It doesn’t help us fully grapple with how slaveholders “articulated their own family lines-their worldly legacies-through the reproduction of their slaves,” and “extended their dominion to spaces inside the bodies of the women they owned,” as Harvard historian Walter E. Instead, their connection, and Hemings negotiating with Jefferson for their children’s freedom, was a “gamble.” Perhaps that more accurately reckons with the material stakes at hand for both Hemings and Jefferson, but the word “gamble” still feels insufficient. Hemings’s and Jefferson didn’t have a “relationship,” as Harvard University law professor Annette Gordon-Reed explained in a June 15 op-ed for the Washington Post. “The children did not concern him at all he was solely preoccupied in indulging his passion for the ‘African Venus.’”
“If his treatment of the children is any indicator, Jefferson’s feeling for Sally Hemings-assuming that he had any feeling for her other than the regard a master feels for a loyal, devoted servant and half-sister of his deceased wife-must have been purely carnal,” Miller wrote. In his 1991 book, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, author and American History professor John Chester Miller portrayed Jefferson as a callous, unloving man whose interest in Hemings was less about romance and more about sexual gratification. In his 2016 book, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, Stephen O’Connor refers to their relationship as “somewhere along the spectrum between love and Stockholm syndrome.” In an effort to humanize both Jefferson and Hemings, O’Connor lands on a story of “love and slavery,” of entanglements and contradictions-and, inevitably, of passion.īut others disagree about the true nature of their exchange. The 1995 art-house film Jefferson in Parisattempted to portray their relationship as a sweeping “love affair,” a romance even.Ĭritics of the film found the costumes, wigs, and music much more enthralling than its depiction of Hemings’s “fiddle-dee-dee flirtatiousness of a Scarlett O’Hara.” Journalists and historians have pored over letters from John Adams to his sons Charles and John Quincy in an attempt to discover if Jefferson’s longtime “ concubine” was a known secret among governmental elites. As with many of the ugly truths committed in this nation’s short existence, historians and filmmakers have wrestled with understanding and depicting the sexual violence Jefferson inflicted on Hemings. Once they returned to America, Jefferson fathered at least four more of Hemings’s children, though it’s unclear whether two or three other children died in infancy. Jefferson even promised Hemings that their children would be freed when they became adults. Slavery was outlawed in France by the time the Jeffersons arrived, and Hemings wanted to stay and enjoy her newfound freedom.īut she agreed to return to the United States on the condition that she and her children would be able to live freely at Monticello, according to an account by her son Madison Hemings. In 1789, when the family was set to return to the states, 16-year-old Hemings was already pregnant with their first child. Jefferson, her legal slave master, was a 44-year-old American minister at the time. Many historians have struggled to piece together the facts of Hemings’s life, but what’s clear is that she was only 14 in 1787 when she accompanied Jefferson’s daughter Polly to Paris after the death of Martha, Jefferson’s wife and her half-sibling. It’s a recognition that is long overdue, and an example of how Black women’s stories only come to the surface when gatekeepers deem them valuable and worthwhile. But now, after decades of historical and biographical accounts have quibbled over Hemings’s agency and authority, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has debuted an exhibit at Jefferson’s former Virginia home that presents Hemings as a “ fully-dimensioned human being: a mother, a sister, a daughter, a world traveler,” according to Gayle Jessup White, one of her descendants.
Sally Hemings, an enslaved Black woman who bore at least six of Thomas Jefferson’s children while living in the slave quarters of Monticello, was once lost to the annals of history.
The Sally Hemings exhibit at Monticello (Photo courtesy of Stacey Evans)
0 kommentar(er)
