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On February 13, 2000, with the airing of the first part of Tina Andrews's television mini-series Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, Sally achieves consummate triumph in the construction of her history. In this version of our story, viewed conservatively by twenty million people, African American Andrews has Jefferson tell Sally he loves her, suffer Sally's accusations of his hypocrisy about race, and watch in agony as his slaves are sold. In this version Sally is secretly freed in Paris and makes a choice to stay with Jefferson until and even past his death. This story of Jefferson and Hemings is a love story, a tear-jerking tragic love story. Handkerchiefs please!
Well, what do you think? Thomas and Sally's second visual life. Ask the same kinds of questions we did of the Jefferson in Paris film. Is this the way that you imagined Sally, imagined Jefferson, imagined their relationship? How do you feel about what writer Andrews did here? What was her goal in dramatizing the relationship? Where did she stick to facts, where invent and interpret? Where is she the same or different than the previous film and, in fact, other representations of the relationship -- Brodie, Chase-Riboud et al.? How does the film fit in its chronological niche, right after the DNA? What kind of intervention into the construction of history occurs here? What haven't we seen before? Does anything surprise you? How does the film relate to the developing African American consciousness about the significance of the Jefferson-Hemings story?
