Little Comfort in ‘Jefferson’
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How disappointing that Robert Koehler finds comfort in the treatment of Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, as a “rumored affair” (“Doblmeier Sticks to the Facts in ‘Thomas Jefferson,’ ” Calendar, April 28).
I suppose--in Koehler’s mind--Jefferson would need to be different in some way from the preponderance of male slaveholders who forcibly used/coerced their female chattel sexually.
What is really priceless is that--in his relief that Jefferson only owned slaves (but couldn’t possibly have forced them to sleep with him)--he says that this more “minor” infraction makes Jefferson “more one of ours “; “somehow closer to us .”
Need I even inquire as to whom he is so strongly identifying? Who “ours” and “us” could possibly be? (We can be fairly sure who it is NOT.) And what would happen to Koehler’s impulse to cuddle up closer to Jefferson if pressed to admit that, yes, Jefferson was not that far removed from any other slave holder!
LORRIE MARLOW
West Hollywood
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