Sally Hemings: A Novel (Rediscovered Classics)

Sally Hemings: A Novel (Rediscovered Classics)
by Barbara Chase-Riboud

Sally Hemings: A Novel (Rediscovered Classics)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Barbara Chase-Riboud
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-04-01
ISBN: 1556529457
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Book Reviews of Sally Hemings: A Novel (Rediscovered Classics)

Book Review: Love Is Warmer than Blood
Summary: 5 Stars

Barbara Chase-Riboud's novel, "Sally Hemings," is based upon the life and love of an African-American slave of that name and her famous lover, Thomas Jefferson, president of the United States. The political and social implications of such a book are so great one almost gasps at the daring an author demonstrates in such an undertaking. Beyond the courage Ms. Chase-Riboud has shown, however, knowing her book will be read by a large audience, some of whom will be inclined to be hostile, her work, always showing, never telling or pedantic, is also often sheer poetry.

Another thing that elevates this book above much historical fiction and narrative is the author's devotion to characterization -- why did Sally and Jefferson do what they did? And, to what end? Most of all, this book is a love story, a story of a love of great magnitude and consequence. It is on that note the novel begins and and it is there that it ends.

Again, it is the author's skill that has made the book so very accessible, allowed us to see into the hearts and minds of this famous couple -- and, to cause us to cheer them on. The reader is, for instance, blinded by their love enough to want them to overcome the issues of black and white, rich and poor, and the fact that there is a gap of three decades between their ages.

It is difficult for me to believe that it's possible for one to read "Sally Hemings" without being changed somehow. The magic. More than the historical aspects of the novel, the human dimension of it has enriched my life. Thank you, Barbara Chase-Riboud.

Summary of Sally Hemings: A Novel (Rediscovered Classics)

One of the greatest love stories in American history is also one of the most controversial. Thomas Jefferson had a mistress for 38 years whom he loved and lived with until he died—the beautiful and elusive Sally Hemings. But it was not simply that Jefferson had a mistress that provoked such a scandal in both his time and ours. It was that Sally Hemings was a quadroon slave and that Jefferson fathered a slave family whose descendants are alive today. In this moving novel, originally published in 1979 and having sold over two million copies worldwide, Barbara Chase-Riboud re-creates one of America?s most powerful love stories, based on the documents and evidence of the day, and gives us a poignant, tragic, and unforgettable meditation on the history of race and sex in America.

When this stirring work by Philadelphia-born Paris-based sculptress and historical-fiction writer Barbara Chase-Riboud first appeared in 1979, it was dismissed by many mainstream historians as "hogwash." But with DNA evidence proving that Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, did indeed father at least one child by his black slave mistress, Sally Hemings, Chase-Riboud's book deserves a new read. With her painstaking eye for research, Chase-Riboud unfolds a complex 19th-century quilt of miscegenation, denial, hypocrisy, slavery and, yes, love in Virginia. She brings to life Heming's relationship with Martha, her half-sister and the President's wife on his Monticello estate; Jefferson's seduction of Hemings in Paris after Martha's death; and his lifelong concubinage of Hemings until his own death, when she and her offspring were freed. Chase-Riboud avoids the sentimental "tragic-mulatto trap" that other writers have fallen into when they deal with slave relations by making Hemings not only multidimensional and believable, but, given late-20th-century political scandals, chillingly contemporary. Along with the novel's other sub-themes, including black disenfranchisement and the fear of reenslavement, Riboud intimates that Jefferson-- despite his racist rantings in Notes on the State of Virginia, which Chase-Riboud uses as epigraphs--may have actually loved this black woman, and that the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was perhaps the clearest example of the American imperative of "seeking a more perfect union," a controversial portrayal that Chase-Riboud makes plausible with skillfully written prose. --Eugene Holley Jr.

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