![]() ![]() The story of a slave who at age fifteen falls in love with her master could easily slip into soap opera. ![]() It is a delicate novel, wise and moving, its portraits full of subtle shadings that bring the characters to life with all the ambiguous longings, revelatory silences and conflicted passions of real human beings. After accompanying his daughter to France in 1787 where he is serving as a diplomat and slavery is not recognized, Sally Hemings becomes his lover. ![]() Published almost twenty years before DNA tests confirmed that at least one son of Sally Hemings was descended from a male of Thomas Jefferson's family, most probably Jefferson himself, Chase-Riboud's novel tells the story of a lonely Jefferson morally opposed to slavery and a beautiful young woman, his dead wife's slave. Over the summer she discovers: "She had lived a life she was startled to perceive that life." She enjoys their talk enough to welcome him back another day. Though Sally Hemings resents the man's confident air, "coming up her road, as if God had ordained it and as if he owned the road," on impulse she invites him in. "How did one address a creature who did not exist, who was the negation of everything he had been taught to believe? There were no white slaves. A woman of fifty-six, still beautiful, stands in the doorway. As Sally Hemings opens, a census-taker arrives at the door of a run-down cabin at the boundary of the Monticello lands. ![]()
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