The myth of Sally Hemings is for sale again. There has always been something about Thomas Jefferson’s lovely black slave Sally Hemings that drives otherwise rational people nuts. From the pages of The New York Times to prize-winning historians, the spewings of pseudo-science and psychic friends network nattering have been truly monumental.

The half-sister of Thomas Jefferson’s wife Martha, Sally Hemings was used by Jefferson’s contemporary political enemies as fodder for spreading a juicy rumour that she and Jefferson were lovers and had a child together. This presumably would establish that their vile political opponent Jefferson was guilty of issuing high-minded public statements while behaving privately like a cad. However the notion that a Washington politician could be a two-faced, sex-crazed hypocrite surprised no one, even 200 years ago. And the added broad strokes with the tarbrush of miscegenation failed to excite interest, much less indignation.

At least everyone seems to agree the attractive young slave girl had a congenially genetic relationship with some member of the Jefferson family that resulted in at least one child. But unfortunately the DNA evidence as to just who the dastardly fellow was has turned out to be more speculative than conclusive. Nevertheless even a decent Miami Herald journalist like Leonard Pitts has concluded Sally Hemings has been sold down the river again-- by the Monticello Association's decision last year to exclude the Hemings family from membership. The nonprofit Monticello Association represents approximately 700 direct lineal descendants of President Thomas Jefferson.

Since the founding of the first English colony at Jamestown 400 years ago, upwardly mobile Americans of all backgrounds have been trying to "prove" everything from royal descent to tangential membership in Indian tribes with rights to oil or casinos. Nothing like deracination from the home country —wherever it was supposed to be--- to make everyone look for “roots.” Family tree software sales and fees for genealogists have been booming recently. Increasing disposable income seems to incite more and more Americans to the discovery or outright invention of indispensably high-falutin ancestry.

The latest fantasy seems to be the "President So and So impregnated my great, great- whatever grandmother and all I got was this stupid Reparations T shirt from Randall Robinson."

It began to get surreal with a Chicago Tribune story about a local black family that claimed descent from George Washington. Apparently the inconvenient fact that the Father of Our Country was a capon wasn't going to interfere with the logic of this "injustice.” 

Much to his sorrow, not to mention serious inconvenience in a colonial world where geniture of all kinds was primo in estate planning, Washington caught smallpox as a young man on a visit to his brother in Barbados. And all evidence to date indicates it left him totally sterile. His solution was to wive it wealthily in Virginia, and somewhere among her stash of property deeds and bundles of cash Washington couldn’t help but notice that the winsome widowed Martha Custis already had a couple of attractive children as well. Acknowledging the impossibility of lineal descent from Washington, even the genealogical organization organized to honor the Washington family calls itself the "National Society of Washington Family Descendants." Its membership committee howls with laughter when gullible chumps proudly present papers that cost them a fortune "proving" direct descent from the issueless Washington.

Ironically, these days genealogical associations are delighted to find eligible members that are black. And though few realize it there are black officers and members of genealogical societies as varied as the Sons of the Revolution and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Even the Daughters of the American Revolution, infamous for its historic contretemps with the great Marian Anderson, has black members today.

Five years ago a rather limited DNA test was hailed as “proving” Thomas Jefferson’s paternal relationship with members of the Hemings family. Alas the test only established all that was really possible to establish scientifically-- that some interdeterminate Jefferson male was involved. Two years ago, a Jefferson-Hemings Scholars’ Commission, including a distiguished group of scholars such as Forrest McDonald and Robert F. Turner also concluded that the roistering Randolph Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s brother, was the most likely of 25 Jeffersons with the same Y chromosome to have fathered Sally Hemming’s child. At 65 at the time and one of the two oldest of the 25 Jefferson candidates, Jefferson himself was not exactly a prime candidate and randy Randolph had already had several children by slave mothers.

But neither the Associated Press nor The New York Times stories recently seem to be able to find these facts to cite. The Times goes further and says Jefferson was “probably” the father based upon the inconclusive 1998 DNA test. Out of laziness or ignorance The Times fails to even notice the 2001 Scholars study and picks just one scholar--- the disgraced Joseph Ellis who just completed a year in academic Siberia for lying about his non-existent war record and his equally fictious work in the civil rights movement to his students as well as the press---  as their authority of record. Ellis had been conclusively unmasked by the Times’s sister paper-- The Boston Globe. 

Sally Hemings “…who many believe was his mistress…” argues the AP, asserting unchallenged the claim of the would-be Hemmings-Jefferson descendants. Evidence to the contrary is carefully excluded from the AP report and The New York Times in yet another act of condescension to fancied black historical fantasies and sensibilities. The “many” who “believe” are clearly journalists who either have not properly researched the subject or have another sentimental idee fixe to fix.

Despite all the sloppy journalism, in truth all scientists can say for sure is that there is clear evidence that a Jefferson DNA code is kicking about in the Hemings family to this day and some Jefferson put it there.

The Hemings-Thomas Jefferson child is a great premise for two hankie movies, sloppy history by Fawn Brodie and Joseph Ellis, and some more zippy lines by race hustlers--, but nothing a serious journalist should fall for. After all. conclusively establishing paternity can be a problem in presidential families even today, as no one knows better than the shakily-fathered Bill Clinton.

But the good news for American blacks is that they have been finally been accepted as members of the American family. Now they can join everyone else in the traditional genealogical illusions of the striving middle class--  from  the fictional “Commodore,” but real, Cornelius Vanderbilt to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fictional Jay Gatsby--  that really unite us.  As Sam Goldwyn understood--you can also get “in” by being included “out.” Ain’t America great?

Thomas Lipscomb, a member of The National Society of Washington Family Descendants, still hasn’t dared apply to The Monticello Association.

© 2003 Thomas Lipscomb