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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