Historical memory, romantic narrative, and Sally Hemings

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Suzette Spencer

In 1998 scientist Eugene Foster published the results of a DNA study suggesting that Thomas Jefferson may have fathered at least one of his slave Sally Hemings's children. The study revived longstanding rumors--some quite derogatory in their portraits--and it ignited a rash of public discourse through which historians and lay people offered contending perspectives to reckon with the scientific evidence implicating Jefferson (see Fig. 1). (1) Some argued that Hemings may have been impregnated by another Jefferson family member with DNA like Jefferson's. Foster's scientific team conceded that "we cannot completely rule out other explanations" (27). The study captured national attention, however, because it corroborated the Hemings family's oral histories, and it struck a blow to many Jefferson historians who have maintained that the liaison would have been completely out of Jefferson's character, in violation of "his own standards of honor and decency," not to mention inconstant with his views on African Americans' inferiority and black women's sexuality (Wilson 62). Indeed, in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson speculated that black women were the preferred mate for the orangutan, and he advanced vexing racial theories outlining the differences he saw between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans (137-41). What, then, could the DNA results mean for rethinking the legacy of this empyrean American symbol? Each generation will answer this question differently, but several contemporary historians have noted that the results are not atypical: in spite of race-mixing taboos, interracial sexual unions have always been a part of American history. Some Americans view the results 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 legacies. In a New York Times editorial for instance, Orlando Patterson, a prominent scholar of race and slavery, said the liaison "humanized" Jefferson for "us," and it made him "feel less alienated, as I suspect will most African Americans eventually." Patterson may be correct that the liaison showed Jefferson to be an ordinary man of his time as opposed to the towering symbol often imagined, for it is indeed Jefferson's iconic role that seems most at stake in scholarly debates about the liaison. One wonders, still, whether Sally Hemings's humanity as slave and concubine deserves meditation and whether her humanity has ever been an issue for the American public. What does it mean that her identity has been constructed in scholarly and public discourse primarily through scandal and through her negation as unhinging excrescence in Thomas Jefferson's sexual history?

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

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. Because Sally Hemings left no diary or other document of her experiences as Jefferson's slave, the second section of this essay discusses some methodological challenges that inform my approach. Then, to help complicate contemporary discourses about the liaison in ways that exceed postulations of a mutually pleasurable interracial affair between Jefferson and Hemings, I perform a set of close readings of scenes from Chase-Riboud's neoslave narrative, tracing the ways this work ironically romances bondage yet provokes contemplation on the inner workings of coersubmission within sexual relations that appear consensual when in fact they are shaped by the forcible protocols of slavery. (2) If, as a nation, we regard Jefferson as a founding father, then what might it mean if we permitted ourselves likewise to consider the relation between Jefferson and Hemings as a founding violence, an inaugural racial and sexual encounter, complicated to be sure, but suggestive of the violent subject formation of blacks in the American republic?

When Chase-Riboud first published Sally Hemings in 1979, it was marketed largely as a love story. In subsequent years it generated interest that resulted in two television productions, Jefferson in Paris and Sally Hemings an American Scandal, both of which represented Hemings,

like Chase-Riboud's neoslave narrative, as a character romantically enthralled in her obeisance. (3) In all of these works, romanced constraint informs coersubmission, which in turn passes as Hemings's sexual agency and privilege. I read both with and against Chase-Riboud's romantic figurations of ambivalent scenes of sexual agency and her representations of Hemings's sexual desire to forefront how restrictive choice, coercive power, and threat of punishment frame idyllic notions of "romance," and how prescribed dominative economies wield and achieve power precisely by producing expressions in the captive subject that can be read paradoxically as "free" agency (romance) unmediated by force. I am not suggesting that the dominating power that inaugurates the slave's agency and ensures her subjection is always consistent with how she internalizes power. Nor am I suggesting that enslaved black women possessed no agency in master-slave sexual relations. I am, however, interested in exploring restricted agency and the conditions of possibility that Chase-Riboud both embraces and troubles to portray love. Sally Hemings embraces and troubles concepts such as romance, consent, and nonconsent. The narrative's economy dramatizes multiple scenes of coersubmission, ambivalent tension and desire, and multivalent address. Its structure thus invites readings of both romance and terror and can be instructive to historians and lay people interested not only in the Jefferson-Hemings liaison but in interracial master-slave unions, gender, subjection, and enslaved black women's sexuality. My readings plumb this neoslave narrative's spaces of multiple address because I believe that Sally Hemings, more than contemporary scholarly discourses about the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, highlights how dominative power relations produce and govern sexual desire and conceptualizations of romance in bondage.