Abagond has written about Jefferson's racist thoughts on Blacks, but how about his own likely Jerry Springer-esque relationship with Sally Hemings? Apparently the latter was likely the half-sister of Jefferson's own wife (Abagond's post on Jefferson here)! As Paul Mooney once said, "that's some Jerry Springer shit!" His wife's family's slave, who happened to be his wife's half-sister (meaning that Sally Hemming's mother was likely raped or "willingly accepted" her white master's sexual advances, and this master just happened to be Thomas Jefferson's wife's father!). Abagond does a good job here describing the scholarly debate on the actual relationship between Hemmings and Jefferson, and regardless of what exactly happened between Jefferson and her, a male relative of Jefferson (if not him directly) impregnated Hemings because the descendants of one of Heming's children was linked to the Jefferson family through DNA studies. Thus, Jefferson, despite his writings about Blacks as ugly and opposition to miscegenation, probably "did the nasty" with his mixed-race slave who, as a "quadroon" and "high yellow," who, "in the night looked less African than she really was"(okay, I got this line from The Boondocks). And when Jefferson's relationship likely began with Hemings, she was significantly younger than him, even if they started after the death of Jefferson's wife. Imagine if you were sleeping with your wife's (deceased or alive) half-sister, who was also a slave and of a different race! Jerry Springer moments, I tell you.
Of note, however, is Abagond's references to the fate of Hemings's children who were freed, likely 'becoming white' in the antebellum US. Not too long ago, some genealogist claimed to have linked Obama to an African slave in colonial Virgina through his white mother, additional proof of how free blacks and people of color could, with money, 'freedom' and, often mixed racial heritage, could escape the growing black/white binary. This reminds me of a book a friend was recommended to by a professor we both had at different times. The book was an examination of a Civil War Confederate general's identity and family past, traced back to his Black ancestry yet by the time of the Civil War, the general was "white" and his identity linked to slaveholding.
Of potentially greater interest is the notion of Jefferson fathering "octoroon" slave children he later freed entering into the earliest English-language novel by a Black American writer, African-American abolitionist and novelist, William Wells Brown. Some versions of his novel, Clotelle, actually turn the slave woman of a Virginia slaveholding aristocrat into relations of the US president, presumably Thomas Jefferson! Thus, the suspicions of many close to Thomas Jefferson, his political detractors, and abolitionists, of all shades, made reference to and display some familiarity with the belief that Jefferson engaged in sexual relations with an African-descended slave woman (for a review of the novel, check my earlier blog post here). Who knows, perhaps Jefferson's penchant for "high yellas" was a product of his Francophile inclinations, since French Saint-Dominguans who sought exile in the US were noted for, at times, publicly displaying signs of their affection for Black women from the Caribbean (Saint-Dominguan exiles shocked the white community in Philadelphia with behavior like this, as Gary B. Nash has demonstrated in his study of the impact of Saint Dominguan exiles and refugees of color in Philadelphia), a practice with some degree of social acceptance for white males who often married propertied women of color in Saint Domingue (as well as the pernicious mulatta stereotypes promulgated by the likes of Moreau de Saint Mery...). Either way, Jefferson's relations with Hemings marks US history, and history in general, as something one could often find in the likes of an episode of Jerry Springer's television program. That programs such as Springer's exist to continue in the established American practice of pathologizing and laughing at the misfortune of the poor, black, uneducated, and "white trash" elements of American society, obfuscates how production of history and historical knowledge is a product of unequal power relations that, in the end, endeavor to silence the voices of individuals such as Sally Hemings.
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