Taking the Wolf by the Ears: Ann Rinaldi and the Cultural Work of Sally Hemings

Taking the Wolf by the Ears:Ann Rinaldi and the Cultural Work ofSally Hemings

E M I LY H O N E Y

WHEN DNA EVIDENCE WAS RELEASED IN 1998 THAT EFFECTIVELY

proved the last of Sally Hemings’ children, EstonHemings, was fathered by Thomas Jefferson (Murray

et al. and Travis), there was a flood of publicity concerning the impactof the evidence on the historical image of the third president, thedescendants of Eston Hemings, the resulting changes at Monticello,and myriad other variables. The centuries-old rumor of a Jeffersonliaison with ‘‘Dusky Sally’’ had finally been confirmed. Yet where isSally Hemings in all of this? Most of the commentary has centered onJefferson and the Hemings children, not Sally herself. Part of this canbe attributed to a lack of historical information. We have minimalaccounts of Sally, and nothing from her in her own words. Is thisenough to explain why most of the furor, both scholarly and not, hasbeen around the president and his potential children, and not thewoman who mothered them?

Seven years before the release of the DNA results, in 1991, writerAnn Rinaldi released a historical novel for young adults entitled Wolfby the Ears. Unlike Barbara Chase-Riboud’s popular novel SallyHemings, Rinaldi tells her story from the perspective of Harriet, Sally’seldest daughter, and centers on the girl’s struggle to leave Monticello,her questions about her parentage, and the problems and choicesrelated to being born of a white father and a black mother. However,I think that this book also says a great deal about the role that Sallyis made to play in contemporary culture, and the multiple roles she is

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2008r 2008, Copyright the AuthorsJournal compilation r 2008, Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

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kept from playing. Using Rinaldi’s book as a framework, I will attemptto explore the cultural work performed by Sally, both as a person and asymbol, and the messages that are being transmitted through thiswork. I will attempt to clarify why it is that the figure of Sally hasremained so obscure despite all of the press about her and Jefferson,why it is that she remains ‘‘dusky’’ both culturally and historically, andwhat purpose this might serve. What does it mean that the main plotof this young adult novel still centers on Thomas Jefferson and HarrietHemings, his potential daughter, rather than on Sally?

In her compelling argument about the ways that Sojourner Truthemployed print and photography to fashion her own image in history,Nell Painter says: ‘‘. . . American history is full of symbols that do theirwork without a basis in life. . . . Like other invented greats, Truth isconsumed as a signifier and beloved for what we need her to have said.. . . Americans consume Sojourner Truth as the embodiment of ameaning necessary for their own cultural formations’’ (480 – 81). SallyHemings is another one of these American symbols, a creation of aculture that needs her to perform specific functions. I suggest thatHemings is being used to propagate the idea that America has finallygotten over its fear of miscegenation in breaking the silence aboutThomas Jefferson. At the same time, she is being relegated to thebackground in favor of Jefferson. Her story is being silenced even as itis coming to light, and that silence helps reinforce racial lines.

There is a passage in Rinaldi’s book that seems to me particularlysuggestive as a place to begin unraveling the question of Sally’s sig-nificance in American history and culture. Harriet has gone throughJefferson’s chambers in order to see her mother’s sewing room. Jeffersonfinds her there. While they are talking, Harriet begins to see themotives behind his words:

[. . .] He was asking me not to leave. He was asking me to forget thatmy mama was sewing a wardrobe for my departure. He was askingme to ignore all the evidence. And he was asking me to bide by hisrule, which dismissed, by silence, anything unpleasant in the house-hold. He wanted me to pretend my mother’s efforts never took place.The way he responded over the years, with silence and pretense, to thesavage rumors in the press about himself and Sally Hemings. (68)

While we have reached a point, thanks to technology and science,where the evidence can no longer be ignored, I would suggest that in a

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cultural sense we are still abiding by Thomas Jefferson’s rule. We areforgetting Sally Hemings’ life, her efforts to free her children, anddismissing with silence the woman behind the president. She has beenreduced to a slave woman who was in love with her master, a masterwho happened to be the third president of the United States. Despitethe fact that even the assumption of love between a master and a slavewoman has profoundly disturbing implications about the institution ofslavery, the nature of the categories involved, and the power dynamicswe have tried to assign to it, the public focus has mostly been given tothe white male figure in the scenario.

Granted, it is only natural that a man so revered as ThomasJefferson, a ‘‘Founding Father,’’ the writer of the Declaration of Inde-pendence, an American icon extraordinaire, would be the object ofconsiderable attention when it was confirmed that he had fatheredchildren on both sides of the color line. There were many historianswho had spent a lot of time studying all the evidence, and had come upwith quite convincing reasons why it was impossible for Jefferson tohave carried on an affair with Sally Hemings. Historian Joseph Ellispublished a biography of Thomas Jefferson in 1997, the year beforethe DNA evidence was unearthed. In his appendix on Jefferson andHemings, he laid out quite clearly why such a liaison was viewed asimpossible. It was not because such pairings were uncommon onplantations; they were common to the point of being unquestioned.It was Jefferson’s personality and psychological defenses that seemedincompatible with having a relationship with a slave:

. . . He obviously knew about the ongoing miscegenation at Mon-ticello, but his powers of self-deception and denial protected himfrom facing these facts, and his urge to remain oblivious was con-siderably stronger than his sexual drive.He was, to be sure, quite capable of living with massive contradic-tions, but his psychological dexterity depended on the manipulationof interior images and personae; he was not that adroit at the kind ofovert deviousness required to sustain an alleged thirty-eight-yearaffair in the very center of his domestic haven. . . . In sum, thealleged relationship with Sally Hemings, if it did exist, defied thedominant patterns of his personality.

(Ellis, American Sphinx 306)

Ellis was one of a number of historians who felt that Jefferson’s men-tality simply did not allow for sexual relationships with slave women.

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Others felt that it defiled an American hero to suggest that he wouldcommit such an openly racist act. Some, perhaps, felt he would havebeen exonerated from the start, because racism was so completely in-grained into American culture during Jefferson’s lifetime. Whateverthe reason, Jefferson was not seen by historians as a man capable ofmiscegenation.

Focusing on Jefferson, however, seems to be the easy way out. Evenwith the DNA evidence that proves he had some sort of sexual re-lationship with Sally, Jefferson can still be culturally classified as anacceptable ‘‘American’’ man. Male sexual behavior has generally been amarker for prowess in American culture, used to confirm manliness andvirility, and excused as ‘‘sowing wild oats.’’ Jefferson’s involvementwith Sally, in fact, can almost serve to make him more accessible andunderstandable to the American public. He made a terribly racistmistake and had a complicated relationship with a slave, somethingthat violated his own ideas of right and wrong. This was the skeletonthat the idealist of freedom carried in his closet. Once the myth aboutJefferson and Hemings was confirmed, it lent credence to the oralhistory of the Hemings family and, conceivably, allowed the Americanpublic to identify even more with one of its heroes. Ellis, forced toreassess his former conclusions about Jefferson, wrote an article for U.S.News and World Report taking stock of the DNA evidence’s culturalimpact:

Indeed, Jefferson’s legacy might appear more lustrous than ever be-fore. For he is now thoroughly human, the American demigod madeflesh who dwelt among us, the saint who sinned, the great man withordinary weaknesses. As we approach the end of the ‘‘AmericanCentury,’’ he has metamorphosed into the new role model for ourpostmodern temperament, if you will, a ’90s kind of guy.

It is of course true that the new evidence about Jefferson and Hemingsdid not transform everyone’s opinion of the third president. One needonly do an Internet search to realize that the argument over this liaisonwill probably never end—my own search for ‘‘Thomas Jefferson andSally Hemings’’ turned up 22,300 web pages. Many people will stillvehemently deny that a sexual relationship between Jefferson and oneof his slaves was possible. However, for the purposes of this article I amaccepting that the DNA evidence is true, and that he did in fact fatherat least one of Sally Hemings’ children. I am also arguing that the

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renewed discussion of Jefferson’s character is obscuring some largercultural problems, many of which are represented by the figure of Sally.Transforming Jefferson into a modern figure, a great man with ac-ceptable weaknesses, is still overlooking the greater issues behind hisaffair with Sally Hemings, along with Sally herself. Where are thediscussions of slavery in light of this new revelation? Where are thediscussions about the impact of miscegenation, both then and now?Where are the calls for a realization that whites and African Americansare much more closely related than has ever been acknowledged, andthe discussion of potential changes in race relations? There are booksnow about the Hemings children, but what about the thousands ofother slave children who had a white father or mother? In the effort tokeep our cultural delusions intact, we have made Jefferson into a ‘‘hu-man’’ hero, and displaced all of the difficulties with his conduct ontohis mistress. We have left Sally in the background along with theproblems that she poses. As Annette Gordon-Reed wrote: ‘‘Historians[. . .] had no interest in attempting to discover who this woman was,because writing about her would draw more attention to the under-lying allegation. The project of defeating the notion of a relationshipbetween Jefferson and Hemings demanded that Hemings herself bekept invisible’’ (Gordon-Reed 159).

Rinaldi, I think, unwittingly plays into this invisibility with herbook. While she was bringing to light for young readers a very con-troversial historical topic, she was constrained by several factors.One, she was writing before the DNA tests, and had no way of makinga definite statement about Jefferson and Hemings. To have done sowould have thrown her credibility and research into question. Two,because she was writing for a younger audience, she could not be nearlyas explicit about sexual matters, or about the power dynamic thatwould have been involved in any relationship they might have had,topics that might have been too weighty for adolescent readers. Itmight have seemed better to create a narrative from Harriet’s per-spective, one that would still deal with the conflicts of her race, par-entage, and position as a slave, but would be removed enough fromSally and Jefferson to avoid confronting the issues head on. Therefore,Harriet becomes the narrator and the focus, and her relationshipwith Jefferson of primary importance—once again leaving Sally ratherin the background, overshadowed by the white man who controlledher world.


The Sally that Rinaldi portrays, however, although she does notappear as much as might be expected, is very aware of the paradoxes inher life and the problems that they pose, both for herself and for herchildren. She becomes something of an oracle, a wise woman—muchlike in our current history books, a symbol for the problems andtragedy of slavery and racism, but also a symbol for a more intricate,complex, and closely connected world, a world that is relegated to theshadows. It is Sally, in Rinaldi’s story line, who convinces Harriet notonly to take her freedom, but also to pass as white. Passing was adangerous method of gaining freedom; if one was light enough to beseen as a white person, it was possible to ‘‘pass’’ and gain all theprivileges of white citizenship. The dark side, however, was riskingone’s life for that freedom. If a slave were found to be passing as a whiteperson, they would most likely be executed. In addition, the slavewould have to give up all connection to his/her family and friends, whowould be left behind on the plantation. Harriet is well aware of therisks and sacrifices involved in passing, and is surprised when hermother encourages her to do so:

‘‘[. . .] oh, my child. My Harriet. If you never listen to me aboutanother thing, listen to me about this passing. I was right abouttaking your freedom, wasn’t I? I’m right about this too, child, Iswear it.’’

‘‘Oh, Mama!’’ I wailed.‘‘Oh, Harriet, this freedom is worth everything. There is no sac-

rifice too great. Knowing that Tom is free and out there and makingit is the only thing that helps me bear the sorrow of hearing fromhim just once in all these years. And if you could pass and have a lifeof your own, never worrying about having your free papers on you orlistening for someone to make you account for what you are about!Just like all those white folk in Thomas Jefferson’s America! Oh,Harriet!’’

(Rinaldi 115)

Sally is clearly aware, in this plea, that Thomas Jefferson’s Americais not her America, that it is a world she will never be a part of. Herchance for freedom was not in America, but in France, back during heryoung adulthood. Yet she knows that her children can be a part ofAmerica, be part of the freedom that Jefferson helped to create, as longas she can convince them to take it. She knows that they cannot havethat freedom unless they become ‘‘white’’ in the eyes of the world, no

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matter how wrong it is that a country professing freedom for all deniesit to those who have a different skin color.

Harriet, for her part, is torn between her love for Monticello and theman she has looked to as a father, and the knowledge of what mayhappen to her if she stays. Gradually she realizes that she would beforced to marry another slave and stay within the slave system, that shewould be treated considerably worse after Jefferson’s death, potentiallylosing the privileged place she has held in his household, that shewould be an object for white men to prey upon, and, worst of all, thatshe could be sold when Jefferson dies. Once again, it is her mother whobrings this problem into full relief for her:

[. . .] ‘‘Haven’t I been talking and talking, until my mouth can’t sayanymore words, about you taking your freedom when you get to beof age? What do you think I mean, girl?’’‘‘But Mama,’’ I whispered fearfully, ‘‘what if the master dies before Ibecome of age? Is it true what Thruston says? Could I be sold?’’She sighed and folded her arms across her middle. She tightened herlips. ‘‘Who knows?’’ And her voice was dead like. ‘‘I trust no one. Sogo downstairs and see Mister Randolph. The time has come to talkplain, Harriet.’’So she didn’t know either, for all her closeness with the master. Butit was the first time we had ever spoken of such a possibility, andsomehow I felt it was the first time she had ever really been honestwith me.

(Rinaldi 99)

This passage is particularly interesting because Sally seems to admitthe full tenuousness of her position, as well as that of her children. Herchildren’s freedom depends upon the presence of Thomas Jefferson;without him, there are no guarantees that freedom will be granted. Shetook the risk of losing her freedom and her children’s freedom bycoming back to America, with a man she ostensibly had some sort ofattachment toe—the man who owned her as a slave. If Jefferson hadtreated her differently, if she had been subjected to a harsher pastand upbringing, Sally could have had every reason in the world to hatethis man. However, she had grown up as a privileged slave who wasgiven special treatment, with both a mother and grandmother whowere mistresses of white men. She may have seen this as an acceptablerole to take on, given the system that she was living in. She had been toFrance, had been educated there at least to some degree, and had been


paid wages for her work (by Jefferson) while she was there. She hadbeen, to a certain extent, a free woman. She was also the half-sisterof Thomas Jefferson’s dead wife. It does not seem impossible that thetwo could have formed an attachment to one another (Gordon-Reed 164 – 66).

A look at some current black feminist theory may help us to un-derstand why Sally might have chosen to combine her love for Jeffersonwith being his mistress and housekeeper, as a way of improving herown situation. Aida Hurtado argues that the relationships betweenwhite women and women of color are largely established by the re-lationship each group has to white men. Historically, white womenwere familially related to white men while black women were owned bythem. This meant that white women were also implicated in owningblack women. In addition, white women have an ‘‘economic cushion’’through their relationship to white men that is not generally enjoyedby women of color.

Now, as then, white middle-class women are groomed from birth tobe the lovers, mothers, and partners (however unequal) of white menbecause of the economic and social benefits attached to these roles.. . . Women of Color, in contrast, are groomed from birth to beprimarily the lovers, mothers, and partners (however unequal) ofmen of Color, who are also oppressed by white men. The avenues ofadvancement through marriage that are open to white women whoconform to prescribed standards of middle-class femininity are noteven a theoretical possibility for most women of Color.

(Hurtado 10 – 11)

Having grown up around two female relatives who were the mistressesof white men, Sally would have understood fully both the economicand social advantages to such a situation. She would have a specialstatus within the slave hierarchy at Monticello. She and her childrenwould be well cared for, and would not be forced to perform field laboror be in danger of being sold. While her arrangement with Jeffersoncould not be socially sanctioned or acknowledged in any way outside ofthat privilege, she would, in effect, be ‘‘marrying’’ him, thus puttingher much closer to the economic safety and status of a white woman.Being the mistress of a white man, particularly a man as powerful asThomas Jefferson, would allow her the sort of ‘‘advancement’’ that mostblack women slaves could not expect, and would remove, to a certain

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extent, the middle terms of black man and white woman that kept herat the bottom of the economic and class scale. Of course, because shewas a slave, she would never truly leave behind the constraints of thatcategory, and would have been at least outwardly subordinate toJefferson’s white female relatives. Nevertheless, such a partnershipwould make the best of her situation as a slave, and give her (and herchildren) much more freedom than ordinarily would have been pos-sible. If we consider the possibilities that she and Jefferson were inlove, and that she may have been carrying his child when they wereready to leave France, it seems plausible that Sally might have chosenthis plan. Consenting to be his mistress/housekeeper may have seemedlike the best way to attain ‘‘freedom’’ of a sort, and keep Jefferson at thesame time.

The problem with this scenario, from a cultural point of view, is thatit begins to break down the binaries of the master and slave and ofblack and white. The ideas about what is ‘‘acceptable’’ and ‘‘right’’ inour culture begin to blur if we acknowledge that a black woman couldhave loved a white man, that a slave woman could have loved hermaster—even enough to give up her own freedom. This was the manwho legally owned her, who had the power to sell her and her children,who, if he chose to, could force sexual relations upon her or herdaughters. Should Sally not have hated this man underneath her out-ward obedience to him? It is all too easy to let her slide into thestereotype of the promiscuous black female, the attractive slave whoused physical pleasure to entice the upstanding white aristocrat into asinful relationship, a relationship that was purely for her own advan-tage. However, simply because Sally was given standing within thehousehold through being Jefferson’s mistress does not negate the pos-sibility that she loved him, especially if she was willing to sacrifice herfreedom in order to keep that love and have some sort of family. TriciaRose touches on the cultural issues that this poses:

I particularly worry about the terms of racial and sexual acceptancethat we as Black folks often project onto Sally Hemings. ForHemings to feel love and desire for Jefferson, according to onepopular Black view, she must have been an outcast from her enslavedpeople. Otherwise, the critiques of slavery as a vicious crime againstBlack people would be diminished. The fact is, slavery was anunevenly experienced, profoundly brutal form of physical, sexual,economic and psychological domination. Yet it’s also true that


human bonds and behaviors have never fit neatly into the designatedboxes we make for them. (202)

Put another way, Rose could be seen as saying here that Hemings’love and desire for Jefferson, to whatever extent it may have existed,does not lessen the critique of slavery but in fact heightens it, for itpoints to Hemings as a human being, as a person, with emotions,personality, choices, and dilemmas.

Not only is it hard to fit a slave woman’s love for her master into ourculture’s typical romantic ideas of what ‘‘love’’ means, the picture be-comes even more complicated if we attempt to accept that Jefferson didnot treat her as a typical slave, that he may in fact have loved her anddone his best to protect her and her children within the legal and socialsystem of the time. Sally was his slave, and therefore not, by contem-porary standards, someone he was supposed to love in any way. She wasa servant, a piece of property, a body, but not a person. If Jefferson didin fact fall in love with Sally when they were in Paris, it was surely justas disturbing to him as it was to her that he could love a woman heowned, a person he was supposed to regard as little more than chattel,and an African woman, no less. She would have been considered in-ferior both mentally and biologically, and her mulatto children wouldhave been considered tainted, their very existence a disgrace and de-gradation to the white race. Given the surrounding culture, it is nowonder that historians have thought it impossible for Jefferson to havehad a relationship with Sally. The consequences to both of them wouldhave been enormous if they were found out, and even in the event ofcomplete secrecy the mental divisions would have been numerous anddifficult to bear. To be lovers and parents on the one hand, and thenmaster and slave on the other, would have required constant negoti-ation of a cultural double standard that privileged both maleness andwhiteness over femaleness and blackness.

Most people would like to think that this sort of double standardhas disappeared. Yet, given the controversy over the DNA evidence,I question whether this is true. There are still historians and scholars,as well as everyday people, who refuse to accept this evidence as factbecause it tears down too many cultural myths. To acknowledge theDNA evidence means accepting several things: (1) that the thirdpresident of the United States had a slave mistress and can no longerbe seen as the perfectly moral and benevolent plantation owner, and

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furthermore, given his openly stated views on slavery and miscegena-tion, that Jefferson can now be viewed and condemned as a hypocrite,(2) that ‘‘Tom and Sally’’ did in fact produce children, (3) that thosechildren, of one of the greatest men in US history, went unacknowl-edged for three hundred years because of their race, and (4) that thepossibility clearly exists that the relationship between Jefferson andSally was long-standing and loving, despite the problematic dynamicsand legal and cultural constraints.

In looking at the above statements, it starts to become clear how farcultural myth and affection for Jefferson has superseded fact. First ofall, was Jefferson ever seen as the perfectly moral and benevolent plan-tation owner? It has been well documented by historians how torn hewas over slavery. His famous statement, from which Rinaldi takes thetitle for her book, openly acknowledges his dilemma over the slaveryissue: ‘‘. . . we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him,nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation theother’’ (Rinaldi 2). He hated slavery and kept slaves, unable to freethem thanks to his debts that could not be paid off. He needed them towork the vast amount of farmland on Monticello, and by his death hisdebts were so bad that with the exception of a few Hemings slaveseither kept in the family or freed, the rest of the slaves were sold(Langhorne 253 – 55). Clearly Jefferson had to make mental moralcompromises in order to continue owning slaves, and the hypocriticalimplications of those compromises were not lost on him. His personallife has never been easy to assess in moral terms, no matter how muchour culture has painted him as the champion of freedom and morality.

Thomas Jefferson kept slaves primarily because he needed them tohelp him live the way he wanted to live. He knew very well themoral issues at stake with respect to slavery. As a lifetime partic-ipant in that system, he had to make rationalizations every day of hislife about how he could be a part of it and remain honorable, decent,and moral. If he could do this for all the other aspects of the slavesystem, why would he have been incapable of making similar ra-tionalizations about another inevitable part of the system: sexualcontacts between masters and slaves?

(Gordon-Reed 117)

It does not seem all that unlikely that Jefferson would have beenable to make this step from rationalizing the ownership of slaves to


rationalizing his affair with a slave woman. If he did indeed love her,the need for rationalization on both counts would have become all themore imperative, and all the more possible. The problem with SallyHemings and Thomas Jefferson having a long-term relationship is thatit hits squarely on the racism of our culture, and erases the dividingline between master and slave, black and white, dominant and sub-ordinate.

This becomes even clearer when we attack the problem of misce-genation in this relationship, and the children that resulted from it, forit was here that Sally’s influence was clearly the greatest in her choiceswith Jefferson. Rinaldi accepts the premise in her book that Jefferson’spromise to free Sally’s children, obtained before they left Paris, was thecondition on which she returned to Virginia with him. Even if she waswilling to give up her own freedom for her love and an attempt to havesome kind of family (for there is also the possibility that she waspregnant by Jefferson when they returned to America), Hemings wasnot willing to give up her children’s freedom. Paradoxically, it is thatpromise of freedom that, in the end, breaks up the family she workedso hard to keep.

‘‘All my life I wanted for you and your brothers. That we should behere together as a family. Yet I only came back with him from Parisbecause he promised me my children would someday be free. Andall it means is the end of my family.’’

(Rinaldi 226)

A slightly darker spin is put on this promise at the end of the MerchantIvory film Jefferson in Paris, which focused on the relationship betweenJefferson and Hemings, as well as Jefferson’s relationship with MariaCosway, his longtime friend and correspondent. At the end of the film,Sally (Thandie Newton) admits to her brother James that she is preg-nant by Jefferson (Nick Nolte), and it is James who tries to persuadeSally to stay in Paris, and takes her to confront Jefferson about herpregnancy. James, in other words, takes on the office of male protectorfor Sally, because he knows she cannot count on protection fromJefferson. Once Jefferson hears about their scheme to stay in Paris,however, he tries to persuade them to return to America by promisingtheir freedom. Sally is confused, and wants to return; she keeps askingwhere she will go and what she will do if she stays in France. Shebecomes much more of a girl figure than Rinaldi’s Sally, a bewildered

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girl who does not know what decision to make. James, not Sally, forcesJefferson to swear on a Bible that he will free Sally and her children inhis will. Sally seems to have very little agency in what happens, but israther a confused child who lets her brother take care of her. Jeffersonappears shocked, confused, angry with James for his demands, benev-olent toward Sally, and generally hypocritical for not admitting hispaternity of the child. Sally, in this portrait, is a young woman whoperhaps used looks and kindness to gain considerable favor with hermaster, but who is left with a harsh bargain that allows her to go home,but deprives her of her freedom and prevents her from declaring thefather of her children. Sally’s decision is taken out of her own hands andput into the hands of her brother, significantly depriving the viewer ofthe idea that there was any sort of joint decision between Jefferson andSally, or that anything about their liaison was particularly romantic. Itmay have been affectionate, but it was an affection that was burdenedwith terrible circumstances.

The truth of what happened, and the extent of Sally’s involvementin the decision, may have been somewhere in between the two por-trayals of the book and the film, but regardless of the way it happened,the promise of freedom undeniably meant that Sally’s children wouldsomeday have to leave Monticello and Virginia. In Rinaldi’s novel, it isHarriet’s brother Beverly who articulates the extent of the family’sdisruption, the night he runs away. It is not only the end of the familyduring their lives, because they will rarely, perhaps never, all be to-gether again, but also the end of the family in history. Beverly exposesthe full truth of their position for Harriet, by showing her how un-connected they are to Thomas Jefferson in the eyes of the world.

‘‘We’re on his slave list,’’ he repeated. ‘‘He notes that he gave breadto us. And how much. You know how important he is. When hedies, people will see those lists. They’ll see we were slaves. A hun-dred years from now that’s all people will see of us, all they’ll know.’’

‘‘That’s not true, Bev,’’ I said.‘‘No?’’ And he looks at me all defiant like. ‘‘Then let me tell you

something else, sister. Something Mama told me. There isn’t onescrap of paper in that whole library of his. Or anywhere. Not onescrap of paper that says what Mama is to him. Nothing that con-nects her to him. Nothing that connects us to him. Except thoselists in that Farm Book of his.’’

For a moment I couldn’t reason. I stood there dumb like, as ifhe’d put a spell on me. I’d never thought about any of this—lists,


scraps of paper. But I saw now for the first time what Beverly wastrying to say to me. We’d lived our lives here, and they had beengood. But where it counted, where men wrote things down in theirgolden books that told about family, we were not.

(Rinaldi 213)

Perhaps more than any other in passage in the novel, this dialoguebetween Harriet and her brother highlights the importance of thewritten word and historical documentation. All of the stories ofHemings and Jefferson were passed down orally, mostly in Hemings’family line. We have no letters from Jefferson to Sally, or from Sally toJefferson, and very few mentions of her in surviving correspondence.Her children appear more frequently in the plantation records, butthere is not one written sentence that personally links them to ThomasJefferson—nothing that he ever wrote to them or to their mother.As Rinaldi is clearly aware, there is plenty of evidence to suggestthat Thomas Jefferson pointedly edited the written records he leftbehind, in order to shape his own image in the eyes of the public. In hisrecords of the plantation, Sally and her children were merely slaves.The fact that they were black kept him from acknowledging themeither in public or in private. One can only guess that this omission onJefferson’s part was intended to keep away more public scandal. SallyHemings’ family was not only broken up by slavery, freedom, andpassing, it was broken up by history, and the intentional censoring ofhistory by Jefferson and/or his family. White historians were able todiscount the oral history of the Hemings family because there was nowritten proof either from Sally or Jefferson. If there had been that ‘‘onescrap of paper’’ in Jefferson or Sally’s hand, if Jefferson’s relationshipwith Sally had been acknowledged in history books from the begin-ning, both the historical record of the third president and our culturalideas about slavery, miscegenation, and cross-race relationships wouldhave evolved very differently. What is impressive about Rinaldi’sbook, in a sense, is that she is trying to create that ‘‘one scrap of paper’’that we do not have. A personal first-person record of Harriet’s life(written in the form of a journal) is an imagined ‘‘golden book’’ for theHemings family, a place where their history is actually told, writtendown, and legitimized, and where cultural history is revised andrewritten. Rinaldi has written a new golden book that tells the story ofthe ‘‘other’’ American family. In comments written for a children’sliterature Web site at Rutgers University, Rinaldi herself acknowledges

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that it was this problem of the Hemings children and their paternitythat drove her to write the book:

It was not my approval of his [Jefferson’s] or her [Sally’s] actionsthat impelled me to write Wolf By the Ears. It was the dilemma ofthese children that appealed to me, the fact that they had to leaveMonticello at age 21, find their own way, and always wonder ifthe great man was their father, for as far as written documentationon his part is concerned, he never acknowledged it. (http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/�kvander/rinaldi65.html)

Given the attacks on Jefferson about his possible relationship withSally that took place in his own time, and the potential repercussionsthat written records could have brought down on him, Sally, and bothof their families, it is perhaps understandable that Jefferson would havewanted to keep those records to a minimum. It could be seen as onemore method of personal and political negotiation in a culture whereracism and slavery were a way of life. It is more shocking to realize thatmodern historians, supposedly more objective and holding fewer racistassumptions, have kept up this omission because Sally and her childrenwere black. In a society that took its ideals of freedom and equalityfrom Jefferson, his hypocrisy was also reproduced, by a group ofscholars who refused to countenance the idea that Jefferson couldhave been involved with a black woman, and who refused to see SallyHemings as a person despite her blackness and her slave status. Thislack of acceptance and the consequent lack of information would havebeen the final problem Rinaldi had in constructing her book. BarbaraChristian argues that a reimagining of the past of African Americans,via literature, was not possible until that history was acknowledged:

Re-memory is a critical determinant in how we value the past, whatwe remember, what we select to emphasize, what we forget. . . . Butthat concept could not be at the center of a narrative’s revisioning ofhistory until the obvious fact that African-Americans did have ahistory and culture was firmly established in American society, forwriters would be constrained not only by their readers’ points ofview but also by the dearth of available information about the pastthat might give their work authenticity. (226)

While the history and culture of African Americans had longbeen acknowledged and accepted by 1991, the history of Thomas


Jefferson and Sally Hemings had not. Historian Fawn Brodie andBarbara Chase-Riboud had published nonfiction and fiction, respective-ly, accepting that Sally had been Jefferson’s mistress and creating a stormof controversy. Rinaldi was attempting to rewrite and rememorize his-tory in the face of denials from historical scholars, scientists, whites, anynumber of people who were invested in keeping Jefferson’s image‘‘pure.’’ Not only that, she was attempting to reconstruct the story for ayoung audience, one that might in fact believe it. She may have had toadopt a form that was circumspect enough to be acceptable, if she hopedto have enough credibility to convince publishers that such a book wasworthwhile for readers in their early teens. It would have been easier todo this with Harriet as the main character, for then she could stilladdress the issues of race, slavery, miscegenation, and even the questionof Jefferson and Sally without seriously undermining any culturalmyths. Sally remains in the background, and as always, Jefferson comesto the forefront, the great idealist who can never be discounted.

There is a moment, in Jefferson in Paris, where the mythologicalstatus of Jefferson is pointed to, and his position as the ideal Americanis acknowledged. Maria Cosway (Greta Scacchi) and Jefferson’s daugh-ter Martha (Gwyneth Paltrow) are walking in the garden of the Parisconvent where Martha was educated. In offering her friendship toMartha, Maria professes to understand the conflicts of being a visitor ina foreign country:

MARIA. You see, I know how it is to be a foreigner in a foreigncountry. I was born in that condition, for in Italy I’m English, andin England I’m Italian.MARTHA. But I’m American everywhere.MARIA. Yes, there you are like your father. Wherever he is, he iswhat he is.

Thomas Jefferson is indeed ‘‘American everywhere.’’ His name is rec-ognized all over the globe as one of the founders of the United States.However, it is also time that we acknowledge Sally Hemings and herchildren as ‘‘American everywhere,’’ as African Americans who have theright to Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, a legacy that he only partly securedfor them. He gave them life and freedom, true, but he did not givethem the happiness of knowing that they were acknowledged andrecognized as his family. He freed their immediate family, but he didnot free all of his slaves, nor did he insist on freeing every slave in the

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country. Fortunately, history has done what he could not, both inregard to slavery and in regard to Sally. Slavery ended with the CivilWar and the Emancipation Proclamation; Sally Hemings is now in ourhistory books as Thomas Jefferson’s mistress. Some of her children havebeen acknowledged as his offspring. It took modern science and DNAtesting to confirm something that had literally been written out(side)of the history books, because it was never written in the first place. If ithad been up to some earlier scholars, the parentage of Sally’s childrenwould have remained buried forever, thanks to a belief in the ‘‘im-possibility’’ of such a union, and a need to keep cultural myths intact.It is impossible to say how many more family histories that are similarto the Hemings could be found, if historians were to take the time tolook for them. How many more people do not have ‘‘one scrap of paper’’to connect them to an entirely different side of their history, anotherhalf of their family? Sally’s children, in a symbolic sense, are all thechildren in this country who have mixed parentage, who do not knowor cannot claim part of their family as their own, because racism stillseparates blood relationships. We have a duty, as scholars and citizens,to end that separation.

Even now that Jefferson’s relationship with Sally has been to somedegree confirmed, admitting the ‘‘indiscretions’’ of one larger-than-lifepublic man could very well lead to a cultural trap, where Jefferson isthe exception that proves the rule. Now that the ‘‘Thomas and Sally’’story has been validated, everyone may go back to ignoring the factthat it happened elsewhere, and indeed still happens. Thus, the fictionof blacks and whites living in one country but in very distinct socialand sexual spheres can be maintained.

Gordon-Reed, once again, points to this problem in her book:

Love between a man and a woman is different because the union ofmen and women of different races creates a mingled bloodline thatconflicts with the notion that blacks and whites must be kept sep-arate to some degree. The American vision, even today, is of blacksand whites living together in harmony, so long as we do not live intoo much harmony. That some version of romantic love could existeven in a system where whites militantly asserted their superiorityand treated most blacks with open contempt leaves whites living ina system that is not wholly rigid, vulnerable to the possibility thatthey (or their children) in certain circumstances might feel com-pelled to reciprocate. (167)


The current treatment of Sally Hemings as a historical figure bearsout Gordon-Reed’s assertion. While the vision of Thomas Jefferson isadapted to allow for human emotions, contradictions, failings, anddouble standards, the portrait of Sally Hemings is still left blurry andindistinct because historians and our society generally have difficultydealing with the complicated nature of a relationship between a slavewoman and her master, what that relationship might mean for herchildren, and the implications this has about the nature of racism incontemporary culture. Bringing forth this woman out of history in allher real life would entail a complete reassessment of the ‘‘dusky’’ areasbetween blacks and whites, and a realization of how closely intertwinedthe races actually are. To allow Sally Hemings agency and personhoodin the pages of history and literature would begin to break down bothracial binaries and familial bloodlines in a way that would completelyrewrite the framework of American social relations. We need to followRinaldi into those ‘‘dusky’’ areas of Sally’s life, and into the dusky areasof slave families, miscegenation, and continued racism and segregationin order to understand our current cultural problems, and bring themto light on the page. We need to create ‘‘scraps of paper’’ not only forSally, but also for all of the other women, men, and children who havebeen written out of history.

Works Cited

Christian, Barbara. ‘‘ ‘Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something’:African-American Women’s Historical Novels.’’ Feminism and‘Race’. Ed. Kum-Kum Bhavnani. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.220 – 32.

Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

———. ‘‘When a Saint Becomes a Sinner.’’ U.S. News and World Report9 Nov. 1998. Lexis-Nexis 15 Feb. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2080/universei.

Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An AmericanControversy. Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia, 1997.

Hurtado, Aida. The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race andFeminism. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.

Jefferson in Paris. Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Dir. James Ivory.Prod. Ismail Merchant. Perf. Nick Nolte, Greta Scacchi, Gwenyth

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Paltrow, Thandie Newton, and James Earl Jones. TouchstonePictures, 1995.

Langhorne, Elizabeth. Monticello: A Family Story. Chapel Hill, NC:Algonquin Books, 1987.

Murray, Barbara, Brian Duffy, Gerald Parshall, and Lewis Lord.‘‘Jefferson’s secret life.’’ U.S. News and World Report 9 Nov. 1998.Lexis-Nexis 15 Feb. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2080/universei.

Painter, Nell Irvin. ‘‘Representing Truth: Sojourner’s Truth Knowingand Becoming Known.’’ The Journal of American History 81.2(1994): 461– 92. JSTOR 31 Jan. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2230/i.

Rinaldi, Ann. Wolf by the Ears. New York: Scholastic, 1991.

———. ‘‘Notes From Ann Rinaldi, Author of Wolf by the Ears.’’ Ed.Dr. Kay Vandergrift. 17 Jan. 1999. School of Communication,Information, and Library Studies, Rutgers University. 22 Jan.2005 hhttp://www.scils.rutgers.edu/�kvander/rinaldi65.htmli.

Rose, Tricia. ‘‘Whose Story Is It, Anyway?’’ Essence Feb. 2001: 202.

Travis, John. ‘‘Paternity Study Ties Jefferson to Slave.’’ Science News12 Dec. 1998. ProQuest 15 Feb. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2052/pqdweb?Did=000000037208082&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=4&Sid=2&RQT=309i.

Works Consulted

Blair, Sara. ‘‘Feeling, Evidence, and the Work of Literary History:Response to duCille.’’ American Literary History 12.3 (2000): 463 –66. Project Muse 15 Feb. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2347/journals/american_literary_history/toc/alh12.3.htmli.

Camp, Stephanie. ‘‘Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.’’ The Missis-sippi Quarterly 53.2 (2000): 275 – 83. ProQuest 15 Feb. 2003hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2052/pqdweb?Did=000000063573440&Fmt=4&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=53&Sid=1&RQT=309i.

duCille, Ann. ‘‘Where in the World is William Wells Brown? ThomasJefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of African AmericanLiterary History.’’ American Literary History 12.3 (2000): 443– 62.Project Muse 15 Feb. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2347/journals/american_literary_history/toc/alh12.3.htmli.

Ellis, Joseph J. ‘‘Jefferson: Post-DNA.’’ William and Mary Quarterly57.1 (2000): 125 – 38. JSTOR 15 Feb. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2230/i.


Neiman, Fraser D. ‘‘Coincidence or Causal Connection? The Relation-ship Between Thomas Jefferson’s Visits to Monticello and SallyHemings’s Conceptions.’’ William and Mary Quarterly 57.1 (2000):198–210. JSTOR 15 Feb. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2230/i.

Petit, Charles W. ‘‘The History that Lies in Men’s Genes.’’ U.S. Newsand World Report 9 Nov. 1998. Lexis-Nexis 15 Feb. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2080/universei.

Roger, Patrick, Glenn Garelik, Amanda Crawford, and Bob Calandra.‘‘All Tom’s Children.’’ People Weekly 23 Nov. 1998. ProQuest15 Feb. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2052/pqdweb?Did=000000036011876&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=1&Sid=2&RQT=309i.

Rosellini, Lynn. ‘‘Cutting the Great Man Down to Size.’’ U.S. News andWorld Report 9 Nov. 1998. Lexis-Nexis 15 Feb. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2080/universei.

Smith, Dinitia, and Nicholas Wade. ‘‘DNA Test Finds Evidence ofJefferson Child by Slave.’’ The New York Times 1 Nov. 1998. Lexis-Nexis 15 Feb. 2003 hhttp://proxy.lib.umich.edu:2080/universei.

Emily Honey is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University ofMassachusetts Amherst. She received a master’s degree from the University ofMichigan, and a BA from Western Michigan University. She is currentlywriting a dissertation on nineteenth- and twentieth-century girls’ seriesbooks, and her other research interests are wide, including peer culture in theSeven Sisters colleges, lesbian popular culture, and Sherlock Holmes.

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Documents

Taking the Wolf by the Ears: Ann Rinaldi and the Cultural Work of Sally Hemings