Sally Hemings’ story sits at the crossroads of America’s most profound contradictions: liberty built on slavery, equality undermined by systemic oppression, and the voices of the marginalized silenced by historical narratives. Angela Davis, bell hooks, and others have provided critical frameworks for understanding Hemings’ life, but even the most serious attempts to tell her story often perpetuate silences, failing to name what is clear: Thomas Jefferson raped Sally Hemings. None of these authors—Black or white—explicitly call it rape, even as their works critique the systemic exploitation of enslaved Black women. This blog post critically examines the silences that persist in narratives about Hemings and Jefferson, as well as my own position as a white male scholar grappling with these truths.
Angela Davis: Understanding Hemings Through Systems of Domination
In Women, Race, & Class (1981), Angela Davis examines the systemic oppression of Black women under slavery, highlighting their unique position at the nexus of racial and patriarchal domination. Sally Hemings, enslaved by one of America’s Founding Fathers, embodies the contradictions Davis critiques. Hemings’ life illustrates how Black women’s bodies were commodified for labor, reproduction, and sexual exploitation.
While Davis does not directly reference Hemings, her analysis of slavery’s systemic violence makes clear that Hemings’ coerced relationship with Jefferson was rape. Davis writes:
Rape was an unvarnished expression of the slaveholder’s economic mastery and the overseer’s control.
Under slavery, consent was legally and socially impossible for enslaved women. Jefferson’s actions, viewed through Davis’s lens, are unequivocally acts of rape, grounded in the economic and racial systems that perpetuated sexual violence against Black women. Davis challenges us to see Hemings’ story not as exceptional but as emblematic of the broader realities of slavery.
bell hooks: The Power of Intersectionality and Cultural Memory
bell hooks, particularly in Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (1981) and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), emphasizes the importance of intersectionality in understanding the experiences of Black women. Hooks’ concept of “decolonizing the mind” applies directly to how we approach Hemings’ story, which has often been romanticized to obscure her lack of agency. Portraying Jefferson and Hemings as lovers erases the power dynamics that defined their relationship, protecting Jefferson’s legacy while silencing Hemings’ voice.
Hooks critiques the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that sustains these narratives, arguing that the erasure of Black women’s agency perpetuates systemic oppression. Although hooks does not reference Hemings directly, her framework demands that we reject the sanitized portrayals of their relationship and confront the historical and cultural forces that continue to obscure the truth of her exploitation.
The Best and Most Serious Attempts to Tell Sally Hemings’ Story ... But Still Too Much Silence
Several authors, both Black and white, have revisited Sally Hemings’ story, offering critical perspectives on her life and her coerced relationship with Jefferson. Yet, none explicitly name Jefferson’s actions as rape. Below is a critique of these works and their complicity as Authors of Silence:
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008)
Annette Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work is the most comprehensive scholarly account of Sally Hemings and her family. Gordon-Reed challenges romanticized narratives, emphasizing the systemic power imbalance of slavery:
Whatever one thinks about the relationship, the institution of slavery rendered any such consent meaningless.
While Gordon-Reed reframes the narrative to highlight Hemings’ humanity and agency within an oppressive system, she does not explicitly call Jefferson’s actions rape. This omission reflects the broader hesitancy within even critical scholarship to confront Jefferson’s actions directly.
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings: A Novel (1979)
Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel fictionalizes Hemings’ life, presenting her as a complex character navigating systemic violence. In later editions, Chase-Riboud critiques the romanticization of Hemings’ story, writing:
Sally Hemings was a victim of the systemic rape of enslaved Black women by their white masters.
However, the novel stops short of consistently framing Jefferson’s actions as rape. Its original cover—a locket featuring Jefferson’s image—reinforces a sanitized, romanticized portrayal of their relationship, undermining the novel’s critique. This framing reflects a broader cultural discomfort with fully acknowledging the realities of slavery’s brutality.
Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (2012)
Lucia Stanton, a white historian and former director of research at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, provides valuable context on the lives of the enslaved at Monticello. However, her work avoids explicitly naming Jefferson’s exploitation of Hemings as rape. Instead, Stanton writes:
Sally Hemings’ life cannot be understood apart from the constraints of slavery, where power, coercion, and control defined every interaction.
Stanton’s role as a steward of Jefferson’s legacy raises concerns about her motivations. By not using the term "rape," Stanton aligns herself with the broader historical project of softening the atrocities of slavery, perpetuating silences that protect Jefferson’s image. Her omissions position her as an Author of Silence complicit in erasing Hemings’ voice.
Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974)
Fawn M. Brodie was among the first major biographers to acknowledge Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings but controversially framed it as a "long-term love affair." This romanticization ignores the systemic power imbalance of slavery and perpetuates harmful myths about Jefferson’s benevolence. Brodie’s failure to name Jefferson’s actions as rape reflects the biases of her time, prioritizing Jefferson’s perspective over Hemings’ lived reality.
Conclusion: Breaking the Silence
The story of Sally Hemings has been revisited by historians, novelists, and scholars, each grappling with the complexities of her life and her coerced relationship with Thomas Jefferson. While works like Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings: A Novel make critical contributions, they, too, stop short of naming Jefferson’s actions for what they were: rape. Lucia Stanton and Fawn M. Brodie go even further in perpetuating erasure, with Stanton sanitizing Hemings’ story through institutional loyalties to Jefferson’s legacy and Brodie romanticizing their relationship as a "love affair." These omissions, whether through avoidance, romanticization, or institutional complicity, obscure the brutal realities of Hemings’ life and Jefferson’s exploitation.
This raises a critical question: does my position as a white male scholar give me the right to tell Sally Hemings’ story? Or does it risk reinscribing the same dynamics of power and silence that have historically obscured her voice? This tension is undeniable, but it is also why The Authors of Silence exists. While I must acknowledge the limitations of my positionality, I have strived to confront these silences head-on—to name Jefferson as a racist rapist and reject the whitewashed narratives that have long shielded him. Unlike these "authors of silence," I aim to tell Hemings’ story without gloss, euphemism, or undue romanticization, knowing full well that this effort can never be free from the constraints of my own positionality.
The Authors of Silence—the play, the course, and this exploration—engages directly with these complexities, attempting to reckon with both the failures of previous works and the ethical demands of amplifying Hemings’ voice. This reckoning involves more than just confronting Jefferson’s silences; it also requires confronting the silences maintained by modern authors and scholars who hesitate to dismantle the myths surrounding America’s founding. As Angela Davis, bell hooks, and others have shown, reckoning with history demands more than critique—it demands an active commitment to amplifying marginalized voices without appropriating them.
By confronting the truths about Jefferson and Hemings head-on, The Authors of Silence seeks to do better than previous narratives that have avoided or softened the harsh realities of their relationship. It aims to break through the loudest silences—those maintained by individuals and institutions with the most power to speak and the greatest responsibility to name the truth. Sally Hemings’ story deserves nothing less than unflinching honesty, and this play, though inevitably imperfect, strives to provide it.
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