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.
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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.