The Jefferson - Hemings Controversy

Episodes

Bibby, Lowe. "Historical Novel Based on Shaky Premise." Associated Press 25 November 1994.: Review of The President's Daughter, by Barbara Chase-Riboud.
Brown, Kimberly Juanita. "Black Rapture: Sally Hemings, Chica da Silva, and the Slave Body of Sexual Supremacy." Women's Studies Quarterly 35.1-2 (2007): 45-66.
Christian, Barbara. â€œâ€™Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Somethingâ€™: African American Womenâ€™s Historical Novels.â€ Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. 326-41.
Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. Review of The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal, by Virginius Dabney. Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 90.2 (1982): 244-45.: Cunningham applauds Dabney for providing for a "broad audience the available evidence regarding Sally Hemings and [exposing] the fallacies of many of Brodie's speculations." Cunningham goes on to merit Dabney for bringing to light the fact that Brodie's work was not only criticized by the "Jefferson establishment" but also by reviewer David Donald and author of The Wolf by the Ears John C. Miller: "In bringing together these and other evaluations of Brodie's book, Dabney has provided a persuasive rebuttal both to Callender's charges and to Brodie's attempt to prove them."
Dawkins, Laura. "'A Seeping Invisibility': Maternal Dispossession and Resistance in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings and The President's Daughter." Callaloo 32.3 (2009): 792-808.: Portrayal of black female slaves like Hemings continuing their oral tradition shows that the women were not silent but, rather, had their own way of recapturing history. The cyclical pattern for female slaves (women's hesitance to reproduce because they do not wish to give birth to slaves with no future) is also discussed.
Dawson, Emma Waters. "Witnesses and Practitioners: Attitudes toward Miscegenation in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings." Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts: Race, Class and Gender in Black Women's Literature. Ed. Dolan Hubbard. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1-14.: Highlighting the fact that Hemings' story is one of silence explains the voice that this awards to African American women. Sally's thoughts and actions are lost in history, leaving room for interpretation of her relationship with Jefferson. Dawson is not trying to propose the idea that Hemings's role in the Jefferson-Hemings relationship was devoid of submission and force, but she explores the effectiveness of Chase-Riboud's use of Hemings's relationships to portray different views of miscegenation.
Filler, Louis. Review of The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal, by Virginius Dabney. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 466 (1983): 224-25.
French, Scot A., and Edward l. Ayers. "The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson." Jeffersonian Legacies. Ed. Peter Onuf. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993.: This extensive bibliographical essay from the 1940s to 1993 contains a good section covering the unsuccessful proposals to make film and television versions of Chase-Riboud's novel.
Gaston, Paul. Review of Across the Years, by Virginius Dabney, South Atlantic Quarterly 78 (1979): 401-2.
Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997.
Harden, Blaine. "Revival of â€˜Rumor' Disturbs Jefferson Scholars." Washington Post 13 February 1979: C1.: Reactions to the novel and a proposed miniseries from the likes of Dumas Malone: "Sex and scandal can be exploited to great financial advantage. The public will always believe the story."
Ishida, Yoriko. "Figurations of the Female Body as Gothic Technique: Race Relations and Gender Conventions in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings." Modern and Postmodern Narratives of Race, Gender, and Identity: The Descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.
Ishida, Yoriko. "Pampered Body, Outraged Flesh: The Ambivalence of Sally Hemings in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings as a Neo-Slave Narrative." Modern and Postmodern Narratives of Race, Gender, and Identity: The Descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.
Kaplan, Sara Clarke . "Our Founding (M)other: Erotic Love and Social Death in Sally Hemings and The President's Daughter." Callaloo 32.3 (2009): 773-91.: Suggests neither historians nor geneticists could ever truly offer us any sort of concrete and factual answer as to why the affair started, how the two interacted, or who ultimately loved who more. Suggests that Sally the slave cannot be separated from Sally the lover; her role as a server of Jefferson is inextricably linked to her submission to him. Suggests Sally's desires to please Jefferson as a lover are a result of her desires to please him as a slave.
Ketcham, Ralph. Review of The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal, by Virginius Dabney. Journal of American History 68.4 (1982): 922-23.
Klein, Julia. "A Sequel Keeps Alive Saga of Sally Hemings." Philadelphia Inquirer 12 December 1994: E1.: Review of The President's Daughter, by Barbara Chase-Riboud.
Kuhn, William M. Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2010. 70-76.: "Jackie [Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of president John F. Kennedy] was intimately involved in encouraging Barbara Chase-Riboud to publish her historical novel": it might be seen as a way for her to talk about her life with JFK without doing so directly and in public.
Lewis, Flora. "An Author Ponders 'Metaphysics of Race'; 'A Visual Person' Jefferson's Contradictions." New York Times 22 October 1979: C15.: Interview with Chase-Riboud: "The U. S. is a mulatto country. . . . There isn't a bitter or angry word in the book. . . . Lots of people found rage in it, but it isn't mine. It's their rage they are projecting. . . . Of course I accept Sally's love for Jefferson as real. . . . If she only wanted to save her skin, she would have stayed in Paris."
Martin, Larry L. Review of Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud. Journal of Negro History 65.3 (1980): 275-76.: Short review appreciative of Chase-Riboud's research and commentary on Jefferson's private and public life but states the book only brings to light the already well known fact that white men in the period of slavery had black mistresses.
Matthewson, Timothy M. Review of The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal, by Virginius Dabney. Wisconsin Magazine of History 66.1 (1982): 74-75.
McHenry, Susan. "'Sally Hemings': A Key to Our National Identity." Ms. October 1980: 35-40.: "It's a love story," says Chase-Riboud in this interview that contains a very full biography of her as well. Sally deserves a place in our public history, and miscegenation is the "last big taboo" and must be faced by White and Black alike: "like the House of Atreus, Monticello contained a mythic drama -- this time of the American racial family."
McKelway, Bill. "Jefferson's TV Debut Slated." Richmond Times-Dispatch 11 February 1979: 1, 3.: Plans for a television series based on the Chase-Riboud book is the subject of a letter campaign led by Dumas Malone.
Monteith, Sharon. "America's Domestic Aliens: African Americans and the Issue of Citizenship in the Jefferson/Hemings Story in Fiction and Film." Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Fiction and Film. Ed. Deborah Cartmell et al. Sterling: Pluto Press, 1999. 31-48.
Moynihan, SinÃ©ad. "History Repeating Itself: Passing, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and The President's Daughter." Callaloo 32.3 (2009): 809-21.
Pinkston, Randall. "Looking toward Home." CBS Sunday Morning 12 February 1995.: Review of The President's Daughter, by Barbara Chase-Riboud.
Pollard, Cherise A. "Self-Evident Truths: Love, Complicity, and Critique in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings and The President's Daughter." Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Slavery and Memory. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2004. 117-29.: Pollard's essay juxtaposes American literary texts, such as Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings, and the historical debates focused on the liaison between Jefferson and Hemings, focusing primarily on the critical backlash created from Chase-Riboud's novel.
Reckley, Ralph. "The Love-Hate Syndrome of Master-Slave Relationships in Sally Hemings." 20th Century Black American Women in Print. Ed. Lola E. Jones. Acton: Copley, 1991. 33-43.: The complex relationships within Sally Hemings are explored, not exclusive to Sally and Jefferson, and highlights how the theme of "love-hate" is not only a recurring theme throughout the novel but suggests the reality in the lives of master and slave.
Review of Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud. Chicago Tribune 3 July 1979: 2:1.
Review of Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud. Richmond Times Dispatch 11 February 1979: 1.
Review of Sally Hemings: A Novel, by Barbara Chase-Riboud. Black Scholar 11 (1980).
Review of The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal, by Virginius Dabney. .New Yorker 17 August 1981: 107.
Review of The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal, by Virginius Dabney. .New Yorker 17 August 1981: 107.
Rosenheim, Andrew. "Fiction: Slave to Love." Guardian 26 October 2002.: Very brief notice of a later edition of Sally Hemings: A Novel, by Barbara Chase-Riboud.
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. ""I Write in Tongues'": The Supplement of Voice in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings." Contemporary Literature 35.1 (1994): 100-35.: Explores the Thomas Jefferson character defense and attempts to make sense of why and how Sally's voice was not deemed valid in the novel. Signifies Sally's silence as the defiant moment when she chooses her race over Jefferson and includes textual examples from Chase-Riboud's novel. Highlights how difficult authentication of the Sally-Jefferson romance is and would have been for Sally.
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. "The Iron Fettered Weight of All Civilization: The Project of Barbara Chase-Riboud's Narratives of Slavery." Callaloo 32.3 (2009): 758-72.: Does slavery render love impossible? Sally submits to Jefferson in intimate ways that a slave never could, and she does so in the name of Love -- most noticeably when she gives up freedom in France to be a slave in Virginia. Rushdy shows how slavery distorts human and sexual intimacies.
Shahid, Sharon. "A Divided Soul on the Color Line." USA Today 2 December 1994: 7D.: Review of The President's Daughter, by Barbara Chase-Riboud.
Spencer, Suzette A., and Carlos A. Miranda. "Abrading Boundaries: Reconsidering Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sculpture, Fiction, and Poetry." Callaloo 32.3 (2009): 711-16.: Distinguishes what makes Chase-Riboud's art different from her contemporaries; follows her through her life and presents her motivations and inspiration for writing Sally Hemings.
Spencer, Suzette. "Historical Memory, Romantic Narrative, and Sally Hemings." African American Review 40.3 (2006): 507-31.: Spencer's feminist perspective explores sexual desire and agency within master-slave relations, definition of rape and romance from a psychic and socio-cultural parameter and "coersubmission" &ndash the legibility of coercion and submission in captive sexual relations.
Trescott, Jacqueline. "The Hemings Affair." Washington Post 15 June 1979.: Interview with Chase-Riboud, who says she learned something "about the presumed rights to interpret American history" facing the "firing squad that Jeffersonian purist historians always form when the Hemings affair is mentioned."
Vivian, Bradford. "Jefferson's Other." Quarterly Journal of Speech 88.3 (2002): 284-302.: Vivian investigates how various representations of the public memory of Jefferson function rhetorically, defining public memory as "Jefferson's other." Delivers judgment on the possibility of a sexual relationship between the two, considers modern tendency to represent the affair according to conventions of romance and explores the "incestuous" relationship between slavery and democracy.
Wilson, Judith. "Barbara Chase-Riboud: Sculpting Our History." Essence December 1979: 12-13.: An interview with Chase-Riboud in an African American magazine that elicits the comment that because of Sally's white color, "one wonders whether Black readers are likely to be offended by the notion that a slave woman actually loved her master as some whites are by the thought of Jefferson loving his slave."