| Episodes |
Chase-Riboud's Elizabeth Hemings
Chris McHugh
[1] In Sally Hemings, Barbara Chase-Riboud gives a new face to Sally Hemings. For the first time, the affair between Sally and Jefferson is shown from Sally's perspective. Chase-Riboud does not only reveal Sally, however, but the other important figures in her life as well. Foremost among these relatives is Sally's mother, Elizabeth Hemings. Elizabeth is known to have had a long liaison with her old master, John Wayles, and, in fact, Sally is a product of said liaison. In this relationship, Elizabeth took it for granted that she and her children would be freed; she has a very strong sense of justice, into which freedom is deeply ingrained. Having this experience, Elizabeth believes she knows Sally's situation perfectly and gets angry when Sally makes what she believes to be the wrong choices. The other side of this, however, is that Elizabeth blames herself for Sally's predicament.
[2] Elizabeth's faith in freedom and justice can be found mostly in her arguments with Sally. In one argument, Sally says "Being free isn't so important I'd die for it," to which Elizabeth replies, "Don't tell me freedom ain't worth dying for" (207). She goes on to describe the deaths of field-hands and other slaves, and even "white folks . . . risking their . . . white lives" in order to say that freedom is not only "worth dying for" but is the most important thing in the world, even more so than love (207). Despite her grasp on the importance of freedom, and a black man's lack of it, however, Elizabeth still seems to think that justice must exist for everyone. At one point in the story, Elizabeth relates the murder of a mulatto man by a George Sweeney. The only witness to the murder was a slave, the man's mother.
"George Sweeney, he'll hang for it won't he?"
"I think not mama. Black people and mulattoes can't testify against white people. Lydia Broadnax can't accuse her son's murderer."
"No! It ain't true." (266)
Elizabeth believes in freedom and justice and that there is always a means for it if one does not trap oneself.
[3] The strongest image of Elizabeth's disagreement with Sally's choices, which sets the tone for the rest of their arguments, occurs when Sally returns from Paris (151). Here, Chase-Riboud shows all the slaves at Monticello rejoicing at the return of their master and of Sally and James. Everyone except Elizabeth, who knows that Sally must have turned down the freedom to which she had the right while in Paris.
And standing in the doorway, rising like a giant accusing finger above the tumult and shouting, was my mother, her hands on her hips, filling the doorway of the mansion like the stone frescos on the facade of the Hotel de Langeac . . . . Then I saw the small figure turn her back and walk into the Big House. (151-52)
Sally looks up to find the lone figure of Elizabeth turn back into her house and refuse to answer Sally's calls to her. It was not until Sally's first child that Elizabeth answers those calls. Five years later "as she [took] Thomas Jefferson Hemings from [Sally's] body she [forgave her] at the same time" (177), but she does not forget. Elizabeth tells Sally that she is trapped, the same way Elizabeth was before her. The difference is that Elizabeth never had the chance at freedom that Sally had in Paris. She tells her, not for the first time, that she must procure a guarantee for the freedom of her children (177).
[4] Elizabeth's biggest regret from her own affair is that she did not procure that promise; she simply assumed that her children would be freed. To try to make up for this in some way, she tells Sally, "Get that freedom for your children" (177). Elizabeth also blames her actions as a mother; she believes that many of her actions in Sally's life culminated in the inevitable outcome of Sally and Jefferson's relationship. From the beginning of her childhood, Sally was taught by Elizabeth to be the perfect slave. Elizabeth's intentions were to keep Sally in the house instead of in the fields, because that was the easier life. Elizabeth asks herself, though, how she was to know that what she thought of as the perfect slave would be what Jefferson saw as the perfect woman. The final, and gravest, mistake was putting Sally on the ship to France. Elizabeth sent Sally in hopes she might find a way out of her life, but Sally trapped herself with love and pride.
[5] Elizabeth's experience gives her the right and knowledge to tell Sally how to live her life and how to see slavery, even under a master she loves. On her death bed, Elizabeth feels both love and contempt for her Sally (34). The love is that of a mother seeing her daughter but also of something more; Elizabeth sees in Sally the same woman who made the same mistakes she made years before. The contempt is for Sally's inability to see the prison she's created for herself and not having fled from it when she had the chance. Perhaps, though, Sally comes to the same conclusions as Elizabeth in the end, when she decides that she has loved the enemy.
