I was perhaps in my junior year of high school when the news broke that, after many years of speculation and debate, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, did father children with one his slaves, Sally Hemings. Jefferson had always been my favorite Founding Father. John F. Kennedy once remarked at a dinner honoring a group of Nobel Prize winners, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent—of human knowledge—that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” I always thought of Jefferson as a true genius—literarily, architecturally—but perhaps not politically in the sense that his presidency was so-so, and it seemed to me he was dragged kicking and screaming into most of the events that led to the founding of this nation. He was, in essence, a quiet man who wanted to be left alone.
Early in life, he lost his wife Martha and he never recovered. Reading Jefferson’s letters (and they are voluminous), you have a sense of how he changed. One of the most interesting of his correspondences is referred to as “My Head and My Heart,” written in dialogue form to the Anglo-Italian artist, Lady Maria Cosway. It is certain he loved her—he even broke his wrist permanently during one of their outings, attempting to impress her by trying to jump a fence. But that relationship was never to be as Cosway was married and, in at least that regard, Jefferson was staunchly opposed to dalliances with a married woman.
But, for nearly forty years, he fathered many children with Sally Hemings, his wife’s half-sister (Sally’s mother Betty belonged once to his in-law John Wayles). The cognitive dissonance of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence which intoned that all men were created equal owning slaves and bedding one (and, coincidentally never freeing Sally, although he freed their children) is one many students of history can’t reconcile. The fact that most geniuses are flawed in deeper ways than us yokels understands reveals itself more and more as time goes on. Yet people, in this activist age, have become rather tired of trying to reconcile these facts. Things are, to coin an unfortunate phrase, only black and white. No grey area allowed.
The obvious question becomes was love involved or was it what it was in many plantations of the South (sexual contact without consent). We will, of course, never know as an entire year of Jefferson’s letters was destroyed and, for years, historians denied the reports of James T. Callender, a muckraker who sold the story of Hemings to the papers in an effort to prevent Jefferson’s reelection because Tom would not give him a governmental post. Callender made the news of Sally a national scandal and, only by orchestrating the Louisiana Purchase, did Jefferson leave Washington unscathed.
The only historian for many years to even tell the tale was Dr. Fawn M. Brodie, a psychobiographer whose early work (No Man Knows My History, etc.) was inspiring, but later work (Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character) was perhaps blinded by hate and ill health. Her volume on Jefferson though, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, was finally vindicated by DNA results proving lineage through the descendants of Eston Hemings in addition to the work of Annette Gordon-Reed, who’s massive The Hemingses of Monticello is a must read for anyone interested in the story. And indeed, I was.
I remember visiting Bennington College before I was accepted and being asked by the playwriting professor if I had any projects I was working on. I said I wanted to write something about Jefferson and Hemings (my idea being vacillating monologues back and forth from one character to the other). He said, “Yeah, you have that idea and about a hundred other people.” Deflated, I abandoned my sketches.
Yet, certain dramatists and writers have tried to tell Hemmings’ story even though there is not much to tell. It is all left to conjecture. There are those who think it was rape and Stockholm Syndrome and those who believed it was love and those who believed it was somewhere in between. There is so much room for dramatic license that you could write anything, but the potency of the idea propagates more and more as our country sees itself further divided on racial lines and, especially interracial relationships, than ever before. One only needs to look at how such connections are mistreated in the media, whether by Spike Lee in Jungle Fever (though that mess of a film has its moments) or something more measured, like Jeff Nichols’ Loving (2016).
The first writer to try to tell the story from Sally’s point of view was novelist/poet/sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose 1979 novel Sally Hemings was a bestseller, so much so that CBS was interested into adapting it as a telefilm until staunch Hemings-deniers shut the project down. A historically minded playwright, Granville Burgess, who achieved some regional success, offered the story as a play onstage for the first time (and Dusky Sally was even published for licensing—I own one of the few copies in circulation), but a landmark court case deemed the play to be a plagiarism of Chase-Riboud’s novel and it was withdrawn.
The next time Sally was onscreen was for the 1993 Merchant-Ivory film Jefferson in Paris. The work of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was praised for many years for elegant, prestige pictures like A Room with a View, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day. Though never money-making crowd-pleasers, they were well-respected and critically beloved. Their efforts on Jefferson in Paris (1995) were almost uniformly ignored—mainly because the film itself never makes up its mind as to what it wants to be. Cosway is there in the first half, played by Greta Scacchi, and Hemings is there in the second, played by Thandiwe Newton. An inspired (no, really!) casting choice was Nick Nolte as the lonely widower. But it was clearly Merchant-Ivory at their least strong—the film equivalent of lukewarm tap water.
It would take many years, but the heroic efforts of dramatist Tina Andrews to bring Sally’s story to the screen finally were realized in the early 2000s. Andrews had been the actress who played Valerie Grant on Days of Our Lives when it became the first soap opera to show an interracial kiss on national television. Shortly after angry, racist fan reactions, she was fired and scrimped by for many years until some took note of her plays and she had some success with her screenplay for Why Do Fools Fall in Love?, a biopic of Frankie Lymon.
Andrews necessarily believed the story of Sally should be told from an African American woman’s point of view and her view was that it was a love story—a deeply ironic and painful one, but definitely love. After all, 38 years? Due to life expectancy, that’s longer than most marriages lasted in that period. Andrews first wrote a theatrical version, The Mistress of Monticello, which was produced in the mid-80s in Chicago. This caught the attention of talent agents who shepherded her through early drafts of a screenplay version, which was never made. Many people, like her mentor Alex Haley (author of Roots), encouraged her to proceed. Her research, detailed in a book about the making of Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, was exhaustive—she visited Monticello many times and interviewed the black descendants of Jefferson.
It wasn’t until the DNA proved the relationship conconclusively that her screenplay became a four-hour miniseries starring Sam Neill and Carmen Ejogo, which premiered on CBS in 2000. I can remember my attempt to catch it on television because, by that point, I was obsessed. But bad weather in Birmingham, Alabama prevented it from being seen as the first night was wall-to-wall tornado coverage. Alas, it would be a few years until I found a VHS copy of it at a Blockbuster and finally saw it.
When comparing it with her final revised draft (printed in her book subtitled The Struggle to Tell the Controversial True Story), it is most certainly a compromised effort. The director, Charles Haid, apparently rewrote some of the scenes and, in the editing, rearranged many of the scenes for more ease of flow, sometimes with good results and sometimes not. Some elements, just being a TV miniseries from over twenty years ago, are “cringeworthy” as the kids say. Mario Van Peebles’ suicide scene (and, in fact, his entire trajectory as the freed brother of Sally) was mishandled to say the least. But Neill has great screen presence as Jefferson and Ejogo was probably seen for the first time to many American audiences (the British actress has gone on to a laudable career).
Still, when the series was screened for a crowd of 800 descendants of the Monticello scandal (black and white), tears were flowing. Many of them lived their entire lifetimes being derided for knowing the truth and they felt like they saw a respectable portrayal of their family’s story for the first time. Andrews’ memoir of the production is more engaging than her teleplay in many respects (though terribly copy-edited by the folks at The Malibu Press). The story behind the story was a little stronger, but the miniseries did lead Andrews to win the 2001 Writers Guild of America Award for Original Long Form dramatic writing (as well as an NAACP Image Award)—quite a feat for the actress who shouldn’t have been fired from a TV show over twenty years before.
There have also been at least three operas of the story, two musicals, and a more recent play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks, Sally and Tom, which is a play-within-a-play about the writing of a play of the story (Say that three times fast). But none come close to at least asking the hard questions than Andrews’ miniseries. While she flatly denied the relationship was not coercive, she depicts many such instances in the film and makes room for a complicated story of a complicated family, told in a no-holds-barred kind of way. Bravo for that.
As for Mr. Jefferson, my feelings on him have not changed. I accept him as a complicated man I’ll never understand. I feel for Sally and her descendants and for the scourge of slavery upon our nation. And yet, I’d like to think if Jefferson had put his money where his mouth was, he might not have had to live a secret life. But we all know, given how such stories play out even today, that would have never been possible.
