ABSTRACT
The year 1979 was of monumental importance for biofiction because Barbara Chase-Riboud published Sally Hemings , a biographical novel about Thomas Jefferson’s lover and slave. This international best-selling novel inspired many important conversations and evoked the ire and contempt of well-established scholars. What biographical novelists give readers is not a specific truth, such as Jefferson and Hemings intimately conversing about the psychology of slave rebellions in front of a fireplace, even though there is such a scene in Sally Hemings. Sally Hemings is not just an imaginative work about two important people from the past. It is a novel that offers people a way of understanding what would become America’s national identity, and it is not just Jefferson but the Jefferson/Hemings relationship that best expresses a key component of that identity. Given the unpleasant consequences of Jefferson’s invention, his slaves give the chamber pot humorous names, such as “‘ultimatums,’ ‘levees,’ and ‘Indian Treaties’”.
