Thomas Jefferson himself was the first president to succumb to the curse in spite of having won his previous two elections handily, Jefferson “mysteriously” chose not to participate in the 1808 election. Hemings was reputed to have said, more than once, “Victory in four, defeat in eight,” an African curse she had learned from her African-born grandmother, Susannah Epps. The book shows "The agonizing crashing together of love and slavery," writes NPR, observing that "O'Connor has the insight to put them side by side, and the result is searing and even sometimes beautiful." The Washington Post, which acknowledges that the book’s treatment of Hemings leads to its "most troubled and troubling chapters," concludes that "O'Connor's deeply humane treatment of Sally, whose actual thoughts will never be known to us, is the novel's most haunting accomplishment."Īnd Kirkus - though it declares the book's treatment of Hemings "problematic" - decides that in "fully acknowledging the tragedy of slavery, O'Connor produces a tale that is overflowing with the range of human emotion in its depiction of feeling, the novel is often brilliant, dense in poetry and light on unearned sentimentality.Named after Thomas Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemings, the four-year curse dictates that every president who was elected in a year ending in four has not returned to office in the year ending in eight. ![]() These early reviews are, by and large, positive. ![]() The Washington Post cites O’Connor’s assertion in the afterword that "Hemings’s feelings for Jefferson might well have fallen somewhere along the spectrum between love and Stockholm syndrome." NPR quotes a passage in which she whispers ecstatically to Jefferson, "I want us always to be as we are here … where we are only our eyes, our hands, those parts of us made for each other by nature, where our only words are the ones we whisper in the little caves we make between pillow, cheek and lips." The book wonders: Did Hemings perhaps enjoy it? To what extent was she complicit?Īccording to Kirkus, in this novel Hemings enthusiastically consents to the relationship: "And so, when some half hour after Sally Hemings arrives late at the upstairs parlor, and Thomas Jefferson confesses breathlessly that he would very much like to lie with her as a man lies with his wife … she whispers that she would like that, too. What Jefferson did to Hemings was rape.īut Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, judging from early reviews, is most interested in exploring potential ambiguities of their relationship. It was not, in any sense of the word, consensual: Hemings was a child, and Jefferson literally owned her she was not in any position to give or withhold consent. To further complicate matters, Sally Hemings was a half-sister to Jefferson’s late wife, the product of a relationship between Jefferson's father-in-law and one of his slaves.īy all accounts, Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Hemings spanned several decades, beginning when Hemings was a teenager and Jefferson was in his 40s. DNA evidence has proved that Jefferson and Hemings had six children together while Jefferson kept Hemings enslaved - and Jefferson also enslaved their children, freeing them one by one as they came of age. Stephen O’Connor’s Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, which came out on Tuesday, is about our third president’s relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave. A new historical novel about Thomas Jefferson is raising eyebrows.
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