I told this story a few days ago to a class and a few of the students visibly grimaced (a good sign from the normally affectless freshmen). One or two rolled their eyes as if to say, "what idiot would say something so blatantly wrong?!"
The person asking the question had a point, at least from his point of view. He's an excellent historian, and his work really helped me in mine. His body of research reconstructs the intellectual world of Jefferson and allows readers to get a sense of the way Jefferson thought. You can sympathize with Jefferson while also growing to intensely dislike him. As I told the students, "you get inside Jefferson's mind, haunted house that it is."
This historian took quite a lot of flak, too, for having been one of the "deniers" before the 1998 DNA tests proving that Hemings's descendants were also Jefferson's descendants. He was lumped in with the deniers who thought that Jefferson was "too pure" to sexually exploit a slave when, in fact, this historian believed that Jefferson was too racist to -- to put it crudely -- get it up for a Black woman. He accepted the DNA as well as Annette Gordon-Reed's revisiting of Sally Hemings's appearance. New information can cause people to revise their ideas. That's the whole point of learning.
I would also add that few people considered Jefferson's behavior as serial rape, meaning rape in its most violent sense as, say, depicted in the film Twelve Years a Slave. A man does not have to be attracted to behave in that way. That said, everything known about Jefferson indicates that he seldom inflicted violence himself. He ordered whippings to be done by overseers, but other types of confrontations he approached obliquely.
But, I digress. The point being...
This historian that I'm talking about approached Sally Hemings through Thomas Jefferson. In writing Thomas Jefferson's life, Hemings figured very small. She gave him sex. She kept his room, clothes, and person clean. She became the source of an inconvenient and scandalous story that he refused to acknowledge. Otherwise, in writing about Jefferson's life, she played a tiny fraction of a role -- a non-speaking, walk-on part.
This is not particularly evident in other work about Hemings, I don't think. First of all, because the paucity of sources about her tends to result in studies that place her in the context of other people like her -- enslaved people at Monticello, her Hemings family, women in Jefferson's life. She also serves as an example in books about sex, race, gender, and concubinage. Second of all, because most of the people who write extensively about her tend to come from a study or an admiration of Jefferson and (much like my adoration of Douglass) that tends to affect their interpretation. Jefferson is the pole star. The resulting narrative means that he takes up more words.
I wanted Sally Hemings to be the pole star, which led to an interpretive and narrative shift that did lessen Jefferson's appearance. Yet, still, when you tell Hemings's life, Jefferson constatntly looms. Even if she were not Jefferson's "concubine" who gave birth to his children, he manspread himself into the narrative.
That gap between the small space that she takes up in his biography and large space that he takes up in hers is the point: it shows the vast power differential between the two. This differential is not simply one of Tom and Sally but one of men and women, black and white, age and youth, access to opportunities and none, and where they all intersect.
In some of the books about them, there is a fixation on love, as if him loving her, a Founding Father loving the woman he owned as he owned all of her family, somehow changes the arc of history. That misses the point. The point is the power difference that existed then and that is embedded in their biographies both lived and written.
The point also is that this is the reason that history must be studied from many different angles and points of view, otherwise you only get one, flat, dimension that explains nothing about then or anything subsequent.
