Thank you, Elizabeth

My letter is from an imagined 1940s descendent of the Hemingses who passes as White. She questions the structure of interracial sexual relationships and child bearing. Although her letter is addressed to Elizabeth (who, in Gordon-Reed’s telling, is a great starting place for understanding the Hemingses), it could be slightly re-written to apply to Hemings descendants throughout the generations.

Dear Elizabeth,

It is so hard, from here, to understand all of what happened to you, all of the choices you made, and where the lines are between choice, force, slave, free, White, and Black.

            Did John Wayles rape you? Do you even know what that means? Do I? The more I think about it, the more it seems like you didn’t have the right to use that word. It didn’t apply to you then, but does it now, in retrospect?

There is a large part of me that wants to believe that your relationship with Wayles was, to some extent, a choice of yours. Or maybe not a choice- no, that’s definitely the wrong word. But something you were not opposed to, something you felt you benefitted from, something you knew your children would benefit from. I’m sure this is because I want to live in a truth where you were hurt as little as possible- this is where I’m selfish. But, I think the real truth is that I can’t understand. We can piece together all the documents we want to try and make sense of these relationships, but how can we ever know how you felt about any of this?

Some would call me stupid for even thinking this could be beyond a clear line of rape, of a forced sexual relationship that violated you. It’s true that you would never have been in that relationship if you’d had the “right” of choice (people are talking left and right about “rights” now, but I’m not convinced I know what that means). But do things change if you use the perspective of the time? Can this relationship be considered relatively? Is it crazy for me to think that what is surely a violation of my rights could have been just another fact of life, maybe even a benefit of being lighter, to you? That feels insane and terrible, like I’m supposed to think of anything deprivation of choice as something that is just plain wrong. And I do think it’s wrong. But it also feels like it could be true. After all, it seems your kids with Wayles, like Sally, probably had better lives than your kids with a Black man. And while the cycle continued (Whiter slaves being favored, being around the Master and Master’s sons, having children with Whites) your Whiter kids, they ended up having some even Whiter kids! That’s how I got here- that’s what helped some of us.

I guess, while I’ve written this and asked you so many questions, I’ve come to some answers from my end. First: no, just because I received the benefits of your relationship with Wayles, and that it may not have felt like a violation to you, it doesn’t change that I find it horrible on some absolute, timeless scale. I don’t know, maybe I just can’t force my perspective enough. Second: I don’t think I can believe in “rights”. Relatively, it hasn’t been that long since your relationship with Wayles, and things are so different from when you lived that I can’t even describe it to you. It doesn’t make sense to me that something like a sexual relationship that you have no control over can be so wrong now, and so not wrong then: that I can feel violated by that, because I know it’s a violation of my rights, but that you might not, because you don’t have that language, those are concepts that have been given to you. If rights don’t exist across time and situations, I have a hard time believing they exist at all.

From here, from now, I would like to say thank you. Thank you for my white blood, whether passing it on to me was a rape in the way I perceive the term, or a relationship that I will never be able to understand.  I hope it is in some way comforting to know that it has done me good, and that I am in a far better place than people who did not have a half-White Elizabeth Hemings, an even more White Sally Hemings, and all of the other Hemingses behind them. Maybe that was out of line though, maybe I have no right to comfort you.

Humbly,

A Young “White” Hemings