Once upon a time, there was a lonely old widower by the name of John Wayles, who was very sad because over the years he had buried three wives due to it being the old timey days when women tended to die giving birth like all the fricking time. Rather put off by the whole marriage thing, but not yet willing to give up on the more physical aspects of marriage given he was only 24 years old, he took to his bed a buxom 26 year old woman by the name of Betty Hemings, by which I mean he told the slave that he owned that she was now his concubine no ifs and or buts. What? You thought this was going to be some kind of romantic story? Betty was actually half white, her father being an English sea captain who later unsuccessfully tried to buy her and her mother, but according to the laws of the day any child born to a Black woman and a White man was automatically a slave. Strangely this law didn’t go the other way, with the fate of the children born to a Black man and White woman decided more on an ad hoc basis, because racism mixed with sexism just results in all sorts of stupid shit. Anyways, the asshat John knocked up Mary six times over the next twelve years, before dropping dead in 1773. The majority of his estate, including Betty and her six children, was inherited by his eldest daughter Martha, who just so happened to be married to some guy named Thomas Jefferson.
Now one might think it would be a little weird to have the woman your father basically raped by the standards of today and your six resulting half siblings living with you, especially given all of them were also your slaves, but this didn’t bother Martha one bit. This is how normal that shit was back then. Instead of in anyway feeling like shit, or even at the very least weird about the situation, Martha thought so little of it that she specifically had all of her half siblings trained to work in the house as servants, meaning she’d see them all the damn time. While this was overall seen as better than working in the fields, even this decision wasn’t thanks to some tenderness in Martha’s heart. No, it was just because the children were three quarters white, which according to the shitty racist beliefs of the day meant they were viewed as smarter and more trustworthy than other slaves. Are you sick to your stomach yet? Too bad, we’re just getting started.
Now Martha died in 1782 at the age of 33, leaving her husband Thomas Jefferson so bereft that a few years later he took a job as envoy to France just to get away for a while. After three years of grieving, he sent for his nine year old daughter to join him, and since you can’t have a nine year old going to France on her own, a young slave named Sally Hemings, youngest child of Beatty Hemings and half-sister of Martha, was sent to keep an eye on her. Upon arriving in France, young Sally caught the lonely Jefferson’s eye, and regardless of how people might try to make it seem better than it was, what happened next was undeniably fucked up. Fun fact, when you’re a slave and the person who owns you says they’re going to have sex with you, there isn’t really an option involving you saying no. To add another layer to how screwed up this all was, Sally was 14 at the time and Jefferson was 44.
Jefferson was in France until 1789, at which time he decided to return to America for reasons that don’t really matter in this narrative. By this time Sally was pregnant and facing a choice. In France, Sally was technically a free woman since the slavery had been outlawed in the country earlier that year. She could return to the United States and be a slave, or stay in France and be free but have no guarantee of surviving and never see her family again. Reportedly, she chose to return with Jefferson after convincing him to let her children go free when they came of age. Her first child died soon after birth, but over the next two decades Jefferson had his way with her numerous more times, resulting in the birth of six children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Jefferson, who tracked the pedigree of all of his slaves in big book, because asshats like him basically saw slaves the same as livestock, did not note down a father for Sally’s children, because not saying anything is considered different than lying for some reason.
Anyways, we will never know exactly what the dynamic was between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. People didn’t talk about that kind of shit back then even though everyone knew it was going on. However, no matter what kind of emotions might be involved in a twenty year relationship, its undeniable that Sally and her children were slaves and Jefferson had the right to do whatever he wanted with them, including selling them to different people, meaning that even under the best of possible circumstances it involved a screwed up power dynamic. To Jefferson’s credit, he kept his word to Sally regarding her children. Though they were slaves, they did very little work beyond the occasional errand, all were taught trades, and all were either allowed to escape or were freed under some pretense by the time they reached the age of twenty-one. Being seven-eighths white, some moved far away and disappeared into white society, while others remained in Virginia as free people of color. Jefferson died in 1826, but Sally was never freed, though she was allowed to live out her days with her children. This was not an uncommon practice at the time, seen as similar to putting an old horse out to pasture, because even at the end this is still a fucked up story. She died in 1835 at the age of 62, at the very least knowing her children were free. Though rumors circulated as early as the 1790’s, Sally’s descendants weren’t recognized as descendants of Thomas Jefferson until DNA testing in 1998, but some people continue to deny it to this day.