Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemmings by Stephen O'Connor (review)

When an author accepts the task of fictionalizing an extremely famous person, the author is accepting a unique challenge, given the mountain of material already available about this person, and the emotional or professional stakes some readers may have in how the famous person is depicted. How much more apparent the pitfalls must be when one of your lead characters, in real life, was not just famous but literally iconic. A founding father of the United States. The author of the Declaration of Independence. Third president of the United States. Founder of the University of Virginia. One of the four heads on Mount Rushmore. Few Americans, indeed few people, have had as many words written about them as Thomas Jefferson, and perhaps no one has had as many fraught words written about him either. Because the country's view of the man, and scholars' view of the man, has been notably bi-polar for decades.

Early renderings of Jefferson, as early renderings tend to be, were essentially hagiographic in nature, stressing Jefferson's intellectual brilliance, his personal humility, his service to the revolution, his architectural interests and devotion to classicism. This picture of Jefferson held in the public's mind for generations. It underscores, for instance, his saintly portrayal in the once wildly popular musical 1776. It was the picture emphasized, almost daily, to me as an undergraduate at UVA in the early nineteen-eighties. "Mr. Jefferson," was how we were instructed to refer to the man. We were not simply students at a highly regarded university but at "Mr. Jefferson's University."

Suffice it to say that with the post-War rise of historical revisionism, our notions about the man have changed. No one disputes Jefferson's intellectual brilliance, but these days what is more commonly emphasized about him is his thin skin, his deceptiveness, his willingness to engage in political back-stabbing and rumor mongering, his unsightly and ongoing feud with John Adams, his profligate personal spending, his failure as a plantation owner, his massive debts, his hypocrisy regarding the slave question, and—now more than ever—his apparently unseemly behavior toward one of his own slaves, Sally Hemmings.

The latter is the subject matter of Stephen O'Connor's fascinating 2016 novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemmings. O'Connor admits in an Author's Note that he understood exactly how loaded was the challenge of fictionalizing a figure like Jefferson, and at the start of his project he worried that, with the mountain of historical material and opinions about the man already, he might be paralyzed by too much information. But O'Connor found his way out of that fear in the way that novelists do: 1) by the act of writing, and 2) by thinking of his characters as people, not as types or representatives of populations. The result is an insightful, dramatically credible picture of a decades-long love affair between a world famous white politician and a mixed-race woman whom he legally owned.

O'Connor, by his own admission, took imaginative liberties in composing his novel. Not liberty in the sense of defying the known facts about Jefferson or Hemmings, but in the sense that the dearth of hard information about their relationship permitted O'Connor to imagine for himself what that relationship might have looked like, when it began, how it progressed, what liberties were or were not taken. O'Connor depicts Sally as learning, through Jefferson's influence, how to read (he admits this is highly improbable), eventually teaching other slaves to read, and finally becoming an accomplished, if unpublished, writer herself.

Indeed, several chapters in the novel are told by Sally herself in the form of backward-looking journal entries penned around the time that Monticello and its slaves are sold. And what a rich portrait of her O'Connor develops, not only in these journal entries but throughout the book. The Sally in the novel both admires and despises Jefferson, scorns and studies him. Her admiration for Jefferson—it...