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1) Neither I, nor Jefferson's political enemies, nor James Callender, nor the English, nor the abolitionists, nor anyone else "invented" the story of Sally Hemings. Jefferson did.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "Case"

2) She felt as if this man had taken her hand and lifted her out of the loneliness after Nathan Langdon, after the destruction of her diaries. Now, alone, she faced the truth of her life: she had loved the enemy. She had denied and denied and denied the mesmerizing violence of Turner and his avengers that had been around her and in front of her and a part of her, always. Nat Turner, the nullifier of her life.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 55 (during Nat Turner's trial)

3) In advertising the novel, Viking Press, its publishers, said, "The family tried to hide it. The history books tried to ignore it. But the passionate, complex affair between Thomas Jefferson and his mistress and slave Sally Hemings is the story that had to be told."
Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal 65

4) The secretive nature of their relationship seemed almost fitting. Had it not always been thus with her? Always the forbidden? It would have been more fitting, she thought, if, instead of exchanging thoughts, they exchanged pleasures. This would have been much more acceptable than what they were doing; for thoughts, feelings, and memories were all a slave, or an ex-slave, had to call her own. Even Thomas Jefferson had bowed to that rule. He had loved her as a woman and owned her as a slave, but her thoughts had always remained beyond his or anyone's control.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 38 (Reflecting on the nature of Sally and Langdon's relationship)

5) Dr. Wood fails to note that I also speculated on the paradox between Jefferson, Hemings, and the French Revolution. But neither I, nor Jefferson's political enemies, nor James Callender, nor the English, nor the abolitionists, nor anyone else "invented" the story of Sally Hemings. Jefferson did, in his paradoxical, intellectually complex, inimitable way, as poignantly divided in his private life as he was between enlightenment and its shadow, racism.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, response to Wood 822

6) There had been love, servitude, hate, womanhood. It was all flowing together that day when Elizabeth Hemings, struggling, frantically seeking an exit from the life she had endured, had whispered, ‘Put your hand on my chest and push down; my heart won't stop beating.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 25 (Sally, along with Martha Randolph, watched as her mother passed away and contemplated their relationship)

7) A cloak of silence was invented around this untouchable institution, allowing the United States to begin its life an innocent, void of slavery and the ostensibly "contaminating" black presence, which was at the time one-fifth of the colonial population.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "One Drop" 827

8) How is it possible, that at the pinnacle of his power, Thomas Jefferson had chosen a slave when he could have chosen any white woman alive!
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 8 (Langdon questioning before meeting Sally)

9) As for Chase-Riboud, her novel Sally Hemings is an example of the type of fiction that has lately come to be known as "faction." In other words, the author and publisher claim a substantial amount of factual accuracy. Chase-Riboud does say that "my Sally Hemings is not the historical Sally Hemings," but her basic contention is that Jefferson had Sally for his mistress, and the entire book revolves about that assumption. Furthermore, the novel purports to place the principal characters in a setting that is historically accurate. . . . Publishers of "faction" indulge at times in extravagant claims to historical authenticity.
Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal 4-5

10) Thomas Jefferson fondled the delicate skin at the back of his slave's neck under the coiled hair. She was indeed his creature. Both in body and in spirit. He had formed and shaped her himself, this wild flower, into something that bordered on the aristocratic -- or at least the unique, an exotic hybrid of exquisite beauty and fascination.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 119

11) If Jefferson was indeed the father of Sally's children, then his recording the births this methodical way seems not just to take the edge off the supposed romance but to turn Jefferson into some kind of unfeeling monster.
Gordon Wood, response to Chase-Riboud 825

12) White blood would flow as easily as black. Virginia had begun to bleed. This day's wound was staunched for the moment, but, like some royal disease, it would result in a never-ending hemorrhaging. Invincibility, Sally Hemings knew better than most, was in the mind.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 56

13) The belief in American innocence I call the "one drop rule" of public history. This is the original rule which defined race in the United States: one black grandfather made a black, but one white grandfather didn't make a white. In other words, one drop of black DNA not only excluded one from joining the human race to the fifth generation, but also contaminated an entire existence, a whole personality and entity, making it invisible.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "One Drop" 827

14) Sally Hemings had spent forth years of her life in daily contact with one of the most powerful men in America. She had seen his friends and his enemies sweep in and out of their mansion in quest of power or in homage of it. She had never understood until now, however, why men lusted after it with such ferocity; why they fought, killed, slandered, flattered, begged, worshiped, begot sons in its name.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 57 (A reflection of Sally during Nat Turner's trial)

15) This massive acceptance by major elements of the media--and apparently of the public--occurred despite the fact that the three internationally recognized authorities on Jefferson's life and career have found the books to be wholly unsound. Historians reviewing the Brodie biography for such scholarly publications as the Journal of American History and the Journal of Southern History have also expressed supreme skepticism, if not outright disbelief, but the circulations of these academically oriented organs are minuscule in comparison to the enormous audience of the mass media and the large sales of the books in question. The Brodie biography was the best-selling hardcover historical work to appear in 1974, and there was a British edition as well. It is obvious, therefore, that the task of combating these charges is a difficult one, especially since so many persons are prone to accept accusations of this sort against important public men. But in the interests of justice and historical accuracy, it is necessary that the other side of the case be given. This is all the more essential in view of Mrs. Brodie's contention that "shame" over his relations with Sally lessened Jefferson's effectiveness as a public figure.
Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal 2-3

16) You think I [James] would spill my seed as a slave! To father other slaves! You think I would enrich some white master by breeding more slaves for him. If I spill it, it will be as a free man who can father free children. This I vowed long ago. In Paris. I vowed I would never touch a woman as a slave. My life has been celibate . . . I have never known a woman.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 202

17) Today the reputations of America's Founding Fathers seem to be vulnerable and in disrepair. Twentieth-century Americans are as skeptical of genuine greatness as they are of the embellished myths of Parson Weems, who tried to make Washington bigger than life. We often scoff at the capacity of men and women to live honorably in an imperfect world, and yet wonder that we lack self-reliant statesmen and citizens. We demean ourselves, however, when we suppose that human beings can only be little, selfish, or prurient. We have become a nation comfortable with Jefferson Pure Rye Whiskey, but not with the challenge of Jefferson's ennobling spirit and the democratic ideals he expressed and represented.
Virginius Dabney and Jon Kukla 53

18) He [Jefferson] sat beside me and we made a list of all the plants, flowers, trees, and vegetables we could see in the kitchen garden and beyond; all the fish we could imagine in the little river by the northwest boundary; all the animals we could imagine living in the pines of the southwest boundary. It was my earliest recollection of him, and, that moment knowing neither past nor future, I felt only an immense calm and safety in his presence that rested on my shoulders like a warm cloak.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 61

19) This idea of an intimate and loving relationship between Jefferson and his black slave may have gained great power and increasing credibility in our culture because it represents the deep yearnings of many Americans; it symbolizes what many of us believe is the ultimate solution to our race problem.
Gordon Wood, response to Chase-Riboud 825

20) Why was it that she could never control the dread and panic she felt at the approach of a white man? Any white man. A familiar uneasiness settled in her stomach. There had been only one white man she had ever welcomed.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 5 (Sally Hemings before she meets Nathan Langdon, Census Taker)

21) In the grave at Monticello lie the bones of one whose fame is secure, no matter what slanderous falsehoods were spread against him long ago by a disappointed and unscrupulous office-seeker burning for revenge.
Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal 134

22) Madison was right. As long as there were slaves, there would be murder, and as long as there was murder, retaliation could fall on anything and anyone who was exposed. That included all Hemingses.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 59 (Sally contemplating in the crowd witnessing the trial of Nat Turner)

23) But Chase-Riboud, writing, as she says, "not as a novelist" but as "a specialist" on the Hemings controversy, is not really interested in these details of the Adamses in London. She is generally angry at all the historians who have questioned her romantic interpretation of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, and I have simply become the latest stand-in for all these historians.
Gordon Wood, response to Chase-Riboud 823

24) Don't be a fool, Nathan. You didn't do it for me. You didn't even know me. You did it for him. To make him not guilty. To shield him. So that he wouldn't have a slave wife!
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 51 (Sally suggesting why Langdon had changed her race on the census)

25) A paperback edition of Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings, published by Avon, appeared in 1980, with lurid promotion. The following language was used by Avon in Publishers Weekly advertising: "She was the mistress of a president's estate. The mother of his children. And the slave he wouldn't free. Now Barbara Chase-Riboud tells the story of SALLY HEMINGS, the woman Thomas Jefferson couldn't live without when the scandal almost cost him the presidency."
Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal 69

26) Why, when he kept so many things from me, did he want to share this particular burden [the Prosser rebellion]? Did I not already have enough to bear? He knew that I could never come down on his side in this.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 223

27) It is only a small step to contend that if one drop of DNA makes a black American, then one drop of black HISTORY makes a multiracial America, adulterating her identity as a white man's country.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "One Drop" 828

28) Sally Hemings, trained since birth in obedience, had heard the silent command of Nathan's mind and body and had obeyed. In her loneliness and weariness she had failed to remember the first lesson of black womanhood: never touch a white man … She took one of his hands in hers, and with the other she pressed his face into the folds of her dress. It was the first and last time Nathan Langdon would experience such a feeling of pure happiness. Sally Hemings' blunder, as offhand and unconscious as it was, awoke in Langdon an unbearable jealousy of a dead man.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 41 (After a conversation between Sally and Langdon)

29) The techniques of psychohistory upon which Mrs. Brodie relied were popularized by Harvard professor emeritus Erik Erikson. This type of historical writing will be judged by specific examples given in the chapters that follow. It is regarded with much skepticism by many historians.
Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal 4

30) I drew my head up and looked long into his eyes. Deep in the centers was a dark pinprick. My own reflection.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 101

31) The late Julian Boyd, editor of the massive Papers of Thomas Jefferson, whose encyclopedic knowledge of Jefferson's career was universally recognized, made the following comment on the Brodie biography in a letter to friends: In the face of the unprovable and in confronting partial or contradictory evidence, the historian may and indeed must employ inference, conjecture, and hypothesis. These are useful and legitimate tools of his craft. But the one thing he cannot do is to regard his own inferences and conjectures as proven facts. Yet this is what Mrs. Brodie has done throughout her volume and in respect to every aspect of Jefferson's life and character, the wholly conjectural account of his relations with Sally Hemings being only the most egregious example . . . . Even on the elementary level of verifiable fact her scholarship is lamentably deficient. Her Jefferson abounds in errors of detail. . . . The great passion of Jefferson's life was directed toward the preservation of "the last best hope of earth," not toward a quadroon slave. He will survive and triumph over any ignoble Jefferson Mrs. Brodie may invent. But the real danger is that the methods of historical investigation she has employed may, if allowed to go unchallenged, begin to pass as intellectual coin of the realm.
Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal 124-26

32) Jefferson remembered everything and asked questions about everyone, white and black. Sally Hemings, through her mother, knew everything that had gone on in the intervening years. She delighted him with her stories, her reports on the crops and gardens. She took over from James the duties of nurse, and every day, her small but surprisingly strong hands would bathe and massage his wrist while she kept up a steady stream of conversation in her soft Virginia accent, a relief to his ears from the harsh beauty of the French he had become so accustomed to.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 86

33) I didn't have the impression when I was writing that I was producing an act of resistance to history. I only said to myself that there were things "scientific history" had overlooked or forgotten, or never written about, or suppressed for political motives, which, for reasons as important as liberation, should be written about.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "One Drop" 826

34) "Slavery is outlawed in France. We are on French soil. That means we are emancipated. Free."
"I don't believe you," whispered Sally Hemings, as if they were being overheard in the empty pantry under the kitchens. . . . "Why don't you ask your master if you won't take your brother's word? Ask a white man." "Have you ever asked him?" "I don't have to ask what I know to be true. There are white men in Paris and London and Boston who are working for the freedom of Negro slaves everywhere but Thomas Jefferson is not one of them."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 89

35) Thomas Jefferson's enduring contributions to the building of democratic institutions and to the freedom of the human mind should need no defense. Indeed, the ideals he vividly expressed have been--and are--a source from which even his detractors take their inspiration. Perhaps a declining sense of responsibility and taste, both among the public and among the nation's periodical and book publishers, forces an author to exhume and embellish long-discredited charges. Perhaps an author must contrive a sensation in order to make the American public aware of a contemporary issue. Misrepresentation of historical fact deludes both authors and readers, however, and impoverishes public debates.
Virginius Dabney and Jon Kukla 61

36) She knew she would have a hard time dying. There they sat, and she lay, the three of them, waiting for death. They had all lived their lives according to the rules: the rules of master and salve, man and woman, husband and wife, lover and mistress … She knew these two would mourn him when his time came, more than they would ever mourn her, and could she blame them? They had been birth'd and trained for that. She herself had trained her own daughter, her favorite child, to the triple bondage of slave, woman, and concubine, as one trains a blooded horse to its rider, never questioning the rights of the rider.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 33 (Elizabeth Hemings privately contemplating her life)

37) The late Fawn Brodie, author of the biography Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, and Barbara Chase-Riboud, who wrote the novel Sally Hemings, say categorically that Jefferson had Sally for his concubine during thirty-eight years, a relationship that resulted in five children. The claim that Jefferson fathered these children is based to a considerable degree on so-called psychological evidence and the result purports to be "psychohistory." The question whether the allegations are true is actually a peripheral one, since the renown of Jefferson as an innovator in government, education, science, law, architecture, agriculture, and other fields is such that nothing can shake it. However, revival of the charges makes it highly desirable that they be appraised.
Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal 1

38) She didn't realize that while she was merely recounting her past to Nathan Langdon, she was in fact uncovering a person she had never known from a life she had had no sense of. From these afternoons emerged a new Sally Hemings.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 39

39) "When I wrote Sally Hemings," she explained, "what struck me were the very complicated and convoluted relationships between those two families--the ‘black' Hemingses and the ‘white' Jeffersons. That's typically American. There has to be a kind of synthesis between ‘black' experience and ‘white' experience in America, because they are the same," she concludes. She qualifies her provocative statement, but only to sharpen its point: "There are differences, but there is no escape from the influence of one to the other, from their interrelation and interlocking."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in McHenry 37-38

40) She applied herself to learning everything she could, the rudiments of dressmaking, hairdressing, and clothes-cleaning. In a few months the backwater-country slave had learned to speak the language well. . . . But with Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings spoke only her soft Virginia-accented English. Thomas Jefferson sought his slave's company more and more. They seemed drawn to each other, master and slave, by mysterious threads that Sally Hemings did not completely understand. Thomas Jefferson indulged her as a child rather than as a servant, laughing when Petit remarked that it didn't matter if she was useless around the ministry; she was such a joy to be with and to look at. And often he would gaze at her, staring without realizing it, or without realizing that he was being watched.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 91

41) Because I don't think Jefferson raped Sally Hemings. I think it was much more subtle than that, and so I didn't want in the book a physical rape of Hemings, because I don't think that that was the point, even though [with] a sixteen-year-old or a fifteen-year-old girl, any kind of physical relationship is going to be rape. It's a child. But I don't think it was love at first sight either. But there was always and there would always be, by definition, between the President of the United States and any woman, white or black, this chasm and this loss of identity. In the relationship with any normal woman to an extremely powerful man this occurs.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in Spencer, "Interview" 744

42) We were the only females on the ship and were made much of by the five other male passengers and the captain. For me, it was the beginning of my real history. From the moment I stepped onto that ship as nurse for Polly, everything that had happened to me before seemed to recede and grow smaller, until nothing remained except the sweet of the sea and the vastness of the sky and those unexpected days of peace and freedom.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 63 (Young Sally of 14 reflecting on the boat to London with Polly)

43) The one drop of black presence Sally Hemings represented was enough to taint America's conception of itself (i.e. Jefferson). The historical outrage was not because she was his lover and his half sister-in-law, but because she was black and his slave, an intrusion on the "purity" of the founding narrative in American identity. No episode of history that illuminated this Sally Hemings rule was to be tolerated.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "One Drop" 828

44) You know it is very difficult to have two female passengers on this ship. Of course, Miss Jefferson is a child, but you are not, and you should be careful how you conduct yourself. I know that at home you have all kinds of freedom and license and that you are … are … are even encouraged … but you must remember in the close quarters of a ship, you cannot … I will not permit that you give … provocation to my gentlemen passengers. You may look sixteen, but I know you are but fourteen, and you invite … something you are not prepared for, to be sure … You are a child, and I might add a not very well-brought up slave and servant, and if you have not been taught as yet your place in life, then I will confine you to your cabin until we reach shore.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 69 (Captain Ramsay to Sally after he found she had altered the truth of her origin and age to Monsieur LaFaurie)

45) This massive acceptance by major elements of the media -- and apparently of the public -- occurred despite the fact that the three internationally recognized authorities on Jefferson's life and career have found the books to be wholly unsound.
Virginius Dabney, Scandals 2

46) "Now another thing, Miss Hemings. You have the habit of sitting on the first platform of the forward mast. Sitting there, you may not be aware, but you are in full view of the sailors working beneath the upper deck. You cannot see them, but they can see you. You sit there for hours, and undo your hair and let it stream down your back, and this is dire provocation for the sailors who call you the "siren." I know you don't know what the means, but let me say, for a sailor, a siren … is something who makes … who provokes." "What's that?" "Provocation … flirting … frolicking."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 69-70 (Captain Ramsay to Sally)

47) SPENCER: The scene where Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson have their first sexual encounter in Sally Hemings is a very interesting one. Hemings describes Jefferson's first sexual approach in some very ambiguous temporal terms that make it difficult to disentangle her present from her past. The structure is such that the old Hemings is narrating, but when we get to that particular scene, the present tense is used. So, by the time we read of their encounter, there's the temptation to even forget that it's the older Hemings that is narrating. There's a chasm in the text, a literal space in the text that one has to hurdle across. I read that as a certain kind of trauma. But there is also an entanglement there, of terror, desire. Why did you create that chasm? It's very ambiguous; it invites your readers to think about this scene in multiple ways.
CHASE-RIBOUD: For all the reasons that you just described. First of all, the construction of that book was rather extraordinary because it's a book that is basically in the third person, but there is about one-third of it that's in first person and the reader comes away with the impression that the whole book is in first person when it is not. Sally Hemings is two-thirds third person. Nobody remembers that it's two-thirds third person.
Suzette Spencer, "Interview" 742-43

48) "You decided!" He couldn't tell whether she was going to laugh of scream. "You decided! For fifty-four years I've been Thomas Jefferson's creature, and now … now you decided it's time for me to be yours. Yours!" She began to laugh. "It's judgment day! Instead of being black and a slave, I'm now free and white."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 50 (Sally outraged that Langdon "decided" she was white on the census)

49) "I have learned it is one thing to write a book and explore a character," she [Chase-Riboud] says. But I have also learned about the presumed rights to interpret American history, even fictionally. Some people think this is a one-race, one-culture, one-sex country, or at least that theirs is the only outlook. But I think they got more upset when they learned the vast public would see this story on television."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in Trescott

50) Madison, for heaven sakes. Not all white men are rapists!
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 21(Sally after Madison argues with her about letting Langdon into the house)

51) In her [Chase-Riboud] behalf, it should be said that the love scenes between Jefferson and Sally are told with definite restraint. The author could have gone to the bedroom and described episodes of delirious passion. To her credit, she did not do this, and we should all be grateful.
Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal 73

52) "A white slave!" Abigail Adams would never get over the shock of seeing the image of Thomas Jefferson's late wife descending the gang-plank of Captain Ramsay's ship in the guise of a Negro slave.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 73

53) 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. Even her "whiteness" is perceived as blackness.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "Afterword" (in Sally Hemings: A Novel) 350

54) Thomas Jefferson was not a happy man, thought James, despite all his fame and riches and celebrated friends. He was lonely. The death of his wife had made it impossible for him to believe again in happiness or good fortune. Moreover, his master missed his home more than he admitted.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 85 (James thinking about Jefferson and his expectance of Maria Cosway)

55) As long as Chase-Riboud remains a novelist she can make up whatever she wants to; but historians are different and are not supposed to write fiction, even in a good cause.
Gordon Wood, response to Chase-Riboud 825

56) Martha then turned to me and whispered, "There was a gentleman a few days ago … you know, who killed himself because he thought his wife didn't love him. They had been married ten years … I believe that if every husband in Paris was to do as much, there would be nothing but widows left." And then suddenly, with an emotion I didn't understand at the time, she said, "I wish with all my soul the poor Negroes were all freed. It grieves my heart!" And she reached over and embraced me.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 98 (Martha and Sally talking)

57) 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.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in Lewis

58) I'm tired, Nathan. I'm tired of white men playing God with my flesh and my spirit and my children and my life, which is running out. . . . You've left me nothing of my own. Not even my color! I've been asked to give, and give, and give, and now I can't give any more. I can't forgive another man, Nathan. I'm sorry.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 51 (Sally to Langdon)

59) 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.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in Lewis

60) Now that he had come, I felt no fear, only as overwhelming tenderness. His presence for me was command enough; I took control of him. I bent forward and pressed a kiss on the trembling hands that encompassed mine, and the contact of my lips with his flesh was so violent that I lost all memory of what came afterward. I felt around me an exploding flower, not just of passion, but of long deprivation, a hunger for things forbidden, for darkness and unreason, the passion of rage against the death of the other I so resembled. For in this moment I became one with her, and it was not my name that sprang from him but that of my half sister.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 102 (Sally and Jefferson's intimacy)

61) I don't think that he thought about race as a scientist, although he had pretensions of doing so. I think it was much more emotional. It was probably the only emotional touchstone that he had in his whole life. That letter [in her Sally novel] where he tries to explain when black becomes white, I put it in there because it was so specific. It was so right. It was as I saw him when he thought about the situation.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in Spencer, "Interview" 742

62) Oh, John. It's not that … or maybe it is that, I don't know. Her color only underlines the horror of her condition because it's our color. But, even more serious, I can't in good conscience entrust the care of a child to another child. The girl is a child, a beautiful one, but one with undoubtedly no training as a nurse or even a maid. Why, she needs more care than Polly herself!
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 73 (Abigail talking to John Adams about the condition of Sally taking care of Polly)

63) Moreover, I had to find a way to elevate a member of the most despised caste in America to the level of the most exalted. I had to do that in order to make believable Sally Heming's liaison with America's most famous historical name: Thomas Jefferson. Linguistically, I solved the problem by always referring to Sally Hemings by her full name. I felt that neither the author nor the reader had the right to call Hemings "Sally," much as Hemings dare not call Jefferson "Thomas" until they were equal in love. . . . It simply lifts Sally Hemings well out of her role as a slave and helps make a minor historical figure the equal, as a genuine archetype, of Thomas Jefferson.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "Afterword" (in Sally Hemings: A Novel) 347

64) I told all my daughters, beautiful things all of you, don't love no masta if he don't promise in writing to free your children. Don't do it. Get killed first, get beaten first. The best is not to love them in the first place. Love your own color. That brings pain enough … I can't say he promised it to me, so I can't say he didn't keep his promise. He never promised and I never asked. I just expected. A terrible thing for a slave to do. Expect.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 27 (Elizabeth on loving John Wayles)

65) Slavery defines American history.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "One Drop" 826

66) Whoever this man my brother was, he was a man. And no matter what happened to him, he would never be caught like me in the throes of a love which now held me against my will. But, no matter what, I would break that will, I believed. I would reclaim my body, my heart, and I would be careful. . . . I would not be deprived of my one chance in life. I would not fail my brother, I vowed. When the time came, I would run.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 122

67) The "questionable" half-truth of the "invention" of the story by a "lying disappointed office seeker" was demolished in 1991, by William Durey's account of the complicated intimate and paternal relationship between (the accused) Callender and Jefferson in With the Hammer of the Truth.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, response to Wood 823

68) James was Martha Jefferson's uncle! . . . That blue and black blood would mix was nothing more than the nature of things, but that it would continue into the second and now the this generation seemed to him beyond propriety, even aristocratic propriety! There was something uncivilized, raw, and brutal about it. On one hand, they hated and despised blacks, and, on the other, they were the objects of the most violent and emotional desires and obsessions . . . That the defection of a chambermaid could bring low a man like Thomas Jefferson . . . Adrien Petit pursed his lips in distaste.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 146-47

69) I had wanted to illuminate our overweening and irrational obsession with race and color in this country. I would do it through the man who almost single-handedly invented our national identity--and through the woman who was the emblematic incarnation of the forbidden, the outcast; who was the rejection of that identity. I would use the form of the nineteenth-century American Gothic novel, whose very essence is embedded in the American psyche.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "Afterword" (in Sally Hemings: A Novel) 345

70) Even now after their moment of passion, there was a violence and a constraint about him that made her tremble. It was then she realized that he liked owning her.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 119-20 (Sally's thoughts after intimacy)

71) There was also the announcement that there would be a "provocative 30-second television commercial . . . in major markets, backed by print advertising in the June Cosmopolitan." This latter advertisement said, among other things, "By day she wore the keys to Monticello; by night she stole secretly to his arms."
Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal 69

72) Her silence was what had kept her alive and sane in this world where everything had been taken from her except these last two sons. And even they knew little about her life. Slaves revealed as little as possible about their origin and background to their children. It was an old trick. Not to speak was not to put in to words the hopelessness of having no future and no past. But now, her sons had that future. It was only she who had none. And the past . . . what did she really feel about the past?
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 14

73) Nonetheless, Chase-Riboud speculates that the television appearance of "Roots" may have prepared the way for a more realistic discussion. "You only have to look at us to know that miscegenation was part of our background and history, no matter how we decide to deal with it," she insists. "It's the last big taboo, and I think both blacks and whites have to face this."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in McHenry 38

74) I was to accompany Martha on her calls to her school friends before they left for their summer estates … we would walk side by side, arm in arm. A lady and her maid, a slave and her mistress, an aunt and her niece, the virgin and the concubine.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings117 (Sally's thoughts about Martha)

75) Many Americans detest their history. They don't like memory; neither do they respect it, good or bad. They want to hear only about the here and now, the present. This relation to history, however, breeds not only contempt but also an inability to learn from the errors committed in the past. This may be the reason why we continue to live in the shadows of our historical problems.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "One Drop" 831

76) Madison stared at the unkempt frontier. It seemed to be the line between his former life and this one. He would never understand why his mother refused to leave this place; why she deliberately chose a rented house so close to Monticello. Was it that she wanted to be reminded, every minute of everyday, of her former servitude, of her concubinage?
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 23

77) The decisive factor here is the disparity of race and the rhetoric of miscegenation. Dr. Wood's approach is typical. Take a half-truth and use it to denigrate irrefutable evidence to the contrary as "questionable": "If Jefferson did sleep with Sally in Paris, he ought to be charged with child abuse: the girl was only about (sic) fourteen."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, response to Wood 822

78) This slave [James] from Virginia's made history today. This slave ran with the Revolution! His eyes said to me: I am mine. We are going to take ourselves to freedom. If God let me do this, then He will leave us take our freedom without running. Take ourselves, without stealing. We are going to be free. Everything is changed.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 139

79) The U.S. is a mulatto country.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in Lewis

80) His voice and his face hovered over me, held me. He [Jefferson] touched and pained me with his terrible loneliness. Never would I cause such pain again. My own needs, my own loneliness, seemed nothing compared to his -- his needs were so much mightier than my small ones, his space in the world so much more vast and important than any place I could imagine for myself. Slowly, I succumbed to his will.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 143

81) It is here that the chasm between the historian's careful sifting of evidence distinctly contrasts with the use of the myth in the service of a cause. No matter how noble the cause, or how despicable the vice to be reformed, if a historian departs from the rigorous standards of the craft in order to bolster a particular thesis, the departure demeans present and past generations. Yet, it remains interesting and highly revealing that the legend that Jefferson took Sally Hemings as a concubine refuses to die. The recurrent resurrection of Callender's original falsehood is, in its peculiarly American way, testimony to the importance of Thomas Jefferson. Plain historical fact is not enough. It is not good enough to know that Peter or Samuel Carr kept Sally Hemings as his mistress--for neither Peter nor Samuel Carr can be made a symbol of America.
Virginius Dabney and Jon Kukla 60-61

82) Thus I sat watch through the night. Lord, keep me from sinking down. Lord, keep me from sinking down. Lord, keep me from sinking down. I would repeat to myself.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 102

83) The question whether the allegations are true is actually a peripheral one, since the renown of Jefferson as an innovator in government, education, science, law, architecture, agriculture, and other fields is such that nothing can shake it.
Virginius Dabney, Scandals 1

84) From that day on, James dreamed of those spots of blood. The whole bed would turn red as he touched it, staining his own hands as if he had plunged them into the entrails of a living creature. He would struggle to take the sheets off the bed, but they would heave and swirl, and sickening sounds would come from them. Terrified, he would back away, but the sheets would pursue him, leaping at his throat like a wild animal, enveloping him in a slimy embrace. In the ensuing struggle, he would be hurled into the fire burning in the room's hearth. His hands and feet, still swaddled in the sticky sheets, would be begin to burn. Then his arms and legs. Then his private parts. Finally, only his torso would remain with a blackened and charred head, the mouth opened in a horrible soundless scream. The head would begin to spin itself in agony until it literally spun itself off the burning body, and lay in ashes, which filled its mouth and eyes and nostrils, strangling and suffocating him.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 105

85) SPENCER: In reproducing these kinds of things, the legal affidavits, pamphlet covers, speeches, newspaper clippings, and family trees, there seems to be tension around authenticating the fiction historically. Why do you go to such great lengths to include these things?
CHASE-RIBOUD: I think it's important, for me at any rate, because it does authenticate these historical characters who were fiction only to historians. These characters who are historical have been treated as if they were fiction by history. So I'm just reversing it. You can argue that the Jefferson that we know and love is fiction, has nothing to do with reality, and that's why what is missing from the whole industrial complex of Jefferson writing is a biography by a black historian. There is none.
Suzette Spencer, "Interview" 753-54

86) I [James Hemings] will never steal myself! he thought. He has no right to force me to do so . . . to make a criminal and an outlaw out of me who has served him for so long and with such loyalty. He must free me legally and openly.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 147

87) Dumas Malone, whose multivolume Jefferson biography won a Pulitzer Prize, said that Brodie "presents virtually no evidence that was not already known to scholars, and wholly disregards test9iimony which I regard as more reliable." Malone concluded that Brodie's best-selling book runs "far beyond the evidence and carries psychological speculation to the point of absurdity; the resulting mishmash of fact and fiction, surmise and conjecture is not history as I understand the term." Julian P. Boyd, of Princeton University, a scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of the historical evidence, wrote that "the principal defect of Brodie's work is the manipulation of evidence, the failure to give due weight to the overwhelming considerations of fact and plausibility which conflict with her preconceptions."
Virginius Dabney and Jon Kukla 56

88) "The People" could destroy my master. And if my master was destroyed, what would become of me? It was then that I understood that my master's enemies were mine as well. That, in this white world, I had nothing but enemies.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 216

89) The maggot is the fact of this pathological fear in the United States of white people that they would suddenly turn into black people. I mean it's a pathological fear of having black blood, of suddenly giving birth to a black baby, which is, of course, impossible to do. But, the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century attitude was that it is possible to and this is some kind of Ham curse.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in Spencer, "Interview" 740

90) Virginia. I knew that what had happened to us could never have happened in Virginia.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 188

91) Amid continued national awareness of the civil rights movement, Fawn M. Brodie subjected Thomas Jefferson to "psycho-historical" scrutiny in a book that gave the impression of careful scholarship, with extensive notes and bibliography. Readers who were not careful students of Jefferson's time or career were easily persuaded that her reiteration of Callender's ancient charges were fact. Brodie's conclusion were not, however, the result of a historian's careful sifting and weighing of evidence , and the world's three leading authorities on the career of Thomas Jefferson agreed that the version of the Sally Hemings story told in Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History was absurd.
Virginius Dabney and Jon Kukla 55-56

92) Whatever he thought of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, third president of the United States, there was one thing he, Nathan Langdon, was determined that Thomas Jefferson would not be guilt of: the crime of miscegenation.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 16 (Langdon after determining Sally and her sons, Eston and Madison, as white in the Census)

93) This reluctance of most historians to accept her fictional interpretation of a secret de facto marriage has infuriated Chase-Riboud and led her in an afterword to a 1994 reissuing of her novel to accuse historians of fudging and misusing historical evidence, often, as she says in her letter, by manipulating half-truths.
Gordon Wood, response to Chase-Riboud 823

94) Thomas Jefferson looked out with emotion over the heads of his slaves. There would soon be a mortgage on all of them in order to finance the rebuilding of Monticello.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 203

95) "It's a love story," explains Chase-Riboud. "The whole national tragedy of slavery and miscegenation, of the excised portion of the Declaration of Independence [the first draft written by Jefferson contained a clause condemning slavery, but other representatives of the Southern slaveholding colonies insisted on its removal], of the pivotal events that led up to the Civil War--all this almost dwarfs the story of the two individuals. But there were other things as well--children and love and loyalty and a kind of grittiness they both had."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in McHenry 36

96) Thus did Thomas Jefferson give himself into my keeping.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 102 (Sally and Jefferson's intimacy)

97) As for Chase-Riboud, her novel Sally Hemings is an example of the type of fiction that has lately come to be known as "faction." In other words, the author and publisher claim substantial amount of factual accuracy.
Virginius Dabney, Scandals 3

98) "Those people" were my people! Even as we spoke, he forgot . . . I pressed my palms to my womb. If I could save one . . . just one of them.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 223

99) Largely forgotten charges that Thomas Jefferson had a handsome light-skinned slave as his mistress for several decades have been resurrected in a recent Jefferson biography. This book was followed by a popular novel elaborating upon the same theme. The appearance of these works has brought to public attention allegations that were first given currency a year after Jefferson became president of the United States in 1801. Growing out of the charges were others to the effect that a beautiful daughter of the master of Monticello and his purported paramour was sold into prostitution in the New Orleans slave market, with Jefferson's knowledge and consent.
Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal 1

100) Then she definitely seduced him. What forty-year-old man is his right mind can resist a healthy fifteen-year-old girl?
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 166 (Aaron Burr's assumption after learning Sally was 15 in Paris)

101) It is said that my novels are very cinema-graphic, very dense, very structured. I imagine this all come from my sculpture. I consider my novels like houses with a foundation, walls, rooms, and a roof, and many, many corridors and mazes within which my characters exist.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in Spencer, "Interview" 752-53

102) I nursed her in her illness and saw her die a little after every birth, trying for a son for Thomas Jefferson. For her darling. And he let her try and let her kill herself trying, then mourned her --monstrous -- as did I. Somehow, I could never forgive him when he knew he was killing her; when he knew after the first child that she had no business trying again.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 26-27 (Elizabeth Hemings on Martha and Thomas Jefferson)

103) Dedicated to the memory of Fawn Brodie.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "Afterword" (in Sally Hemings: A Novel) 355

104) Nothing would ever free me of him. Nothing would erase those strange words of love which I had to believe in my weakness. "Je t'aime," he had said. In his terror, he had used that most potent of weapons, the ruler of the mighty as well as the helpless. And I had answered, without any other words passing between us. "Merci, monsieur."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 103

105) The author and publisher of Sally Hemings described that work as soundly researched, especially as it relates to the master of Monticello and his comely slave. We shall see to what extent that description is justified.
Virginius Dabney, Scandals 5

106) "I'm with child. That is why I ran away. . . . I will not give birth to a slave! I am free now. I will never birth slaves!" . . . "I know . . . that I cannot hold you against your will. Our . . . your child I consider free and will always consider free. You have my word. I recognize that you are free, free as your heart permits." I was lost. My heart was his, and he knew it. I faltered, cornered, weak. . . . His promises mingled along with mine in the sultry darkness. No, I would not leave him again. No, I would not die in childbirth. No, I would not claim my freedom. Yes, my children would all be free. When? At twenty-one. Twenty-one. Five years more than I had been on this earth . . . "Promise me you will not abandon me again." "I promise, Master." "I swear to cherish you and never desert you." "Yes, Master." "I promise solemnly that your children will be freed," he said. "As God is your witness?" "As God is my witness."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 142-43

107) I look at world literature more than I look at American literature; and, of course, since the relationship between me and America is one of confrontation, I tend to, as anybody would, I tend to go where I'm loved--[laughter]--which is not the United States of America in particular.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in Spencer, "Interview" 739

108) White people] ain't different, daughter, they simply expect to get what they want or what they need in life, that's all. It never occurs to them -- as it always occurs to us -- that they won't get what they need, nor what they want.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 200

109) History should be revered, not the people who make or write it. And this history should be revered, warts and all, with all the dangerous passions, secrets, contradictions, anachronic interpretations, dark undersides, and self-preserving lies that go with the mythology of a nation, and should be revised often.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, "Afterword" (in Sally Hemings: A Novel) 354

110) Sally Hemings' eyes took in the mysterious stubble of red beard and the fine age-lines around the eyes and the stern mouth. There were marks of age at his throat, a slight indentation of flesh, and suddenly she felt a piercing flash of pity for him.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 114

110) I laid her next to Edy, in the slave cemetery. Four of his white children lay under their stones in the white cemetery. The dividing line did not even stop at the grave. But what did it change? They were all his children, and they were all dead.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 218

111) And Sally Hemings loved Thomas Jefferson. That was the tragedy. Love, not slavery. And God knew how much slavery there was in love…"
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 34 (Elizabeth reflecting on her daughter's life)

112) You should say "freedwoman," not ex-slave, Nathan. You make it sound like a punishment instead of liberty."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 38 (Sally after Langdon mentions a black female writer, an ‘ex-slave')

113) For Nathan Langdon, the Hemings affair was a parenthesis in the Institution; it neither condemned nor knighted it. He felt that there was something sinister in this blatant misuse of a master's absolute power. But then, did one have absolute power when one was in love?
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 40

113) To be that young . . . Love is never a surprise to the young; but to him! He almost laughed.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 113

114) Thomas Jefferson sought his slave's company more and more. They seemed drawn to each other, master and slave, by mysterious threads that Sally Hemings did not completely understand. . . . Both James Hemings and Adrien Petit saw this affection develop. Petit, observing with cynicism of his race and his caste, and James like a blind man; he had been away from Virginia and slavery too long.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 92

114) Was it not incredible that she was here at all, in Paris, in his arms? Was it not strange and unaccountable the circumstances of her arrival here, of her very birth? That fateful Wayles legacy so intertwined with the past, and now with the future? Future? What possible future except hate and guilt could they possibly have, he reminded himself.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 113

115) So strange to have blood in your veins and not know where it comes from.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 93 (Sally talking to James about their father)

115) You think they don't know what they men doing with their female slaves? You think they believe their slaves getting' whiter by contamination?
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 179 (Elizabeth warning Sally of the consequences of a white mistress at Monticello)

116) When I accompanied James on his excursions to the city, he would speak of what our life would be together, once we had our freedom. He would speak wildly and with arrogance, as if what he dreamed could be had at the wave of a hand. Perhaps so, but I knew as sure as death that I belonged to Thomas Jefferson.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 99 (Sally and James in Paris)

116) It's been six years . . . A white man don't keep a black concubine for six years without loving her. He loved your sister and he lost her, and now he loves you.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 178

117) He had gone to fetch his slave from her rooms as soon as he had arrived in Paris. She was on her side, turned away from him, her long, dark hair fanning out from her body … He lifted the covers from her and slowly pulled them away from her body. Then he bent his bright head and ran his tongue along the delicate backbone. The taste of honey and pine hit the pack of his throat.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 112 (Jefferson's thoughts as he lays next to Sally in bed)

117) "Get that freedom for your children," she repeated like a litany. "And get it for yourself while you're at it," she added. "Don't nothing in life count more than that." She had looked at me with a mixture of pity and exasperation. "Not even love."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 177

118) Madam Dupre had no way of knowing that Sally Hemings was a slave. She had no way knowing that a "maid" in Virginia was a polite way of indicating someone who was black. Sally's complexion told Madame Dupre nothing, except that she was black.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 107

118) He [Jefferson] straightened a lock of her hair. He was a rational man. It was unreasonable, he thought, loving for once what he saw and felt without wanting or trying to give a reason, and not caring much if there was one.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 113

119) From his daughter's maid I had become the pampered and adored mistress of Thomas Jefferson. I was one insignificant secret amongst the many buried under the surface of this spring procession.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 115

119) His master, thought James, showed no lessening of the tyrannical possessiveness and watchful interest in her dependence on him. . . . She had honored her natural grace and inborn elegance on the examples of the most fashionable ladies of Panthémont and Paris on whom she spied incessantly and indecently, and had a developed a lust for clothes and a taste for finery that went with such examples. She had lessons in French, in music, in dressmaking. In her seclusion, Sally was better read than most ladies. Yet she had resisted all his pleading to use her power over the senses of their master to achieve her freedom and his. She assumed that all would be taken care of in time. That love would make her free. James knew better. Men didn't free what they loved.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 124

120) A year had passed since Thomas Jefferson had taken his sister as a concubine. Only he saw the dark side of her station: she was still a slave. The master had taken up his political and social life as if nothing had happened, he had simply added Sally Hemings to his bed. He, James, had become a master cook and his sister had become a master whore, he thought with bitterness.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 123 (James' thoughts of Sally as a concubine)

121) I pressed myself into the broad chest behind me. My master might own Monticello and my mother might run it, but Monticello was mine. There had only been one white mistress of Monticello, the first Martha, and she was buried at the foot of the mountain under a pale white stone etched in Latin.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 185 (Sally's thoughts after Jefferson promises her that there will never be a white mistress at Monticello)

122) It was amidst the ceremonies and processions that followed the fall of the Bastille that I found I was with child. . . . "No, Madame [Dupre], that is not what I mean. I mean it is his not only by blood but by property. It is his property to do with what he likes, just as he can do with me what he likes. I am not free, Madame." Madame [Dupre:] "Go back to him. Go back and demand your freedom and that of his child. Demand it in writing and stay here in Paris. You will find a protector. I promise you that. On French soil you are free and you shall stay free. But return to him. Give him the chance to express his instincts as a father and a lover. You may be surprised. He loves you." [Sally:]"I don't want to be loved. I want to be free." [Dupre:] "Do you really, my child? You love him as well, and there is no freedom in that."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 140-41

123) He [James] has served me faithfully, devotedly, and unselfishly in his craft and art, and I am loath to part with him. He shall ever have in my heart and my affection a special place, just as his brother Robert does for all of us here, and I am sure there is not a person present that does not wish him every happiness in his new and justly deserved . . . freedom!"
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 201

124) "'Mama!' I cried against all the other cries and commotion. But, if she heard me, she did not turn back. "'Mama!" I screamed again and again. It was years before she answered that call.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 152

125) Then I saw the small figure in the doorway [Sally's mother] turn her back and walk into the Big House. . . . she would have chosen freedom.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 152

126) The looks directed my way were polite and curious until it was discovered I was maid to Master Jefferson's daughters. Then the looks ceased to be those directed as a living person and became the looks one fastens on a crate or a sack of meal.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 150

127) There would be no white mistress at Monticello. He had promised.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 185

128) He picked up a handful of my letters and strode toward the fireplace. "You burn those letters, Thomas Jefferson, and you'll sleep alone." He hesitated a moment and then he threw the letters onto the smoldering coals. In a flash I was beside him. I shoved him out of the way. The letters were already going up in flames. I pulled them out with my bare hands.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 187

129) From that day I vowed never never to put myself in that jeopardy again [advocating the end of slavery]. I vowed never to raise my voice in defense of myself or my principles -- especially about that. I washed my hands of it! I vowed to let the Almighty, if there is one, do his own work!
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 194

130) I have often thought … if my declaration had been adopted as I had written it … you would not be here, for there would be no slavery in America, no slaves.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings194 (Jefferson whispering to Sally)

131) I thought of Martha and her peers tittering and giggling. . . . gossiping, silly girls who knew nothing of men. Their feverish fantasies and sickening pride revolted me. I neither despised them nor was jealous of them. I merely pitied them. What did they know about being a woman?
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 116

132) I looked at the tall figure standing beside me. No. Not tall. Immense. Like some glorious eagle overlooking Marly. I studied the familiar profile. My fifteen-year-old heart burst with pride. I could pale that face with longing. I could part that beautiful mouth with desire. I could fill those eyes with agony or joy.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 116

133) It was Jefferson himself who had been the first deceived. He had deceived himself into believing he could love a woman he held in slavery. He had deceived Sally Hemings into believing a man that held her in such servitude could love her.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 160 (Adam's inner voice)

134) I was left alone, having just passed my seventeenth birthday, the mistress of Monticello.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 152

135) Don't tell me [Betty Hemings] freedom ain't worth dying for! Black people dying left and right, in the fields and on the ships, being beaten to death for not yielding, being hunted like dogs for strollin', being killed for standin' up like men and women instead of grovelin' like dogs! Don't give me any of your lip about 'not worth dying for'! They's even white folks-abolitionists who's risking their lives -- their white lives -- for black peoples, helping them run. And you, you with your pride! Thinkin' that slavehood would never touch your precious body, or your precious spirit, that it would not hurt you and damage you and change you . . . Pride has given you a worst burden than any field hand out there, because theirs can be lifted, but yours never will. Thomas Jefferson playing father to you, me spoiling you like I didn't know your color. If you had stayed here, you would have learned . . . . Oh, Lord Almighty, how I wish I had never put you on that boat!
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 207-8

136) I was delighted with the harpsichord. "It is a charming one, I think," she [Martha] said, "but certainly inferior to mine." She was looking not at the harpsichord, but at the white, blond, blue-eyed slave child I held in my arms . . . her half brother.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings 219

137) I'd been going through life, up until a certain point, with this attitude that nobody really cares what I do or nobody notices who I am, and so I was completely out of it and so was he. So we were having our little romance and Yale was burning and we didn't even know it. There were all kinds of rumors back and forth. I suppose the whole situation was, "you let in one little black girl and she sort of upsets the whole school."
Barbara Chase-Riboud, qtd. in Spencer, "Interview" 738