| Episodes |
1) I find myself dangerously close to reading this fictional novel as actually being Sally's true diary or story for the very reason that I have been so eager to hear her voice.
Mary O'Reilly, Lehigh University
2) [What are the forms of sexual interaction through which we might imagine the nature of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson?] "consent, coercion, rape, or seduction."
Kimberly Juanita Brown
3) Brown's first version of Clotel, which was sensationally subtitled "The President's Daughter," was based in part on the fact that Hemings was Jefferson's mistress. But Brown used this slave mulatta's existence to cast shadows on the great Jefferson who, at once, had a black mistress and children he would not free and who nonetheless championed freedom and democracy. In contrast to Brown, Chase-Riboud uses a romantic frame to dig into the myth of Sally Hemings and to reveal this complex woman's bond to her master both as a slave and as a lover. Because Chase-Riboud is interested not only in the contradiction between Jefferson's personal and political life, and in the institution of slavery, but also in the way the nineteenth-century definition of love is related to the definition of enslavement -- she revisions Brown's sentimental romance.
Barbara Christian 335
4) This story brings to mind the Sally Hemings I always imagined: beautiful, wise, in love, the matriarch of Monticello and the last woman to lay claim to Jefferson's heart. The issue and harshness of slavery is understated by CR, but it holds well to the ambiance of her novel. It was refreshing to read something that can bring to life the notion that Jefferson's and Sally's relationship was based on affection and love rather than accusing Jefferson of being a rapist and Sally being "like a prostitute."
Ruslana Makarenko, Lehigh University
5) It is another thing, however, that the wide coverage given Brodie's readings in Jefferson, and the frank concoctions of Chase-Riboud based on Brodie, should have required of Dabney a patient tracing of rumors and inaccuracies about a figure who had exacted the sturdy of generations of scholars. The goal was not merely to demean Jefferson as a calculated hypocrite and trickster, but to demean the nation for such faults.
Louis Filler 225
6) [Chase-Riboud's] book, which became a runaway best-seller during the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s, probably has been the single greatest influence shaping the public's attitude about the Jefferson-Hemings story.
Annette Gordon-Reed, "American Controversy" 4
7) Virginius Dabney has written what we can hope is the last book on the question of Thomas Jefferson's alleged illicit affair with the Monticello slave, Sally Hemingsâ€"the "last book" not because it offers conclusive proof one way or another, but because further commentary is probably futile.
Ralph Ketcham 922
8) The "exploitation of his power over her" because of how in love she was with him. Enamored, infatuated, and a slave. But in the case of love, whether there is an "inherent" power structure within the relationship, exploitation isn't uncommon. The one who cares less, has less to lose, etc. tends to have the power in the relationship. It made it very real to me. Very normal. They became less like historical figures to me and more like people I could empathize with, understand more. But if I were using this as a work of reference on the legacy of Jefferson and what his life was actually like . . . there are many many grievances. Because there is a lack of historical fact. And that lack of fact is why she was able to write a novel in the first place. And why we are able to have this class of constant discussion exchange and debate. Because we are trying to formulate what exactly did go on . . . and what that means for history.
Maxine McCoy, Lehigh University
9) Dabney concludes the charges are unproved and unprovable. Jefferson had a very strong and lifelong aversion to racial mixture; other observers said Sally's children were sired by one or both of the Carr brothers; the charges were popularized by a notorious scandalmonger by the name of James Callender who had been refused appointive office by the President; and Jefferson himself implicitly denied the charges. All major Jefferson scholars reject Brodie's claims.
Timothy M. Mathewson 74
10) This is the story of a rekindled controversy and the firing squad that Jeffersonian purist historians always form when the Hemings affair is mentioned.
Jacqueline Trescott
11) Chase-Riboud has Sally and James's mother, Elizabeth Hemings, take the skeptical and rather commonsensical position that the word love is ill-equipped to describe the tense, fraught, difficult relations between those who may be coerced through their powerlessness and those who possess the power to coerce those they own.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Iron" 760
12) Sally Hemings' story in Chase-Riboud's novel ends tragically. The characters still breathing at the end of the novel recognize that no human being is ever really free. The tendrils that connect us to other human beings also enslave us. However, Sally's choices are so limited that she exercises her freedom by remaining silent about her life. Sally recognizes her "triple bondage"-- woman, slave, and African American. Her womanhood made her a lover, and "love had been more real to her than slavehood." The novel ends sadly.
Anonymous , Lehigh University
13) Jefferson's writing is part of his creativity, his creation and re-creation of Sally Hemings as his possession. Both the things he writes and the things he does not write are part of his "means to possess" Sally Hemings. While he writes letters that literally en-thrall her -- "she strained over the tiny cramped writing, as if her life had depended on it" -- he refuses to write an agreement that she and her children will be freed.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 124-25
14) However, scholars have redefined their enterprise: no longer intent on establishing whether or not the relationship existed, they have turned their energies to exploring the implications of the liaison for Jefferson's troubled legacy.
Laura Dawkins 793
15) Feeling herself now, for the first time, in control of her life, Sally Hemings sets out to remember her past in order to control it, as well. She revisits it with a new emotional valence and approaches her former relations with a new understanding of power.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 116
16) When I was reading CR, for the first time I started to think of Sally as a white woman with some African American blood in her . . . rather than how I had been thinking about her up to the point I was reading this, which was as a black slave. I think CR did this for a reason, emphasizing her beauty and attractiveness, to create not only a sense of romanticism and passion (because what great romantic novel or movie doesn't involve the main character who is beautiful beyond measure). Her whiteness gave Sally a certain power I hadn't given her before in my mind. Sad that whiteness equates to this, but in historical context, it does. And it wasn't until watching the mini-series that I saw her strength come to life.
Teresa Salvatore, Lehigh University
17) Far from transcending or enduring despite the omnipresent relations of coercion that characterize chattel slavery, Sally Heming's love for Jefferson is expressed within and through the structuring discourses of chatteldom. On her tongue, the words of love between master and slave are revealed as sharing a lexicon not with the rhetoric of freedom -- consent, will, choice -- but with the idiom of subjugation.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 780
18) What Chase-Riboud clarifies through Langdon's character is how profoundly possessed Hemings has been on multiple levels: possessed by Jefferson as property, possessed by Langdon as object of curiosity, possessed by journalists and muckrakers who coin salacious phrases and tawdry jingles to revile her race and sex, possessed by her own and Jefferson's delusional transpositions of her subjection as romance.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 517
19) Langdon and Trumbull misrecord and destroy the evidence of her life in order to create History, in order to make Sally Hemings, black slave mistress to Thomas Jefferson, disappear from the record. Theirs are actions in the service of a heroic vision of American history, a vision that denies the abuse, rape, and coerced miscegenation practiced by slave masters. Nat Turner too belongs to that heroic vision, fulfilling later what Abigail Adams wishes all slaves to be. Lost from that record of History is essentially the truth of lived lifeâ€"slaves who were not always resistant in ways deemed revolutionary, masters who were never the benign patriarchs of the myths created by recorders of History like Langdon and Trumbull.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Iron" 762
20) On the surface, Sally Hemings is familiar love story gone wrong because of societal restraints. In a nutshell, Suzette Spencer asks us to consider Sally. Should we only feel alarmed or disappointed with Thomas Jefferson's sullied reputation, when his fellow human beings, his property, lived in physical and metaphorical bondage? Spencer discusses the tragedy of slavery in Sally Hemings, specifically that tragedy in the existence of the female slave. Early in her argument, Spencer reiterates the same sentiment most of us have had -- Jefferson's reputation seems to be most at stake, and yet we all feel bothered about Sally's existence and the only context in which we discuss that existence -- scandal. Spencer states, "One wonders, still, whether Sally Heming's humanity as slave and concubine deserves meditation and whether her humanity has ever been an issue for the American public."
Anonymous , Lehigh University
21) Love is called at one point in the novel "that most potent of weapons, the ruler of the mighty as well as the helpless." By suggesting that love is indeed that kind of potent force, governing masters as effectively as it does slaves, Chase-Riboud is positing a power greater than the "master" of the master-slave dialectic. If Chase-Riboud's first point is a Hegelian abstraction that love may indeed be a force above the master-slave dialectic, her second is a Marxist counterpoint that love is also subject to, entangled with, and reflective of those material conditions in which some possess and some are alienated from their bodies and labor.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Iron" 761
22) By having Langdon interview persons whose historical sensibilities are not the same as his own, Chase-Riboud demonstrates the process by which histories are made self-consistent and self-contained narratives.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 117
23) More significantly, the collapsed images of Sally Hemings's lost virginity and the charred corpse of a black male slave evoke one of the central horrors of the fertile slave woman's destiny: her sexual initiation ushers her into a future in which she will repeatedly reproduce her own abjection, giving birth to equally enslaved and vulnerable bodies -- even potential lynch victims.
Laura Dawkins 795-96
24) Suzette Spencer comments that the longevity of Sally and Jefferson's relationship and the freedom granted their children "as an indication of Jefferson and Heming's love for each other, is to sidestep all too smoothly questions of white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny to which Hemings and untold numbers of black men and women were subjected during slavery." She comments further that "what we say about her reveals more about contemporary politics and desires than about hers." Spencer's curiosity delves into Chase-Riboud's "Nathan Langdon," the young census taker who ultimately exercises, once again, white supremacy over Sally. Spencer ends defending why she "read Chase-Riboud against herself . . . to demonstrate how important her historical fiction is to the histories being written about the Jefferson-Hemings liaisons, how important it is to discussions of slavery, master-slave liaisons, black enslaved women's sexuality, gender, and race in US Society." After reading Spencer's article, I am forced to agree with a statement I just read in another new text on our subject, In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal by William Hyland Jr. Early in this text, Hyland comments, "Perhaps, this whole unsettling controversy is another reminder that history is a tragedy, not a morality tale."
Anonymous , Lehigh University
25) One instance of Pollard's argument that I found interesting was her discussion of relationships in Sally's life. Pollard argues that Chase-Riboud "complicates the politics of love, and the passionate undercurrents in the master/slave relationship" (121). She notices Chase-Riboud's comparison of Sally's romantic life to that of her mother's and grandmother's more "realistic" representation of what we expect of a slave narrative. While reading this section of Pollard's article, I couldn't help but realize that Chase-Riboud was delivering the unexpected -- the truth of sorts. While Sally's grandmother wears the "R" on her chest for "runaway," Sally carries her pain psychologically. "The signs of abuse are not on Sally Heming's body; they are in her soul. Sally Hemings' invisible scars beseak her historical invisibility. But as Chase-Riboud imagines it, her suffering is deeply despondent" (122).
Alexandra Neumann, Lehigh University
26) Hunger for things forbidden, darkness and unreason, all elements that comprise the arsenal of stereotypical projections of masterly desires upon black enslaved women â€" are conceptual building blocks in Heming's narrativization of her structured "control."
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 524
27) But Sally Hemings is Black, female, slave, a fact that Riboud never lets the reader forget. And while the character is deluded into believing that she is something more than property, the realization slowly comes to her that she is, and her love for Jefferson becomes an ambiguous, bitter thing.
Ralph Reckley 35
28) The first thing Kaplan pointed out was that 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. What she concludes, instead, is that this was the "terrain of fiction" (778). I think this is a really interesting way of looking at Chase-Riboud's novel -- we have no way of ever actually understanding what really transpired between Jefferson and Hemings besides the likelihood of sex over the course of thirty-eight years. What's to stop anyone from imagining the rest of the details? Any one guess is essentially as legitimate as any other at this point. I guess I kind of felt this to be true all along, but I find it to be a pleasant validation of what Chase-Riboud did in the face of all the critics who accuse her of anything other than simply taking a creative guess at what may have transpired. It also almost makes me wish more writers would step forward and offer various perspectives on the situation or alternative scenarios -- chances are, they are just as likely as Chase-Riboud's story.
Mary O'Reilly, Lehigh University
29) Relative to Chase-Riboud's assessment, Reckley reminds us that "possibly the most valuable character in the novel is Sally herself, for she begins her relationship enamored of her master, and she ends that relationship hating him."
Emma Waters Dawson 11
30) The portrayal of Jefferson's alleged affair with Sally Hemings in novels, films and other discourses demonstrates that the rhetoric of public memory, which preserves the relevance and utility of the past for audiences in the present, is often sustained, not by a transparent or even plausible understanding of former persons and events, but by profound and potentially irresolvable confusions over the relationship between what is commemorated and those doing the commemorating.
Bradford Vivian 285
31) Chase-Riboud probes into this dialectic by having James recognize that the freedom of self is wholly involved in the freedom of others, but she renders that insight problematic by showing us James's inability to recognize, in this case, the differences between a male self and a female Other (his mother, his sister). The peculiar combination of James's sensitivity and his insensitivity, his recognition of the self's involvement with the other and yet his demonstration of the difficulty of seeing the other as other (and not simply a reflection of self), is part and parcel of Chase-Riboud's critique of Hegel and her exposé of the dangers of romanticizing the power of the slave. The slave might well feel something akin to "love," Chase-Riboud suggests, but Chase-Riboud also clearly reveals that the slave remains subject to a panoply of social and material forces that render that intimacy fragile at best.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Iron" 764
32) I've just finished the novel, and I have to say that I was eventually fished in. C-R creates an imaginatively plausible version of Monticello that seems to account for what is known of Jefferson and his behavior toward his slaves, as well as "fill in the blanks" of a 38-year relationship with Hemings. That said, I still wonder if I don't find that the novel strains credulity because I'm so credulous. In the absence of historical explanation, I am I too ready to accept a fictional one. Owner and Owned is not a style of human relationship that I have any context for. I try to imagine what it might have been like to be Jefferson, but there's a missing piece. I do not quite grasp the bonds and boundaries in this "family" of Jefferson's.
Anonymous , Lehigh University
33) However, scholars have redefined their enterprise: no longer intent on establishing whether or not the relationship existed, they have turned their energies to exploring the implications of the liaison for Jefferson's troubled legacy.
Laura Dawkins 793
34) The collisions and collusions of blood and sex that characterized interracial sexual love and miscegenetic reproduction in the antebellum United States can then be understood to index modern racism's reinscription of "the thematic of sexuality in the system of law" through the "analytics of sexuality and the symbolics of blood" (Foucault 149:50). At this material-discursive caesura of sex and death, "the real blood of chains and whips and hatchets" and "the blood of race, polluted, displaced, and disappearing in rape and miscegenation" converge to produce the necessary conditions for the production and reproduction of black social death.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 782
35) Love is called at one point in the novel "that most potent of weapons, the ruler of the mighty as well as the helpless." By suggesting that love is indeed that kind of potent force, governing masters as effectively as it does slaves, Chase-Riboud is positing a power greater than the "master" of the master-slave dialectic. If Chase-Riboud's first point is a Hegelian abstraction that love may indeed be a force above the master-slave dialectic, her second is a Marxist counterpoint that love is also subject to, entangled with, and reflective of those material conditions in which some possess and some are alienated from their bodies and labor.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Iron" 761
36) Juxtaposed to Sally is James Hemings, who refuses to "steal" freedom for himself. He stubbornly refuses to take what he believes is rightfully his. I found myself admiring him and just as I think you all did, held my breath at the dinner party in which Jefferson keeps his promise to James and grants him his freedom. James's freedom allowed him that most sacred of bonds, marriage, as described in Clotel, "the first and last sanctuary of human culture." He refuses to "father more slaves." Fiction or not, Chase-Riboud gives us people to think about because, more than anything, this story has become a human one for me. In a perfect world, we all exist to make others' lives good and happy.
Anonymous , Lehigh University
37) Hence, the contemporary public memory of Jefferson is defined by what I refer to as Jefferson's other: a discursive haunting of his official reputation in which various ghostly counterparts are said to represent what the official record can only suggest.
Bradford Vivian 285
38) Perhaps most notably the author underlines a major dichotomy in Jefferson's political thought: the Jefferson who in a draft of the Declaration of Independence denounced George III for the enslavements of blacks was the same Jefferson who himself persisted in maintaining slave labor.
Larry L. Martin 276
39) "It's all a shocking thing to a historian," Malone said, contemplating the novel's appearance. "It's distressing for anyone who has spent a lifetime trying to find out how things really happened. There is a concern for truth that is almost like a religion. Then things like this come along and there seems to be an utter disregard," he said. "That's the thing we bore down on in the letters, the irresponsibility of it all." As for the possibility of a television program, Malone said grimly, "I don't think I could bear to watch it."
Bill McKelway
40) I echo those who have said that we have to remember that this is a fiction book. Reading this novel is to the historical documents as seeing a movie is to reading its source novel. All of a sudden, the artist's creation becomes "real" in the mind because it walks and talks and has all of those human attributes we've been trying to fill in for ourselves. A lot of her guesses feel right, but maybe that's because they are the guesses we'd like to be right.
Anonymous , Lehigh University
41) As Elizabeth Hemings -- Sally's mother and enslaved concubine before her -- comes to realize, not even legal emancipation can free one from the "dangers of blackness," or provide escape from white terrorism disguised as justice. In an ultimate rejection of the terms by which black social death is produced and maintained, Elizabeth exercises the form of opposition available to her: to die on her own terms.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 783
42) What makes Abigail Adams comfortable is a stock image of a slave as unalterably resistant; what makes her uncomfortable is the image of a slave who acts like a fifteen-year old girl, who in her innocent budding sexuality seems unaware of the system that will rob her of her innocence as it has robbed her of her freedom. Adams is just one of a series of people who wish to reduce, negate, or nullify Sally Hemings.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Iron" 762
43) For James, his sister's loss of her virginity to their master becomes inextricably tied to his own sexual-racial terror: dreams of immolation; genital violation; beheading.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 779
44) At about the half-way point, I feel like Chase-Riboud is doing all she can to exonerate Jefferson short of denying the affair. The mysterious "spell" she casts on Langdon, a man roughly thirty years her junior, suggests that as a young woman Sally would have been virtually irresistible, especially to a man as bereaved and lonely as she makes Jefferson out to be. She sets up an unspoken "can you blame him?" This version of the tale seems to be sympathetic to everyone involved in the extreme.
Anonymous , Lehigh University
45) She can only express her injury and rage through a grammar of love predicated on perfect submission -- submission that paradoxically registers and obfuscates her injury, even as her anger is so profound that she seeks to "strike," "maim," "kill," "cripple," and "paralyze" her master but can only sustain such measures in an imaginary realm.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 527
46) She [Sally] seems to realize that she is both physically and emotionally enslaved and that physical violence, in her case, might not be appreciated, but she vows she would destroy her lover, the enemy, spiritually and psychologically by making him a slave to their love.
Ralph Reckley 36
47) History, then, is more than just Chase-Riboud's field of interest or a major aspect of her novel's settings; it is the "subject" of her novel.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 105
48) In this historical debate, there is little room for fiction as a means of developing an argument. While the idea of romance and mutual love is fun, it does not seem to shed any light on the true story or seem very practical. It is interesting that scholars reacted to a fiction novel so defensively, as if readers were taking the novel as empirical evidence rather than a new take on an old debate.
Anonymous , Lehigh University
49) Dabney's book shows that the scholarly criticism of Brodie's work has not been confined to a "Jefferson establishment." He cites, among others, David Donald's review in Commentary and John C. Miller's book The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. 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.
Noble E. Cunningham 245
50) In Sally Hemings, Chase-Riboud complicates the politics of love, and the passionate undercurrents in the master/slave relationship. The imagined experiences of Sally Heming's life are constructed upon the scaffolding of Thomas Jefferson's official history. . . . Chase-Riboud's historical project considers the possibility of the existence of an alternative historical reality at Monticello.
Cherise A. Pollard 121
51) In the world of Sally Hemings, love does not conquer slavery. Chase-Riboud shows us this memorably in a dialogue between Jefferson and Sally Hemings that boils down to his repeated request to her: "Love me and remain a slave" (269).
Ashraf Rushdy, "Iron" 762
52) We have to remember not to give too much credence to the viewpoints and events depicted in the novel. I think it's a good read for its own purposes, but I would be careful not to put this alongside our historical accounts, writings from historians, etc. While we may enjoy reading this more than the "dry" writings, it's not "fact."
Anonymous , Lehigh University
53) Both Sally Hemings and Langdon think Turner is the nullifier of their lives -- but there is a difference. Whereas Sally Hemings uses the realization of her nullified life to draw strength from the image of Turner and comprehend the contradiction in her life, Langdon sees his life nullified because Virginia will never be the same again.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 115
54) Read against the grain, Chase-Riboud's historical romance reveals the contours of a radically reconfigured conception of love as it functions within the context of raced and gendered subjugations. The erotic love between master and slave depicted in Sally Hemings neither mitigates white coercion nor reaffirms black humanity. Indeed the ties of love between Jefferson and Sally Hemings in Chase-Riboud's novel are not only coeval with the bonds of ownership, but are one in the same.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 779
55) Some Americans view the results [of the DNA tests] as indicative of contradictions upon which the nation was founded and as an attestation of Jefferson's common humanity. Instead of crying "tragedy," they assert, we might consider his sexual history an opportunity to rethink the nation's intertwined racial and cultural tendencies.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 507
56) Most impressive to me was the strength of a connection I began to feel towards Sally as Chase-Riboud guided us along Hemings' romantic and emotional rollercoaster ride with the Jefferson family. Prior to reading this novel I had tended to associate with literary characters similar to myself (read: white males). Thus it is with no limited amount of wonder that I must admit Riboud's Sally Hemings into my pantheon of most-favored characters such as Jack Burden, Randle McMurphy, Jake Barnes, and Amory Blaine. Chase-Riboud does far more than simply forge a strong protagonist/reader bond, however; she also uses said bond to explore some truly novel and fascinating angles of the Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings affair. Of most interest to me was her conception of love through Sally's eyes. Love as something to be survived (38 years of it in this instance) rather than embraced is powerful to begin with, but when coupled with just how much sense it makes in light of the Master/Slave relationship existing between the two, it is downright horrific.
Anonymous , Lehigh University
57) What Langdon does when he misrecords the color of Sally Heming's body is, first, to demonstrate his attitude toward history and the written documents he believes make up the historical record and, second, to appropriate Sally Heming's past and radically transform her future. Langdon figures that since what is officially written is believed to be true, he, in effect, can change the story by rewriting its characters in an official document. To do so, he replicates what Thomas Jefferson had done in his documents.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 109
58) The central theme in Sally Hemings, however, is miscegenation and the effect of the power of love between slave master and concubine, manifested not only through the relationship between the fictional Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings but also through other relationships: public official-slave, parent-child (master and slave), slave woman-slave mistress, slave mother-daughter, slave master-slave mistress, and male-female slave.
Emma Waters Dawson 2
59) Sex and scandal can be exploited to great financial advantage. The public will always believe the story.
Dumas Malone, qtd. in Harden
60) As tragic as it is to see a soul so antagonized and suppressed by love, it is almost equally sad to watch the once "great" Jefferson family and estate crumble after its patriarch's passing. The unwaveringly brutal depiction of Martha in the closing pages is especially critical to understanding Chase-Riboud's view of the Jefferson family. As Martha verbally lashes out at Sally with some of the most hateful vitriol imaginable, the reader begins to feel full-force the author's true sentiments towards the state of racial relations at this dark time in American history. Whites like the younger Martha Jefferson who truly believed that blacks were nothing more than "chattel,"convenient slave paramours," or simple "receptacles" appear to occupy a special space in Chase-Riboud's mind as the most despicable individuals to ever live. And rightly so. One must wonder, however, just how much better of a human-being does Riboud see Thomas Jefferson as relative to his demonic daughter?
Anonymous , Lehigh University
61) But by complicating what appears to be a choice, by making consent seem not so simply consensual, Chase-Riboud does remind us that all choices are made in social contexts where there is an unequal distribution of power. And where the particular context is a slave society, and the inequality in that distribution is premised on the roles of master and slave, those choices made by people to enslave themselves or remain enslaved are, in the end, not choices but a different kind of act that we might perhaps have no name to give, although the description Chase-Riboud offers, consent not chosen, is certainly compelling.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Iron" 768
62) Rather than resolve whether Sally Hemings loved her master or consented to their sexual relationship, Sally Hemings portrays a romance between enslaved concubine and American president which troubles the underlying premise that erotic love relies upon or evidences the lover's capacity to consent, and, thus, her relative individual freedom.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 778
63) The mulatta is the physical manifestation of white, male America's libertine manners -- and of its strident refusal to acknowledge patrimony.
Emma Waters Dawson 3
64) The Martha-Sally relationship reminds me of a scenario I have seen in modern television shows dozens of times. A single father takes up the young mistress only months or years different in age from his daughter and the daughter gets jealous. And understandably so -- what daughter wants to imagine her father having sex with a woman she could have gone to school with, been friends or even sisters with.
Sarah Freeman, Lehigh University
65) The book is titled "Sally Hemings," and this is what the advertising blubs say: "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."
Bill McKelway
66) During the course of the novel, Chase-Riboud moves Hemings through a maturing of vision and insight into herself, mirroring every woman's journey from pliable male-identified dependency to a womanhood of lingering ambivalence; if not rage.
Susan McHenry 37
67) Whatever the eventual outcome of the debate, it is certain Jefferson's reputation as a major contributor to the American tradition is secure. Dabney rightly points out that his achievements in the creation of democracy, education, government, science, law, and other fields put him in the pantheon of America's great leaders.
Timothy M. Mathewson 74
68) Sally often refers to Jefferson as "master." Though he was her master, we get a sense throughout the book, at times at least, that they are equal, I wonder if Chase-Riboud throws this in to subtly remind readers that they actually aren't. Not just in the technical sense of master-slave but in the romantic sense as well.
Samantha Feinberg, Lehigh University
69) The mystique has the effect of redeeming Jefferson, despite his own paranoia about miscegenation and although Hemings was, according to the law of the day, Jefferson's property. Fetishizing the image of Hemings as nearly white with long, straight hair (as beautiful, according to Eurocentric standards) neutralizes, on the one hand, persisting anxieties over the notion of a sexual affair between Jefferson and a black woman while deflecting attention, on the other hand, from the fact that Hemings was Jefferson's slave.
Bradford Vivian 289
70) In her recent critical study on the construction of "whiteness" in the American literary imagination, Toni Morrison points out how "Africanist narrative (that is, the story of a black person ...)" is manipulated in order to be used "in the construction of a history and a context for whites by positing historylessness and contextlessness for blacks."
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 110
71) As I have argued elsewhere, the contemporary neoslave narrative is at its core a revisionary textual practice. Both formal revisions of the antebellum fugitive slave narrative and revisionary historiographies of chattel slavery in the Americas, neoslave narratives interrogate the processes through which both historical knowledge and racial subjects are produced, mediated, and articulated.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 774
72) I don't believe for a second that Chase-Riboud's description of the first sexual contact is how that scenario went down: "His presence for me was command enough; I took control of him" (102). Chase-Riboud gives Sally a ridiculous amount of power in her seduction of Jefferson. It just seems unlikely that a fourteen-year-old girl who was consistently in a role of submission because of her sex and race would be capable of seducing a man of Jefferson's age, reputation, and celebrity.
Alexandra Neumann, Lehigh University
73) In this case, writing does not create a familial division; it creates the potential for a renewal of blood kin. Just as Jefferson's letters had caused her to forget blood bonds, so Callender's reports cause her to remember them. She responds by recognizing the power she now holds -- the power of slaves to tell stories about masters' indiscretions or to maintain silence.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 129
74) Hemings's fated matrilineage of concubinage portends the restricted conditions of her existentiality, but most revealing is her rendition of how her master exercises terror in and through terms of affection. . . . The absence of harsh words obfuscates the distinction between coercive violence and voluntary affection and produces instead violence as affection -- violence through affection -- and the slave's submission, which passes as consent.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 525
75) Back home in Paris after his trip is over, Jefferson once again becomes the ardent lover. He has just run his tongue along Sally's delicate backbone and has groaned "Mon Dieu." But at the height of his embrace, he sees not Sally Hemings, but Hagar, and he becomes the Biblical patriarch founding a family as it was destined by Jehovah.
Ralph Reckley 37
76) It does kind of bother me the way Chase-Riboud depicts Jefferson when he tells her about his failure to include the abolition of slavery in the Declaration, and this serves as a reminder that this is, in fact, a novel -- not a memoir or journal. I couldn't quite keep out of my head his "Notes on the State of Virginia" and all the racist comments he made there, considering blacks to be an inferior race, and I just didn't buy this. All this aside, though, This scene does play well into the romantic relationship between Jefferson and Sally and how this romance was actually possible. If Jefferson did feel so strongly that "one-sixth of our nation," i.e. the black population, was "created equal" and thus deserved "the same liberty" as the other five-sixths, then there would have been no moral issue with him having an affair with a black woman (regardless of her actual skin color).
Samantha Feinberg, Lehigh University
77) The exploration of the theme of miscegenation and the effect of the power of lover between slave master and concubine illustrate the pervasive influence such an illegal liaison had not only upon the fictional loves but also upon others, such as the white male census taker, the slave children, the white mistress, the black slave mother, and even the black male slave.
Emma Waters Dawson 11
78) He [Langdon] refuses to acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson could be guilty of miscegenation -- a tabooed practice if acknowledged publicly.
Emma Waters Dawson 5
79) Despite the conventions of romance with which it is often decorated, the Jefferson-Hemings folklore contains many elements disquieting to conventional sensibilities.
Bradford Vivian 295
80) Something else I was thinking about while reading this section was how fictional this all obviously is. Neither we nor Barbara Chase-Riboud know anything about Harriet Hemings -- especially not how old she was when she lost her virginity, how her relationship with her father was, what her departure was like, or really anything beyond the fact that she existed. The fact that TJ defenders got in such a huff over this book seems so . . . foolish, I guess? I'm not exactly sure what the right word would be. I just feel like anyone can recognize that Chase-Riboud obviously isn't trying to pass this off as non fiction -- and thus should not actually treat as someone's attempt at an empirically correct history book. I am very curious to see how historians actually responded to and argued "against" this.
Mary O'Reilly, Lehigh University
81) It might seem wrong-headed to speak of "silence" as a potent tool because it is so often used to represent acquiescence or powerlessness. It might seem especially contradictory to speak of silence as an enabling act in a novel I have so far argued to be a novel about the pursuit of voice. But for Sally Hemings silence is precisely what she can use most effectively to hurt her master.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 130
82) A pinprick in the master's eyes, the slave's recognition of herself in the master or of the master as the self foregrounds her existence as property, the animated extension of the master's desire, a perfect and faithful slave who is in fact the master's fantasy. Narrating her reflection of self in her master's eyes, Hemings functions doubly as both subject and object, affirming the irrefutably of his vision -- mirroring his vision -- and her interpellation in it.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 522
83) Sally Hemings maintains a deafening silence as she strives to protect the identity of her child's father. In a cruel irony, she protects the identity of Jefferson, a Founding Father of the new Republic, while simultaneously blocking their just claim to their patrimony as sons of the founder. The post-revolutionary setting of the novel serves to heighten the irony.
Emma Waters Dawson 7
84) At some moments, Sally is so powerful. In others, she's a creature. It's so frustrating.
Stephanie DeLuca, Lehigh University
85) Reprinted several times over the past thirty years, and again this year in its anniversary, Sally Hemings continues to draw attention in light of several factors: ongoing debates over the nature and substance of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the DNA results which indicate that Jefferson may indeed have fathered one of Hemings's children, oral lore from the Hemings family, and critical interest in issues of race, gender, sex, identity-formation, and power in slave societies and American history.
Suzette Spencer, "Abrading" 712-13
86) Chase-Riboud has developed Sally Hemings as moving away from the complicitous romantic slave girl who became intimately attached to the founding father; rather she has become bitter and rebellious. . . . Chase-Riboud frees her from a lifetime of oppression.
Cherise A. Pollard 120
87) What's the use of us [historians] trying to get history straight?
Dumas Malone, qtd. in Harden
88) Both the Spencer and the Kaplan article talked about how Sally the slave cannot be separated from Sally the lover. That her role as a server of Jefferson is inextricably linked to her submission to him. I found this interesting from a psychological standpoint. We have been discussing the idea of romance, but according to these articles this could not have been possible given Sally Hemings's mindset as Jefferson's slave. What the articles suggest is that Sally's desire to please Jefferson as a lover are a result of her desires to please him as a slave. She grew up as his slave, it is the only thing she ever knew, and therefore would not have been able to separate her duties from her desires. I think the Chase-Riboud novel addresses this idea with the reoccurring idea of Sally not being able to love. At the end of the novel during an argument with Martha, Hemings says she, like her mother, had "beat love." This is in reference to her relationship with Jefferson, and how she never loved him. But given the contingencies the articles suggest, her love for him could have only ever been the love of slave to master, not the romantic love of equals.
Sarah Freeman, Lehigh University
89) The ubiquity of the romantic genre in contemporary portrayals of the Jefferson-Hemings affair is symptomatic of a desire to humanize and redeem Jefferson, to remember him neither by his raciest attributes nor as a man who would force himself upon Sally Hemings when she was a mere teenager.
Bradford Vivian 289
90) Chase-Riboud portrays this story of miscegenation with sensitivity and restraint that removes it from the pulp tradition of Mandingo and places it in its rightful realm of serious complexity. But Sally Hemings is no epic of assimilation. The couple in Chase-Riboud's book are genuine archetypes: like the House of Atreus, Monticello contained a mythic drama -- this time of the American racial family.
Susan McHenry 37
91) Sally Hemings never gives Jefferson the reply he hoped for; she gives him no reply at all. She responds to his dying question in precisely the same way she had responded to his "abstraction" of George's murder -- with a "whole kingdom of silence." He dies without knowing, without hearing from her, that she has loved him. That is the final (unspoken) word on their relationship.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 130
92) Rushdy spoke about slavery rendering Love impossible, yet at the same time, Love re-enacts the relations of slavery. And this is an interesting idea when in the Jefferson-Hemings context. How much of their relationship was love? Did this love also have some qualities of enslavement? Sally submits to Jefferson in intimate ways that slavery never could, and she does so in the name of Love; most noticeable when she gives up freedom in France to be a slave in Virginia. And this was the main point of Rushdy's article, how slavery distrorts human and sexual intimacies.
Kristen Dalton, Lehigh University
93) But because Sally Hemings was widely marketed as a "romance" and served as the basis for titillating films about "forbidden love," Chase-Riboud's decidedly dark vision of antebellum and postwar American society -- as well as her demonstration of black women's resistance to slavery -- has frequently been minimized or obscured in critical appraisals of her work.
Laura Dawkins 793
94) If African chattel slavery in the United States simultaneously "affirmed the self-identity and liberty of whites and, conversely, denied the self-identity and liberty of blacks," then passing, like interracial erotic love, must be understood not as an "exercise of liberty or self-identity" but as an act chosen within the coercive conditions that predicated the nominal freedom from social death on the obliteration of black identity.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 785
95) The slave girl's sense of powerlessness leaves her the constrained "options" of hastening or delaying the moment of seizure but no safe exit from her master's dominion. Paradoxically, then, she becomes both the seeming agent and object of her own subjection, and narrating the event punctuates this crisis.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 522
96) In regards to Langdon, it seems that although he did question what Sally told him, it was as if he had to list her as white because otherwise he could not have any kind of relationship with her. If he listed her as black, then he could never take her voice seriously. It is just so remarkable to think of how Langdon rationalized his feelings about Sally (and her relationship with Jefferson) based on the color of her skin. Even if he knew she could be black, it was better to list her as white because then he could really believe that Jefferson was not involved in a miscegenation relationship.
Abigail Harris-Shea, Lehigh University
97) Riboud forces us to take note of the complex and sometimes ambiguous emotions that surge through the female slaves as they try to understand their environment, and to control their destiny.
Ralph Reckley 35
98) Jefferson's other is always double: both the enigma of his racial, economic, and sexual other (Hemings) and the silhouette of a Jefferson nowhere present in official history.
Bradford Vivian 285
99) In fairness, it is imperative to bear in mind, of course, that Chase-Riboud's viewpoints on the Jefferson-Hemings question have been shaped by her contentions with historians' and the American public's anti-black and anti-"miscegenation" sentiments and by the need to refute historically engrained ideas of a purely white America and an untarnished Jefferson.
Suzette Spencer, "Abrading" 714
100) By encouraging Chase-Riboud to write Sally Hemings, Jackie [Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of president John F. Kennedy] had given a woman who had never spoken before a historical voice. She had also placed a president and his mistress on the page without feeling any of the scandal or awe or intimidation or prurience that such a subject usually inspires.
William Kuhn 74
101) One of the deeper problems involved in Langdon's quest is his motive. He seeks out these interviews [Adams, Burr, Trumbull] not to get additional information, but to "authenticate" the story he has heard from Sally Hemings with the testimony of three white men.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 119
102) Simultaneously embedded in and disloyal to national historical narratives and/or racially authentic truths, Sally Hemings's miscegenetic merging of the historical and the fictional, black and white, has been deemed illegitimate by both the standards of historical facticity and of fictional authenticity. A historical fiction that is at once too historical and too fictional, it has been largely relegated to the margins of the burgeoning body of scholarship on contemporary narratives of slavery.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 777
103) Using Barbara Chase-Riboud's neoslave narrative Sally Hemings, this essay engages these questions from a feminist perspective by exploring the formation and articulation of enslaved black women's sexual desire and agency within master-slave relations, the psychic and socio-cultural parameters that define rape and romance, and the legibility of coercion and submission in captive sexual relations -- what I call coersubmission.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 508
104) As I read through the novel, I find myself going through phases of getting lost in it and thinking it's real. However, perhaps because of all the content we've read up to this point (primary documents, essays, etc) there are definitely reminders throughout the way that it is fiction. It's important to finally give Sally a voice, but it's important to remember that this isn't her actual voice. Even aside from Sally, it gives TJ a defined personality and a voice as well, and I've been thinking it might be even more important to remember that this is not his actually voice either.
Samantha Feinberg, Lehigh University
105) Like Clymnestra she [Sally] makes the bed of love a net to enslave, to entrap and to destroy the lover. This is the love-hate syndrome that Riboud suggests is at the bottom of such master-slave relationships.
Ralph Reckley 36
106) Sally Hemings has first to come to the realization that her past has been made fodder for Langdon's imagination and his will to record her as he wishes her to be. The image Chase-Riboud chooses to describe that realization is one mixing ideas of propertylessness and violent sexual violation. "She owned nothing, except the past. And now, even that had been taken from her. She had been raped of the only thing a slave possessed: her mind, her thoughts, her feelings, her history."
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 112
107) Modern accounts of Jefferson and Hemings, from Fawn Brodie's book to Jefferson in Paris, depict their relationship as a passionate romance induced by the fairy tale context in which it supposedly began.
Bradford Vivian 285
108) Barbara Chase-Riboud's work is as challenging as it is inspiring. She is an artist who is unafraid of contradiction, conflict, and multiplicity. "If you have to have acceptance," she says, "then you shouldn't be an artist. There is no such thing as an 'acceptable artist.'"
Suzette Spencer, "Abrading" 711
109) It is worth pointing out here that the terms of division in Sally Hemings, especially the division in communicative modes, are complex. This is not a simple narrative about the struggle between a print medium which violates the African-American subject and an oral relation which heals and maintains the integrity of an African-American subject. In other words, this is not a novel that posits a clearly marked confrontation between an originally pure orality and a violating literacy. For one thing, Langdon has listened to Sally Hemings's stories and will listen to the stories of Trumbull, Burr, and Quincy Adams. Moreover, Sally Hemings is also a writer. Not only does she keep a journal during her childhood years in France, but she even rewrites that journal in her adulthood: "I could hardly write at the time. . . . I have since copied those first attempts over" (37). Writing for Sally Hemings is indeed a political issue and not an epistemological or ontological one. Like other contemporary African-American writers representing the tension between literacy and orality, Chase-Riboud represents writing as that which often co-opts and undermines oral subjectivity. In particular, writing as institution -- which, as Williams notes, has "betrayed" the African-American community -- represents what Michele Wallace helpfully terms the "long tradition of the structural 'silence' of women of color" (242).
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 113
110) If the response to Sally Hemings in popular media and by early American historians has all too often emphasized the novel's failure to meet the standards of historical facticity, then its marginalization within African American literary studies can be tied, at least in part, to its failure to adequately portray a kind of racial truth.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 775-76
111) Inasmuch as Jefferson had defined himself by his property, including Sally, so does the sale of Monticello's amenities and slaves become the auction of his life.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 132
112) Although Sally Hemings disappoints her mother by refusing to claim her freedom in France, she not only procures the promise of her children's liberty but also subverts Jefferson's authority as "master" in numerous ways: by using the rare privilege of slave literacy to write the fugitive James Hubbard a pass out of Monticello (263); by providing her eldest son Thomas with money to "stroll" from the plantation before the stipulated age of twenty-one (277); by refusing to tell Jefferson the whereabouts of their son Beverly, who has also "strolled" (309); and by speaking French rather than English with her children "all their lives" (The President's Daughter 4), thus repudiating the language identified with her oppression and instead claiming the native tongue of France, a language she associates with her freedom in Paris.
Laura Dawkins 801
113) On its surface, Sally Hemings tells the story of a "nearly-white," beautiful and privileged mulatta protected from the more severe ravages of slavery by the love of her powerful master.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 777
114) Still, contradictory elements perturb romance. Do we witness the weak seducing the powerful, or the powerful seducing the weak, or is this formulation all too simple? Do we see a slave girl "fucked tenderly," enraptured by the thrill and the rewards to follow? What is legible in Heming's rendering of her sexual encounter: rape, romance, terror, pleasure, or some composite phenomena that might be best described as coersubmission to tender yet dominative force?
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 524
115) In discussing the potential violence of an oppressed people, Frantz Fanon says that the oppressed might be made to feel inferior, but he is never convinced of his inferiority. . . . According to Fanon, years of oppression keeps the oppressed in an angry state.
Ralph Reckley 36
116) No longer the invisible woman, Hemings calls into question the irrational basis for the racial stereotypes that trap her outside of history.
Emma Waters Dawson 7
117) For Langdon, Jefferson is a "permanent fixture in American history" while Sally Hemings is a slave and a woman "despised for her color and her caste." Jefferson is dead and part of the historical record, while Sally Hemings is "still alive, and so had to be counted."
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 105
118) Jefferson himself becomes something other by virtue of his association with the mystery of Hemings, as if he must have succumbed to his own tortured alter ego in order to father several of the children. Hence, Jefferson's other is always double: both the enigma of his racial, economic, and sexual other (Hemings) and the silhouette of a Jefferson nowhere present in official history. Although we may never know the nature of whatever feelings existed between Jefferson and Hemings, contemporary discourse about their relationship is driven by a persistent desire to explore the possibility of mutual affection. If Jefferson and Hemings are imagined to have borne a deep fondness for one another, especially over a period of thirty-eight years, the memory of their relationship acquires the mystique of romance.
Bradford Vivian 289
119) Perhaps it is simply the guilt of holding people in bondage in a republic truly devoted to liberty and equality that makes these charges against Jefferson a historical perennial. If this is true, perhaps the charges against him will be forgotten (after 200 years there is reason to doubt they will ever be resolved) when Americans lose their sensitivity to such questions.
Timothy M. Mathewson 74
120) In a forcefully argued brief, Dabney has provided for a broad audience the available evidence regarding Sally Hemings and exposed the fallacies of many of Brodie's speculations. Marshalling the critiques of others and adding his own responses, he has uncovered the flimsy scaffolding that supports her most controversial contentions. Dabney does not claim to be a Jefferson expert but seeks to acquaint his readers with the verdicts of Jefferson scholars, particularly Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and Julian Boyd.
Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., "Virginius Dabney's The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal" 245
121) The sale of a Thomas Jefferson on the auction block shorn of "his history" is an apt and beautiful conclusion to a memorial which demythologizes the subjects of "History." Thomas Jefferson, in Sally Hemings's recollection, was as vulnerable and as human as any of the slaves he kept. And, in the end, she cannot forgive him, the author of the Declaration of Independence, for having kept them -- and her.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 132
122) In tracing the adult experiences of Harriet Hemings, allegedly the only daughter of Jefferson and Hemings, Chase-Riboud demonstrates how slavery -- and the sexual exploitation of black women within slavery -- have disrupted kinship structures and wrought lasting devastation upon the African American family.
Laura Dawkins 793
123) Jefferson's love for Sally Hemings in not merely enacted through violence, but is a form of violence itself; it exists only though the ultimate negation, or social death, of the love object. Sally Heming's love for Jefferson indexes the myriad forms of labor -- domestic, biological, sexual and affective -- through which enslaved black females reproduced both the black subjects and the black social death that were the necessary preconditions for African chattel slavery's continuation.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 782
124) [The purpose of the novel is to reclaim Sally Hemings from her current role] as "a national symbol of noxious blackness."
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory"
125) But Jefferson does not see Sally as a human being, an equal partner in the love act. At the height of his passion when he takes her virginity, he sees and feels his dead wife, Martha
Ralph Reckley 37
126) A rhetoric of silence undermines the ideology in the slave community. Truth is corrupted; motherhood is a lie, for it is incompatible with the ideology of slavery. Placed in an untenable position, the slave mother tries to comply with her dual and contradictory roles as worker and concubine.
Emma Waters Dawson 6
127) Jefferson, the man, and Monticello, the place, exert an intractable gravitational pull on all characters and events in Sally Hemings.
Larry L. Martin 275
128) The modern era's unceasing fascination with Jefferson has dramatically and irrevocably transformed his image. The refractions of Jefferson's original likeness, the phantoms of rumor, the portraits of Jefferson's other, are reflections of ourselves.
Bradford Vivian 299
129) She [Chase-Riboud] is part of a long line of cosmopolitan African American artists who, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, have traveled to Europe in search of artistic opportunities and training and in contestation of United States racial proscriptions.
Suzette Spencer, "Abrading" 712
130) The signs of abuse are not on Sally Heming's body; they are in her soul. Sally Heming's invisible scars bespeak her historical invisibility.
Cherise A. Pollard 122
131) Chase-Riboud supplements the "old documents" that undergird "dominant narratives" with an oral memory which is relentlessly democratic: "All were equal before it." Sally Hemings's memory acts as that supplement which recuperates how she and her mother Elizabeth Hemings and her brother James Hemings felt about their lives at the same time as she provides her children with "some memory" to prevent the potential "silence" of the future.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 134
132) Rather than identifying with the world of racial privilege which she has infiltrated, Harriet's strongest loyalties clearly remain with the oppressed group whose wrongs she is now -- as a white woman -- able to address openly. Her role as an advocate for African Americans -- "speaking for every black man, woman, and child that had ever been born" (257) -- suggests that Harriet's assumption of "whiteness" serves as a strategic means of gaining political agency.
Laura Dawkins 800
133) If, as Patterson suggests, the "direct and insidious violence, the namelessness and invisibility, the endless personal violation, and the chronic inalienable dishonor" of social death in slavery make "authentic human relationships," including those of "genuine" love, impossible, then what sense can be made of Chase-Riboud's fictional love between Sally Hemings and her master? Within the rubric of (hetero)normative romantic love, in which the coercive terror of slavery is rendered illegible by the rhetoric of tender romance, such a love is unimaginable.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 782
134) A critical feminist perspective might suggest, alternately, that rather than deploy longevity as a premise upon which voluntarist narratives of interracial sex and romance can be constructed, we consider it an invitation to question the possible extent of Heming's subjection on multiple psychological and physical levels. Foreclosing these disquieting issues, as plantation apologists once did, puts us one step from positing that slaves loved slavery and its benefits--certainly not our objective.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 514
135) By examining the motions and the emotions of her [Riboud's] characters, she has revealed the ambivalent feelings of love and hate that surge through master and slave.
Ralph Reckley 42
136) A large part of what Chase-Riboud does is challenge the conventions of the American historiographical tradition that lead Sally Hemings to make this particular distinction between the significance of her life and Jefferson's. Sally Hemings's reflections on her role in "History" suggest how historiography itself fails to achieve a satisfactory representativeness.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 105
137) Rescuing Sally Hemings and her daughter from that complex and double-edged silence, Chase-Riboud creates both a disturbing portrait of black maternal dispossession and an affirmative vision of matrilineal survival.
Laura Dawkins 806
138) By depicting Jefferson and Heming's relationship as not just erotic but romantic, Chase-Riboud unsettles the Manichean binary of love and coercion, calling into question the meaning and limits of erotic love and black subjection.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 774
139) Even to think of Hemings as a "person in history" begs contemplation, for as Jefferson's slave she was a subject that was no subject: she was no "person" in the social or legal sense that Jefferson was nor in the sense that the term is understood today.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 509
140) As the slave mistress of Jefferson, Hemings was placed in a highly contradictory position -- connected, yet excluded from the dominant discourse of American politics.
Emma Waters Dawson 1
141) Chase-Riboud offers us a wonderful image to capture Sally Hemings's ambivalence between her regret and her emergent sense of wholeness: "She opened drawer after drawer of memories, which she rearranged, changed, aired, discussed, and counted, like linen."
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 110
142) The slave mother's impossible dilemma, as Hemings implicitly recognizes, is that, by developing a strong affective bond with her childrenâ€"specifically her daughterâ€"she risks that daughter's inability or unwillingness to free herself from a maternal model of submission and victimization
Laura Dawkins 797
143) Yet if Chase-Riboud's novelistic renderings of Sally and Harriet Hemings provide an opportunity to re-examine the meaning of freedom and subjugation within African chattel slavery, so too do they enable a reconsideration of the possibility of black liberation outside of those structures.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 787
144) If, as a nation, we regard Thomas Jefferson as a founding father, what might it mean if we considered the relation between Jefferson and Sally Hemings as a founding violence, an inagural racial and sexual encounter, complicated surely, but suggestive of the violent subject formation of blacks in the American republic.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 508
145) By depicting the various interactions between slave and master, black and white, and male and female through shifts in consciousness and dialogue between characters, Chase-Riboud transforms Sally Hemings into a vehicle of rage directed not only against the ironies present in Thomas Jefferson's personal "history" but also against the principles of the Founding Fathers, resulting in her empowerment of a black female slave protagonist never freed by her master and lover.
Emma Waters Dawson 2
146) She [Chase-Riboud] insists, "Art makes history. It does not explain history."
Suzette Spencer, "Abrading" 713
147) Because Jefferson exists as a "fixture in American history," his past should be beyond reproach. To ensure that the historical record sustains the image of that imaginary hero, Langdon has to remove Sally Hemings from history.
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 110
148) Historians and media pundits alike agreed; the questions of how? and why? that were raised ad infinitum in the wake of the answer to if? were ones unsuitable for historians or geneticists to answer. Such questions, most finally concurred, were the terrain not of history, but of fiction.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 778
149) For the fugitive daughter who passes into white society, the severance from the mother represents both an opportunity to reconstruct a devalued identity and a devastating orphanhood.
Laura Dawkins 799
150) Embracing and troubling concepts such as romance, consent, and non-consent through ambivalent scenes of coercion, submission, and agency, Sally Hemings lends itself to interpretations as a chronicle of romance on the one hand and a chronicle of terror on the other. It asks us to consider 1) the psychic and socio-cultural parameters that define rape and romance and 2) the imbrications of coercion and submission in captive sexual relations, an entanglement we might call coersubmission.
Suzette Spencer, "Abrading" 713-14
151) When Sally Hemings is awakened to reflection on her life by meeting Nathan Langdon, the census taker for Albemarle County, she thinks of herself, for the first time, as part of a larger narrative structure: "She had lived a life; she was startled to perceive that life [in] the midst of tremendous events called History" (47). Following the discovery that she is part of such a structure of events, Sally Hemings begins to trace the relation her life has to "History." The way she does so is to see the relation between her personal life -- referred to as "my real history" (63) -- and her lover's public life, referred to as "History." At the end of the novel, she thinks that she has escaped the grasp of the past and transcended the demands of the future, imagining herself to be "beyond love, beyond passion, beyond History" (343).
Ashraf Rushdy, "Tongues" 105
152) To dwell on the normativity of antebellum interracial sexual liaisons and cite the longevity of the Jefferson-Hemings liaison and the freedom it guaranteed Heming's children as an indication of Jefferson and Hemings's love for each other, is to sidestep all too smoothly questions of white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny to which Hemings and untold numbers of black men and women were subjected during slavery.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 514
153) Miscegenation is the scarlet letter of national shame.
Emma Waters Dawson 3
154) [Speaking of the proposed mini-series,] it will be a mockery of history.
Dumas Malone, qtd. in Harden
155) Chase-Riboud exposes her labor's skeletal frame: She openly concedes to her narrative's risks, its creative license, and spaces of uncertainty. In so doing, she unmasks historical conceit with a noteworthy caveat: the impossibility of certain recovery in any historical project that attempts to reconstruct or represent the interior lives of enslaved black women who were structured into invisibility and silence.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 512-13
156) In Sally Hemings, imaginative history has opened up exciting and challenging representational possibilities which allow writers and scholars to imagine various possibilities for constructing African American pasts.
Cherise A. Pollard 126
157) By portraying the alleged affair from a new perspective, that of Hemings herself, Barbara Chase-Riboud's 1979 novel Sally Hemings represented a pivotal effort to render Hemings with a fuller palette. In the words of Scot French and Edward Ayers, Chase-Riboud used fiction "to supply what document-based history could not"; fiction gave her license to narrate, through long inner monologues, the psychology and emotions of Sally Hemings.
Bradford Vivian 290
158) Further, it seems critical to consider more than Hemings's racialized desirability or her acceptance of any advances that Jefferson might have made, and to remember that slavery was first and foremost a condition of force, whether brutally or benignly exercised. A master's will often manifested in the compliances of his slave, and while plantation slavery depended upon paternalist discourses of affection that masqueraded as evidence of its benefits, the institution was grounded in threats of violence and punishment that were inextricably tethered to "loving" sentiment and submission.
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 511
159) While this work [Chase-Riboud's novel] illuminates the thirty-eight year liaison between Hemings and Jefferson, if could perhaps more validly have been titled, in light of the considerable attention given to Jefferson and the emphasis put upon Monticello and the life thereupon, Jefferson: A Monticello Perspective.
Larry L. Martin 275
160) The trope of a romantic affair between Jefferson and his slave thus allowed Chase-Riboud to portray Hemings, for the first time, with a multidimensional persona.
Bradford Vivian 290
161) In both Sally Hemings and The President's Daughter, Chase-Riboud reminds us that to construe the historical silences surrounding African American women of the antebellum era as evidence of their acceptance of or accommodation to slavery is to grossly oversimplify and misrepresent black women's lives. When Hemings, accompanying her son Eston to Jerusalem, Virginia, to witness Nat Turner's martyrdom, "scream[s] that Turner is accusing her of something, but she was not guilty," she suggests that her life as a slave concubine has concealed the same spirit of resistance embodied in more spectacular acts of heroism: "She raised her hand above her head as one does in drowning, but it was really to signal Nat Turner that he was not alone."
Laura Dawkins 805
162) But what if we dispensed with guarding Jefferson from the charge of miscegenation and took up instead the sensitive but much needed line of inquiry that interrogates the forms of power that might occasion such an asymmetrical sexual relation? The symbol of Jefferson as metonym and synecdoche for freedom and whiteness in continually wagered against Hemings as a symbol of black abjection, but can we permit ourselves as a nation to consider Hemings's humanity and the violence of slavery?
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory" 512
163) Will television viewers remember Jefferson as a consistently temperate man who guided a nation, or, as Ms. Brodie has written, as a man who felt a "normal need for sexual fulfillment coupled with his attraction for the forbidden"? Knowing the state of television today, Malone suggested the result is predictable. "Think of the millions of people," he said.
Bill McKelway
164) Her mixed ancestry not only adds to the plausibility of Jefferson's attraction to Hemings, who may have reminded him of his dead wife. But, as Barbara points out, it further complicates the story's significance. Since both Hemings' father and maternal grandfather were white, "you can imagine what color she really was," the author remarks. For precisely that reason, one wonders whether Black readers are likely to be as offended by the notion that a slave woman actually loved her master as some whites are by the thought of Jefferson loving his slave.
Judith Wilson 13
165) The publication in 1974 of Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History attracted widespread attention. In a period when a presidential coverup had recently been exposed, a large audience was receptive to suggestions that for years Jefferson biographers had covered up an illicit relationship between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, whom he had allegedly kept as a mistress for thirty-eight years and who had borne him five children. One reviewer even found the book "the best-rounded single-volume biography" of Jefferson.
Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., "Virginius Dabney's The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal" 244
166) But the interesting question is, why are Americans still discussing this question after a period of 200 years? There is enough evidence to make the charges against Jefferson plausible. There is enough evidence to make Dabney's case plausible. But aside from the evidence, perhaps Americans still discuss the question because race and "race mixture" still agitate Americans.
Timothy M. Mathewson 74
167) If the vision of Jefferson and Hemings as tragic lovers satisfies a contemporary desire to humanize and cleanse the memory of Jefferson, then this same romantic discourse also facilitates a reciprocal desire to rescue Hemings from historical caricature and racist stereotype. Romantic iterations of the Jefferson-Hemings affair transform Hemings into a passionate heroine, endowed with enhanced agency because she had won Jefferson's heart.
Bradford Vivian 290
168) "I can't go so far as to say the public will see Thomas Jefferson in a bedroom scene," said Warner Bros. spokesman Tom Bishop." But there will certainly be intimate scenes between him and Sally Hemings." Imagine! A four-part television drama dealing with Thomas Jefferson and having to tell your children they can't watch it. But there are people left in Virginia who will not stand by idly as the state's foremost Founding Father is depicted as a father of foundlings.
Bill McKelway
169) In a forcefully argued brief, Dabney has provided for a broad audience the available evidence regarding Sally Hemings and exposed the fallacies of many of Brodie's speculations. Marshalling the critiques of others and adding his own responses, he has uncovered the flimsy scaffolding that supports her most controversial contentions. Dabney does not claim to be a Jefferson expert but seeks to acquaint his readers with the verdicts of Jefferson scholars, particularly Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and Julian Boyd.
Noble E. Cunningham 245
170) Chase-Riboud recovers and reconstructs the vibrant presence of the enslaved Hemings, whose voice is silenced by the political and sexual ideologues of the nineteenth century.
Emma Waters Dawson 1
171) They were bound together by a doomed love that transcended the societal norms of the day; or, Jefferson was guilty of an ongoing act of rape and their offspring were the product of that violent sexual coercion; or, their relationship was a mutual calculation of reciprocal benefit, in which Hemings provided her master sexual satisfaction in exchange for a set of otherwise unachievable protections and privileges, including the eventual legal and de facto freeing of their children.
Sara Clarke Kaplan 778
172) The symbol of Jefferson for freedom and whiteness is continually wagered against Hemings as symbol of black abjection, but can we permit ourselves as a nation to consider Hemings's humanity and the violence of slavery? Or does slavery and hypersexualized black femininity for which Hemings has become a malignant national trope so affront that we retreat into repressive logics, inflicting injuries of old through a range of denials and abeyances? Can the nation permit itself even to fathom enslaved black women's injury? If so, what kinds of logic and language allow us to inaugurate such a process?
Suzette Spencer, "Historical Memory"
173) Despite how we might feel now about the way Sally Hemings lived out her predicament, Chase-Riboud believes she deserves a place in our public history; as much as Abigail Adams or Dolley Madison; as much as Frances Wright, the outspoken feminist, abolitionist, and utopian movement leader who was once the mistress of Lafayette.
Susan McHenry 37
174) It is difficult for me to believe that it is possible for someone to read Sally Hemings without being changed somehow. How can you say no to such a love story? If historical aspects or discrepancies of the novel serve as distractions, surely the human dimension of the novel is enough to captivate you.
Stephanie DeLuca, Lehigh University
175) By linking Sally and Harriet Hemings -- the "privileged" slave concubine and the successful "passer" -- to a matrilineal heritage of trauma, Chase-Riboud blurs the distinctions between black women of different social classes and historical moments, suggesting that the primal wound of slavery marks each generation.
Laura Dawkins 793
176) It is really hard to believe that Jefferson and Sally's relationship WASN'T coercive. As much as we like to romanticize Sally and Jefferson's relationship and we enjoy allowing Sally a voice as she has in the Chase-Riboud novel, the bottom line is that Sally was probably completely powerless. Regardless of whether the relationship was loving or not, or consentual or not, it was what Jefferson wanted, whatever that happened to be at the time. I think Spencer's term "coersubmission" really hits this idea on the head, and its pretty hard to shake the notion that this sort of behavior was present in the relationship at least to some degree.
Kimbrilee Weber, Lehigh University
177) Jackie's [Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of president John F. Kennedy] role in the publication of Sally Hemings indicates her fellow feeling for women who struggled against their economic reliance on men, but she was hardly shocked by what men did with their liberty.
William Kuhn 75
