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133 Chapter 5 Jefferson’s Other In 1827, two male slaves named Madison and Eston Hemings were freed by the terms of Thomas Jefferson’s will. Within five years of their emancipation, Madison and Eston both married women who, like them, were of racially mixed heritage. In 1835, the brothers moved to southern Ohio, where, no matter how light their skin color, law and social taboo enforced a radical gulf separating those known as white from those with even the subtlest “visible admixture” of “negro blood” (Stanton and Swann-Wright 1999, 164). Eventually , Eston moved with his family to Madison, Wisconsin, changed his name to Eston H. Jefferson, and, by virtue of his new-found anonymity, completed what Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright describe as Eston’s “northwestardly course, from slavery to freedom and, finally, to whiteness” (1999, 165). Madison and his family kept the Hemings name and remained in Ross County, Ohio, on what Stanton and Swann-Wright call “the black side of the color line” (165). Eston honored the name and memory of Thomas Jefferson, whose persona offered a valuable token of legitimacy in the white world he and his family inhabited. Madison preserved the name and memory of his mother Sally, almost never speaking of his family’s rumored heritage as illegitimate descendants of Jefferson until late in life. Whereas Eston laid claim to the memory of the man he identified as his father in order to pass for white, Madison preserved the memory of his mother while living as a black man in a black community (Stanton and Swann-Wright 1999, 173).1 Memory and biology form a common alloy in this narrative, shaping the itinerary of Madison and Eston Hemings’s lives. Indeed, the narrative suggests the workings of desire in the lived experience of memory: Eston’s desire to pass as a white man and Madison’s desire to preserve a heritage under 134 Being Made Strange threat of dissolution. Even today, a desire manifested in the confluence of memory and biology sustains the legend of an illicit affair between Thomas Jefferson and a slave named Sally Hemings. The homology of memory and biology informing this legend was no more evident than when, in November 1998, the scientific journal Nature published the results of DNA tests conducted in order to determine the likelihood of a sexual affair between Jefferson and Hemings (Foster et al. 1998). Instead of resolving controversy over enduring rumors of the affair, scientific evidence supporting its likelihood reinvigorated public debate over Jefferson (Lewis and Onuf 1999b; McMurray and McMurray 2002). In this chapter, I explore a diverse array of texts in order to investigate the public memory of Thomas Jefferson. Together, such texts exemplify an especially provocative instance of rhetoric in the middle voice. Rhetoric in the form of this public memory does not represent individual memories or historical truth but manifests, rather, the discursive formation of multiple conditions for knowing, speaking of, and rendering judgments about the symbolic affinities between past and present. Curiously, the rhetoric of this memory represents a past for which no certain record exists. The depiction of Jefferson’s alleged affair with Sally Hemings in novels, films, and other discourses demonstrates that the rhetoric of the past, which preserves its relevance and utility for audiences in the present, is often sustained, not by a transparent or even plausible understanding of former persons and events, but by profound and potentially irresolvable confusions over the relationship between what is commemorated and those doing the commemorating. Hence, the public memory of Thomas Jefferson is defined by what I refer to as Jefferson’s other: a discursive haunting of his official reputation in which ghostly counterparts are said to represent what the official record can only suggest. Throughout this chapter, I view Jefferson’s other as the characteristic trope of a discursive formation that vividly exemplifies contemporary relations between past and present, history and politics, self and other, good and evil. The significance of such rhetoric exceeds the confines of academic debates. Thomas Jefferson’s centrality to United States political philosophy and civic identity is well documented.2 In 1874, Historian James Parton proclaimed, “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right” (iii). More recently, Gordon Wood commented that Jefferson “remains a touchstone, a measure of what we Americans are or where we are going. No figure in our history has embodied...

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