Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud
A book review
As the novel Sally Hemings opens, a census-taker arrives at the door of a run-down cabin at the boundary of the Monticello lands. A woman of fifty-six, still beautiful, stands in the doorway. "How did one address a creature who did not exist, who was the negation of everything he had been taught to believe? There were no white slaves. There could be no white ex-slaves."
Though Sally Hemings resents the man's confident air, "coming up her road, as if God had ordained it and as if he owned the road," on impulse she invites him in. His questions awaken memories. She enjoys their talk enough to welcome him back another day. Over the summer she discovers: "She had lived a life; she was startled to perceive that life."
Published almost twenty years before DNA tests confirmed that a son of Sally Hemings was descended from a male of Thomas Jefferson's family, most probably Jefferson himself, Chase-Riboud's novel tells the story of a lonely Jefferson morally opposed to slavery and a beautiful young woman, his dead wife's slave. After accompanying his daughter to France in 1787 where he is serving as a diplomat and slavery is not recognized, Sally Hemings becomes his lover. This is a delicate novel, wise and moving, its portraits full of subtle shadings that bring the characters to life with all the ambiguous longings, revelatory silences and conflicted passions of real human beings.
The story of a slave who at age fifteen falls in love with her master could easily slip into soap opera. Chase-Riboud makes it instead a meditation on love and the imbalances of power that can, for any man or woman, blight love and make it a slavery of the heart. Her perceptive, adaptable heroine very quietly develops a courage and self-respect that makes her love transcendent, bringing her to stand triumphant "in the vast intractable wilderness of the American landscape ... where all biographies become one." (1979; the new 2009 edition from Chicago Review Press includes a list of source documents and an extensive Afterword discussing the story behind the author's research and the Sally Hemings controversy)