Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (review)

"I want to posit in this book a new myth of origin of the United States," writes the author Clarence E. Walker, who suggests that "at the moment of its creation the nation was not a white racial space but a mixed race one" (2). Rather than positioning George and Martha Washington as "founding parents" of the United States, the author suggests that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings replace them. Walker makes his case for the "new myth" in Mongrel Nation, a slim two-part volume containing the essays "Sexuality," and "Character and History, or 'Chloroform in Print.'" Walker acknowledges that his proposition will disturb some readers. Nevertheless, he focuses sharply on the Jefferson-Hemings nexus to answer questions about national identity, racial provenance, and who owns history.

An 1802 story in the Richmond Recorder by James Thompson Callender claimed that Jefferson had fathered children with Hemings. "Interracial sex was normative," says Walker (27) yet such a charge against Jefferson, president of the United States, was "news." Besides, he had published disparaging remarks about people of African descent, especially women, in Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), causing Jefferson's defenders to believe he would never become intimate with a black woman. As a result, the "news" prompted members of Jefferson's family, his admirers, and some historians to vigorously dispute Callender's charge. Jefferson's defenders remain vigilant, and their attitude is, in Walker's view, "representative of a congenital racial tension in American society" (2).

A brief review of the scholarship about Jefferson and Hemings spanning nearly fifty years calls attention to the continuous debate in which Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997) and the 1998 DNA evidence linking Jefferson to a Hemings offspring are integral. Given the body of existing literature, one must ask what will Mongrel Nation contribute? Briefly, Mongrel Nation takes the thirty-eight-year-long Jefferson-Hemings relationship out of the "closet" and places it within a global context. The United States was part of a larger colonial settler society or plantation complex in which creolization, primarily by exploiting enslaved women, occurred. It is against this historical backdrop that Walker asks, why did intimacy between blacks and whites create angst in the United States? In actuality, it is not solely the intimacy but the resulting "mongrel nation" that has been disturbing.

Whiteness, rather than an impossible mixture thereof, defined and was the criteria for American citizenship. Children resulting from white-black relationships prompted fractionized calculations or mathematical blood analyses that relegated non-whites to an outsider status in the "racial state." Mixtures threatened the creation of a "pure" republic. Within this context, Jefferson's ideas about colonizing blacks outside the United States are understandable. Writing or theorizing about people of African descent was one thing, but living with or loving them was another matter. How was that possible? Was it ambivalence about blacks that created a racial and sexual amnesia? Did that amnesia create a canonical master narrative of the United States distinguished by "unblemished whiteness?"

The answer may be found in Walker's alternative readings and discussions of who Americans are as a nation. Had another Virginia planter, for example George Wythe or John Wayles rather than the esteemed Thomas Jefferson, been accused of intimacy with an enslaved woman would the results have been the same? Obviously, the answer is no, but answers to more edgy questions give pause. For example, do readers know with certainty that Sally Hemings was phenotypically black? How did she identify herself? There is no extant description of her skin color, hair texture, or facial features to determine that they were clearly Caucasoid or Negroid. Even so, one must ask if she and her half-sister, Martha Wayles, Thomas Jefferson's wife, bore a striking resemblance. Could Jefferson, a forty-one-year-old widower, have subjected Sally's identity to the mathematics of blood as he once...