure out. Though using our imaginations to fill in the emotional gaps of truth have proved to be just short of lying about family history, it is very possible that this same avenue will be taken a little more carefully to help us in the future. Gordon-Reed admits the incredible amount of anxiety this prospect has, but "in the end, it will probably be left to novelists, playwrights, and poets, unencumbered by the need for footnotes, to get at the ultimate meaning of this story. That effort, done in the right way, will yield universal truths as important and real as any to be found in history books." What a thought! To be rewriting history as it unfolds in the present.
[14] In his "Monticello Stories Old and New," Rhys Isaac says, "in this time, on the threshold of the twenty-first century, we are now engaged in telling more openly than at any time since the abolition movement a story of the harsh injustices and the perpetual atrocities of the system of race slavery. Now is therefore a time when we both face up to the bitter legacies and take pride in the steps already made toward addressing them with provision for interracial equality and freedom." This seems to be the place where historians are heading next. The DNA has provided them with a clear link to the past, but now the focus should be on the implications of that DNA on the future, a place where we run into universal emotions and importance of having a story. Isaac continues, "To be a person is to have a story. To not be allowed a story is to be marked for obscurity and oppression. African Americans and women certainly know this, having so lately prevailed in a proud insistence that history must include their stories. Stories are the great means of effective knowledge of human life. Knowing them, and being able to follow them or even anticipate their unfolding, is an essential prerequisite to engaging in social action. Historians therefore recognize that carefully attending to the stories past people told and enacted is one powerful way to gain understanding of those past people."
