Historical memory, romantic narrative, and Sally Hemings.

In 1998 scientist Eugene Foster published the results of a DNA study suggesting that Thomas Jefferson may have fathered at least one of his slave Sally Hemings's children. The study revived longstanding rumors--some quite derogatory in their portraits--and it ignited a rash of public discourse through which historians and lay people offered contending perspectives to reckon with the scientific evidence implicating Jefferson (see Fig. 1). (1) Some argued that Hemings may have been impregnated by another Jefferson family member with DNA like Jefferson's. Foster's scientific team conceded that "we cannot completely rule out other explanations" (27). The study captured national attention, however, because it corroborated the Hemings family's oral histories, and it struck a blow to many Jefferson historians who have maintained that the liaison would have been completely out of Jefferson's character, in violation of "his own standards of honor and decency," not to mention inconstant with his views on African Americans' inferiority and black women's sexuality (Wilson 62). Indeed, in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson speculated that black women were the preferred mate for the orangutan, and he advanced vexing racial theories outlining the differences he saw between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans (137-41). What, then, could the DNA results mean for rethinking the legacy of this empyrean American symbol? Each generation will answer this question differently, but several contemporary historians have noted that the results are not atypical: in spite of race-mixing taboos, interracial sexual unions have always been a part of American history. Some Americans view the results as indicative of contradictions upon which the nation was founded and as an attestation of Jefferson's common humanity. Instead of crying "tragedy," they assert, we might consider his sexual history an opportunity to rethink the nation's intertwined racial and cultural legacies. In a New York Times editorial for instance, Orlando Patterson, a prominent scholar of race and slavery, said the liaison "humanized" Jefferson for "us," and it made him "feel less alienated, as I suspect will most African Americans eventually." Patterson may be correct that the liaison showed Jefferson to be an ordinary man of his time as opposed to the towering symbol often imagined, for it is indeed Jefferson's iconic role that seems most at stake in scholarly debates about the liaison. One wonders, still, whether Sally Hemings's humanity as slave and concubine deserves meditation and whether her humanity has ever been an issue for the American public. What does it mean that her identity has been constructed in scholarly and public discourse primarily through scandal and through her negation as unhinging excrescence in Thomas Jefferson's sexual history?

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Using Barbara Chase-Riboud's neoslave narrative Sally Hemings, this essay engages these questions from a feminist perspective by exploring the formation and articulation of enslaved black women's sexual desire and agency within master-slave relations, the psychic and socio-cultural parameters that define rape and romance, and the legibility of coercion and submission in captive sexual relations--what I call coersubmission. Because Sally Hemings left no diary or other document of her experiences as Jefferson's slave, the second section of this essay discusses some methodological challenges that inform my approach. Then, to help complicate contemporary discourses about the liaison in ways that exceed postulations of a mutually pleasurable interracial affair between Jefferson and Hemings, I perform a set of close readings of scenes from Chase-Riboud's neoslave narrative, tracing the ways this work ironically romances bondage yet provokes contemplation on the inner workings of coersubmission within sexual relations that appear consensual when in fact they are shaped by the forcible protocols of slavery. (2) If, as a nation, we regard Jefferson as a founding father, then what might it mean if we permitted ourselves likewise to consider the relation between Jefferson and Hemings as a founding violence, an inaugural racial and sexual encounter, complicated to be sure, but suggestive of the violent subject formation of blacks in the American republic?

When Chase-Riboud first published Sally Hemings in 1979, it was marketed largely as a love story. In subsequent years it generated interest that resulted in two television productions, Jefferson in Paris and Sally Hemings an American Scandal, both of which represented Hemings,

like Chase-Riboud's neoslave narrative, as a character romantically enthralled in her obeisance. (3) In all of these works, romanced constraint informs coersubmission, which in turn passes as Hemings's sexual agency and privilege. I read both with and against Chase-Riboud's romantic figurations of ambivalent scenes of sexual agency and her representations of Hemings's sexual desire to forefront how restrictive choice, coercive power, and threat of punishment frame idyllic notions of "romance," and how prescribed dominative economies wield and achieve power precisely by producing expressions in the captive subject that can be read paradoxically as "free" agency (romance) unmediated by force. I am not suggesting that the dominating power that inaugurates the slave's agency and ensures her subjection is always consistent with how she internalizes power. Nor am I suggesting that enslaved black women possessed no agency in master-slave sexual relations. I am, however, interested in exploring restricted agency and the conditions of possibility that Chase-Riboud both embraces and troubles to portray love. Sally Hemings embraces and troubles concepts such as romance, consent, and nonconsent. The narrative's economy dramatizes multiple scenes of coersubmission, ambivalent tension and desire, and multivalent address. Its structure thus invites readings of both romance and terror and can be instructive to historians and lay people interested not only in the Jefferson-Hemings liaison but in interracial master-slave unions, gender, subjection, and enslaved black women's sexuality. My readings plumb this neoslave narrative's spaces of multiple address because I believe that Sally Hemings, more than contemporary scholarly discourses about the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, highlights how dominative power relations produce and govern sexual desire and conceptualizations of romance in bondage.

The Invisible Slave Woman & Methodological Horizons

It is critical that scholars attend to the structuring absences that archives can (re)present, and interrogate, in turn, what such silences might signify and how they impact the questions and arguments we advance about historical persons. Such work is especially pertinent in Hemings's case. She left no written body of records, yet her body functions as both invisible enigma and the open or naked surface upon which historians inscribe multiple narratives. Historian Nell Painter has issued some instructive and sage cautions about such methodological dilemmas in reflecting on the approach that she adopted to research the life of Sojourner Truth. "If we are to write thoughtful biographies of people who were not highly educated and who did not leave generous caches of personal papers in the archives where historians have traditionally done their work," Painter cautions, "we will need to develop means of knowing our subjects, and adapt to our subjects' ways of making themselves known, that look beyond the written word" ("Representing" 462). When she made this statement in the Journal of American History, Painter asked scholars to reconceptualize where we look for historical matter, and in her examination of how Truth deployed photographs to counter 19th-century white women s depictions, Painter suggests that "truth" resides not merely in what a subject may have said or written but in the what she might have inscribed with her body and our subsequent interpretations. Similarly, in querying the methodological questions that frame biographical discourse about 19th-century black women, critic Daphne Brooks asks "what kinds of critical methodologies might be used to interrogate the subjectivity of historical figures ... who have been largely denied the right to claim discursive property as well as the patriarchal fantasy of 'writing themselves into being'?" (46).

Painter's and Brooks's ideas provoke additional questions about Hemings: what if our subject was legally structured into an invisibility constitutive of her contradictory identity, to how she was defined ontologically and socially during her lifetime and implicitly so in our own? What if her occlusion is paradoxically the only way she can become known and the pivotal index of her oxymoronic identity, first as a (non)person in history, then as concubine and as negated national symbol and burdened historical ellipsis? Even to think of Hemings as a "person in history" begs contemplation, for as Jefferson's slave she was a subject that was no subject: she was no "person" in the social or legal sense that Jefferson was nor in the sense that the term is understood today. First and foremost, Hemings was Jefferson's property, three-fifths of a person in constitutional terms. Black woman with no archival legacy save the deeds done in her body, Hemings lived a life governed by multiple levels of social and juridical invisibility. (4) To think about her subjectivity and agency, therefore, we must reckon with her ontological and legal status as property and the social relations and servile obligations pertinent to that property status.

Writing in 1969, almost 30 years before the DNA study with what was one of the most sympathetic yet still problematic early approaches to the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, historian Winthrop Jordan proposed that "indirect evidence indicates that Sally was happy throughout the period of her motherhood, and more important, Jefferson was not capable of violating every rule of honor and kindness, to say nothing of his convictions concerning the master-slave relationship" (465). Anxiously proleptic, the last portion of this commentary belied a haunting line of thought--that the liaison might have existed--but it turned all too easily to what Jordan considered "more important:" a defensive recuperation of Jefferson's character that averted the logical consideration that, given slavery's function as a dominative and traumatic involuntary system of multiple violations, then, indeed, violence, dishonor, and force might have been possible constituents of the liaison. It is not that there is no evidence that Jefferson treated Hemings and her children differently from other slaves. Rather, in anticipation of questions about the nature of this asymmetrical sexual union, Jordan's proposition of Hemings as "happy" mother is inseparable from his immediate assertion of Jefferson's honor. It is in Jordan's proleptic moment that we discern a glimmer of haunting questions that have largely structured historical research and debates about the liaison, even when such questions have not been posed straightforwardly.

In fairness to Jordan, who conducted critical historiography of racist European attitudes towards African Americans, and who, along with Fawn Brodie, was one of the first contemporary historians to concede to the liaison's probability, up until the DNA study most historians simply refuted the liaison by citing Jefferson's racial views and by brokering his credibility and symbolic stature against Hemings's ostensible debasement as an African American, a slave, and Jefferson's property. (5) The logic of such dismissals rested upon two presumptions: (1) that engrained race prejudice against African Americans would automatically generate public disbelief in the liaison, and (2) that Jefferson was incapable of behaving in ways inconsistent with the symbolic image he has come to represent. Herein lay profound methodological and ethical errors, Annette Gordon-Reed would argue in her book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Herein lay, too, evidence of abiding racial tensions and racism in the scholarly discourse that affected and continues to affect the kinds of questions and issues raised to contend with this liaison's plausibility and conditions of possibility.

One year prior to the DNA study, Gordon-Reed garnered national attention by wielding the analytic tools of a lawyer to make her historical intervention. Using a combination of sleuthing, speculative questioning, scrutiny of circumstantial evidence, and cross-and re-examination of known historical facts and subjective accounts, she advanced a persuasive case in support of a sexual liaison between Hemings and Jefferson. She produced a point for point rejoinder to earlier historians' denials, while revealing their approaches and perspectives to be biased and questionable. "Historians' prejudices and individual desires to keep inviolate their particular image of Jefferson," Gordon-Reed argued, "prevented fair, hardheaded and thorough presentation and consideration of all the facts" (Thomas Jefferson 225). She showed that they consistently nullified or suppressed a seminal piece of testimony, the memoir of Sally Hemings's son Madison Hemings, and offered instead their own contemporary white racial authority as reliable historical evidence rather than seriously pursuing Madison's claims. In his 1873 memoir, Madison claimed that (1) his mother was Jefferson's concubine; (2) Jefferson was his and his siblings' father; and (3) Jefferson made provisions to free his enslaved children when each turned 21, according to an agreement with Sally Hemings. (6) Whether or not we consider the negation and exclusion of African Americans in legal spheres or in other arenas of public life, the disqualification of Madison Hemings's testimony seems emblematic in many respects of the general problem of black testimony in the nineteenth century and beyond. It also underscores the constructedness of the historical archive by, for, and in favor of the dominant and the kinds of social and intellectual violence that can be (re)enacted through deliberately structured historical silences in the constitution of national memory.

Gordon-Reed's objective was to present evidence that the liaison was indeed highly probable and to demonstrate that Jefferson's racist sentiments did not necessarily controvert a possible liaison (226). "Most commentary on the subject," she argues, "proceeds from the assumption that any relationship between Jefferson and Hemings would have involved a degree of force," and "this is implied largely to make the situation look as bad as possible, so that no one will believe, or want to believe, that the story could be true" (164). "Might not Sally Hemings have thought being the mistress of a slave master a suitable role?" she asks. At this point, she concludes, "we have to confront the unpleasant notion for many, both black and white, that Sally Hemings may have welcomed any advances that Thomas Jefferson may have made" (164). We cannot know what Sally Hemings thought, but Gordon-Reed's points on force are significantly out of step with scholarly discourses that have studiously, if defensively, elided the possibility that Hemings might have been forced, since such a possibility would represent Jefferson as a rapist. For the sake of argument, what if we rethought her statement to ask whether or not we can accept the unpleasant notion that Sally Hemings may not have accepted Jefferson's advances? Further, it seems critical to consider more than Hemings's racialized desirability or her acceptance of any advances that Jefferson might have made, and to remember that slavery was first and foremost a condition of force, whether brutally or benignly exercised. A master's will often manifested in the compliances of his slave, and while plantation slavery depended upon paternalist discourses of affection that masqueraded as evidence of its benefits, the institution was grounded in threats of violence and punishment that were inextricably tethered to "loving" sentiment and submission. Liberal individualist notions of choice and "acceptance" merely obscure the constraints of slavery with the fiction of volition. It seems prudent in this regard to note, therefore, that while we cannot entirely reduce the liaison to the context of its genesis, it is central nonetheless to consider slavery's dominative terms. As Saidiya Hartman observes, ultimately, "conditions of domination and subjugation determine what kinds of action are possible or effective, though these acts can be said to exceed the conditions of domination and are not reducible to them" (55). (7)

My concern is not to quarrel about the veracity of the liaison or recover some virginal innocence in Hemings. Nor will we "try" Jefferson for miscegenation here. The US public's preoccupation with miscegenation attests in many respects to its excitement over sexual and racial prohibitions, which predisposes Jefferson to the charge of having tainted the pure white American bloodline by descending literally and figuratively into a black hole. What concerns me are a set of issues not adequately explored thus far, particularly at this moment when in contending with the DNA results many have transitioned from staunch denials or circumspect silence to postulating an interracial romance and love affair between Jefferson and Hemings. Hobbling in the face of the DNA results, many now advance romance or interracial sex where denial or indifference once reigned and where questions of power yawn outstretched awaiting examination. But what if we dispensed with guarding Jefferson from the charge of miscegenation and took up instead the sensitive but much needed line of inquiry that interrogates the forms of power that might occasion such an asymmetrical sexual relation? The symbol of Jefferson as metonym and synecdoche for freedom and whiteness is continually wagered against Hemings as symbol of black abjection, but can we permit ourselves as a nation to consider Hemings's humanity and the violence of slavery? Or does slavery and hypersexualized black femininity, for which Hemings has become a malignant national trope, so affront that we retreat into repressive logics, inflicting injuries of old through a range of denials and abeyances? Can the nation permit itself even to fathom enslaved black women's injury? If so, what kinds of logic and language allow us to inaugurate such a process?

Laboring imaginatively at the limits of the archive, Chase-Riboud provokes meditation on these issues and more in her neoslave narrative Sally Hemings. While not a credentialed historian, she establishes a dialogue in Sally Hemings with historians and with such early novels as Williams Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) by interweaving creative expositions of the Jefferson-Hemings liaison with historical facts and with Jefferson's writings and plantation records (DuCille 450-51). As the late Barbara Christian observed, "because Chase-Riboud is interested not only in the contradiction between Jefferson's personal and political life ... but also in the ways the 19th-century definition of love is related to the definition of enslavement--she revisions Brown's sentimental romance" (335). Addressing historians directly in the author's note to her 1994 edition, Chase-Riboud argues that "history should be revered, not the people who make or write it. And this history should be revered, warts and all, with all the dangerous passions, secrets, contradictions, anachronistic interpretations, dark undersides, and self-preserving lies that go with the mythology of a nation, and should be revised often" (Afterword 354). "It is well to remind ourselves," she adds, that "history is nothing more than the human adventure as told by fallible humans, with all their prejudices and psychoses and visions, to the society which they serve. The result is sometimes, even most often, 'scientific' truth, but not always" (354). By including a factual Hemings family tree as preface, a scholarly bibliography, an afterword, "concrete" historical events, and her own personal motivations for penning this narrative, Chase-Riboud exposes her labor's skeletal frame: she openly concedes to her narrative's risks, its creative license, and spaces of uncertainty. In so doing, she unmasks historical conceit with a noteworthy caveat: the impossibility of certain recovery in any historical project that attempts to reconstruct or represent the interior lives of enslaved black women who were structured into invisibility and silence. (8)

While certainly no historical testimony, Chase-Riboud's neoslave narrative constitutes nonetheless a critical epistemological and methodological intervention into the field of historical discourse about the Jefferson-Hemings liaison because it instigates reflection on aspects of interiority and asymmetrical power relations critical to theorizing the invisible Hemings. We might interpret Sally Hemings as a creative anticipation of Brooks's question about the kinds of critical methodologies used to explore historical subjects denied access to writing themselves into being. And we might also view it as a creative anticipation of Painter's admonition that we explore dimensions of historical subjects that exceed what words can divulge. Situated on the boundaries of the archive and on the margins of scholarly discourse, Sally Hemings works through words to exceed words. It focuses upon potential deeds done in Sally Hemings's body as well as psychic domains that in many respects defy easy articulation or legibility. This focus is perhaps the narrative's most instructive potentiality for theorizing Jefferson and Hemings. My reading of this neoslave narrative as a critical intervention is not meant to argue that we interpret it as historical testimony but to suggest its utility to historians' speculations. Scholarly discourse thus far has produced some rather bizarre speculations, many of which rest implicitly on white supremacist and sexist logic. They either ambivalently magnify Hemings's biracial status as the racial capital that commended her as an obliquely admissible object of sexual desire, then as now; assert rather simplistically that this teen was eager to seduce Jefferson or welcome his advances to secure plantation privileges; or embrace the liaison as a metaphor for propositions of an all too easy discourse of multiracial harmony. Even when some caution, as Philip Morgan does, that "modern notions of romance--seeing Hemings and Jefferson as America's premier biracial couple--should not be projected onto unions born of trauma, dependence, constraint," the volitional discourse of interracial sex persists in undermining precisely such cautions (75). Indeed, Jefferson might have been attracted to Hemings because of her resemblance to his deceased wife to whom she was half-sister; he might have also been attracted to Hemings because she was of mixed race ancestry. In his mind her white appearance might have placed Hemings above African Americans of unmixed ancestry. It is also not unlikely that Hemings might have so completely understood both her racial status in the white supremacist phenotypic symbolic order and the constraints and gendered expectations of her slave status that she acted within the normative scope of sexual obligations required of enslaved women. From this historical distance, what remains to be considered is whether scholars will extend the vexed terms and logic of this white supremacist and sexist governing order by leaving them uninterrogated.

In Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, editors Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter Onuf write that they hoped "historians would be able to suggest which fields of research now appeared most fertile, how [the DNA] evidence might shift our perspective on a variety of topics, such as the history of race relations, and what this new piece of evidence meant for traditional historians' methods" (3). (9) Strikingly absent, however, from this important 1999 volume are any critical feminist theoretical-historical perspectives that might enlarge the parameters of the discourse at the end of the twentieth century. Strikingly absent is any consideration of the important field of black women's history and black feminist studies, both of which provide analyses of enslaved black women's experiences and their narratives about those experiences, and which are models for more sophisticated reflections on Hemings's possible subjectivity and her position as Jefferson's concubine than those advanced in Lewis and Onuf's volume. To dwell on the normativity of antebellum interracial sexual liaisons and cite the longevity of the Jefferson-Hemings liaison and the freedom it guaranteed Hemings's children as an indication of Jefferson and Hemings's love for each other, is to sidestep all too smoothly questions of white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny to which Hemings and untold numbers of black men and women were subjected during slavery. It is to sidestep by extension issues of enslaved black women's sexual and psychic injury, slavery's despair and compulsory survival within its prescribed power domains, and to imply rather facilely that longevity and paternalism, or rather endurance in paternalism, should somehow be understood as interracial harmony and not white supremacist and sexist domination. Such reasoning is tantamount to the tautology that since African Americans were enslaved for hundreds of years, they somehow relished slavery. A critical feminist perspective might suggest, alternately, that rather than deploy longevity as a premise upon which voluntarist narratives of interracial sex and romance can be constructed, we consider it an invitation to question the possible extent of Hemings's subjection on multiple psychological and physical levels. Foreclosing these disquieting issues, as plantation apologists once did, puts us one step from positing that slaves loved slavery and its benefits--certainly not our objective. (10) The task seems, as Lewis and Onuf rightly argue, to bring other fields of inquiry into the discourse about the liaison.

One step in that direction and a decidedly reflexive imaginative form that emphasizes a fictional slave narrator, Sally Hemings points back to historical crises of witnessing what innumerable enslaved black women experienced during slavery. Its structure and form foreground the fragmentary nature of attempts, whether in scholarly or fictional discourses, to reconstruct the "voices" of enslaved black women who were barred from witnessing about, or bringing formal charges to contest, the deeds done in, to, and upon their captive bodies. Sally Hemings will never testify about her life. What we say about her, therefore, may reveal more about our contemporary politics and desires than about hers. Still reading multiple scenes from Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings motivates critical reflection on those politics of desire, their complicated contours, and their overarching significance in regard to race and gender in American history and culture.

Structuring the Past/A Structured Past

Sally Hemings opens in Virginia in 1830, with a scene symbolizing the constrained parameters of black existence in a white supremacist order and the framed representation of Sally Hemings's identity in historical discourses: "There was a white man coming up her road, as if God had ordained it and he owned that road" (3). That man is census taker Nathan Langdon, Harvard graduate and lawyer, enchanted by the prospects of meeting Thomas Jefferson's slave mistress, "famous in Albemarle County for as long as he could remember," although "few had actually seen her" (4). Watching him approach, an aged Hemings stands petrified in her cabin doorway, asking herself "why was it that she could never control the dread and panic she felt at the approach of a white man?"(5). Langdon's approach recalls the terror of another approach more than 40 years before, in the spring 1787. That coming, too, similarly petrified Hemings before she embraced it. Langdon, however, is no Thomas Jefferson, but like Jefferson, he desires to explore the unspeakable: "how was it possible that, at the pinnacle of his power, Thomas Jefferson had chosen a slave when he could have chosen any white woman alive!" (8). His question is answered from a number of vantage points through a series of retrospective flashbacks into Hemings's life as partially narrated by Hemings and an omniscient narrator. These structuring flashbacks oscillate between alternate temporalities and split subjectivities that rival and contradict each other at critical points. One productive way of interpreting this convergence of memory and bifurcated subjectivities and temporalities is to locate them within a framework of trauma wherein the traumatized subject grapples with an inaugural physical and psychological breach by revisiting that breach from varying perspectives and in alternate modalities, exploring dimensions of its impact, known and unknown.

Primarily interested in capturing and containing Hemings's story, Langdon's preoccupations with her race ironize contemporary preoccupations with Hemings's blackness and dis-ease over her identity in contemporary debates. Hemings's existence bewilders Langdon not merely because it contradicts disputations of her reality but because she bespeaks a larger history "of the whole commerce between master and slave ... [as] a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part and the most degrading submission on the other" (17). Jarred by this embodiment of the South's loaded sexual history, Langdon wonders "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. There were no women who looked like this" (8). In the anxious silence separating the two, Hemings's skin sullies hallowed conceptions of whiteness upon which Langdon establishes his own white male identity and stakes enormous investments in "the great man" (14). Though the liaison is but a "parenthesis in the institution," Langdon sees "something sinister in this blatant misuse of a master's absolute power. That Sally Hemings was a victim was certain. Her submissiveness was what had made her the perfect slave, but, to his mind, the perfect woman as well" (40). Intrigued by this oxymoronic enigma of a woman who affords him a homosocial connection with Jefferson through "the fading echoes of her existence," Langdon visits Hemings over the course of several months, inquiring presumptuously into her past (37). In so doing, he prompts Hemings to contemplate her self-formation in that past.

In "long afternoons" with Langdon, Hemings "discover[s] that she had indeed had a life: a life full of deep and complex feelings," and "slowly, out of an almost invisible but very deep wound, in an unceasing stream, thoughts and feelings welled up and spilled out. She felt her self floating, felt an odd excitement in answering Nathan Langdon's questions, and even while speaking was divided between pleasure and torment" (38, 47). In the course of the neoslave narrative, Hemings's complex feelings are articulated through ambivalent restagings of the "pleasure and torment" characterizing her liaison with Jefferson. Despite the pleasure and torment of thinking back; despite her knowledge that her and Langdon's status positions and the "secretive nature" their relationship deemed it "more fitting if instead of exchanging thoughts they exchanged pleasures"--Hemings, having rent an aperture in the veiled past, "spoke more and more openly," opening "drawer after drawer of memories which she rearranged, changed, aired," and "counted like linen" (38-39). Giving the body was perhaps most appropriate in such race-gender configurations, for "thoughts, feelings, and memories were all a slave, or an ex-slave had to call her own" (38). Even Jefferson had recognized this self-possession: "he had loved her as a woman and owned her as a slave, but her thoughts had always remained beyond his or anyone's control" (38). "Despite herself," however, or perhaps precisely because of her self and the inveterate rule of silence by which she keeps that self "alive and sane" in a world where "not to speak was not to put into words the hopelessness of having no future and no past," Hemings speaks "with a kind of desperation" in "volatile performances" that awe and excite Langdon, at the very same time that she "uncover[s] a person," a self whom "she had never known from a life she had no sense of" (14, 39). "Startled to perceive" that she had indeed "lived a life," repressed "in a long underground passage which ascended only now and again in the midst of tremendous events called History," Hemings struggles to reckon with a self formed in subjection and to generate courage to transform that self through introspection (47).

Langdon triggers Hemings's memories into the past, but he also unleashes anger about that past, anger that moves her to reexamine his historical motives and interest in her history, Jefferson's role in her life, and her inherited position in the sexual protocols of slavery. "Determined" that Jefferson not be judged "guilty of the crime ... of miscegenation," Langdon, unbeknownst to Hemings, records Hemings and her sons as white in the census ledger, then mentions this notation nonchalantly during one of his visits (16, 50). He styles this rewriting of race and history as a generous bestowal upon the Hemingses meant to circumvent laws prohibiting free blacks from living in Virginia--a gift of whiteness, he thinks, that will make life "much easier" (50). His error is fatal but eye-opening for Hemings: it dismantles the fragile trust between the two and incites an "unfathomable, uncontrolled black rage that went beyond the terrified young man" (52). Langdon's circumventions cannot be achieved with the stroke of a pen; Hemings's black past, Jefferson's black past, cannot be rubbed out by fraudulent ascriptions of whiteness. The violence and audacity of his erasure is at once all too familiar to Hemings and she tells him so: "I've been Thomas Jefferson's creature ... and now you decide it's time for me to be yours. Yours! ... It's Judgment Day! Instead of being black and a slave, I'm free and white.... What did you think you were doing--playing God?" (50). As a recorder of history, an ostensibly reliable eyewitness and authenticator of the very existence of people in history--a white witness--Langdon assumes a proprietary racist and sexist authority over history in order to transpose it and enact violence through it. He aspires concurrently to transpose or rename this violence as benevolence. In his audacity, to which he is completely blind, he feels assured that the mantle of whiteness can wand away a burdened and burdening past and its resulting social anguish, but instead he magnifies violences past, Hemings's sense of her exploitation and the foul nature of her invisibility and existentiality in the white supremacist social order.

Significantly, it is during a discussion about blacks' inability to testify against whites that Langdon's ruse slips. He and Hemings discuss the case of a "mulatto" who wishes to testify against his white cousins, to claim his siblings as his property and thereby free them. The absence of Hemings's family condition as one rectifiable in the legal sphere amplifies Langdon's treachery. His subsequent pleas for forgiveness do not abate the situation. Rather, they provide Hemings an opportunity to express what the arrogance of whiteness demands from black people in general and black enslaved women in particular: "forgive you because you didn't' realize.... That's what black folks are here for. To forgive white folks because they didn't realize. Forgive me. Forgive me. My father said it. My lover said it. My white sons will say it. Yes, I forgive you. All of you, and your insufferable arrogance. But I never want to see you again" (51). Nor do Langdon's professions of love redeem his error. If anything they infuse Hemings with a "pure crystal light" of rage, "something diabolical and possessed that could maim or kill at will," when she considers that it is those very words ("That's what he said") that bound her for 38 years, "soul and flesh," to Jefferson (52, 277).

Langdon's transpositions are instructive on multiple levels. They are instructive for Hemings who understands them as commensurate with and analogous to Jefferson's ownership of her body and public disavowal of her identity as his concubine. They are instructive for readers because they function as meta-commentary on the vexed nature of Hemings's representation within the field of American history proper. When Hemings tells Langdon that she is "tired of white men playing God with my flesh and my spirit and my children and my life" (51), she repudiates an all too traditional, one might say historically hegemonic authority over black life that is as relevant to the fictional census taker's arrogance and to her past as concubine in the narrative as it is to contemporary historical discourses about the liaison that negate Hemings's race and gender identity. Chase-Riboud's irony rings clear: just as Langdon attempts to guard Jefferson's character and recuperate through historical discourse a control that he (Langdon) cannot materially exert over the exslave's body, so, too, some contemporary scholars use their authority to structure Hemings into invisibility, or better, concurrently to inscribe and displace her as a national symbol of noxious blackness. In challenging these normative accounts of Hemings, what Chase-Riboud clarifies through Langdon's character is how profoundly possessed Hemings has been on multiple levels: possessed by Jefferson as property, possessed by Langdon as object of curiosity, possessed by journalists and muckrakers who coin salacious phrases and tawdry jingles to revile her race and sex, possessed by her own and Jefferson's delusional transpositions of her subjection as romance. (11)

It is significant, therefore, that when Hemings dismisses Langdon, she erupts into a nosebleed while thinking simultaneously of his erasure as a rape. "She had been raped," the character thinks, "of the only thing that a slave possessed: her mind, her thoughts, her feelings, her history. Among all the decisions of her life, she realized, not one was ever meant for herself" (52-53). Accentuated by her nosebleed, which might be read as a figuration of the wounded body or a punctured orifice, Hemings's designation of Langdon's erasure as rape moves beyond his violations to evoke other violations past to which she is passionately if ambivalently attached. Hemings's passionate attachments accord with Jacques Lacan's theorizations of subject formation and fixation and with Judith Butler's assertion that the subject, "called by an injurious name," brought into sociality through injury and trauma, paradoxically embraces the injurious terms of her existence, even in moments of resistance against injury, for it is those very terms of injury that "constitute" the subject socially: it is precisely through those traumatic terms that the subject comes to form, understand, and experience identity (104). If Langdon's impositions on Hemings's race and thoughts are read as rape, then they also punctuate the captive body as a vector of unspeakable trauma and Chase-Riboud's intimation that similar violence is enacted ideologically in present discourses about Hemings's identity. Noticeably absent in Hemings's formulation of rape is the rape of the body-property, an irony that dramatizes her crisis in ownership over the body and the analogical nonexistence of rape as a crime against which enslaved black women might petition in 18th- and 19th-century America. Chase-Riboud's emphasis on thoughts--literally the unspeakable--as the object of rape thus foregrounds other unspeakable phenomena: the sexual exploitation of enslaved black women and the trauma of sexual coercion and domination that produces the split subject whose mind is ambivalently at odds with the master-possessed body.

Situated at the beginning of the neoslave narrative, Langdon's exchanges with Hemings are the structural mechanism through which Sally Hemings speaks back to historical discourses about the liaison. Chase-Riboud's temporal deployment of Langdon's impositions create an aperture through which readers can explore the possibilities of the captive subject's sexual trauma within relations that may be understood as both romance and terror. It is only after Hemings names Langdon's erasure as rape that she interrogates and reconfigures her perceptions of a romantic past with Jefferson and seriously ponders her self and image in history. Just as she refuses to see Langdon gain some control over what history she has left, in a cathartic ritual of self-purging and self-reckoning, Hemings bums Jefferson's love letters and her own diaries cataloguing their liaison, as if to castigate the abhorrent past and her own implication in it. "This moment she knew had been coming ever since that April day the census taker had arrived at her door, interrupting her solitude, disturbing her memories, changing her color" (53). She begins by unearthing a girlhood self-portrait from Paris that she has not shown to anyone, "not to her sons, not to Nathan Langdon, not to Thomas Jefferson. She had never reasoned why," except perhaps because "this was the sole image of herself that belonged only to her" (53). After studying the image, wondering how she could "ever believe, invisible as she was, betrayed and drowning in a sea of loneliness, that she had loved? ... Had loved the enemy," Hemings throws it into the fire, burning this self that represents a "blood sacrifice" and Jefferson's object (53). Then, in an act that symbolically executes Jefferson and repudiates his structuring inscriptions, Hemings burns Jefferson's letters after concluding, "in order to burn them, I would have to forget you" (53). The final act of self-realization, creation, and purging in this ritual is Hemings's burning of her diaries, the evidence and rem(a)inder of what she views as her complicity in her subjugation. Kneeling as if "in attitude of prayer" or perhaps confession, or both, Hemings opens her diary on her "bloody apron," reexamining and reciting the date and length of each of Jefferson's visits during the "thirty-eight years of minutes, hours, [and] months," that she had "re-enslav[ed]" herself by returning from Paris with Jefferson (53). "A certainty that her fate was more than something personal overtook her"--a certainty that it was not just hers but that of her sister, mother, and grandmother, and that, finally, of the master within that must be destroyed for a new subjectivity to emerge (53). With "deep calm," thus, she burns this last diary in a move that parallels Lacan's theorization of fantasy traversal, the transition from "it" to "I"/eye: this act "she would make her very own ... neither black nor white, neither slave nor free, neither loved nor loving," for "she had crossed a line" and "she no longer feared anything; not even death itself. Even if they hanged her" (54).

Where Langdon attempts control of the past through writing, Hemings attempts control of the past by burning writing (Rushdy, "I Write" 116, 120). Her destruction of the image of self and the literal inscriptions of her master are attempts to dispose of slave scripts or, at the very least, to deform them. Her ritual is an inauguration as pivotal as her initiation into the "blood sacrifice" that was her concubinage. But one wonders what Hemings feared previously, hanging being the one example she cites. Why does death as punishment slip so easily into her articulation of resistance? At what point might it have been a threat? Was it in years past when she feared for her life and that of her children, knowing that the price of resistance, whatever its shape, could weigh as heavily on the body as acquiescence? Or was it only now at 56, in traversing the master's romantic fantasy and adopting in its stead a reflexive critique of the self in/ and the other's desire, that she embraced the death awaiting the slave who dared say no, the hazard of being murdered and to murder, to kill the master within and thereby produce something approximating a "free" self? These questions are answered partially and metaphorically in Hemings's next move, her attendance at Nat Turner's public hanging, at which she heralds Turner as the "nullifier of her life," the one who embodies the "truth of her life," and who unfurls "a vision of herself more terrible than she had ever imagined," for "she had denied and denied and denied the mesmerizing violence of Turner and his avengers that had been around her and in front of her and part of her, always" (55, 57).

The answers to these questions also unfurl more broadly through time, memory, and Hemings's narration of pleasure and torment in a manner that accords with Lacan's theories of subject formation, fixation, and fantasy traversal. For Lacan, subjects come into being as a "form of attraction toward and defense against a primordial, overwhelming experience," which constitutes jouissance, "a pleasure that is excessive leading to a sense of being overwhelmed or disgusted yet simultaneously providing a source of fascination" (Fink xii). Subjects form identities in relation to others' desire, assuming those desires as their own even as they might also recognize those desires as "mesmerizing and lethal" and seek to traverse them (Fink xii). Traversing a master fantasy involves (1) subjectivizing (narrating) traumatic experience, (2) replacing the self at the scene of the encounter, and (3) naming the role of the self in the encounter, which may paradoxically be read as another articulation of the other's desire. In Hemings's narration, her pleasurable and tormented memories represent jouissance, even as the objective of her narrativization is to traverse her master's fantasies and interrogate her desires. Lacan's theories as they apply to the fictional Hemings are significant to contemporary discussions of the liaison because they are a lens through which it is possible to think through romance to move beyond romance, and to ponder the manifold violences of slavery that produce coersubmission but that operate through the vehicle of romance to carry out domination and sustain power. Sally Hemings presents visions of a subject for whom longevity, children, and plantation benefits do not merely signalize rapturous romance but profound trauma and repression, a loaded sexual history. How the fictional Hemings narrates the story of her subjection as she traverses the fantasies of her romance with Jefferson is thus a point to which I return to present some further possibilities that might be considered in discussions about the liaison and highlight the relationship between enslaved black women's trauma and their subjectivity.

Sublimating Subjection, Traversing the Other's Desires

I leave to time the unfolding of drama. I leave to posterity to reflect upon times past; and I leave them characters to contemplate.--Abigail Adams, 1801 (83) (12)

Sally had no worldly pride, no independence, no idea of justice. She was still childish, rancorless, detached, except for that which concerned what she loved. Sally was not even conscious of injuries inflicted upon her, and of the self-possession it took to forgive, she had not one grain of that.--Sally Hemings (34)

The presumed mutuality of feelings in maintaining domination enchanted the brutal and direct violence of master-slave relations.--Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (88)

If a scene of sexual trauma is the site in and through which the bondwoman's sexual desire is formed, then how does she tell the story of the formation of her sexual desire and its articulation within the captive relation without implicating the self as architect of or accomplice to her trauma? How does she reckon with what she understands as sexual desire? What characterizes the labor of reckoning (for the captive and her audience if she happens to have one)? These are the challenges Chase-Riboud takes up in staging scenes of Sally Hemings's recollections of her first sexual encounter with her master. And these are the challenges with which she confronts us as readers by staging scenarios that are at once profoundly ambivalent, open to competing and contradictory interpretations, and perhaps structured so precisely both to render a sense of the captive girl's dilemma and to expose US readers' own investments in the projects of historical interpretation and representation. In these double-edged scenes, how one reads (the politics of reading) is as important as what one reads. Here, I examine three scenes to think through the vehicle of Chase-Riboud's construction of Hemings's fictional character about the psychic and sociocultural parameters that define rape and/as romance and about the (il)legibility of coercion and submission in captive sexual relations--what I have called coersubmission. These issues are critical to acknowledging the unspeakable dimensions of enslaved blacks' sexual and psychological injury, which defy the most profound attempts at anything akin to an earnest accounting.

After attending Turner's hanging at which she whispers a plea of forgiveness, "O God now forgive me for ever loving him [Jefferson]," Hemings vaults into slave narrative mode, reverting back to 1787. Yet immediately, as if to register memory's fallibility and its tortuous circuits of recall, or perhaps in a hesitant start, or both, she loops back further in time to when she was eight or nine years old--a time that precedes 1787 but that is central to 1787. "I BELIEVED myself to be happy. As I child I was happy," she starts, emphasizing the naivete of her childhood perceptions and summarily casting doubt upon them. She then relates an incident punctuating the tensions between paternalist sentiment, sexual desire, and physical and psychological injury: left alone to play when she was eight or nine, Hemings broke into tears, so "master Jefferson came upon me and tried to comfort me," explaining "being sad was a waste of time" (61). Her "earliest recollection of" her master, "at that moment, knowing neither past nor future," Hemings "felt only an immense calm and safety in his presence that rested on my shoulders like a warm cloak" (61). Jefferson's enveloping gesture had soothed his slave-child and won her trust, but it also incited a "rage of jealousy" in his daughter Martha, who bludgeoned Hemings at the temple with a boot, leaving her bloody in "tears of confusion and grief" (62). A defining moment, this incident foreshadows the paradoxical braid of pleasure and pain characterizing Hemings's ambivalent relation to her master. More to the point, this convergence of sentiment and pain in paternal gestures first tendered to the slave-child foreshadows Jefferson's tender and terrifying advances later in Paris to the teen.

Hemings's fond reminiscence on an unencumbered childhood thus builds gradually from childhood scenes--through childhood scenes of carefree days spent at Monticello, "the most beautiful place in the world"--up to the seminal moment of her first sexual encounter with Jefferson in Paris (64).

Even before she arrives in Paris, however, while en route aboard the Greenhelm, she learns an important lesson about what her black enslaved female body signifies in white male sexist culture and how she functions as an overdetermined semiotic through which white male desires might be articulated--a lesson from which she seems to have been largely shielded at Monticello but that is critical to her relation with Jefferson once in Paris. Aboard the Greenhelm, Hemings learns that her body is provocation to white men; "still quite childish at fourteen," she "looked older than [her] age," an ostensible enticement of which the captain informs her: "I know that at home you have all kinds of freedom and license and that you are ... are ... even encouraged.... You may look sixteen, but I know you are but fourteen, and you invite ... something you are not prepared for to be sure ... you are a child" (69). This warning that is also a projection of white male sexual desire onto the enslaved black female body initiates the teen's awareness of her color and sex as immutable burdens. It also prefigures the transposition later in Hemings's narrative of the master's sexual desire as the always already willing disposition of his (sexual) property. In the sailors' eyes, the slave-child at play transfigures into a "siren" "flirting" (70). Chase-Riboud uses ellipses to infuse the captain's speech with inarticulable sexual fantasies that forecast yet another related elliptic plunge that Hemings narrates shortly after--the initial encounter with Jefferson, also characterized by confounding ellipses marking either gaps in Hemings's memory, events too painful or shameful to recall, or something so completely understood, so already assumed at the time it occurred and/or in the subsequent narrativization, that it need not be spoken. All of these possibilities seem likely, for both encounters--the captain's reproach and Jefferson's sexual approach--dramatize the enslaved black female body as an object that simultaneously speaks and is mute, an object upon which unmentionable acts can be practiced and imagined: a body, finally, beyond the slave girl's control and that cannot be protected by self or kin. Both incidents are connected across space and time by Hemings's realization of her body as property of another. "For the first time in my life," she recalls, "I realized that I was truly alone.... I had no rights before society ... no rights even over my own body. ... I could be coveted and punished at the whim of any white man, not just my master. No kin of mine could protect me for they had no rights either. This horrified ... white man ... could beat me or confine me or take me to his bed and I had no redress: no man would step forward to protect me, and I had no right to protect myself if I could" (70).

Hemings describes Jefferson's sexual approach in similar terms but in a rather ambiguous temporal manner that makes it difficult to disentangle her present from her past and that pronounces the convoluted temporal drama of revisiting scenes of trauma: "Perhaps I had always known, he would claim me," she asserts (12). "Had not the same happened to my mother and my sisters? I watched him secretly to see if he knew, but I realized he would know only when that moment had arrived. I could hasten or delay that moment, but I felt powerless to prevent it" (99). The slave girl's sense of powerlessness leaves her the constrained "options" of hastening or delaying the moment of seizure but no safe exit from her master's dominion. Paradoxically, then, she becomes both the seeming agent and object of her own subjection, and narrating the event punctuates this crisis. It is here that we can think with Lacan in observing the limits of the subject/object's articulation of an inaugural trauma when the telling itself, the placing of the "I"/eye where there was formerly an "it", works both for and against the subject/object. This self-reckoning is most clear when Hemings relates how the sexual encounter with Jefferson proceeds. Before summoning the teen to his room, his speech, like the captain's before him, is marked ambivalently by ellipses. These ellipses simultaneously inscribe his hesitation and contemplation of the forbidden, but they also read as the figuration of a stumbling block in Hemings's memory, a point perhaps beyond recall or simply unthinkable. Jefferson announces his intentions to travel for six weeks, and like a father instructing good etiquette, he coaches Hemings into a response:

   I shall miss you, Sally.
   Yes, Master.
   Sally is that all you have to say?
   Yes, Master.
   Sally, I shall miss you. I promise....

Then, "in more sob than exclamation," as if to manage the inevitable, Hemings ejaculates, "Promise me!" (101). "I could bear the waiting no longer," she says: "I drew my head up and looked long into his eyes. Deep in the centers was a dark pinprick. My own reflection. Yes, I thought, the time had come" (101). A pinprick in the master's eyes, the slave's recognition of her self in the master or of the master as the self foregrounds her existence as property, the animated extension of the master's desires, a perfect and faithful slave who is in fact the master's fantasy (see Fig. 2). Narrating her reflection of self in her master's eyes, Hemings functions doubly as both subject and object, affirming the irrefutability of his vision--mirroring his vision--and her interpellation in it. A textual gulf then ushers in the manifestation of unspoken promises between master and slave: the narrative marks this lacuna literally with a jarring blank space, white space, separating the unspecified promises from their materialization. This space might be read in multiple intersecting ways: as the indescribable or irretrievable psychic space across which Hemings must hurtle; an absence that marks the impossibility of resistance and its representation because there is for the slave in effect no sell but rather a zero sell a null self; the threshold separating the master's fantasy from the black body as spatial and material void--uninscribed territory that can be mapped, molded, and transformed at will (of the master and those who read or hear the slave's narrative); the breach in which terror and desire are ambivalently entangled for the captive subject, the aged slave narrator, and audience; the seducing aporia in which terror can be romanced by all; the fraught locus, finally, of infinite creation and plenitude in which the perfect slave is borne and the merger of woman and slave forms beguiling (dis)union.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Whatever the case, across the breach, we meet a terrified Hemings. "A thousand times a day fear would overwhelm me," she recollects (101).

      Blood would rush to my head, and
   often I would clutch a velvet hanging
   or the back of a silk covered fauteuil.
   ... I dared not leave the house lest he
   send for me. At night I fell asleep sitting
   upright on the side of my bed. My
   body would be turned away from the
   door, but my head and shoulders
   would be turned toward it. There was
   no lock, and I would not have dared
   turn the key had there been one. I
   would not face the door lest I invite its
   opening, yet I could not turn completely
   away. Thus I sat watch through the
   night.

      Lord keep me from sinking down.

      Lord keep me from sinking down.

      Lord Keep me from sinking down. I
   would repeat to myself. In the early
   hours of the morning, exhausted, I
   would sleep (101).

The split positioning of Hemings's body signals the precariousness of her condition and the paradoxical readings that can be mapped onto her body by virtue of her own narrativization. If we consider the scene synchronically, on one level the body's positing suggests ambivalent desire; on another level, of course, it demarcates watchful terror and Hemings's realization that no lock or key will prohibit the master's seizure. How to emotionally manage and describe the longing for the end of the inevitable beginning is the dilemma that casts Hemings in the role of the agent of her subjection. Her trepidation over what is sure to come, the sleepless nights of turmoil spent watching and praying to a god who cannot save her, are more maddening than the "real thing" itself, her narrativization suggests; hence, she embraces the moment of seizure with relief when it comes. Foreboding transforms rather paradoxically and effortlessly into rapture once Jefferson arrives, but not without provoking reflection on how tender encroachments can make even the violated appear grateful for a gentle incision. Performing under her master's benevolent command, Hemings becomes animated. Paternal tenderness and affection negotiate the forbidden, even as smothered terror enshrouds her: "when I awoke an immense shadow blocked my vision. I had no idea how long he had been standing there," but, "now that he had come," Hemings says, as if her recollection is the moment:

   I felt no fear, only an overwhelming
   tenderness. His presence for me was
   command enough; I took control of
   him. I bent forward and pressed a kiss
   on the trembling hands that encompassed
   mine, and the contact of my
   lips with his flesh was so violent that I
   lost all memory of what came afterward.
   I felt around me an exploding
   flower, not just of passion, but of long
   deprivation, a hunger for things forbidden,
   for darkness and unreason, the
   passion of rage against the death of the
   other I so resembled. For in this
   moment I became one with her, and it
   was not my name that sprang from
   him but that of my half-sister. (102)

At this point, we might say that Hemings's confrontation with Jefferson becomes our own, for Chase-Riboud confronts us as readers with an instructive dilemma. How are we to read this experience, she seems to ask. As terror? As romance? Or do we move beyond this binary to read terror itself as romance, and romance as terror? Hemings's recollections are at once seductive and perplexing, seductively perplexing. Her description of passion appears a romantic resolution of dread. And yet, coersubmission and terror converge so symmetrically in the synchronic and diachronic time of her narration that as Hemings tells her story, not only does her anguish recede, but her interpellation is literally punctuated by the transposition of her master's desires and power as somehow her own. The tender but coercive violence of the master's "command" is romanced as Hemings's passionate desire and her violence against him: it is the contact of her lips with Jefferson's flesh that inflicts violence, as opposed to Jefferson's "benevolent command" to which his slave dared not say no (102). He is forbidden while her body functions as dangerous vector and serviceable vestibule. Her body is the conduit through which the master's sexual "deprivation" can be physically and rhetorically expressed yet concealed. Hunger for things forbidden, darkness and unreason, all elements that comprise the arsenal of stereotypical projections of masterly desires upon black enslaved women--are conceptual building blocks in Hemings's narrativization of her structured "control." The scene is at once one of introjection, coersubmission, and subjection, and Hemings's retelling performs this combination as well, for the retelling itself stages coersubmission as mastery and mastery as coersubmission (Butler 117). Still, it is as if language cannot contain the inversions and contradictions that Hemings renders, and is strained by them. Jefferson is noticeably absent (shrouded) in the scene as an actor, but he is a structuring absence, and there are several ways that this positioning might be understood in relation to memory and trauma. On one level his absence is an instructive delineation of the masking of masterly motives and their transference to his slave, so not only does she articulate his desires, but she absorbs or effaces what he abhors: his unveiling. Alternately, his absence functions as Hemings's attempt to render her trauma coherent by traversing his fantasy--blocking him out--at least dimming his control to assume control of the self in past and present.

Still, contradictory elements perturb romance. Do we witness the weak seducing the powerful, or the powerful seducing the weak, or is this formulation all too simple? Do we see a slave girl "fucked tenderly," enraptured by the thrill and the rewards to follow? (13) What is legible in Hemings's rendering of her sexual encounter: rape, romance, terror, pleasure, or some composite phenomena that might be best described as coersubmission to tender yet dominative force? Might paternalist sentiment and bonds of affection romanticize slave and master, thereby clouding the legibility of duty, terror, constraint, and compulsion? How can compulsion be described if the compelled finds tortured rest in subjection as existential limit? If Hemings stands in as substitute for Jefferson's dead wife, then does her bounded condition provoke a vision of social death in and beyond the moment of carnal pleasure? Does her relation to Jefferson's wife incite fleeting glimpses of the encounter as an outrage as it would have been construed if enacted against her white body? Or does the slave's partial resemblance to her sister merely delineate the race and gender divide distinguishing the encounter as the master's fair use of sexual property? In revisiting the traumatic past, Hemings's traversal might be read as a hopelessly aporetic affair, a failed affair and no traversal at all, as I have suggested, insofar as her traversal is bound to cognition of an injury that is socially illegible and legally nonexistent. If traversing the master's fantasy requires revisiting scenes of injury to engender a critical subjectivity, then this neoslave narrative also asks us to consider the extent to which narrating the past merely restages trauma for romantic consumption if the audience to which the captive speaks is invested in repressing her trauma or reconfiguring it as enjoyment. For, what if the "the grammatical requirements of narrative work against the account of subject formation that the narrative attempts to provide"? (Butler 124). And what if in telling her story, the captive ambivalently pleasures her constraints as a result of those grammatical requirements, the prescriptive burdens of witnessing, and the mutually confounding entanglements attending physical and psychic bondage?

By constructing this crucial sexual encounter as one subject to and reflective of the fictional captive's memory, Chase-Riboud instigates consideration of these issues, even as we are aware there is no concrete body of memory documenting Hemings's subjectivity as slave and concubine. It is nonetheless Chase-Riboud's construction of a character who drives her narrative by memory, which invites the nation to place the slavewoman at the center of our national memory and at the forefront of discourses about the liaison. It is the fictional Hemings's profoundly ambivalent account of the liaison that invites consideration of it as a union borne in trauma to which the captive subject remains passionately attached and by which she is concomitantly repulsed. Like Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, and the neoslave narratives Dessa Rose, by Sherley Anne Williams, and Beloved, by Toni Morrison, Hemings's account asks us to think systematically about the interior workings of power in master slave relations, and it interrogates our investments by seducing with manifold aporia demanding close scrutiny and deliberation. It begs us to think deeply about the slave's articulation of desire within circumscribed limits, and to remain conscious of how we theorize black enslaved women's sexuality. The paradoxes in Hemings's retrospection seduce and trouble precisely because at the same time that they represent her ambivalence, they represent visions of contented subjection deeply mired in and inseparable from regnant myths of halcyon plantation days, and stereotypes of hypersexualized enslaved black women at once ingenuous and ingenious, oblivious to injury and yet full of sensuality. Hemings's character partially encodes such master fantasies, but the contradictions in her narrative disturb these very fantasies and provoke reflection on a tender violence left for her audience to take up. The neoslave narrative's seductive ruse is that it both pleasures bondage and pressures critical deliberation on tender scenes of terror. (14) It is the knowledge that Hemings narrates in retrospect that grounds this inaugural encounter and the liaison in general as something more confounding than romantic.

One further example underscores the breakdown of romance and the centrality of coersubmission. The morning after her first sexual encounter with Jefferson, Hemings "gathered [her] clothes from the four corners where they had been flung in the violence of the night" (102). She goes for a walk and upon seeing Jefferson is "filled" with "confusion," not knowing "should I turn back, hurry to greet him, stay as I was now fifty paces behind him, [or] call out to him?" (102). "Dreading that he would for some reason turn around and see me," she is seized by a "terrible yearning:" "I thought of my mother and her mother before her. Nothing would ever be the same again. Nothing would ever free me of him. Nothing would erase those strange words of love which I had to believe in my weakness. 'Je t'aime,' he had said. In his terror, he had used the most potent of weapons, the ruler of the mighty as well as the helpless. And I had answered, without any other words passing between us. 'Merci Monsieur'" (103). Hemings's fated matrilineage of concubinage portends the restricted conditions of her existentiality, but most revealing is her rendition of how her master exercises terror in and through terms of affection. Instead of issuing threats as was the institution's custom, he used words of love, "the most potent of weapons," Hemings says, "ruler of the mighty as well as the helpless," and a "strange" but productive tactic in this violent institution that typically employed savage rhetoric to forecast bodily harm. The absence of harsh words obfuscates the distinction between coercive violence and voluntary affection and produces instead violence as affection--violence through affection--and the slave's submission, which passes as consent. Perhaps it might be better said that loving words affirm the indissolubility of violence and affection in the master-slave relation, and that the love the master speaks is a love for and of himself extended in the pleasures of property. Not only does Jefferson's use of a foreign tongue accentuate the non-translatability of the encounter, it masks and transforms, romances domination. His amorous gesture references its own disguise and registers the dissimulation of domination by virtue of an "other" language. Sentiment, desire, terror, coersubmission, servile duty, and constraint are inextricably commingled. This entangled complex of contradictory impulses pressures and provokes readers: what might the slave's love look like under such conditions?

Hemings's retrospection on love demystifies its abstraction, importantly unraveling its tortured and torturing pleasures. In gothic fashion, "perfect" servility and possession define love for master and slave. Hemings realizes "that [Jefferson] liked owning her," for "he possessed something he had created from beginning to end, without interference or objections or corrections. In a way, he had birthed her. As much as his own daughter. He had created her in his own image of womanly perfection, this speck of dust, this handful of clay from Monticello" (119-20). Correspondingly, she reaches a point at which she deconstructs the fictions of love by paradoxically embracing its injurious terms to rage against her master. "I would live," she says,

   like a perfect slave, in perfect love, and
   this slavery and this love would be my
   strength and my fortress; never would
   he forgive himself or his world for it,
   and never would he escape from it. It
   would be the master who would be
   branded and bonded to me forever. I
   would turn love against the possessor
   and daze him into the everlasting hell
   of guilt! I vowed Thomas Jefferson
   would see only what he wanted to in
   the silver-and-gilt mirror of my love
   and, with that reflecting force, I would
   strike him down, blind him, commit
   arson against him, I would kill him
   with love. And if I could not kill him, I
   would maim him forever, cripple and
   paralyze him, so that he would have
   no possibility to walk away from me,
   no voice to deny me. A ruthless joy
   took hold of me. I fled from the room
   and from the mansion out of doors. I
   would free his sons. (242)

What compels here is Hemings's abjection and subjection as perfect mastery, again expressed in the grammar of "love." She can only express her injury and rage through a grammar of love predicated on perfect submission--submission that paradoxically registers and obfuscates her injury, even as her anger is so profound that she seeks to "strike," "maim," "kill," "cripple" and "paralyze" her master but can only sustain such measures in an imaginary realm. This grammar of love is at once a silver-and-gilt sham, and the pleasures of Hemings's protracted subjection punctuates the sham. Hemings's plan of love is an attempt at resistance and at violence against the master that is violence against herself, a tautology expressed in her silver-gilt-mirror analogy. Love is inextricably linked to physical and psychological violence. Indeed, her "sons stood as testament and hostage to a body I could never call my own," yet "it was she who had lusted, not he. She who had seduced, not he" (276). Even so, she recalls, her desire was "to strike again and again, with all my strength and smash him. ... In my mind's eye I struck, and struck, and struck" (276-77). In this contrary love that had bound her and her children to her master "soul and flesh," Hemings "wanted to see terror and disbelief" in his "innocent eyes," to "smash that high-arched nose, to see that expression of mild benevolence disappear under blood" (277).

Although fictional, this fractious and fractured vision of love in the master-slave union provokes us to think beyond the historical liaison's longevity and DNA, and grapple seriously with the terms of injury under which Hemings may have lived as Jefferson's slave and concubine. Historian Jack Rakove argues:

   we cannot know whether the patriarch
   of Monticello crudely commandeered
   the pleasures of Sally's body--seizing
   the part of many a plantation lord--or
   whether Sally set out to seduce her
   owner and brother-in-law, demonstrating
   in the cool of a Parisian evening,
   with a fire roaring in the hearth, or in
   the heat of a sultry Virginia night, that
   his flesh might be willing even when
   his spirit was weak or that the reason
   of the head need not always prevail
   over the tug of the heart and associated
   organs.... What we can surmise, I
   think is that any simple reconstruction
   of this relationship based on the stereotype
   of the lustful white planter forcing
   the submission of a fearful slave
   mistress probably misses the mark.
   (215)

Rakove is right that we cannot know for certain what inaugurated the liaison. Nevertheless, he transposes stereotypes and facts in regard to the widespread phenomena of enslaved black women's rape, and from this specious premise suggests that slavemasters, and by extension Jefferson, have been stereotyped as lustful. What makes it easy for Rakove to conjure extensive titillating portraits of a slaveholder seduced in Paris and Virginia--but not also conjure visions of a slave girl coerced into submitting to her master? Why should "we" "surmise" that "the lustful white planter forcing the submission of a fearful slave mistress probably misses the mark"? How does the slave girl come to be mistress? What is it, in other words, that allows for the meticulous hypothesis of Hemings's seduction of Jefferson but then disallows for alternate speculations of Jefferson's seductions or, worse still, his force? Why is it that in the very grammatical construction of his statements Rakove cannot even name the "patriarch" at site of "seduction"?

As historians of black women's history and slavery have documented, "the rape of black women existed as an unspoken but normative condition fully within the purview of everyday sexual practices, whether in implied arrangements of the slave enclave or within the plantation household" (Hartman 85). (15) This regularity of rape does not unequivocally mean that Jefferson raped Hemings, but the history of slavery, black women's position within it, and their sexual suffering leave this possibility open to consideration, at the very least to discussion. Rakove begs precisely this issue and fears its implications simultaneously. He retreats, therefore, into racist and misogynist stereotypes of enslaved black women's depraved sexuality and raises, but cannot or will not pursue and therefore represses, the possibility that something less than Hemings's romance and less than her consent may have characterized the liaison. Yet no transpositions or stereotypes of enslaved black women can abate these considerations. Noting how 19th-century white southerners viewed enslaved women's sexual exploitation, Hartman observes that "the sexual exploitation of the enslaved female incredulously served as evidence of her collusion with the master class and as evidence of her power, the power to render the master weak, and, implicitly, to be the mistress of her own subjection. The slave woman not only suffered the responsibility for her sexual (ab)use but also was blameworthy because of her purported ability to render the powerful weak" (87). In pondering Rakove's logic and his extension of that logic to "we" the people, I wonder whether 19th-century perceptions of enslaved black women's lasciviousness are not still with "us," informing the ways they are configured in historical discourse. In 18th- and 19th-century society and law, "not only was the rape [of enslaved women] simply unimaginable because of purported lasciviousness, but also its repression was essential to the displacement of white culpability that characterized the black subject as the originary locus of transgression and offense" (Hartman 79-80). Such practices derived not only from southern shame and a desire to obscure physical and social violence but from the larger social polity's ontological definitions of who and what black women and black people were, contradictory objects of property defined outside the category of human and yet criminal subjects.

The 1994 edition of Sally Hemings was published by Ballantine Books under a cover that, perhaps by design, bore a striking resemblance to the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers (1988 and 1991), a series that included several narratives by enslaved black women. In an afterword to this edition, Chase-Riboud wrote that in constructing Sally Hemings, book and character, she "wanted to illuminate our overweening and irrational obsession with race and color in this country by using the "form of the 19th-century American Gothic novel" and "through the man who almost single-handedly invented our identity" (345). She "had to find a way to elevate a member of the most despised caste in America to the level of the most exalted" and in so doing she had "solved the problem" "linguistically" by "referring to Sally Hemings by her full name," for "neither the author nor the reader had the right to call Hemings 'Sally,' much as Hemings dare not call Jefferson 'Thomas' until they were equal in love" (347). This linguistic shift, Chase-Riboud explains, "simply lifts Sally Hemings well out of her role as a slave and helps make a minor historical figure the equal, as a genuine archetype, of Thomas Jefferson" (347). It was a narrative strategy "lost on [her] copy editor who wanted to know what difference it would make" (347). Perhaps this ostensibly naive question ensued because the linguistic shift cannot perform the task or assume the burdens that Chase-Riboud puts upon it to bracket the status of the slave, and because the shift's very necessity bespeaks profound racial, gender, and social asymmetries between master and slave, white and black. The elements that converge in Sally Hemings's multiple scenes of terror and pleasure, passionate attachment, and lethal sentiment render a complicated entanglement surpassing amorous bliss. It may be that there can be no elevation or exaltation of the slave in an institutionalized white supremacist order that defines the slave socially and ontologically as negation, and that depends parasitically upon said definition(s) to establish white identities. The discourse of exaltation speaks to the enduring problems of race, caste, and gender inequalities in US society, whether in the centuries of slavery or in the present, for the most exalted come to be so in a violently dialectical manner. In this sense I read Chase-Riboud against herself in this essay, but I do so to demonstrate how important her historical fiction is to the histories being written about the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, how important it is to discussions of slavery, master-slave liaisons, black enslaved women's sexuality, gender, and race in US society. Sally Hemings is a critical conversation not only with Jeffersonians but with the growing body of black enslaved women's narratives and the scholarship produced by feminist historians of slavery. As Chase-Riboud states, "If Thomas Jefferson offers himself up as surrogate for meditation on the problem of human freedom, then Sally Hemings is available for meditation on terror, darkness, invisibility, dread of failure, guilt and powerless" (350). Hemings's ostensible "availability" juxtaposed to Jefferson's "offering" reminds us that language reinforces race and gender inequalities in US life and culture. Indeed, in Sally Hemings, "the heart of darkness that is an integral part of American identity" presents itself to readers in multiple ways (Chase-Riboud, Sally 350). And thus the present historical turn to disclosures of interracial sex as a means of reckoning with the Jefferson-Hemings liaison might be considered less an embrace of America's multiracial histories and rather a profound form of ambivalent disavowal.

Works Cited

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Andrews, Tina. Sally Hemings, an American Scandal: The Struggle to Tell the Controversial True Story. New York: Malibu P, 2001.

--, screenwriter. Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: An American Scandal Dir. Charles Haid. Videocassette. Santa Monica, CA: Artisan Home Entertainment, 2000.

Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Block, Sharon. "Lines of Color, Sex and Service: Comparative Sexual Coercion in Early America." Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Ed. M. Hodes. New York: New York UP, 1999. 141-63.

Brodie, Fawn McKay. Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate History. New York: Norton, 1974.

Brooks, Daphne A. "The Deeds Done in My Body: Black Feminist Theory, Performance, and the Truth About Adah Isaacs Menken." Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women. Eds. Michael Bennett and Vanessa Dickerson. New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers UP, 2000.41-70.

Burg, B. R. "The Rhetoric of Miscegenation: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Their Historians." Phylon 47.2 (1986): 128-86.

Burstein, Andrew. "Jefferson's Rationalizations." William and Mary Quarterly 57.1 (2000): 183-97.

--. "The Seduction of Thomas Jefferson." Journal of the Early Republic 19.3 (1999): 499-509. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Powec Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997. Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Email Letter to Suzette Spencer from Milan, Italy. 3 May 2006.

--. Sally Hemings: A Novel New York: Ballantine, 1994.

--. Afterword. Sally Hemings 345-55.

Christian, Barbara T. "Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something: African American Women's Historical Novels." Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance. Eds. Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin. New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers UP, 1990. 326-41.

Coates, Eyler Robert, and Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society. The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty. Charlottesville, VA: Jefferson Editions, 2001.

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House, 1981.

Ducille, Anne. "Where in the World Is William Wells Brown?: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of American Literary History." American Literary History 12.3 (2000): 443-62.

Elliott, E. N., ed. Cotton is King, and Proslavery Arguments: Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright. Augusta, GA: Pritchard, Abbott, & Loomis, 1860.

Ellis, Joseph. "Jefferson: Post-DNA? William and Mary Quarterly 57.1 (2000): 125-38.

Faust, Drew Gilpin, ed. The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.

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Garrett, Aaron. "Of Racism and Remembrance." Common-Place 1.4 (July 2001). History Cooperative. <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vol-01/no-04/garrett/>. 15 Nov. 2002.

Goodman, Ellen. "Not Even DNA Tests Can Reveal How Sally Felt." Houston Chronicle 8 Nov. 1998, sec. Outlook.

Gordon-Reed, Annette. "Engaging Jefferson: Blacks and the Founding Father." William and Mary Quarterly 57.1 (2000): 171-82.

--. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997.

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Hine, Darlene Clark. "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance." Signs 14.4 (1989): 912-20.

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Jennings, Thelma. "Us Colored Women Had to Go through a Plenty: Sexual Exploitation of African American Women." Journal of Women's History 1.3 (1990): 45-74.

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-- The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, 1970.

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Notes

(1.) Sensationalist James T. Callender, largely responsible for bringing national attention to Jefferson's liaison with Hemings, published several articles about Jefferson's relation with Hemings in the Richmond Recorder (also known as the Lady's and Gentleman's Miscellany), on July 21, 1802; October 20, 1802, and November 3, 1802. In 1802, the Boston Gazette published a satirical ode parodying Jefferson's sentiments to Hemings, which included the lines: "Oh Sally! hearken to my vows! / Yield up thy sooty charms-/My best belov'd! my more than spouse, / Oh! take me to thy arms!" (McDonald 48). For a sampling of the range of contemporary debates, see Burg, Burstein (1999 and 2000), Coates, DuCille, Ellis, Fraser, Garrett, Goodman, Nicolaisen, Staples, Walker, and P. Williams.

(2.) I am using the term "neo-slave narrative" as defined in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature: "Neo-slave narratives are modern or contemporary fictional works substantially concerned with depicting the experience or the effects of New World slavery. Having fictional slave characters as narrators, subjects, or ancestral presences, the neo-slave narratives' major unifying feature is that they represent slavery as historical phenomenon that has lasting cultural meaning and enduring consequences" (W. Andrews 533). See also Rushdy's ground-breaking study (1999).

(3.) Space does not permit analysis of these films, but I want to point out that Tina Andrews, the screen writer of the miniseries Sally Hemings, An American Scandal, published a book shortly after the series's debut in which she explained how network executives "misrepresented my writing" (Sally 79). She asserted that "there were several scenes I could not save from misinterpretation;" further, "whole scenes had been rewritten, whole sequences changed, complete content and motivations altered," such that she "sat in utter sock as I watched dallies of Sally pulling off her gown sexually presenting herself to Thomas Jefferson standing at the door, having yet to move .... I had to go on talk radio all across the country to explain how that scene was about as far from what I wrote as one could get" (79).

(4.) My use of the term "deeds done in her body" is a variation of a statement once made by Sojourner Truth, but I am using it here in the way that Brooks has used the term creatively to theorize about black women's bodies.

(5.) Brodie was castigated for her book, which performed a psychoanalytic historical analysis of Jefferson while arguing in support of the liaison.

(6.) Jefferson's estate records reveal that he did manumit these Hemingses when each turned 21 or shortly thereafter. See Gordon-Reed 218-19.

(7.) See also Block, who argues that "beyond the unadorned physical power that could compel a woman into a sexual act, a master had an array of indirect means to force a dependent to have sex with him that simultaneously denied her resistance to him, and by switching between threats of physical harm and gifts of courtship, [a master could] undercut the appearance of forced sexual interaction" (147).

(8.) In a response to a query about her authorial aims in Sally Hemings, Chase-Riboud says: "the whole point is that there is a Sally Hemings without Chase-Riboud. She existed and is not a figment of my imagination, and in recreating her historically I could NOT make her what I wanted or decided her to be. She had to correspond both to history (documents and Jefferson's documented life), but to 18th-century psychology, female psychology, and slave psychology.... The rules for writing this kind of fiction [are] exact adherence to historical veracity, to a thousand details that make your historical character so that no one can say it is 'out of character.' Why couldn't I have her poison Jefferson or attempt so? Simply because she didn't and neither did her mother. I had to consider this possibility and a thousand others, but in the end, the choice always came down to one or three at the most, if I stuck with the facts" (Email).

(9.) This study was published as a result of a conference held in 1999 at Monticello and at the University of Virginia, during which US social historians convened to discuss the importance of the DNA results for rethinking Jefferson and Hemings.

(10.) For proslavery arguments and political tracts, see Elliott, Faust, and Finkelman.

(11.) According to Chase-Riboud, "there really was a census taker who changed Hemings's race from black to white. Was it to protect Jefferson from the crime of miscegenation?" she asks; "I, as a writer, having examined all the possibilities, chose yes as the answer. The fact is used novelistically just as the personage of Hemings is used both novelistically and historically, both in combination and independently" (Email).

(12.) These words are attributed to Chase-Riboud's character Abigail Adams in the 1994 edition of Sally Hemings.

(13.) Morrison uses this phrase in The Bluest Eye to interrogate the problematic of incest when Cholly Breedlove rapes his daughter Pecola.

(14.) Here I borrow language from Hartman's analysis of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Hartman interrogates "seduction and the ruses of power" that work for and against Jacobs as author and character in her narrative as Jacobs tries to negotiate the sentiments of her white audience.

(15.) See Carby, Davis, Hine, Jennings, Lerner, Sterling, and White.

Suzette Spencer, Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Connecticut Storm, specializes in 19th- and 20th-century African American literature, history, and culture, and Anglophone Caribbean fiction. She is presently working on Stealing A Way, a book about maroon-age and legacies of resistance to slavery in the New World.