The Hemingses of Monticello as an African American Novel

Abstract

The extraordinary and highly creative archival work of Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello has altered our understanding of early American history. But I confess that I ultimately read Gordon-Reed's approximately 700-page family biography from cover to cover because it engages the imagination and offers the pleasures that we traditionally associate with the literary. With its multigenerational perspective on family history, its close attention to the psychological, its thick descriptions of law, politics, and other historical matters, and its strong narrative flow, The Hemingses of Monticello resembles classic realist novels such as Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. With its attention to interracial sexuality, The Hemingeses of Monticello also resembles classic nineteenth-century African American novels such as Frank Webb's The Garies and Their Friends, Charles Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars, and William Wells Brown's Clotel. The family resemblance to Clotel is especially pertinent because that novel presents a ficionalized account of two daughters and three grand daughters of Thomas Jefferson and the slave woman whom Brown calls Currer, and because it draws on what were then the rumors of Jefferson's sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Those rumors were circulated by Jefferson's political enemy James Callender in 1802 and then were picked up by abolitionists and British travelers during the 1830s through the 1850s. That there possibly could have been a sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings was discounted by most twentiethcentury historians until the results of genetic testing were published in the science journal Nature in 1998 (Foster). But before genetic testing, there was Annette Gordon-Reed's 1997 Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which meticulously sifted through the evidence and made a compelling case for regarding the Jefferson-Hemings relationship as part of the historical record. I mention Brown's Clotel because I've edited two Bedford Cultural Editions of the novel and in each case was profoundly influenced by the work of Gordon-Reed. For the edition of 2000, I was grateful to a historian whose work guided me away from the hype of the recent genetic testing and engaged crucial aspects of early national slave culture. Her work helped me to see that Brown in Clotel was as much a historian as a fiction writer; and I think it's fair to say that both Brown and Gordon-Reed suggest how fine the line is between fiction and history. For the just-published second edition of Clotel, Gordon-Reed helped me to think in more complex ways about the problematics of interracial love--whether as described in a novel like Clotel or in a history like The Hemingses of Monticello. From William Wells Brown, or Annette Gordon-Reed, or both talking back and forth to one another in my head, I've learned how difficult it is to disconnect power from love when thinking about interracial relationships in a slave culture, and how mysterious and complicated are the workings of history. I want briefly to consider a particularly mysterious and complicated moment in The Hemingses of Monticello: Gordon-Reed's account of the pregnant Sally Hemings's decision in 1789 to return with Jefferson to Virginia instead of remaining in Paris, where she would have been free. In the manner of the best novelists, Gordon-Reed keeps interpretation open about motivation, limning character, psychology, and material concerns, but ultimately respecting the uncertainties of history and the human. Gordon-Reed writes about this mysterious moment: Why would [Sally Hemings] trust Jefferson, and why would she, under any circumstances, return to Virginia with him? …