Getting to the Good Stuff

I feel like I'm working hard to get the salient details of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship, but the details are satisfyingly detailed and scandalous. Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife as well as their slave. When the wife died, Hemings remained Jefferson's slave, and she lived with him in France while he was the American ambassador there. Also living with them were Jefferson's two legitimate daughters and another slave, who was Hemings' brother. Sally Hemings became pregnant while still in France, and gave birth in Virginia. She and Jefferson had four children together who lived to be adults. Three of them eventually were freed and after leaving Monticello, lived as white people.

When Hemings and Jefferson began their sexual relationship, she was 16 and he was 46. Annette Gordon-Reed, the author, suggests that any time an unsupervised teenage girl is introduced into a household where an adult man is not married, an inappropriate relationship is inevitable. I'm not sure I believe this is inevitable. Possible, surely. Maybe even probable?

As she tends to do. Gordon-Reed painstakingly points out obvious things to the reader and she's driving me crazy. For example, she explains the difference between a man's relationship with his wife and his relationship with his daughter. She does this to help build her case that Hemings and Jefferson's sexual relationship was a likely turn of events, considering that Jefferson was a widower, and therefore, unmarried. Now I'm doing it! (Pointing out the obvious, that is.) Anyway, Gordon-Reed actually says that if a wife had been present, she would have said, "Stop gazing at Sally" and "Have sex with only me." But that a daughter could not say such things, mostly because she'd have nothing to give in return, because daughters don't have sex with their fathers. She said that.

I believe that Gordon-Reed's continual pointing out of the obvious is not meant to be patronizing. I think she's refuting the years and years of historical interpretations (and denials) about Jefferson and Hemings' relationship and the marginalization of Hemings. I think she isn't really talking to me; she's talking to those historians. But it's still hard to take.

For those who read my blog to find out what I had for dinner, last night it was rib-eye steak, rosemary-garlic oven-roasted potatoes and a green salad. We have salad a lot, because it's one of the few vegetables our son will eat. I played sous chef and seasoned the steak with lemon pepper and seasoned salt. It rained, so Gerard abandoned plans to grill, and cooked it in a cast-iron skillet with some more of his compound butter. We also had a beer sampler, as he had bought a mix-and-match six-pack of micro-brews from Whole Foods. I tasted "Hairy Eyeball" and "Small Craft Warning."