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The Tragic Mulatto: An Overview
Listen to "The Clarity of the Oppressed" (9 minutes):
As we saw in the previous episode of our miniseries, British critics employed the scandalous story of Jefferson and his black concubine to disparage the politician's image and through him the reputation of the young United States. For, as Frances Trollope said, it seemed to revolt common sense to respect or revere a country that claimed equality yet based its social and economic relations on slavery. The protests of African Americans and abolitionists fighting for a complete end to the institution of slavery in the early 19th century paralleled British criticism of the American system. In his in-your-face Malcolm X-like style, for instance, rabid and radical African American abolitionist David Walker in Walker's Appeal (1829) went gunning right away for Jefferson the Founding Father, whose racist assertions in Notes on the State of Virginia are "swallowed by millions of the whites." Walker realized that it is Jefferson's arguments about the nature of African Americans that we who are "MEN" must "refute" or "we will only establish them." And, as if to insure that the new generation would know the enemy, Walker "solicit[s] each of my brethren, who has the spirit of a man, to buy a copy of Mr. Jefferson's 'Notes on Virginia,' and put it in the hand of his son." For Walker, to be an African American MAN is to stand up to Jefferson.
But if the British focused primarily on the Founding Father and his soiled intellectual heritage, the African Americans and abolitionists focused as well on the failed father and his distressed physical lineage. It speaks volumes that the frontispiece of the first novel by an African American depicts a Jefferson daughter committing suicide as literally the only way to escape the closing pincer of White greed and lust. The children of Jefferson and Hemings, we hear, over and over, what about the children? Such abolitionist newspapers as William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, William Goodell's The Friend of Man, and Frederick Douglass's The North Star carried additional answers. For instance, a "sober" man of "unquestioned" credibility saw in New Orleans a Jefferson daughter sold for $1,000. Another report makes it two daughters and $1,500 each, adding meaningfully that they will be used for "unmentionable purposes." Tragically, a poverty-stricken black news vendor in New York, who lost both his legs to frost, might be "the incontestable descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Black Sal." On the other hand, almost humorously, one Jefferson-Hemings granddaughter is -- no "might" about it this time -- a shouting Methodist in Liberia. And rumor has it that "A natural son of Jefferson by the celebrated 'Black Sal'" now lives in Ohio, and, ironically, this son of the Father of Democracy can't vote.
Thus, newspapers, oral tradition, rumor, gossip ("The proof has not been furnished, though the gossip has been persistent," notes abolitionist Theodore Parker) are replete with assurances and traces of Jefferson's mixed-race children. "Perhaps no other antebellum figure," says Stephen Hodin, putting this phenomenon in wider context, "is as utterly haunted by Jefferson's ghost as the mulatto, whose lost white paternity problematizes both her [and his] personal and national identity."
Rumors that the president of the United States engaged in sexual relations with a slave may have been ludicrous to white elites; however, such news was not as shocking to African Americans of the time. Master-slave relationships were a reality within the institution of slavery, and therefore blacks and abolitionists hardly doubted that a white politician, regardless of his prestigious position, would be "above" such things. They used the story as leverage in their campaign against slavery and the hypocrisy of the young democracy. Therefore, this oral tradition was integral in sustaining the scandal through the 19th century, even though Jefferson biographers and American historians who wrote of his life and administration largely excluded the African American voice from the official narrative.
Oral history as a valid channel of historical knowledge has long been questioned. Opponents say that stories passed down by "word of mouth" lack credibility; only the written word is reliable. Consequently, the story of the Jefferson and Hemings affair was officially continually discredited through much of the 19th century, leaving Sally Hemings and fellow African Americans alienated. Since their enslavement forbade them an education, most slaves were incapable of recording their experiences and therefore had no "voice" in the official narrative. However, that all changed in 1853 with the publication of William Wells Brown's novel Clotel: or, The President's Daughter: a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, often considered the first novel by an African American.
Brown was born to a slave woman and a free white man in Lexington, Virginia. Once he escaped from slavery, he joined the abolitionist movement and lectured extensively about the injustices of human bondage and attacked the white supremacist ideology that bolstered the American way of life. In 1847, he published his memoir entitled Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, which described the abusive nature of master-slave relationships, and six years later came Clotel. Clotel is a fictional account of Thomas Jefferson's slave daughters Althesa and Clotel by Currer (that is, Sally Hemings), who are sold into slavery upon his death. Since thousands of black men and women suffered the same fate on the auction block, Brown felt compelled to present the experiences of slavery from a slave's perspective. Though he never writes explicitly about the Jefferson and Hemings/Currer relationship in the novel, Brown forces readers of his time (and ours) to ponder the effects felt by Hemings and her lineage by attending to her and their situation. Ultimately, this first African American novel gives the Hemingses, and consequently the African American community, a voice.
Brown recounts the tragic tale of the mulatto girl Currer: "The gentleman for whom she had kept house was Thomas Jefferson, by whom she had two daughters." Here is the first of the only six mentions of Jefferson in Clotel; he is not Brown's focus in the plot or even a character, just the point of origin and the signifying context. To claim that the president had reproduced with a slave woman was a grave accusation, and it undergirds Brown's entire story. That story details the trials of Currer and her daughters within the confines of slavery. Most significant is the description of the auction block, where "two daughters of Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of American Independence, and one of the presidents of the great republic, were disposed of to the highest bidder!"
Currer's daughter Clotel was sold for $1,500 to one Horatio Green, and Brown writes of the romantic involvement between Green and Clotel and their eventual daughter Mary. However, Green ultimately marries a white woman who tears the "family" apart, selling Clotel and Mary. After Green's marriage, Clotel disguises herself as a man and attempts to escape to the North. Along her way, she passes through Virginia in hopes of helping Mary escape as well. She is pursued by slave catchers and, rather than return to slavery, jumps into the Potomac River. As Brown says, "Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States; a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration of American Independence, and one of the first statesmen of that country."
In writing Clotel, Brown's intention was to fuse history and literature to produce a picture of the master-slave relationship as African Americans knew it. Clotel acted as a vehicle for the public to explore the complexities and inconsistencies in America's social structure provided by the Jefferson-Hemings affair. Still, Brown's work in Clotel is incessantly criticized for its anachronisms and historical inaccuracies. In response to these critiques, it is vital that we recognize Brown's technique in writing the novel. In an attempt to unveil the cruelties of slavery and its destruction of the African American family, Brown offers a parable of sorts in which he combines oral and written history with an anecdote about Currer and her affair with the president to produce a commentary on the still-circulating story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. The author did not concern himself with the accuracy of dates or the truth behind the alleged affair; rather, by employing the popular story of a beloved politician, Brown brought attention to master-slave relationships and the harmful consequences suffered by the slaves and their mulatto offspring.
So, indeed, talk of the sorry fate of Jefferson-Hemings offspring was in the air in African American and abolitionist circles, and their seemingly shameful existences spurred Brown to create Clotel in an effort to give them a voice. Essentially, Brown, like other African Americans and abolitionists, recognized the misfortune of being a mixed-race descendant, let alone one of a famous politician, and created the infamous figure of the "tragic mulatto," an archetype thenceforth used to personify the horrors of slavery. That is, the tragic mulatto is the embodiment of the destruction of African American families, the unenviable lives of interracial people, and the inhumanity of human bondage. As Hodin says, "Brown dedicated his life's work to holding responsible America's white fathers, past and present, for what they begot."
Clotel offers us a lens through which to view the slave experience while exposing the moral and political hypocrisy of our nation's founding fathers. Brown's work acts as an official mouthpiece for slaves, authorizing their oral accounts of Jefferson and Hemings, along with thousands of similar stories. His novel gives credibility to the African American experience and the role it played in shaping our nation's history. Arguably, Brown's authorization of African American accounts foreshadowed others stepping forward and contributing to the unofficial narrative. As we will see in coming episodes of our miniseries, for instance, Madison Hemings's 1873 memoir would foreshadow other Jefferson-Hemings descendants eventually speaking out about their heritage, creating a black-white family dichotomy that ignited years of controversy, and culminating, for the moment at least, in Annette Gordon-Reed's project of completely unveiling the heretofore hidden history of what Jefferson wrought in her Hemingses of Monticello (2008), significantly sub-titled An American Family.
