Seeing Past the Slave to study the Person by Patricia Cohen

This article mostly talks about Ms. Gordon as a writer and how she came to write this book. As she puts it herself she wanted to tell the story of this family in a way which was never done before. She believes that when it comes to blacks in America social history becomes so dominant that no one merely pays any attention to the biography and personality of individuals. Therefore, she tries to examine the lives of these slaves as real people and tries to go beyond cliché generalizations made about them throughout history.
She believes that these people all had strange lives, which would not be so understandable for us nowadays. Their relationships were so complicated that it would be a wild guess to say what an individual must have been feeling or thinking when committing an act like mixing with whites. To provide some examples for this intermingled and sophisticated web she gives the example of James Hemings who was actually a half brother to Martha, Jefferson’s wife. James’s father was John Wayles a slave owner and Jefferson’s father in law, therefore it would be really hard to understand how he felt when he realized that only if he were white he could have inherited Wayles’s fortune and not be ruled over by his half sister and Jefferson who was actually his brother in law!
One would also think of Sally as being desperately in love with Jefferson or simply a naïve person after she followed him from Paris where she was legally free to Virginia where she would be a slave again. Ms. Gordon tries to depict how a pregnant black teenager would feel staying behind in a place where she had no relatives and no protection, that’s why she agrees to return under the circumstance that her children would be freed. That “treaty” was actually realized and four of her seven children were freed and the other three passed as white.
Ms. Gordon was interested in Jefferson since childhood. She remembers reading a biography of him to her class but she says in that version the black slave was not as smart as Jefferson was. She continued her studies on Jefferson until she became a famous writer just as she had wished for with her revealing book.
There are some parts about her personal life in this article, which persuade one about why she tries so hard to prove some facts like Sally’s free will in having a relation with Jefferson. She went to a white school before schools were legally integrated. And as says herself she did face some problems but finally she was able to stand up and be what she had dreamed to be; that’s maybe why she’s throwing light on some dark parts of black slave life.
I don’t know why but in these last two posts I finally come to the conclusion that what we see on the surface is not what really happens in the depth of America. Are there any more instances of Sally still belittled and put in a dark shadow?!
Hajar Amidian