Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud

First published: 1979

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: 1759-1835

Locale: Paris, France; Virginia

Principal Characters:

• Sally Hemings, a beautiful, white-skinned woman born into slavery who is mistress to Thomas Jefferson
• Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence
• Nathan Langdon, a lawyer and census taker in Virginia, who befriends Sally Hemings after Jefferson’s death
• Aaron Burr, a politician and enemy to Jefferson
• James Madison, and
• Dolley Madison, the fourth president and First Lady, friends of Jefferson and abolitionists
• John Trumbill, an artist who paints portraits of important historical figures
• Elizabeth Hemings, Sally’s mother, housekeeper and boss of Monticello
• George Wythe, Jefferson’s former schoolteacher and sometime mentor
• John Adams, and
• Abigail Adams, the second president and First Lady, friends to Jefferson who supervise Sally during her stay in France
• Madison Hemings, and
• Eston Hemings, sons of Sally and Jefferson
• James Hemings, Sally’s brother

The Novel

Since Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime, it has been accepted by many historians, though never officially proven, that the third president had for a mistress a slave who bore him several children. Barbara Chase-Riboud takes this matter as fact in writing the novel Sally Hemings.

The work is based in great part on facts that are substantiated by documentation and historical records. Essentially, however, the novel itself is fiction; dialogue, characterization, and plot are all creations of the novelist, who takes great license with what is known and established about Jefferson and his relationship with Sally Hemings.

The book is divided into seven chapters according to place and time; however, the arrangement is not chronological. Most of the story is told by the novelist herself, writing in the third-person-omniscient point of view. In a few of the chapters, though, Sally Hemings tells her own story from the first-person point of view.

The book begins in 1830 in Albemarle County, Virginia, after Jefferson’s death. Monticello has been sold, and Sally Hemings is living as a freed slave (and white woman) with her two sons on a small farm near the president’s old plantation. A census taker visits to get the facts of her existence for public record. Infatuated first with Sally’s story and then with Sally herself, young Nathan Langdon becomes intrigued with her beauty (even though Sally is now an old woman and Nathan is much younger) and history, and they become friends. Nathan’s curiosity about slavery, Jefferson’s two families, and race relations provide the author with a way to engage and entice the reader into concern for Sally’s circumstances. Sally’s two sons, Madison and Eston, are naturally suspicious of the white man and his motives, but they are unable to prevent the friendship.

The novel then switches in time and location to Paris, France, in 1787. Here, young Sally and her brother James, functioning as servants, travel with the Jefferson family when Jefferson is serving as ambassador to France. Under French law, the two slaves are free and cannot be held against their will or forced to return to the United States, where they will once again be legal slaves. Jefferson himself seduces the two into returning, more or less by making promises to free them. This promise is not kept to James Hemings for another several years; Sally is freed only at Jefferson’s death many years later. Be that as it may, the chief interest of this chapter is the relation between Jefferson and Sally, for it is in Paris where he first seduces the beautiful fifteen-year-old girl, falls in love with her, and makes her his lifelong mistress.

In the next section of the novel, Chase-Riboud again focuses on the United States. It is now 1833, and Nathan Langdon is trying to find all the information he can about the Jefferson and Hemings families. He interviews the artist John Trumbill, who knows the facts but will not tell them, thinking that the facts would only besmirch the name of the great Jefferson. Like all other major characters in the novel, white or black, and including Sally herself, no one is willing to tell the story directly. All remain silent, not only about Jefferson and Sally, but also about the institution of slavery itself and the way in which Jefferson’s two families (the white one and the black one) lived together, loved one another, and otherwise conducted their affairs and familial relations.

The middle section of the novel records these family histories from 1795 to 1809. The author explores the ways in which two sets of children, one white and one black, could live together given the social hypocrisy and the legal implications of the various blood relationships. Similarly, slave life is depicted, and certain historical characters are introduced by the novelist in order to give differing points of view about what is going on at Monticello. Jefferson is described at length. Always, the most important matter is his love for Sally, which is returned. Sally bears children to Jefferson and suckles the offspring of her white sisters. One by one, her own children leave (some with their father’s knowledge and blessing, some without) for the north and freedom, where they must thereafter live as whites and can have no contact with their parents.

In the last chapter of the novel, Chase-Riboud makes clear that her main purpose is an indictment of slavery and the people who perpetuated the institution, even would-be do-gooders such as Jefferson himself. As Jefferson became older, his finances deteriorated, and he was forced to sell off slaves to keep Monticello his own. With his death, the demise is complete: The plantation is sold, as are most of the remaining slaves, even though many of them are family members and blood relations to Jefferson. The cruelty of the actions here, all going back to Jefferson himself, do not succeed to balance, in Sally’s life, her love for him or his love for her. She remains a victim of the economic system, but most of all a victim of Jefferson himself.

The Characters

Sally Hemings is the centerpiece of the novel in every way. It is she who commands the story, telling much of it. Victimized by slavery, Jefferson, love, and herself, Sally does not so much grow and mature as she becomes older; rather, she merely endures changes in her circumstances. Always, Sally is seen making choices: The novel opens with her deciding whether to talk to Nathan Langdon; in her youth, she must decide if she will remain in France and be free or return to Virginia and slavery; through the years, she repeatedly elects to stay with Jefferson and to love him; as Jefferson’s death approaches, she must decide to what extent she can and will help her children escape slavery; finally, after Jefferson’s death, she remains illegally in Virginia in order to live on a small farm near Monticello. The character is described by the author almost throughout; however, in three or four instances she does speak for herself in small subchapters given to her first-person point of view.

Thomas Jefferson is always depicted externally, as are most of the characters in the novel. Readers see him in action and hear him speak but seldom know what is occurring in his mind. The novelist, to her credit, does not attempt to debunk myths surrounding the historical Jefferson; his greatness is left intact, though readers will doubtless be disturbed by the omnipresent fact that Jefferson continued to own slaves and to live his life within the confines of slavery as an institution. His greatness and role in history are not undermined, but much of his hypocrisy is exposed. Chase-Riboud has assured this by prefacing the chapters with actual historical writings, documents, and letters, most of which are directly from Jefferson himself.

Nathan Langdon grows and learns more than any other character in the work. A Southerner himself, he fully understands the functions and techniques of slavery, but he is unable to understand how Thomas Jefferson could have had such a relationship with Sally Hemings. Langdon plays something of a proxy for the reader, for his questions to the various characters would likely be the reader’s own questions. Inevitably, what he learns is that Jefferson is a hypocrite; he also learns that Sally acted out of love to cause her own destruction.

Madison and Eston Hemings, as the only surviving sons of Sally and Jefferson, live in a world where they are legally black but otherwise white. Fixed forever in this messy state of affairs, their circumstances serve to expose the evils and corruption of the society itself. Their primary action in the novel is to object to their mother’s new friend, Langdon. They do not trust him, because he is white. Sally, too, comes to distrust him, though for differing reasons.

Aaron Burr is one of the most memorable characters in the novel. Again, Chase-Riboud’s description does not significantly vary from the traditional picture of the historical man. As an enemy to Jefferson, he acts to expose him for his miscegenation at home. A political creature who has few morals, Burr is never silenced except by old age.

John Trumbill appears throughout the narrative in significant episodes. As the sensitive artist who has painted Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson as well as other important historical figures of the time, Trumbill knows what is going on in the personal lives of these people. According to propriety, he must remain silent and does so. Chase-Riboud makes important not so much what Trumbill says but what he remains silent about.

Sally’s mother, Elizabeth Hemings, has in many ways lived the same life as Sally. With white skin, education, and manners, Elizabeth knows very well the trap into which her daughter is falling with her love for Jefferson; too, the mother knows and forewarns Sally that nothing good can come from it, that Sally will pay with her life. Elizabeth serves to prove to the reader, and Sally herself, that mistakes are passed from one generation to the next.

Critical Context

Sally Hemings is Barbara Chase-Riboud’s first novel. First published in 1979, it is a statement about a fact of history: Thomas Jefferson’s forty-year love relation with one of his slaves. Inescapably, the novel is important because of messages that have importance for contemporary race relations in the United States. Of first concern here is not the fact that a founding father had a black mistress, but that he loved her and kept her in servitude. The social meaning is clear: Those who control power cannot continue to want brotherhood privately but not publicly.

Sally Hemings indicates the maturity of the black novel in American literature. Published at a distance of some ten years after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s, it makes clear that equality remains a goal—an ideal—for which the nation should work. Chase-Riboud’s thrust is not to expose the evils of slavery but to relate a matter that explains something in the national character. This movement toward equality and human rights is depicted in a historical setting so as to emphasize that such social changes have not yet been realized.

Bibliography

Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974. The controversial biography upon which Chase-Riboud’s novel is based. Brodie combines historical and psychological analysis to interpret the extensive historical record of Jefferson’s life.

Dabney, Virginius. The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981. Dabney rejects Brodie’s and Chase-Riboud’s premise that Sally Hemings was Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, analyzing their sources and disputing their conclusions. Chapter 5, “Fiction Masquerading as Fact,” focuses specifically on Sally Hemings, pointing out minor historical inaccuracies as well as rejecting its basic premise.

Energy-Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006. Exhibition catalog including work by and criticism of Chase-Riboud. Analysis of the author’s work as a sculptor helps define her interdisciplinary aesthetic and commitments.

Heidish, Marcy. Review of Sally Hemings, by Barbara Chase-Riboud. The Washington Post, June 15, 1979. A dissenting review that faults Sally Hemings for its shifts in voice and chronology, which Heidish sees as disruptive to the narrative.

McHenry, Susan. “Sally Hemings: A Key to Our National Identity.” Ms. 9 (October, 1980): 35-40. Both a review of Sally Hemings and a profile of Chase-Riboud. Includes the writer’s comments on her novel, information about Chase-Riboud’s life, and discussion of the evolution of her thought and art.

Russell, John. Review of Sally Hemings, by Barbara Chase-Riboud. The New York Times, September 5, 1979, p. III21. A laudatory review that praises the author’s ability to vivify the past in her writing.