I’m not quite done with it yet, got about 50 pages to go, but I want to go ahead and plug it now since I’m sure my opinion isn’t going to change in the next hour or two.
To me the most remarkable thing about the book is how legitimate and powerful the author makes an awful lot of speculation. There are really very few records of Sally Hemings’ life, and her long term relationship with Thomas Jefferson was treated very quietly even among his friends. As though it were nonexistent. And so the book is really built on sand. Until now, I would have said this much speculation must doom a book to being trivial. Not worth consideration.
But when the speculation is so careful and thoughtful as it is here, I see now there’s a difference. It’s possible to get real meaning out a miscellaneous collection of very small incidents. And the author does that. She inflates these people, the Hemingses, into a whole tribe of different people with different discoverable characteristics, human characteristics that differentiate them from each other and from us, and unite them as a family, at the same time. She takes a group with almost no historical existence and recovers them as individuals, as a people, and as an aspect of their time. As a lens, through which to view Jefferson and his people. It’s really wonderful. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but here it is. It should have won a Booker Prize.
To me the most telling paragraph was this one: “The lives of Robert and James Hemings were even more complicated than Douglass’s on this score, for there were many more ways in which Jefferson raised their expectations about what they had a right to have in life. It would have been a far simpler matter for Jefferson, and forestalled the conflicts that later arose, if he had given Robert and James Hemings fewer or no opportunities to develop identities apart from him. Their heritage almost surely affected the way they viewed their circumstances. The Hemings brothers knew that the man who controlled their lives had inherited a fortune that would have been theirs if they, the sons of John Wayles, had been born free white men. Robert was an eldest son in a world where that position meant something. There was nothing the brothers could do about it, but that did not prevent them – as \[Frederick\] Douglass would do years later – from considering the obvious.”
To me, it’s one thing to consider the bulk theft of the lives and work of the enslaved people who made the Virginia system work. It all blends together and gets the label “slavery” and disappears into “whaddayagonnado.” It’s quite another to try to imagine how many individuals were robbed, under color of law, of wealth that would have been theirs if they had only been white. It particularizes the problem, for me, in a very different way. Jefferson’s wealth came primarily from his marriage to Martha Wayles, because her father, John, had no sons to whom to leave it. Well; he had sons. Martha’s brothers. The Hemingses.
Well. It’s a very good book.
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by tolkienfan2759