"A Seeping Invisibility": Maternal Dispossession and Resistance in Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings and The President's Daughter

Abstract

Beginning in 1966 with publication of Margaret Walker's Jubilee, African American writers—as Barbara Christian, Caroline Rody, and Ashraf Rushdy, among other scholars, have demonstrated—revolutionized genre of historical novel, achieving, in Rody's words, collective return to story of slavery unimaginable in preceding decades and strategic recentering of American in lives of historically dispossessed (157-58). 1 Christian has placed black at forefront of this literary devel- opment, suggesting that Sherley Anne Williams's highly acclaimed Dessa Rose (1986) and, especially, Toni Morrison's masterpiece Beloved (1987) represent aesthetic pinnacle of what Rushdy famously named neo-slave narrative, but that neither (Williams's or Morrison's) novels would be what they are if it were not for previous historical fiction by African American women (338). More recently, Bo G. Ekelund has also credited mainly, but not only, female black writers with mid-century turn in historical novel, af- firming that transition from historical romances featuring white heroes and Southern Belles in antebellum South to serious contemporary fiction centered on histories of discrimination and oppression has permanently transformed American literary landscape (140). Shifting focus of historical novel from larger-than-life heroes to daily lives of an oppressed people, African American brought a new gravity and political engagement to a genre previously associated, according to Ekelund, with an antiquarian and conservative perspective (140). Both Christian and Rody cite Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings (1979)—a novel that, as Christian demonstrates, digs into myth (335) of Thomas Jefferson's enslaved concubine—as an important precursor for Morrison's Beloved. Chase-Riboud creates a complex portrait of an African American woman whose role in American history, as Suzette Spencer maintains, had heretofore been constructed in scholarly and public discourse primarily through scandal and through her negation as unhinging excrescence in Thomas Jefferson's sexual history (507). Offering a long-overdue corrective to white-authored portrayals of still-disputed relationship between Jefferson and Hemings, Chase-Riboud humanizes iconic figure of Hemings and provides her, through medium of fic- tion, with a speaking voice. However, author dramatizes historically obscured life of Hemings not as a way of getting at the truth behind controversial legend; this truth, she suggests, remains inaccessible. Instead, Chase-Riboud recreates Hemings's shadowy past as a means of throwing slavery's sinister legacies into sharp relief, as she indicates in author's note to 1994 edition of Sally Hemings: If Thomas Jefferson