Sex, Race, and Ambiguity in the Old South

Joshua D. Rothman. Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xiii + 360 pp. Genealogical chart, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

In this excellent study, Joshua Rothman explores how sex across the color line affected the social construction of race in early national and antebellum Virginia. Rothman complicates our understanding of racial identity, consent, coercion, family, and even the role of law in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Virginia. Rothman demonstrates how interracial sex blurred the lines between black and white and between coercion and consent. Sex across the color line created legal ambiguities regarding individuals' racial identities and families' status. Interracial sex also caused emotional suffering and provoked ferocious violence. Rothman discovers that, in spite of the troubling consequences of interracial sex, Virginians constructed a social order that accommodated such liaisons. This customary toleration of sex across the color line existed alongside legal prohibitions against interracial sex, creating a fluid and dynamic situation that continuously forced Virginians to negotiate the meanings of race, sex, and the relationship between the two. Rothman argues that Virginians recognized that accommodation and negotiation were crucial to maintaining social stability in a multiracial world where interracial sexual liaisons were unavoidable. By the 1850s, however, some Virginians rejected this accommodation and began to demand the enforcement of rigid racial and sexual boundaries.

Rothman begins his study by focusing on one of the best known, and perhaps most controversial, interracial sexual relationships—that between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Rothman's analysis of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship casts light on the interpersonal dynamics of master-slave sexual associations and on the role of the white community in enforcing accepted norms regarding sex across the color line. Rothman acknowledges that master-slave sexual relations ranged from lifelong, consensual affairs to brutal rapes and assaults. He argues that the Jefferson-Hemings relationship did not fall at either end of this spectrum, but was "rooted in a complicated, evolving, and sometimes contradictory set of power relationships—a concatenation of calculation and trust, practicality and affection, coercion and consent" (p. 15). Rothman expertly outlines the choices that were available both to Jefferson and Hemings, as well as the potential consequences of those choices. While in France, Hemings could have petitioned for her freedom and remained in Paris. However, doing so would have left her far from her family, alone, and without many marketable skills in a foreign country whose language she had not mastered. Instead, she chose to return to Monticello and acquiesced to a sexual relationship with Jefferson in exchange for the promise of more favorable treatment and her children's freedom. Rothman presents Hemings's options without overstating the significance of the "choice" she was able to exercise. He is quick to point out that Jefferson had far more bargaining power than Hemings, and that once Hemings had decided to return to Monticello, she remained vulnerable because of her dependence on Jefferson to keep his promise. Rothman rightly complicates the issue of Hemings's consent, or agency, by reminding readers that "[w]hatever negotiating power she may have had, the man she negotiated with already had the advantage of being her owner and provider. . . . [S]he ultimately made her decision from a position of relative weakness to Jefferson, not from strength or even equality" (p. 25). Sally Hemings's "choice" demonstrates the inadequacies of such dichotomies as coercion and consent when examining the dynamics of many master-slave sexual associations.

Rothman's analysis of Sally Hemings's choices reveals the opportunities and constraints that could shape the lives of female slaves who were sexually involved with their masters. His analysis of Jefferson's choices, on the other hand, illuminates the balancing act masters had to maintain in order to engage in interracial sex without provoking the open disapproval of the white community...