Selections from Mistress: A Forthcoming Collection

Introduction

In 2011, in a graduate creative writing workshop, I wrote a sonnet in the voice of Madison Hemings, one of Sally Hemings's sons. I didn't know then that sonnets—fourteen-line poems with a rhyming structure, of which Shakespeare is a famous practitioner—would become an integral part of my poetic practice. Similarly, I didn't know the poem would launch me into six years of research and writing that would develop into a poetry collection entitled Mistress, forthcoming from New Issues Poetry and Prose later this year, which features Sally Hemings persona poems constructed from her history.

As many know, Hemings, born in 1773, was a mixed-raced enslaved child Thomas Jefferson inherited after Martha Skelton Wayles Jefferson's father, who was also Hemings's father, died that same year. A couple years after her death in 1782, Jefferson lived in France, where he served as trade commissioner and then US minister, with his daughter Martha (Patsy) and James, Sally's brother. In 1787, Hemings traveled with Jefferson's daughter Maria (Polly) to France, where she served as a lady's maid to her and Patsy. During her two years in Paris, Hemings was paid wages and learned some French. According to Madison Hemings, she became Jefferson's concubine while she was in France. In his memoir, he states:

[D]uring that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson's concubine, and when he was called home she was enceinte by him. He desired to bring my mother back … but she demurred [I]n France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him.

(Madison Hemings "Life among the Lowly," Pike County Republican, March 13, 1873)

This first child soon died. Hemings and Jefferson had six more children, two of whom died young. Their surviving children—William (Beverly), Harriet, James (Madison), and Thomas (Eston)—were freed, either formally or informally. Beverly and Harriet left Monticello in the early 1820s and were not pursued; both passed into white society. Hemings and her two youngest sons, however, left Monticello after Jefferson's death in 1826. Although both of her sons were freed in his will, she was not. Instead, she was "given her time" by Patsy. When Hemings left Monticello, she took three items that belonged to Jefferson: an inkwell, a shoe buckle, and a pair of his glasses. She lived in Charlottesville with her sons until her death in 1835.

Even though the poems are inspired by history, they are necessarily works of my imagination. Although I've let creativity take precedent, it has remained important to me that Hemings was not just fodder for my artistic pursuits, in the same way I did not want her to be an aside to Jefferson's history and legacy. I also wanted to render her experiences and emotions as complex as I believe they likely were over the course of her adult life. For these reasons, I've developed my version of Hemings through imagining some of the more intimate moments of her history. I've done this in the poems included here, envisioning the birth and death of her first child, her potential jealousy of the freedom her sister Mary was able to attain in 1792, her sexual desires, her complicated feelings when Jefferson was dying, and her grief about never being able to know Harriet's children because she passed into white society.

I recognize there is a violence in inhabiting the voice of a person who has no voice in history. I've grappled with that violence; however, my hope is that I've done less harm than good by trying to render Sally Hemings a mother, a daughter, a sister, a woman, a human being.

Boy of my body, january 1790

She gave birth to...