On Apr 26, 2008, at 5:42 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> . . . one of the authors . . . stated “DNA testing cleared the
> Carrs.” Of course, it
> did no such thing. Only descendants of one child (Eston) of Sally
> Hemings
> were tested. The descendants of the three other surviving children,
> Harriet, Beverly and Madison have not been tested, . . . .
Well, I swore I wouldn't step into this overfished stream again, but
it's a chilly rainy day and I'm cranky, so here goes.
The comment above is, with all due respect, a bit of a red herring
(to continue the piscatory metaphors). Even if someday, somehow,
more DNA testing on other Hemings descendants were to suggest Carr
descent for a non-Eston line, that would not change the scientific
evidence of Jefferson descent for Eston and his line. And the
contemporary historical evidence--i.e., the evidence from those
living in the Monticello/Albemarle community during SH's childbearing
years--names no possible Jefferson candidate for the Eston line but
TJ, which is why a majority of scholars--myself included--regard
Eston's paternity as settled history, barring the unlikely discovery
of actual historical evidence to the contrary.
Nevertheless, it has always seemed very possible to me, perhaps even
likely, that SH was involved with more than one man--perhaps as a
matter of personal preference in one case (one of the Messrs. Carr?),
and as a matter of strategic accommodation, within the constraints of
her world, in the other (and note that strategic accommodation is
exactly how her son's autobiographical statement characterizes her
relationship with TJ). There is, after all, no evidence that TJ felt
for her or her children either the sort of emotional attachment or
the sort of paternal proprietorship that would have elicited his
jealousy or resentment at her involvement with another man. It is
even possible (see how quickly we all yield to blatant speculation on
this subject?) that he might have welcomed the presence of another
man in her life as a means of shielding his own involvement from his
disapproving white family--which, if so, is apparently exactly what
happened, at least in the case of his Randolph grandchildren.
Moreover, there is evidence in the lives of SH's close female
relatives, including her mother (with John Hemings's probable father,
a white artisan) and her half-sister Mary Hemings Bell (with her
eventual husband, a white Charlottesville merchant with whom she
began having children when he leased her from TJ), of sexual
involvement with white men as a matter of choice. See Cinder
Stanton's small gem of a book on the Monticello slave community--and,
I'm sure, Henry Wiencek's eagerly awaited forthcoming book--for more
on these histories.
I know that the Monticello report has dismissed the possibility of
more than one lover for SH, though on this point their reasoning
seems to me rather weak: after all, everyone who claimed personal
knowledge of SH's lover(s), starting with the politically partisan
neighbors who fed information to J.T. Callender and other Federalist
scandal-hunters in 1800-1802, had personal reason to suppress the
possibility that she might have borne children to more than one man.
I know also that Annette Gordon-Reed, whose work I deeply respect
(despite the easily discovered transcription error that so inflames
others), recently railed at the suggestion of such a possibility on
the grounds that it reduces SH to a stereotype of black female
promiscuity. Aside from the fact that one ought not let fear of
stereotype, any more than fear of iconoclasm, deter consideration of
all possible conclusions suggested by historical evidence in any
particular case, Professor Gordon-Reed's hostility on this point is
particularly surprising inasmuch as the most famous exemplar of the
female slave experience in American history--Harriet Jacobs, through
her autobiography--chose a life strategy with parallels to that which
I suggest may have been Sally Hemings's. Refusing and spectacularly
evading the advances of her master (as it seems probable SH did not),
Jacobs nevertheless chose to involve herself with another white man
and bear his children as an alternative assertion of personal choice
in a world where her choices were drastically limited. (Her book is
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/
jacobs/menu.html, and no one seriously interested in the experience
of slavery in the American South should fail to read it.)
One wonders how many other enslaved women, even if they slept with
the men who owned or supervised them out of force or fear or (as
seems most likely in SH's case) a pragmatic desire to improve the
situation of themselves or their children, also took another lover
more to their own liking if permitted to do so, simply out of the
human need to exercise choice or preference in the most intimate
areas of life.
--Jurretta Heckscher,
who also thinks that if the legions of brain cells and pixels
currently devoted to arguing about the probable sexual practices of
two members of the Monticello community were instead devoted to
discovering more about the lives of all the other people who lived
and worked there, we might actually advance the cause of historical
understanding
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