While biographers and historians are expected to be rigorously factual, in novels the primary function of fact is to facilitate readers’ suspension of disbelief. Factual accuracy is somewhat more important in realistic novels that purport to represent significant historic or political events, but even so, fiction writers are generally given license to do whatever they want in the gaps between facts. Under such circumstances, the dearth of verifiable information concerning Jefferson and Hemings’s relationship ought to have given me a field day, but, as it happens, Thomas Jefferson presents rather specific challenges to any writer.
With the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, he is the most written-about and well-documented figure in American history, and his relationship with Sally Hemings has also made him one of the most controversial. I was terribly worried when I first began working on this novel that the sheer volume of information concerning Jefferson would so dominate my thinking that the book would end up as hackneyed and plodding as a dutiful docudrama. And I was even more afraid that the intense political debate regarding his relationship with Hemings (of which I was reminded every single time I told anyone what I was writing) would make it impossible for me to give my characters enough psychological and moral complexity to feel like living, breathing, passionate and perplexed human beings.
The first thing I did when I began to work on this novel was read three biographies: Annette Gordon-Reed’s Hemingses of Monticello, Fawn M. Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History and Joseph J. Ellis’s American Sphinx. But as soon as I felt I had grasped the basic facts of my protagonists’ lives, I stopped research and leapt straight into writing, composing scenes entirely out of chronological order and switching randomly between realism, fabulism, essay, prose poetry and quotation. My hope was that by never knowing what I was going to write next or how these pieces might link up in the finished work, my mind would be freer to imagine Jefferson and Hemings in fresh and surprising ways and with minimal influence from other people’s narratives or opinions. And, indeed, it was during this phase that Jefferson became an ape, a blimp and an art student in New York and that Sally Hemings created an invention that eventually became the world that Jefferson would have to inhabit. It was also during this phase that I “discovered” my protagonists’ lonely childhoods and the extremity of their passions, be they love, loathing, fury or fear.
Once I had staked out what seemed sufficiently fertile and fresh imaginative territory to guarantee my novel a margin of originality (or so I hoped), I felt free to return to my research. I found two biographies especially useful: Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, by Jon Meacham, and Master of the Mountain, by Henry Wiencek—a pair of books that could hardly have diverged more radically in their portrayal of their subject, with Meacham’s Jefferson corresponding fairly closely to the familiar figure of the brilliant if excessively idealistic Founding Father, while the most direct precursor to Wiencek’s Jefferson is Simon Legree—the cruel slaveholder in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The stark contradiction of these portraits was instructive all on its own, because it helped solidify my sense that Jefferson was an amalgam of opposites—which is not to say that he occupied any sort of bland midpoint between the extremes of virtue and monstrosity but that he was brilliant, idealistic, ignorant and evil all at once. And while I had many problems with Wiencek’s often absurd interpretations of decidedly cherry-picked facts, his book nevertheless forced me to confront Jefferson’s dark side over and over—a process that turned out to be immensely productive.
In addition to these and other biographies, I also read Jefferson’s Autobiography, his most significant political writings (including Notes on the State of Virginia) and two especially revealing collections of his letters: The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, edited by his great-granddaughter, Sarah N. Randolph, and Jefferson in Love: The Love Letters Between Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway, edited by John P. Kaminski. Apart from Annette Gordon-Reed’s masterful account of the whole Hemings family, the book that best helped me envision Sally Hemings’s experience was Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a memoir by Harriet Jacobs, first published in 1861, although I also gathered extremely useful insights and background details from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (both books are included in The Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.). The brief memoirs by Madison Hemings, Peter Fossett and Isaac Jefferson also deepened my understanding of Hemings, of course, but, more important, they gave me a rich sense of life at Monticello, even if all three of these men clearly allowed their narratives to reflect many of the interests and prejudices of their white interlocutors or readers. And lastly, I visited the places where Jefferson and/or Hemings had lived—Monticello, Poplar Forest, Williamsburg, Philadelphia, London and Paris—and I wrote substantial portions of my novel at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, not far from Charlottesville, where I came to have an intimate sense of the smells, sounds, weather and beauties of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
One of the reasons I was so anxious about the effects of the intense political passions regarding Hemings and Jefferson was that I shared those passions to a very considerable extent, especially concerning race and gender. During the early improvisatory phase of my writing, however, I did my best to put such issues out of my mind and just write what seemed most natural and necessary for each individual scene or meditation as it came along. But once I had that first draft, and ever more so as I wrote my final ones, I constantly interrogated myself to be sure that my vision had not been clouded by unconscious prejudice or simple ignorance. I also gave successive drafts to trusted friends—black and white, male and female—and listened carefully to what they said, making corrections where I felt I had misunderstood the reality of the experiences I was trying to render. My goal always was to add depth and specificity to my portrayal of my protagonists, without ever confining them to any preexisting ideas of who they were or what their lives might mean—and I can only hope that I succeeded in this regard.
My understanding of my characters and their story evolved considerably over the course of my research and writing. At the beginning I assumed that Jefferson and Hemings’s relationship had commenced with rape and amounted to, at best, a grudging submission on her part to demands she was powerless to resist. But the more I read, the more I encountered evidence suggesting that the relationship might have been much more complicated. I was struck, in particular, by the fact that when Sally Hemings finally left Monticello, she took three items that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson: his inkwell, a pair of his spectacles and a shoe buckle. It just didn’t seem possible that if her life with him had been nothing but sexual torture, she would have wanted to possess such intimate belongings, nor that she would have passed them on to her son Madison, who gave them, in turn, to his daughter.
Eventually I came to believe that Hemings’s feelings for Jefferson might well have fallen somewhere along the spectrum between love and Stockholm syndrome—the latter being that tendency of kidnap victims to identify with their captors and even to develop extremely positive feelings for them. There is no way I can know whether this supposition is correct, but I did think it made for a much more interesting story than had my original understanding. A narrative in which Sally Hemings was simply tortured and abused by her master would be only a recapitulation of very familiar ideas about the nature of slavery (which is not to say that such ideas should ever be forgotten), whereas a novel in which she felt—or even only believed she felt—something closer to love for her master would amount to an exploration of the mysterious and disturbing underside of an emotion that many of us consider the chief source of human happiness.
While I did my best to make the relationships and events of the realistic segments of my narrative consistent with the historical record (to the point that I hope my book might give readers some insight into what Hemings and Jefferson might actually have been like), there are several elements of the story that have almost no basis in fact. I think
it highly unlikely, for example, that Sally Hemings was literate (if that were the case, then she would have been the one to teach Madison Hemings to read, rather than Jefferson’s grandchildren), yet I felt that if I made her not just literate but well read, I would be intensifying the fundamental equality between her and Jefferson and thereby adding illuminating moral complexities to both sides of their relationship. I also felt that by having her write her own confession, I would be giving her a much more powerful voice—one that might help counterbalance the imposing gravity that Jefferson possesses merely by virtue of his historical significance.
The scene in which Hemings and Jefferson watch a hot-air balloon take off from a farmer’s field outside of Paris is complete invention. While Jefferson did witness a balloon flight in Philadelphia, there is no evidence that he or Hemings ever attended such a spectacle in France. I wrote the scene partly because the idea simply delighted me, but also because I knew early on that toward the end of the novel I would describe Beverly Hemings’s balloon flight (for which there is some historical evidence), and I thought this earlier flight might give his experience greater emotional and thematic power. The lodge to which Hemings and Jefferson retreated to be alone is also an invention. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever as to where they conducted their sexual relationship.
Moak Mobley and Sam Holywell are likewise products of my imagination, as are all the street vendors and white servants in Paris (apart from Adrien Petit) and the white servants and shopkeepers in Virginia. Some of the stewards and overseers at Monticello bear the names of real people, but when I was unable to discover the names of the people who actually held these jobs during a particular period of my story, I simply made up a name. Otherwise all the characters with “speaking parts” are based to some extent on real people in Hemings’s and Jefferson’s lives.
And lastly, all of the statistics relating to fertility and life expectancy cited here are not from the late eighteenth century but from the 1850s, the earliest era at which such data was compiled. I chose not to indicate the provenance of these figures when I cited them, because I felt there was only so much scholarly awkwardness a novel could stand. And I had similar reasons for not revealing that estimates of maternal mortality rates during the mid-nineteenth century range from 1 to 16 percent, depending on the structure of the study and the source of the underlying data. I settled on 4 percent, a figure cited by more than one source, primarily because I wanted to err on the side of caution.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
None of my books has ever been the result of my efforts alone, but never have I so benefited from the insight, generosity and, in some cases, hard labor of my friends and colleagues as I have this time around.
I want to thank, first of all, my wife, Helen Benedict, who has read many iterations of this book over the last five and a half years and given me much extremely beneficial advice about countless aspects of its content, style and political ramifications, and who has demonstrated admirable patience with my endless midnight panics and my tendency to infuse dinner-party conversations with gossip about the Founding Fathers.
I also want to thank those dear, wise and exceedingly kind friends who read my ten-pound manuscript and had the courage to tell me exactly what they thought, thereby giving me the chance to save myself and my readers from my ignorance and manifold weaknesses of character. Thank you, Idra Novy, Robert Marshall, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Ellery Washington, Cassandra Medley and Anja Konig.
Several good friends read excerpts from the manuscript and likewise helped shield the world from my deficiencies: Christine Hiebert, Mary McDonnell, Ellen Kozak, Amy Bonnaffons, Pascal Aubier, André Pozner, Erwan Benezet, Olivier Renouf, Abby Rasminsky, David Goldstein and Julia Deck. I’d also like to thank Christa Dierksheide and Anna Berkes at Monticello for providing me with crucial details about the way Jefferson’s slaves actually lived.
I owe a huge debt of thanks to my wonderful agent, Jennifer Lyons, for her hard work on my behalf, her unflagging belief in me and in my books and for her excellent editorial advice. I also want to thank her assistant, Kit Haggard, for her consummate efficiency and all-around good nature.
This book never would have come into being if James Yeh, coeditor of Gigantic, hadn’t invited me back in 2009 to write a three-hundred-word piece on a historical character for his journal. I sat down at my desk and, without thinking, wrote, “Sally Hemings is sleeping,” and thereby commenced a surprisingly long journey. Thanks, James.
Since that first piece I have benefited from the intelligence and excellent advice of a number of editors—the first and foremost being Paul Slovak, my editor at Viking Penguin, whose careful reading, spot-on marginal remarks, literary savvy and unfailing enthusiasm and generosity have done so much to help me transform this book into its best self. I consider myself hugely lucky that he wanted to work with my book and with me. Thanks, too, to Carolyn Coleburn, Rebecca Lang and to the many other extremely helpful people at Viking.
I am also indebted to Andy Hunter, a founding editor of Electric Literature, for his interest in and smart edits of this novel’s earliest incarnation as a short story; to Halimah Marcus for remembering that story and wanting to publish an updated version of it in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading; to Ben Samuel for his own astute editing; and to Martha Colburn for her surprising, suggestive and beautiful video and for the art book that came along with it.
I did an enormous amount of work on this novel during three summers at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and will be forever grateful to the entire staff, but especially to Sheila and Craig Pleasants for their hospitality and support and for insisting that I visit Poplar Forest. Substantial portions of this book were also written during residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Palazzo Rinaldi in Noepoli, Italy.
And, lastly, for giving me advice, listening to my gripes, bolstering my spirits, making me welcome and for assorted other kindnesses, I want to thank Bruce Baumann, Patti Capaldi, Courtney O’Connor, Marcus Grant, Marika and Kasya O’Connor Grant, Elizabeth Harris, Nell Boeschenstein and an extremely helpful young woman at the Millinery Shop in Colonial Williamsburg.
Throughout the research and composition of this book, I tried to jot down the names of everyone who helped me in any significant way. Nevertheless, I am sure that there is at least one person whose name has been left off the foregoing list. Should that be you, please forgive me and know that I am deeply grateful for your wisdom, your encouragement, your inspiration. Thank you.
9/6/09–8/20/15
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