How to Discern a Race Issue?

To the author: I am really fascinated by your account on the intersections of different roles for Sarah Hemings.  As it is shown in your book, Sarah have at least three identities: a slave, a female, and a black. The most interesting thing between these identities is that they all have dramatic effect on each other. As a woman independently, one should be supposed to resist sexual harassment or offences, but as she was a slave, she was “inherently inferior” to white females, and does not have the “right” to “say no”. For her, and many other enslaved females in her time, resisting patriarchal oppression is considered a kind of crime (see the Celia case).

Besides this pair of overlap, her relations with Jefferson is also intriguing. There will always be a hot debate on the issue of whether Jefferson has true “feelings” for her. In a patriarchal society, a female’s identity of womanhood is somehow largely dependent upon her male counterpart’s attitude and the texture of emotions on her. For Jefferson did not officially marry after the death of Martha Jefferson in the year 1782, she was destined to be an unlawful counterpart of Jefferson (a concubine). People may argue that the connections between she and Jefferson are like “apparitions” that “hovers around them whenever they are together. The similarities in behavior between Sarah and Martha Jefferson in accent in language, customs, behaviors, and even daily manners may have reminded Jefferson of his dead wife when he saw Sarah. To the basis of this issue, the connections between these two people to the same person—Martha—will always indirectly link them together. But on the other hand, another fact that cannot be denied is that as slaves, Sarah had no power of disposal even for her own body—sometimes for her soul. The actions trying to romanticize the master and the slave’s relations are essentially neglecting the effect of the grand social and historical background on a single case in identity.