Reconsidering the Jefferson–Hemings Relationship

Introduction: Racial Revisions of Revolutionary Narratives

In October 1994, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York held a mock trial of Thomas Jefferson before an audience of lawyers, historians, and judges. ¹ As Annette Gordon-Reed observed from the audience, the issue to be decided “was whether examples of hypocrisy in Jefferson’s life significantly diminished his contributions to American society.” Charles Ogletree and Drew Days, two African American attorneys, argued on behalf of the prosecution and defense: “Each talked about Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, with his plantations and slaves” (Gordon-Reed 1997, 125). While all but seventy-eight of the four hundred audience member jurors agreed on the verdict of “not guilty,” the very enactment of this mock trial speaks to very real contemporary concerns. ² The framing of the charges, which Gordon-Reed argues took hypocrisy for granted, exemplifies how judgments of Jefferson in our times have put this founder’s authority under exacting racial scrutiny. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in those academic and popular representations of Jefferson the slave master that center on Sally Hemings, the oft-reputed “slave mistress” of Monticello.

There is a broad consensus among scholars that the story of Jefferson and Hemings is a politicized site of remembrance, one that I contend stands for the intertwined legacies of republican founding and racial slavery. A testament to the central role founders play in American memory is that historians, legal scholars, cultural theorists, and literary critics are still debating the political significance of their relationship today. Clarence Walker (2009, 29), for example, contends that the United States, a “mongrel” nation, “should recognize Sally and Thomas as its founding parents” because the norm of amalgamation in the New World belies the myth of white American origins. Gordon-Reed (2008, 325), for her part, recenters the Jefferson story on Sally, James, and other Hemingses to investigate the foundations of “American consciousness” in slavery and other institutions of white domination. These critical countermemories of the founding period contest the optimistic claim that a “postracial” United States has left behind its racial preoccupations. In the post–civil rights era politics of history, Walker and Gordon-Reed challenge a prominent raced and gendered allegory of sole agents and singular origins: the notion that the (white male) fathers, acting as the exclusive agents of the revolutionary process, gave birth to the nation in an unrepeatable act of foundation.

Historical imaginations from the past half century have turned toward questions of whether and how to represent the past as racial, continuing a venerable national tradition of confronting and more often evading problems of racial recollection. Enacted in public rituals, monuments, popular associations, and literary fictions, a whitewashed remembrance of the civil war promoted interregional reconciliation by forgetting emancipation as a meaning of the struggle, declaring northern and southern causes to be equally just, and erasing African American agency (Blight 2001). This “master narrative” corresponded to the policies that ameliorated postbellum regional animosities by reunifying and nationalizing the polity on the basis of black exclusions (Marx 1998, 144). Late-nineteenth-century to mid-twentieth-century stories of northern against southern brothers, like contemporaneous stories of the revolutionary band of brothers who became founding fathers, remembered the nation in ways that represented its members, past and present, as already and naturally “white.”

Recent criticisms of racially exclusive stories of singular national origin are, in part, informed by 1960s to 1970s racial movement activisms’ extension of political contest into the terrain of everyday life (Omi and Winant 1994, 96). Such cultural and political shifts invite us to reimagine the U.S. “constitution”—in the expansive sense of unspoken norms and informal membership—as multiple in its foundations (Allen 2004, 6-7). A sure sign of the civil rights movement’s status as a refoundational moment is the critical pressure exerted on founding figures that followed in its wake. In explaining how Jefferson could live with and off of slavery, post–civil rights era biographers provided intricate, ambivalent portraits of Jefferson in lieu of the simplified, unequivocal hagiographies that typically serve revolutionary and/or racial nationalisms (see Adeleke 1994). Still, post-hagiographic biographies assumed that the nation is essentially “good,” a fiction that gave rise to the privatized problem of “character” in the first place. The representation of nationalist histories without nationalist heroes is the first paradox characteristic of those accounts of the Hemings–Jefferson relationship that I explore.

Renewed interest in Jefferson’s involvement with Hemings arose against the backdrop of a critical reexamination of America’s involvement with slavery (see Jordan 1968; Genovese 1974; Davis 1975). ³ This is not to say that the question of Hemings received an adequate response. Post–civil rights era biographers could marginalize race when discussing Hemings’s and Jefferson’s genders and sexualities and, what is more, could even declare irrelevant the racial differences between the two. Instead of using “color-blind” rhetoric to articulate racial views problematized after the official repudiation of racism (Bonilla-Silva 2006, 55), Jefferson scholars did something not as fully analyzed by critical race theorists—they used openly racial rhetoric to portray the Hemings–Jefferson relationship as a “color-blind” one. In this essay, I demonstrate that race-blind representations of Jefferson and Hemings’s relationship are of a piece with nationalist narratives that solicit identifications from their audiences with a redeemed founding. The representation of racial sexuality as devoid of racial significance is the second paradox characteristic of the two biographies I closely read.

The first is Fawn Brodie’s (1974) Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, the best-selling psychoanalytic case history that contended that Jefferson and Hemings loved each other for almost four decades. Based on the oral testimony of Madison Hemings, Sally’s son, Brodie’s version of the story remains the template for most scholars who accept that Hemings and Jefferson had several children together. ⁴ Contemporaneous Jefferson scholars ridiculed Brodie, ostensibly for deploying Freudian reading strategies and blurring what she considered an artificial boundary between private and public life. Moreover, this was a case of a white woman taking the side of a black man to argue that “a group of white males did not know what they were talking about” (Gordon-Reed 1999, 239). No doubt, the hostile reception Brodie received within scholarly circles was also the result of the limited interpretive frameworks of “traditional” biographical researchers and their institutional supports (Brandwein 2006, 235). More interesting, though, is the warmer reception she received from the broader reading public, which—after the race-based mass protests and civil disorders of the late 1960s and early 1970s—proved ready to accept the redemptive message of Brodie’s tragedy. Brodie relies on color-blind love to make reparations to those Hemings descendents whom conventional biographers would not recognize. In Brodie’s allegory, love racially integrates the nation.

Brodie wrote a few decades before most of her colleagues would come around. By the time 1998 DNA tests confirmed that Jefferson had at a minimum fathered Easton Hemings (Foster et al. 1998, 27-28), biography had turned into the last stronghold of disbelief (Lewis and Onuf 1999, 2). Joseph Ellis’s (1996, 1998a) American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, our second biography written with a nonacademic audience in mind, drew on a standard repertoire of character defenses against the “accusation” that Jefferson had regular intercourse with Hemings (Walker 2009, 59-99). ⁵ Less than conditionally surrendering in a 1998 US News & World Report article, Ellis acknowledged that the two most likely had a long-term sexual liaison. Ellis’s reconsideration of the facts, like Brodie’s love story, is predicated on a nationalist deracialization of Jefferson’s desire; but Ellis, who refuses to avail himself of the narrative resources of romance, minimizes the significance of the Hemings–Jefferson relationship. Ellis’s 1998 article repeats almost verbatim tropes and phrases from his 1996 book, as if we need not revise our perspectives on Jefferson, much less the race-transcendent narrative of national inclusion which Hemings could undermine. His usage of signs of racial difference to signify national sameness is symptomatic of the color-blind discourse of the Clinton 1990s.

Popular publications situated at the nexus of the founders’ life stories and the nation’s origin stories raise questions of how narrations of the past connect to legitimations of the present. I argue that Ellis and Brodie write national histories without nationalist heroes using race talk without racial significance to affirm the always-contestable authority of the founders and the founding in the post–civil rights era. Indeed, I have chosen to read Brodie’s 1970s avowal alongside Ellis’s 1990s disavowal of the Jefferson–Hemings relationship to emphasize that opposed sides in the debate shared much common ground. The intersections of slavery and foundation in Ellis’s and Brodie’s texts are suggestive of how biographical remembrances of Jefferson can be pressed into the service of historically re-membering the United States. Both narrate an allegory of patrilineage wherein Jefferson’s character is coded as the legitimacy of the founding, Jefferson’s family stands for the collectivity founded, and Jefferson’s desire, or, alternatively, desire for Jefferson, represents modes of racial integration. My allegorical reading of Brodie and Ellis clarifies that the contemporary stakes of remembering Hemings and Jefferson concern founding authority and national membership far more than Jefferson’s character or sexuality. In conclusion, I consider some of the critical potentials of the historiographical and literary turn toward Sally Hemings herself.

The Character Trials of Thomas Jefferson

On Jefferson’s practices of plantation slavery, Jack Rakove (1999, 226-27) opines that “one cannot avoid thinking in moral terms even when one is diffident about reaching moral judgments. . . . But judge Jefferson we must—or so it seems—so the question becomes on what basis can we do so?” If “judge Jefferson we must,” then the necessary question is why we must judge. Paul Ricoeur’s (1984, 57-58) answer is as commonsense as it is convincing: any narrative includes judgments. The “symbolic resources” on which stories draw include “a scale of moral preferences” according to which actions and therefore characters can be judged. To take Aristotle’s classic examples, tragedies and comedies feature characters respectively better and worse than ourselves. Character types presuppose and entail evaluations: “poetics does not stop borrowing from ethics, even when it advocates the suspension of all ethical judgment” (Ricoeur 1984, 59). In this section, I intend to show that Brodie and Ellis judge and ultimately pardon Jefferson for owning slaves on the basis of psychology. More controversially, I contend that moralistic impulses to judge figures like Jefferson respond to and refigure historical idealizations meant to secure national identifications.

Brodie’s An Intimate History cites Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood in an admonitory tone: “Biographers frequently select the hero as the object of study because . . . they have a special affection for him at the outset.” An unconscious influence of the “infantile conception of the father,” Brodie (1974, 30) says, pervades the biographical “treatment of the story of Sally Hemings. This liaison, above all others in Jefferson’s life, is unutterably taboo.” Neither a “brooding Irish clergyman” nor a “casual debaucher of slave women,” Jefferson was “a man richly endowed with warmth and passion but trapped in a society which savagely punished miscegenation, a man, moreover, whose psychic fate it was to fall in love with the forbidden woman.” Since his “psychic fate” was to be unlucky in love, “the fault, if it can be held, lay not in Jefferson but in the society which condemned him to secrecy” (Brodie 1974, 32). Here Brodie administers the Hemings story as a litmus test of Jefferson’s relationship to slavery, guaranteeing that “the heroic image [will remain] untarnished and his genius undiminished” (32) once Jefferson’s intimate life has come to light. Our hero, suffering from the difficult imbrications of love and slavery, will take on a properly tragic aspect.

As Brodie thinks that a doer must play a part in accounting for any deed, the psychological discourse she uses to characterize Jefferson carries a distinctly ethical connotation. However, the psychoanalytic notion of personality distances this doer—a subject decentered by hidden forces—from full autonomy and responsibility: ⁶ Jefferson acted like an “unconscious aristocrat” among the French nobility, engaged in “unconscious seduction” with his daughters, and so on (Brodie 1974, 193, 365). Meeting judgment on the terrain of psychology, Brodie explains that Jefferson believed he had found harmonious affection at Monticello, and “the inescapable oppressions of slavery could [not] shake this conviction. In this respect it can be said that Jefferson dwelt in a fantasy world.” The ability to blur the line between fantasy and reality cuts both ways: it allows “great leaders” to cover over “contradictions in [their] own behavior” as well as grants them access to “the visionary future as if it were the living present” (Brodie 1974, 337). Jefferson must be able to see the contradictions in his behavior to be responsible, but his historical insight makes his self-contradiction difficult to see. This mutual dependence of delusion and vision mitigates the harsh charge of hypocrisy.

Ellis, a disbeliever in the relationship at the time of the publication of American Sphinx, cannot redeem Jefferson the slave master through Hemings. But Ellis’s defense still puts a psychic limit on moral culpability: “More self-deception than calculated hypocrisy,” Jefferson’s position on slavery was an exercise in “psychological agility” (1996, 89). The crux of this justification is the “lie detector test” that attests to an almost total psychologization of character:

Jefferson possessed the psychological dexterity to overrule awkward perceptions, including the day-by-day realities of slave life. He was the kind of man who would have been able to take an oath—and if technology for a lie detector test had been available, to have passed it—certifying that his slaves were more content and better off as members of his extended family than under any other imaginable circumstance. (Ellis 1996, 150)

If George Washington’s cherry tree discloses the character of a child who could not lie about even trivial matters to his father, Thomas Jefferson’s lie detector test reveals the character of a founding father who lied to himself about important things. Jefferson the psychologically complex wins out over Jefferson the simple hypocrite again. However, unlike Brodie’s Jefferson, Ellis’s Jefferson lacks the “dexterity” needed to sustain a relationship with Hemings, a difference of characterization whose gendered and sexual dimensions I address in the next section.

Alluding to psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology, Ellis (1996, 149-50) argues that “Jefferson’s own highly developed network of interior defenses . . . helped sustain his paternalistic self-image by blocking out incongruous evidence . . . or consigning it to some oblivious region of his mind.” Jefferson’s psyche is split between knowledge and belief: he knows that he is an oppressive slave owner, but he believes that he is a benevolent patriarch. ⁷ Jefferson’s fantasy life infused his visionary politics, as his gaze fixed on “a more rarefied region where political parties, constitutional distinctions and even forms of government themselves were rendered irrelevant” (Ellis 1996, 105). Both Brodie and Ellis understand Jefferson’s virtues and vices as mutually dependent expressions of the same basic psychological tendency. It might seem, then, that Jefferson deserves no more praise for his statesmanship than blame for his slaveholding. Yet the anxiety over the possibility that blame might win out over praise is persistent. “The heroic image” remains, Brodie assures us, just as Ellis (1996, 23) asserts that “the Jefferson image is safely enshrined in the national memory. Nothing that we learn about the human flaws of the historical Jefferson can put the icon at risk.”

Reassurances of Jefferson’s immortality indicate that attachments to the hero are equally difficult to break and maintain. Our biographers’ joint investment in this founding father underwrites this anxiety, which the case histories of Jefferson the psychological subject are meant to assuage. Neither Brodie nor Ellis excuses Jefferson for oppressing slaves; on the contrary, both criticize Jefferson’s practice of slaveholding to figure Jefferson as a flawed, fallible hero. Their biographies, which administer Hemings (Brodie) and lie detectors (Ellis) as tests of character, select personal sincerity as opposed to abstract right as the criterion of justification. That late-modern biographers make recourse to mitigating psychological circumstances should hardly be surprising if, as Ricoeur would insist, narratives must pose questions of ethics and character. Less transparent are the intentions of the commissioner of these psychological portraits—the post–civil rights era American reading public that, Brodie and Ellis assume, wants to know if Jefferson should be considered a hypocrite. For the popular alignment of Jefferson with the most radical and participatory strands of the U.S. revolutionary tradition makes his slave holding and racial prejudices appear only all the more troubling (see Arendt 1963).

The image of a Jefferson not fully conscious of his self-contradictions replies to a charge of hypocrisy already indicative of a moralistic impulse, a more-than-moral interrogation that somehow must be answered. The late-modern moralizing that Wendy Brown links to a loss of faith in teleological narratives of progress can be specified in our case as the highly personalized moralizing that I attribute to the post–civil rights era recognition of present injustice coupled with a loss of faith in racial progress. That moralism that compensates for the political action and the social transformation it cannot inspire or achieve must be differentiated from “the founding and sustaining principle of the Civil Rights [M]ovement,” that is, a situational critique of “the immorality of racial segregation in a liberal democratic nation” (Brown 2001, 25). A frustrated desire for the good reacts against a past of slavery and segregation unredeemed by the persistence of racial inequality, “against history in the form of condemning particular events or utterances, personifying history in individuals” (Brown 2001, 30, emphasis original). Our moralism blames historical individuals who must be held responsible for not achieving the racial justice that we no longer have the faith in our own powers to enact.

The political distinction between moralism and morality is the difference between privatized and publicized objects of judgment, not the difference between attacking and defending an individual. It is the contrast between Ellis’s (1996, 149) personalized position that “[a]lthough the self-serving character of [Jefferson’s] paternalistic posture might have an offensive and fraudulent look to us, it had decided advantages for Jefferson’s slaves” and Gordon-Reed’s (1999, 241) politicized story about “a man, a woman, and the children they had together in the midst of a devastating social system that the man could have done more to help dismantle.” It is the difference between Paul Finkelman’s (1993, 211-12) charge that “[n]o one bore a greater responsibility” for the failure to put the nation on the path of liberty for all “than the author of the Declaration of Independence” and the 1838 response of The Emancipator to an apocryphal account of Jefferson’s daughter, “the daughter of the President of the United States, the boasted land of freedom, sold into interminable bondage!”: “Here is no violation of law—you have the natural, legalized working of the system” (cited in Moss and Moss 2000, 71).

The overindulgence of speculation on Jefferson’s psychic character as opposed to his public persona is symptomatic of the demand to judge individuals in and of themselves as responsible for injustices. A more-than-moral impulse drives Ellis and Brodie to pronounce on Jefferson’s “true” character rather than politicize the raced division of labor that made Jefferson’s plantation possible. Assuming that authors share actual “symbolic resources” (Ricoeur 1984) in addition to potential affective responses with their audience, I venture that the urge to displace accountability for present, public predicaments (the perseverance of white over black inequality) onto the depoliticized, privatized past (the Jefferson family’s ownership of slaves) is an undercurrent of moralism that courses through the national culture at large.

Granted, not all citizens and denizens of the United States identify equally with Jefferson or are equally interested in his character; the more intriguing responses to “the Sally Question,” as we will see, point to the possibility of identifying with Hemings and decentering Jefferson. The object of long-standing, racially inflected ambivalences among African American communities as well as contemporary, religiously inspired loathing of Texas conservatives (McKinley 2010), Jefferson remains a controversial figure even after his ascension into the pantheon of founding fathers (Peterson 1960, 4). ⁸ Nonetheless, Jefferson symbolically functions as a revolutionary brother-cum-founding father and hence serves as a possible and familiar site of national authority and attachment. This is why the demand to defend and attack Jefferson on the part of his biographers is a political passion that responds to a problem of public identification.

What follows is a psychoanalytic account of Ellis’s and Brodie’s strategies of resolving what I diagnose as “the crisis of an ego ideal.” Mine is an “as-if” story that explores the function of post-hagiographic heroes in late-modern processes of national identification. Let us start with Freud’s ([1922] 1959, 61) definition of a group as “a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.” In the simple case at hand, Jefferson would be positioned as an “ego ideal” by those national subjects whose identification with one another is both symbolic (marked by terms like freedom, founding, etc.) and affective (invested with love, attachment, etc.). If this common internalization of ego ideals in part constitutes the public identification of various egos as “American,” then skepticism toward an ego ideal’s worthiness can only destabilize the aforementioned identification. Now, a secure nationalism presents the simple case in which “everything that the [ego ideal] does and asks for is right and blameless” (Freud [1922] 1959, 57). But our case is full of political complications, as Brodie and Ellis face the question of whether Jefferson’s personal authority can bear the brunt of historical revisionism.

The psychoanalytic notion of “splitting” illuminates how this crisis of an ego ideal can be resolved—how the figure of Jefferson, as a representative of both freedom and oppression, can continue to solicit national attachments with a minimum of ambivalence. The commonplace opposition between the Declaration of Independence and the practices of plantation slavery, the basis of the charge of hypocrisy, turns into a split between Jefferson’s principles and Jefferson’s practices. Both Brodie and Ellis psychologize the holding of slaves to keep “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” relatively “right and blameless” (Freud); Jefferson’s ideals, in turn, do the important work of depersonalizing psychological defenses for the pair.

Hence a progressive narrative of national ideals triumphing over historical injustices staves off the moralism that brought about the crisis of an ego ideal. Ellis (1996, 54), who equates the Declaration with “the American creed,” redeems Jefferson and renews his faith in liberal-democratic progress at the same time: “The entire history of liberal reform in America can be written as a process of discovery, within Jefferson’s words, of a spiritually sanctioned mandate for ending slavery” as well as “providing the rights of citizenship to blacks and women.” Brodie (1974, 448) deploys a similar splitting strategy to redeem Jefferson’s life through Jefferson’s ideas: “[H]is institutional and intellectual legacy served to aid the liberation of both women and blacks. Without it, their respective kinds of enslavement might have been prolonged indefinitely in America.” Ellis and Brodie seek to stabilize the ego identification with the purified part of the ego ideal (principles), the purified part that retroactively purifies the whole (personality and principles). Membership is neither raced nor gendered at its core since the nation potentially includes women and blacks at its inception; only the historical actualizations of national ideals have failed to be gender- and race-blind. Both biographers, shifting the moral weight that imperfect personalities cannot bear onto idealized principles, promise an American nationalism without nationalist heroes. This American nationalism based on civic ideals as distinguished from European-style nationalisms based on ethnic homogeneity is nonetheless bound to the “promotion” of national community (Sheth 2009, 80).

The Deracialization of Nationalist Narratives

The language of kinship, far from a psychoanalytic imposition, is the native tongue of national discourse. In an essay on the Randolphs, the “white Jeffersons,” Jan Lewis (1999, 129) layers the stories “of a white family and a black family, of a national family of blacks and whites.” Accenting patrilineage, Clarence Walker (1999, 196) contends that “[i]n claiming Jefferson as one of their ancestors, the Woodsons [Hemings descendents] were proclaiming their ‘American-ness.’” Lewis’s and Walker’s narratives are doubly “domestic affairs,” both genealogies of a founding father’s descendents and allegories about the national accommodation of racial difference. In this section, I aim to show that Brodie and Ellis deracialize Hemings in memory to secure the “color-blind” present because the “otherness” of the uncanny Hemings might otherwise disrupt comforting narratives of foundation. This process of domestication, centered on Jefferson’s love and the love of Jefferson, seeks out investments in an oedipal father/republican founder within the affective and narrative economy of civic nationalism.

Brodie’s (1974, 433, 92-93, 158-59) story is that Jefferson loved Hemings “innocently” and “without debauchery” despite his antipathies toward blacks and ambivalences toward miscegenation. ⁹ What makes this situation possible is an individualist logic of desire, which might be articulated from the white male position as follows: “While my (black) lover is of a different race, I love that (female) person the same as I would any other (white woman).” Color blindness, as the name suggests, looks at the markers of race only insofar as it needs something to proclaim irrelevant, thereby presupposing this minimum of racial perception. It turns a blind eye to recognize yet not recognize difference in the same glance. Brodie (1974, 29) applies this color-blind logic in categorizing Hemings as a racially unmarked “forbidden woman”: “[S]ave for his first passion at twenty-one,” Jefferson’s affections were always “directed toward women who were in some sense forbidden”—namely, Betsey Walker, Martha Wayles, Maria Cosway, and Sally Hemings. Set aside the complication that the existence of color-blind love is as likely as that of gender-blind love (to be clear, I assume that all sexual practices are equally sighted, unnatural, and social). Notice how Walker and Cosway, the wives of Jefferson’s acquaintances, Wayles, the widow whom he married, and Hemings, the slave whom he owned, are treated as the same kind of “forbidden fruits.” ¹⁰

Love sees only singularity, but it still needs a space to appear in Brodie’s romance. Distance from American racial-sexual mores begets a love affair in France, where Jefferson’s attraction toward a forbidden woman is met by Hemings’s attraction toward a fatherly figure. Telling a similar story from another point of view, Sally remembers that “[i]n Paris, we had forgotten what it meant to be white or black, master or slave” in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s (1979, 178) novel Sally Hemings. With the taboo of miscegenation far across the Atlantic, our lovers allow heterosexual “nature” to take its course. Yet Jefferson looks with foreboding on the prospect of returning to Monticello, imagining how he “would feel the menacing strength of the slaveholding society in the first hours of his arrival” (Brodie 1974, 245). This mood foreshadows the political scandals that would punish Hemings and Jefferson’s transgression and the public secrecy that would drive their mutual desire into exile.

By the end of Jefferson’s term as a foreign ambassador, Sally—like her brother James, who served as a cook to his master—had learned of how French and Virginian law differed on the issue of slavery. Both Hemingses “knew they were free if they chose to make an issue of it . . . and were thinking of becoming expatriates.” But Jefferson, standing over and against them, strategized to secure their return to Monticello: his “failure to free James and Sally Hemings in Paris marks a decisive watershed in his zeal for emancipation. To free them was to lose them, and Jefferson was an extraordinarily possessive man” (Brodie 1974, 234-35). So Thomas promised to emancipate James after the gourmet chef trained a suitable replacement, while he promised a by-then-pregnant Sally that he would emancipate any children they might have together when they turned twenty-one. Out of complexly gendered motives, Sally traveled “home” not only to provide freedom for her unborn children but also to maintain a hidden relationship that required her enslavement. After the transatlantic journey transmuted the bonds of love into the bondage of slavery, the loss of the one would entail the loss of the other.

As to why he would fail to emancipate his beloved, Brodie replies that Jefferson kept Hemings enslaved not in spite of, but out of love. Race society, once again, is at fault: “For although a master could carry on a liaison with a slave in relative secrecy without public censure, it was very much more difficult and socially dangerous with a free Negro.” Brodie (1974, 293) even proposes that Hemings’s attachment to Jefferson squelched any need for freedom: “Here the slave was peculiarly deprived of the right to, and even the desire for, emancipation, because freedom meant loss of the love relationship.” Only the promise to the next generation of Hemingses, then, can redeem Thomas’s ownership of Sally. In his will, Jefferson emancipated Easton and Madison, the last of Sally’s children who had not yet (been allowed to) “run away” (Brodie 1974, 466). A final act of subversion makes a man who turned away from his youthful “zeal for emancipation” worthy of love; a secret scene of emancipation posits black liberation as the telos of love rather than revolution. Brodie’s allegory of forbidden love is an American freedom and redemption narrative. The redemption of the founder can be found in eventual freedom for both white masters and enslaved blacks—Jefferson promises to free his slave children just as the founding promises to free itself from the racial slavery in its foundations.

Ellis’s story is considerably less stirring: there is nothing to narrate. Rewriting Brodie’s tragedy as a farce, Ellis compares the Hemings–Jefferson story to “talk shows and tabloids” that satisfy “the primal urge to know about the sexual secrets of the rich or famous” (1996, 303). The title of the appendix, “A Note on the Sally Hemings Scandal,” nicely summarizes this short correction of “the slander.” Unlike the opposition, “who have allowed their own racial, political or sexual agendas to take precedence,” Ellis (1996, 305) acknowledges that he can only speculate against the speculators in the absence of conclusive facts. In The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal, Virginus Dabney (1981, 133) likewise dedicates more than a hundred pages of enraged debunking to a “story . . . of relatively minor importance.” The suspension of judgment might be a satisfactory response to speculations on Jefferson’s involvement with Maria Cosway or other white women. ¹¹ But “who knows?” or “who cares?” will not suffice for the Hemings–Jefferson relationship. The “racial, political [and] sexual” stakes are too high.

The rumored relationship is all about sex for Ellis. It is therefore imperative that Jefferson conformed to official rather than effective kinship and racial rules of antebellum sexuality. Ellis, without a hint of personal distaste, admits that amalgamation flourished at Monticello and other southern plantations before exempting Jefferson from this pattern: “[H]e was not that adroit at the kind of overt deviousness required to sustain an allegedly thirty-eight-year affair in the very center of his domestic haven” (1996, 306). It would have been far more in character for Jefferson to deceive himself about slavery than for him to deceive his socially recognized family about this “affair,” as a familiar portrait of the intimacy and integrity of the white family cuts the possibility of miscegenation out of the picture. ¹²

Besides, Jefferson could not have been possessed by the specter of miscegenation because “for most of his adult life he lacked the capacity for direct and physical expression of his sexual energies” (Ellis 1996, 305). This character defense relates back to an account of early-nineteenth-century politically motivated attacks on Jefferson, where Ellis (1996, 216-17) affirms our contemporary comfort with interracial sexuality by noting that early tellers of the Sally story leveled “a charge of sexual (and in its own day racial) impropriety. . . . The Boston press was especially interested in how the fifty-nine-year-old president managed to make love with a much younger . . . woman. The answer was her African features.” Like other biographers who interpret the Hemings story as an affront to Jefferson’s reputation, Ellis assumes that male character, especially in the less than race-blind “sexual history of blacks and Euro-Americans in North America,” is built on the refusal of desire (Walker 2009, 39-40). Adding to this complication of character is that an attraction to Hemings’s “African features” would mean that Jefferson’s desire is neither color-blind nor controlled. Admitting to the existence of the very thing denied, Ellis (1996, 193) must racially discipline a sexuality that he implies does not exist in, for example, his description of the Jefferson presidency as “textual” (read: asexual).

The task at hand is to explore the political significance of Jefferson’s desire for Hemings, a source of redemption for Brodie and a source of danger for Ellis. Following Hayden White (1987, 45), our task will be to read allegorically: “[R]ather than regard every historical narrative as mythic or ideological in nature, we should regard it as allegorical . . . as saying one thing and meaning another.” White, in elaborating this politics of writing history, suggests that narrative “has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or more generally, authority” (13). Nationalist historiography, in particular, aims to confer authority on a public entity that, in the case of Jefferson biography, is the American nation. National authority (allegorical referent) resides in the traditional respect for the founders’ revolutionary actions (literal referent), which the republican tradition understands to be binding on future generations; “revolution,” in this sense, concerns the event of founding a new authority as well as the constant returns to preserve the authority founded (Arendt 1968, 120-24). However, as Roland Barthes (1975, 47) observes, any narrative turn toward “the beginning” is necessarily conflicted: “Does every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin, speaking one’s conflicts with the Law…?” Both oedipal and republican, Ellis’s and Brodie’s narratives return to the origin to articulate their conflicts with the father’s law, yet also reaffirm the founder’s authority precisely in this revolutionary choice of interlocutor.

The twentieth-century history of the Jefferson image is the immediate context of such conflicted narratives. As the New Deal divested decentralized, localized Jeffersonian governance of its practical import, Jefferson emerged as a symbol of the “ancestral ideals of democracy” (Peterson 1960, 375). ¹³ Jefferson’s post–civil rights movement somatization is a renegotiation of his post–New Deal symbolization, with the flesh-and-blood memory of Jefferson appearing next to the larger-than-life statue of the Jefferson Memorial in the American imaginary. Biographers writing after the civil rights movement were torn between conflicting images of an actual white, elite paterfamilias who subjected black slaves and an idealized, symbolic father of national freedom. The remainder of this section discusses how Brodie and Ellis use the concept of desire to resolve this set of raced, gendered, and sexualized complications. While Brodie integrates “the two Jeffersons” (Singh 2004) more fully than Ellis, a difference in representation that I partially attribute to differences of decade, both biographers domesticate Jefferson’s desire to enhance the affective appeal of and to the national “family.”

To put the predicament in Freudian terms, an Oedipal conflict with the origin menaces the infantile conception of the father, as the revisionist judgment of the slaveholding founders threatens to divest them of national authority. The (white) father’s problem of dealing with slavery is inherited as the (national) children’s problem of recognizing all (black) Americans. Drawing on this commonplace of public kinship, Brodie (1974, 470) articulates a public conflict of descendants with the figure of origin as a personal contradiction within the figure of origin.

His ambivalences, instead of corroding his principles, corrupting his essential decency, and incapacitating him for work, were in the most extraordinary fashion harnessed to creative endeavor—to the perfect constitution, the nondespotic state. . . . Only his conflict over the just treatment of the black people in his life, whose voices, certainly articulate at the time but silent in the documents that have come down to us, remain unresolved, troubling, and corrosive.

The sole exception to a record of extraordinary accomplishments, Jefferson’s “conflict over the just treatment of the black people in his life” turns on the allegorical meaning of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, whom he treated with justice. In his life, Jefferson loved Hemings regardless of race, and upon his death, he freed enslaved Hemingses at great cost to his indebted, “legitimate” heirs. Consistent with her position that Jefferson was trapped in a slaveholding society is Brodie’s (1974, 359) attribution of the favoritism that Jefferson showed to his white grandchildren over his black children to “the traditional code of miscegenation in the plantation South.” This admission of ambivalence confirms again that Brodie personalizes racial conflicts for political reasons. Placing slavery on the public stage would cast doubt on Jefferson’s revolutionary commitments, while shifting the racial conflict to the private realm allows an offstage romance with Hemings to resolve it. The self-contradictory figure of origin, split between a public commitment to freedom and a private interest in slavery, is rendered more consistent in the intimate realm, where desire opposes slavery and ignores race.

Although the “black people in his life” can no longer speak for themselves, Brodie can include them as parts of Jefferson’s biography and U.S. history. Brodie, in psychoanalytic terms, speaks from the depressive position characterized by the drive to integrate the partial objects of an anxiety-filled, paranoid-schizoid world. This integration is sought, according to the object-relations school of Melanie Klein (1977), for the sake of reparation. Acknowledging Jefferson’s love for Hemings, Brodie integrates intimate with political life at the biographical level; recognizing Hemingses as Jefferson descendants, Brodie “integrates” the national body split by black–white division at the allegorical level. Her attempt to make psychopolitical reparations accounts for the diverse opinions of contemporaneous black Americans, whether such individuals “accept the [Hemings] story as accurate,” “repudiate Jefferson as a hero,” or “believe that [Hemings–Jefferson] descendants dot the country.” Care for the silenced voices of Jefferson’s kin compels Brodie (1974, 30) to accept Madison Hemings’s memoirs as “the most important single document” in the debate at a time when almost every other Jefferson biographer favored the Randolph family denial. ¹⁴

Writing at a time when the Hemings story is widely accepted, Ellen Friedman (2002, 708) proposes that rearticulating the kinship metaphor might “[shed] a necessary critical light on the construction of national ideals as well as [extend] who is entitled by their legacy.” The latter more than the former possibility had already been anticipated by Brodie’s (1976, 2) article “Jefferson’s Unknown Grandchildren,” which told the stories of “children [who] disappeared into the ‘historical silence’ that [engulfed] hundreds and thousands of other slave children fathered by white men.” With reparative intent, Brodie recognizes Jefferson’s black descendents as no less a part of the American “family” than his white descendents in a way that Brodie claims Jefferson never could. In a 1970s context of new right backlash against radical black, Amerindian, Latino, and Asian empowerment movements, Brodie envisioned national inclusion along the liberal lines characteristic of certain tendencies within the civil rights movement. The Hemings family oral history project, started in 1993 with funding from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, similarly drives for racially inclusive reparation in “[giving] voice to Monticello’s African American families” (Stanton and Swann-Wright 1999, 162-63).

Brodie, in sum, figures the Hemingses’ equal status as nationals through an allegorical coding of Jefferson’s love for his expanded family. As Melanie Klein (1977) might say, “Through love and guilt, reparation of the nation,” or as Michael Rogin (1987, 81-144) might say, “The president’s two bodies are united; the somatic natural body integrates the symbolic body politic.” Her terms of reparation and integration are liberal—as color-blind as the founder’s love—and affective—privileging the father’s desire over his law. Brodie presents Jefferson as “postpatriarchal” insofar as her patrilineal narrative treats “the father . . . as an ordinary signifier without the more,” as a fallible, everyday, and embodied character (Friedman 2002, 697). However, as I argued in the last section, Brodie makes Jefferson ordinary in his everyday feelings so that he can remain heroic in his extraordinary endeavors.

Ellis came to grips with the postpatriarchal father when confronted with the conclusive evidence he deemed absent in 1996. “When a Saint Becomes a Sinner,” an article written after 1998 DNA tests overcame Ellis’s character defenses, is suffused with a vague sense of guilt. The “sin,” explicitly sexual and implicitly racial, is alluded to as Jefferson’s “long-term sexual relationship with his mulatto slave,” “sexual liaison with Sally Hemings,” and “sexual connection to Sally Hemings” (Ellis 1998b, 67-69). The transfiguration of saint into sinner splits the already fallible hero into manifest “bad” and latent “worse” parts: the mortal sin disavowed before the DNA report (the nonexistent desire is not racial) is now admitted in venial form (yes, there is desire, but no, it is not racial). ¹⁵ While the worse part of the father must stay out of sight, the bad part can be integrated into Ellis’s post-hagiographic founder with little trouble. My criticism, to be precise, is not that Ellis is personally prejudiced against “race mixing,” or, as the practice was known in the early nineteenth century, “amalgamation.” ¹⁶ It is that Ellis’s text attempts to go around rather than work through the question of what Hemings and her descendants could symbolize in their racial specificity. Unlike Brodie, who integrates Jefferson from the depressive position, Ellis splits him into partial objects from the paranoid-schizoid position and defends the less-than-ideal ego ideal against nonideal interracial desire. The sinner might be bad, but he is not worse.

A lack of narrative resources intensifies sexual anxieties since Ellis, in contrast to Brodie, cannot redeem desire as love and love as emancipatory. Does not the “casual debaucher of slave women” (Brodie) lurk behind “a sexually active, all-too-human Jefferson” unprotected by the halo of love (Ellis 1998b, 67)? ¹⁷ Based on the assumption that interracial sex under slavery must be depraved, the schizoid split of Jefferson into bad and worse parts protects the figure of origin from the taint of racially inflected obscenity. Abandoning the 1996 scene of a “domestic haven,” which prevented Jefferson from hiding his sex life from his white family, Ellis accepts the 1998 scientific evidence of Jefferson’s “deeply duplicitous character”: “it would seem that his oft-stated belief in black inferiority and his palpable fear of racial amalgamation somehow coexisted alongside his intimate relationship with an attractive black woman” (1998b, 67). Ellis drops the character defense only to cling all the more tightly to the character question, comprehending Hemings as yet another occasion for considering Jefferson’s ethics. This privatized framing of the issue is symptomatic of an impulse to keep fractious racial contestations out of a 1990s public sphere where presidential sexuality is all too frequently discussed.

Ellis (1998b, 67; also see 1996, 15 and 303) compares Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky on the grounds that both were confirmed by DNA traces of “the primal urge.” That key phrases of the 1998 article are drawn almost verbatim from the 1996 book cannot be attributed solely to an attempt to maintain consistency. Ellis’s identification of Hemings with Lewinsky erases racial difference in an analogous gesture to Brodie’s identification of Hemings with Maria Cosway and company. That said, Ellis’s take on Jefferson’s “extramarital affair” strictly opposes Brodie’s take on Jefferson’s “second marriage,” although for the record Jefferson’s intercourse with Hemings began only after his wife Martha had died. Moreover, Brodie’s language of love allows for a fuller, holistic integration, whereas Ellis’s language of sin requires subtle (bad/worse) splits to sustain Jefferson’s appeal. Jefferson then becomes “the American demigod made flesh who dwelt among us,” “the great man with ordinary weaknesses,” a near immortal whom we now see as wont to engage in sexual misconduct (Ellis 1998b, 69). Slavoj Zizek (2000, 329) surmises of Clinton’s impeachment troubles that “the Leader’s charisma is sustained by the very features (signs of weakness, of common ‘humanity’) that may seem to undermine it.” A hint of the ordinary makes the leader all the more extraordinary just as a note of sourness makes a fragrance all the more sweet. Obscenity will do the trick for neither Ellis nor Brodie.

All the academic name-calling of late—Jefferson is hypocritical, racist, and so forth—matters little to popular audiences. Ellis (1998b, 67; also see Ellis 1996, 13) assures his readers that “public affection for Jefferson is so strong that his legacy seems secure,” a statement whose Freudian interpretation would be “we are Americans because Americans love Jefferson.” Claiming that historical evidence can neither support nor refute what he accurately describes as the “tragic romance” of Brodie, Ellis (1998b, 69; also see Ellis 1996, 304) resists “the urge to make Jefferson and Hemings America’s premier biracial couple.” Instead, he insists that with new DNA evidence Jefferson “surfaces again . . . as a most potent guide into a fresh round of more candid conversations about the way we truly were and are one people.” In Brodie’s narrative, Jefferson’s color-blind desire for Hemings racially integrates the nation, but in Ellis’s narrative, the nation’s color-blind desire for Jefferson does this work. The nation must accomplish this for the historical Jefferson, who “[presumed] that America must remain a white man’s country” contra commentators who would anachronistically hold him up as a “multicultural hero” (Ellis 1998b, 69; also see Ellis 1996, 202). Countering Brodie’s resolution of the generational conflict, Ellis shifts our attention from Jefferson’s desire to the desired Jefferson: American desire resolves the racial contradictions of the oedipal figure; national desire is invested in the partially integrated father with an “all-too-human” flaw as distinguished from the part-father with an obscene desire.

The paranoid-schizoid character of this integration based on splitting derives from the fact that it defends against the possibility of sexual obscenity rather than deals with the historical injustice of race. Ellis reads portraits grand and miniature (Mount Rushmore, the two dollar bill, and the nickel) as signs of public affection. But Ellis’s dehistoricized head on Mount Rushmore must remain a talking one lest the disavowed desire return in bodily form: Jefferson “has levitated out of the historical muck and into a midair location that hovers over the political landscape like a dirigible at the Super Bowl, flashing inspirational messages to both teams” (Ellis 1998b, 69; also see Ellis 1996, 10). The resurrected ego ideal rises out of the scandalous “muck” to reassert his vitality as a bipartisan leader in the game of politics and breathe new life into a united people who can rise above black and white (another possible reading of “both teams”). My point about authority and affect is precisely that sexual practices have no necessary connection with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Ellis sticks to the “it happened, but it doesn’t matter” story out of a concern with the coincidence and contamination of abstract ideals with concrete embodiment. His conception of the body politic includes blacks in a way that evades the body politics of race. The common denominator of Brodie’s and Ellis’s representations of the Hemings–Jefferson relationship is that Jefferson’s sexuality is without contemporary racial significance.

The political stakes of representing Thomas Jefferson in relation to Sally Hemings and founding fathers in relation to slavery have surely changed over time. ¹⁸ To play up consensus for a moment, Americans in the early republic held that returning to the principles of the virtuous founders could stave off the inevitable corruption of their polity (Frank 2010, 246). Hannah Arendt (1963, 204) observed as late as the mid-1960s that national memory shrouded the constitutional founding in “an atmosphere of reverent awe which has shielded both event and document against the onslaught of time and changed circumstances.” After the 1960s to 1970s, hegemonic political culture downgraded Arendt’s “reverent awe” into a subdued reverence or, put less confidently, a worried defense. Brodie and Ellis, writing after the refoundational civil rights movement transformed the meaning of almost every event in U.S. racial history, left behind that fantasy of an unblemished founding that might have served as an unproblematic point of return. While I would hesitate to explain any texts in terms entirely contextual, I would suggest that the historical conditions under which Brodie and Ellis wrote can illuminate their political significance for the 1970s and 1990s U.S. reading publics.

The 1970s found the United States fragmenting under the strain of religious, sexual, racial, and regional conflict as well as self-doubtful in the face of declining economic and military fortunes. One response to this crisis of national unity and faith was Richard Nixon’s new right appeal to the “silent majority,” whom he implicitly contrasted to “vocal minorities” on the streets and in the headlines (Omi and Winant 1994, 122). Brodie’s differently color-blind tack was to recognize black Americans as full members of the body politic while attempting to overcome the body politics of American identity. Appealing to other Americans who read interracial sexuality as a sign of racial progress, our 1970s liberal ridiculed the early-nineteenth-century Federalist press for its sexual “hang-ups” about Hemings, that is, for “[scolding] the President like an indignant parish vicar for not having married a nice white girl” (Brodie 1974, 353). Only an overarching national unity, Brodie told her contemporaries, can encompass differences of race. Her story of a founding father and an enslaved woman imparted the popular message that race-blind love can bind the nation against the disintegrating hate of racism.

Ronald Reagan’s 1980s neoconservative administration consummated the policy retreat from the civil rights movement legacy and the silent prohibition against U.S. racial radicalism, both of which gained strength in the 1970s. By the 1990s, the racial mainstream had shifted so decisively to the right that Bill Clinton could rework the neoconservative themes of hard work, personal responsibility, and family values into his “New Democratic,” neoliberal framework (Omi and Winant 1994, 156). This decade witnessed calls for the restoration of a common American creed that could ward off the specter of a racial division operating under the depoliticized, deracialized sign of “multiculturalism.” In this context, Ellis sought to move beyond the racial past without resorting to what he considered romantic anachronisms. Proposing a counterimage to popular remembrances of Hemings and Jefferson as tragic interracial lovers à la Brodie or multicultural heroes avant la lettre, Ellis (1998b, 69) argued that Jefferson “has metamorphosed into the new role model for our postmodern temperament, if you will, a ’90s kind of guy.” Part of our postmodern predicament is figuring out how to transcend the modernist preoccupation of race within the modernist horizon of nation. An American love for Jefferson regardless of race would seem to be Ellis’s preferred solution to this historical problem.

Our biographers reconciled heroic actions with historical injustice in ways that would make sense to themselves and their communities of memory (Arendt [1958] 1998, 192). Brodie and Ellis contested prevalent ideologies of their times (1970s center-right populist resentment, 1990s center-left multiculturalism) on the same historical terrain of articulation (centrist post–civil rights era color blindness). Their nationalism of civic ideals relies on a narrative about the gradual extension of founding principles to individuals irrespective of race and gender. This deployment of “abstract liberalism,” as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2006, 9) argues, can easily accommodate claims that racial inequality stems from the inability of blacks, Latinos, and other non–“model minorities” to exploit the equal opportunities of the present. A related danger is that difference-blind liberalism fused with nationalist republicanism would exclude raced and gendered particularities in telling the supposedly general history of the nation.

Conclusion: The Racial Uncanny of the National Family

While contributing distinctive narratives to the postwar project of reimagining national and racial identity at the site of the founding (Walker 2009, 96-97), Brodie and Ellis shared a patrilineal “frame” of liberal republicanism in which national heroes without national hagiography and racial sexuality without racial recognition functioned as “baseline categories of thought” (Brandwein 2006, 231). I have argued that Ellis and Brodie explain racial contradictions psychologically and figure desire as race-blind to shore up Jefferson’s authority in the face of critical scrutiny concerning his associations with slavery in general and Hemings in particular. Both demonstrate that the loss of faith in perfect founders by no means entails the loss of faith in the founding and, furthermore, that progressive color blindness keeps the faith on behalf of the doubtful national subject. In this conclusion, I reconsider the broad stakes of telling Jefferson and Hemings’s story before considering Gordon-Reed’s alternative framing of Sally Hemings’s unique life story.

Revising and reaffirming founding narratives, Jefferson biographies extend affective invitations to a national readership that their performative dimensions help to convoke and keep together. Just as a “segregated society demanded a segregated historical memory” (Blight 2001, 391), a society seeking to overcome segregation requires an integrated history—for a symbolization of the nation after the civil rights movement that excludes black Americans casts the legitimacy of the nation itself into doubt. Still, doubt clings to that imperative of belonging to a nation which, like any other, has been “imagined as limited” from its inception (Anderson 1991, 7). The declaration of “we are all Americans regardless of race” presupposes the understanding that “‘we’ were not all ‘Americans’ due to racism.” A retroactive inclusion of the Hemings family as part of the American family wagers that national identifications can make palatable legacies of racial subordination and exclusion. ¹⁹ Yet even Brodie’s freedom narrative cannot preclude the possibility of a radical disidentification with the nation on the part of those who identify more with the Hemingses than the Jeffersons of the world.

This temporally doubled, racially differentiated invitation to the nation has redounded in ambivalence toward sites of national appeal. Gordon-Reed (1997, 147) voices this tension between kinship and slavery, nationality and subordination: “As irrational as I know it is . . . I do not want to believe that Jefferson could treat his own flesh as slaves.” “Monticello inspires and angers” Vesper Osborne (2003, 591), who sees it as a “majestic, elegant . . . symbol of the sweat and toil of [his] slave ancestors.” The possibility that African Americans like Gordon-Reed and Osborne claim Jefferson as a founding father is perhaps all the more ambivalent if they can neither simply nor fully refuse the national invitation. Nationalist invitations attempt to smooth over these ambivalent, unstable, and partial national identifications, responses which they might ironically provoke in bringing out histories of contradiction, marginalization, and subordination. Consider how two anecdotes with widespread circulation in biographical literatures come across in Ellis’s (1996, 235) remark that Jefferson’s “last request . . . was answered by a slave, just as his first memory . . . was of being carried on a pillow as a young child by a slave.” On what terms and in what senses are “we” all invited to be Americans in such remembrances?

A shift of focus from the founders to “other” figures of the period might even herald the decentering of the mythos of singular origin—namely, the story that the nation begins once and for all with the actions of Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and the like. Gordon-Reed’s (2008, 23) The Hemingses of Monticello is tellingly more postnational than postracial in seeking out stories of Sally, James, and other Hemingses. Gordon-Reed is at pains to decenter Jefferson while recognizing that the very focus on the Hemingses is Jefferson-centered: ironically, “being the ‘property’ of a famous man ensured that . . . more would be known about this family of slaves than is known about the vast majority of freeborn white Virginians of the time.” Thomas Jefferson, who has been rendered in exquisite biographical detail, casts a shadow over Sally Hemings, whose obscured visibility depends on this overshadowing. We have access to only the outlines of Sally Hemings’s silhouette, through which we must catch sight of her unique life story: “Hemings lived in her own skin, and cannot simply be defined through the enumerated experiences of the group—enslaved black females” (Gordon-Reed 2008, 290). The scant documentary evidence of Hemings’s extraordinary life is enough to see that “it was a mere accident that those barely discernible traces that ordinary people leave upon the world happen to have been preserved” (Ghosh 1992, 17). While the contingencies of Hemings’s relationship to Jefferson might make her story available to us at all, only our political choices can make Hemings’s story as worthy of remembering as Jefferson’s.

The moment of high drama for Gordon-Reed is the existential decision that Sally Hemings made within the limits and possibilities of her situation as a pregnant teenager in Paris, where Hemings could either return “home” to her enslavement to Jefferson or make a bid for freedom from Jefferson under French law. Gordon-Reed retells Brodie’s freedom narrative with Hemings’s love for her family rather than Jefferson’s love for Hemings at its center. A young Hemings is sufficiently self-possessed to bargain over the conditions of her return: “That the two would be having sex was implicit in the understanding that Hemings was going to have more children and that provision would be made for them as well as the one about to be born—the particular one that Hemings most wanted: their freedom” (Gordon-Reed 2008, 357). Hemings’s is not a story of how Jefferson fulfills his promise to redeem himself and the nation, but rather one that redefines who counts as an historical actor in the quotidian struggle for black liberation during the founding period (Gordon-Reed 2008, 541). Her choice to enter with Jefferson into an informal “sexual contract” represents the insertion of black female agency into the American “social contract.” As Carole Pateman (1994, 227) would remind us, and as Gordon-Reed has not forgotten, this sexual contract with a constitutive racial subclause signifies women’s freedom and subordination at the same time.

This revised allegory of the Jefferson household represents America as Hemings’s country by choice and freedom as Hemings’s children by contract; it remembers the raced and gendered body of Hemings as a way of re-membering the body politic as a site of both sexual and collective agency. ²⁰ Gordon-Reed renders visible those embodied singularities of race and gender which cannot be subsumed into the abstract universals of nation and citizenship found in Brodie’s or Ellis’s stories. Black American culture, like other “other” American cultures, imagines “different narratives and critical historiographies” that open up the space of the hegemonic nation to “new ways of questioning the government of human life by the national state” (Lowe 1996, 29). Articulated from the space of African American storytelling, Sally Hemings is an unruly, uncanny figure that Brodie’s and Ellis’s narratives attempt to subsume, tame, and integrate into the progressive narrative that eventuates in gender and race blindness.

What I call “uncanny” here is that racially ambiguous haunting that has a powerful resonance with the gothic metaphorics of national and domestic imaginations. The uncanny, in Freud’s ([1919] 1953, 222, 225-26) analysis, has the significations of “belonging to the house or the family,” “intimate, friendlily comfortable.” But these meanings quickly slide into their opposites of “something concealed, secret,” “something hidden and dangerous.” Hemings disrupts the homeliness of nationalist narrative as the mulatto half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, the mother of Jefferson’s literal slave family, and Jefferson’s silenced other: her position is both intensely entangled with yet indelibly estranged from a hypervisible founding father and an official founding family. Throughout Chase-Riboud’s (1979) novel Sally Hemings, she speaks under the “I”-shifter to reveal that the love of Jefferson, in both senses of that phrase, is radically insecure. Thomas obsessively asks what Sally really wants, which he hopes or perhaps demands to hear is himself. Drawing a line from a “sorrow song” (Du Bois [1903] 1994, 160), Hemings responds with a demand to be heard: “‘Lord, keep me from sinking down,’ I repeated over and over again into that silence” (Chase-Riboud 1979, 326). Hemings, somewhat of a “tragic mulatto” in Chase-Riboud’s book, descends into the silent depths of the American memory of founding figures.

Yoriko Ishida (2010, 58) appropriately interprets Hemings in Chase-Riboud’s novel as the boundary transgressing “Gothic Other that subverts white America”—but she forgets to add “black America” and “America itself.” Gordon-Reed (1997, 235) calls Madison an “even better” synecdoche for the African American experience than Sally because he refused to “pass” after watching three siblings disappear into the white world and he paid the price of ridicule when he claimed descent from Jefferson. Perhaps Madison is more representative than Sally of an open, on-the-record commitment to black community. If Madison plays the black child to Thomas’s white father, then Sally plays the interstitial mother. Resisting the racial oedipal triangulation, she troubles the kinship language of a nation of black and white cleanly differentiated, but clearly together. She suggests that replacing George and Martha with Thomas and Sally as “founding parents” (Walker) challenges the rule that excludes the subaltern from historical writing while simultaneously reinstating a patrician logic of authority. The first line of Cyrus Cassells’s (2001, 707) poem, “Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson,” reads “Je m’appelle Sally.” This not-quite-black-or-white, not-quite-national-or-foreign figure names herself to address a national founder in the language of a national other. ²¹ Hemings, speaking from an uncanny position located after the civil rights movement, continues to inspire storytellers to articulate those smoldering silences that could speak the histories of multiple origins and racial injustices.