Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record: Accuracy, Authenticity, and Closure in Ann Rinaldi’s Wolf by the Ears


Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record: Accuracy, 
Authenticity, and Closure in Ann Rinaldi’s Wolf by the 
Ears 

Brian Dillon

Children's Literature, Volume 44, 2016, pp. 21-60 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 6 Apr 2021 02:59 GMT from Carnegie Mellon University ]

https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.2016.0018

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/619575

https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.2016.0018
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/619575


Children’s Literature 44, Hollins University © 2016. 21

Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record:  
Accuracy, Authenticity, and Closure in  
Ann Rinaldi’s Wolf by the Ears

Brian Dillon

In Wolf by the Ears, Ann Rinaldi creates a voice for the only daughter (who 
survived) of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Harriet Hemings, 
an intriguing figure who has no voice in the historical record. Rinaldi 
depicts Harriet on the cusp of maturity in her final years at Monticello, 
from December 1819 to August 1822. More than half a century after the 
events covered in this novel, her younger brother Madison mentions 
her in an Ohio newspaper article, and various notations about her are 
marked in Jefferson’s Farm Book. But no journal entries, memoir, or 
piece of correspondence written by Harriet have emerged. Faced with 
an absent voice—as well as any visual representation of Harriet—Rin-
aldi needed to situate a believable character within the context of a 
Monticello community, about which an abundance of evidence exists, 
and in relation to the third president, about whom competing claims 
have been fiercely argued. The opening paragraph of Rinaldi’s “Au-
thor’s Note” identifies the key source for her 1991 publication: Fawn 
Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, first published in 1974 and 
responded to with dismay by numerous established Jefferson scholars.1 
Brodie constructed a provocative circumstantial case about the intimate 
relationship between Jefferson and his slave—and deceased wife’s 
half-sister—Sally Hemings, as well as their offspring. Decades later, in 
1998, DNA evidence corroborated Brodie’s investigative work and ef-
fectively silenced historians who had doubted that Jefferson could lead 
such a double life.2 Rinaldi’s gamble in relying upon Brodie proved 
prescient. Though our understanding of Jefferson’s personal actions 
has advanced considerably since 1991, Wolf by the Ears continues to 
function as a complex, meaningful novel in itself and as a springboard 
to classroom examinations of the role of slavery.3

Yet, without blaming Brodie, there are passages in Rinaldi’s novel 
that prove to be problematic when the historical evidence is exam-
ined. With the hindsight of over twenty years since Wolf by the Ears was 
published, readers may judge how faithful Rinaldi’s novel is to the 
historic record. Carrie Hintz and Eric Tribunella define terms key for 
such a judgment: 



22 Brian Dillon

Accuracy depends upon the correspondence between recorded 
history and fictional representation, whereas authenticity indi-
cates how a literary work fills in the gaps of the historical record 
and whether the imaginative components of the work are plau-
sible. While accuracy is a matter of how faithful the work is to 
what is thought to be true, authenticity is a matter of whether the 
fictional additions or imaginings are within the realm of likeli-
hood or possibility. (251)

This definition sounds circular: the reader affirms that characters and 
situations are authentic if the reader finds them plausible, and in a 
work of historical fiction, the reader will find plausible those characters 
and situations that adhere to the reader’s knowledge of the history of 
the same or similar people and situations as presented in the fictional 
work. Such circular logic may be unavoidable. Catherine Butler and 
Hallie O’Donovan acknowledge the difficulty in determining whether 
a fictional work achieves authenticity:

Historical fiction is haunted by the demand for, and the impos-
sibility of, authenticity in its representations of the past. The 
concept of authenticity covers a lot of semantic territory, en-
compassing not only the criterion of factual accuracy—that is, 
of telling it like it is (or was)—but also the questions of who is 
doing the telling, and how and why. Any modern representation 
of the experiences of those who lived in the past must necessarily 
be a ventriloquistic performance, given in terms designed to be 
understood by a modern audience. (73) 

Determining authenticity requires a more subjective interpretive re-
sponse than the effort to determine accuracy. 

This essay examines the novel’s authenticity: the difficulty in judging 
the authenticity of Wolf by the Ears is compounded by the presentation 
of historic individuals. Harriet, narrating between the ages of eighteen 
and twenty-one, is circumspect, reflective, intent on processing the 
abundance of advice thrust on her. For the novel to seem authentic, 
from the very first scene the reader must accept as plausible that Har-
riet has been tutored sufficiently to compose such a narrative and 
that Jefferson would encourage such private reflections. The histori-
cal record remains silent about such crucial possibilities. Butler and 
O’Donovan stress “the questions of who is doing the telling, and how 
and why.” Rinaldi chose to depict Jefferson and the Monticello com-
munity through the eyes of a house slave who enjoys privileges alien 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 23

to the slaves who work in the fields, for example, under the sway of a 
brutal overseer. Harriet admits she has never been away from Monti-
cello except for brief visits “to a neighboring plantation” (164). The 
lengthy entries in her private journal highlight the comparative luxury 
of a slave who seems unaware that other slaves are victims of rapes and 
beatings and forcibly separated from their own families, while she is 
granted many months to contemplate the choice—over which she has 
much control—to leave her family. Rinaldi remains true to the testi-
mony provided decades later by Madison Hemings: “My brothers, sister 
Harriet and myself, were used alike. We were permitted to stay about 
the ‘great house,’ and only required to do such light work as going on 
errands. Harriet learned to spin and to weave in a little factory on the 
home plantation. We were free from the dread of having to be slaves 
all our lives long, and were measurably happy. We were always permit-
ted to be with our mother, who was well used” (qtd. in Gordon-Reed, 
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 248). Presumably, Rinaldi considered 
the soft focus on slavery that Harriet provides a legitimate trade-off for 
the insights Harriet has access to about Jefferson and other historically 
prominent members of Jefferson’s extended white family. Ideally, when 
examined in a classroom setting, Rinaldi’s novel would be considered 
in the context of other documents, including Madison’s concise recol-
lections in his memoir.4

Evaluating authenticity relies upon gap-filling strategies that a 
reader must devise. Because no written testimony by Harriet is extant, 
because Jefferson chose silence rather than any acknowledgement of 
his Hemings children, Rinaldi’s reader must explain why his speech and 
her response to him seem plausible, why her personal and moral con-
fusion strikes an authentic note. Wolf by the Ears achieves a convincing 
degree of cultural authenticity: Harriet’s life at Monticello falls within 
the boundaries of the historical record. Furthermore, her internal life, 
her identity formation, achieves a convincing degree of psychological 
authenticity. This point is especially crucial as the novel engages with 
this personal dimension of authenticity: whether Harriet can remain 
authentic to herself if she leaves Monticello and passes as white.

This essay also examines the accuracy of Rinaldi’s novel based upon 
historical documents available to her, as well as evidence from the 
past two decades since Wolf by the Ears was published. Four historical 
inaccuracies are identified that bolster Harriet’s view of Jefferson as a 
morally centered man whose current political powerlessness provokes 
her pity: references to her older brother Tom, to Jefferson’s mentor 



24 Brian Dillon

George Wythe, to the composition of the Declaration of Independence, 
and to the Missouri Compromise. It would be unrealistic to expect that 
most readers, especially YA readers, would be capable of identifying 
the inaccuracies or why they matter. Consequently, the novel needs to 
be approached with guarded skepticism. A reader informed with more 
historical evidence than the novel provides may question whether Jef-
ferson deserves Harriet’s pity-provoking depiction of him: this essay 
provides such evidence and expands the ability of Rinaldi’s readers to 
evaluate Jefferson’s conduct and its consequences. 

It is insufficient, though, to assess accuracy simply by noting paral-
lels or deviations from the historical record in the novel. The issue of 
accuracy must be linked to “who is doing the telling, and how and why.” 
Harriet perceives Jefferson with a mixture of awe, the godlike former 
president whose knowledge of the world exceeds that of anyone she 
knows; pity, over his inability to change cultural norms regarding the 
treatment of slaves; and exasperation, in regard to his silence on the 
issue most crucial to her personally—her own paternity. Of these three, 
the affective response that most risks distorting what is known about 
Jefferson is pity. The closure to the novel confirms a sense of Jefferson 
as pitiful and pushes the injustice of slavery out of sight. This essay will 
consider an alternative ending that Rinaldi chose not to construct, 
one that challenges the implicit emphasis on pity and sentimentality 
and that is historically based. Rinaldi succeeds in avoiding historical 
anachronism: she does not impose contemporary cultural norms on 
a society roughly 200 years in the past. She leaves much interpretive 
room for the reader to determine whether Jefferson deserves to be 
judged harshly. 

Jefferson effectively succeeded in controlling the narrative of his pri-
vate life until the end of the twentieth century. Wolf by the Ears disrupts 
the narrative Jefferson wanted told. “Historical novels,” Kim Wilson 
states, “holding the peculiar position of being both fiction and fact 
simultaneously, are effective vehicles to promote values and attitudes 
pertinent to the formation and perpetuation of a national identity” 
(130). Despite the four historical inaccuracies that this essay will ex-
amine later, and despite Harriet’s relatively privileged slave status, the 
novel’s authenticity implicitly challenges the white supremacist political 
power structure of the early nineteenth century. Despite Harriet’s pity-
ing perspective, the novel subverts efforts to engage in hero worship 
of the complex former president and slave owner.



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 25

Rinaldi’s Reliance upon a Young Adult Narrator and  
Some Initial Historical Points

Before discussing these four historical inaccuracies and why they mat-
ter, this section examines Rinaldi’s choice of Harriet rather than Sally 
as narrator and indicates that Harriet operates as a pawn or by-product 
within the larger plot of the Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship. Also, 
certain episodes in the novel that prove to be partially accurate must be 
analyzed to provide a context for understanding the four inaccuracies. 

Without using the terminology of this essay—accuracy and authen-
ticity—Rinaldi’s preliminary note to her novel positions herself on the 
defensive, offers disclaimers: she did not intend to “put down” Jefferson, 
but to depict him as accurately as she could based upon his own writ-
ing (x–xi). Yet the novel’s display of Jefferson’s passivity and duplicity 
challenges the heroic-ideal conception of him. Rinaldi’s preliminary 
note to her novel also self-consciously explains why she composed 
her narrative by relying upon Harriet’s point of view. Of course, as a 
twentieth-century white woman she does not claim to “know what it felt 
like to be a slave,” but she understands the concept of alienation based 
upon her lack of knowledge of her own mother who died when she 
was born (xi). The author’s response to the historical fact of Harriet’s 
departure from Monticello on her own, leaving her family behind, 
perhaps forever, is “How terrible!” (x), and her novel then justifies why 
Harriet’s decision to leave Monticello does not fit the stereotypical flight 
from slavery to freedom that would be celebrated. But the preliminary 
note does not explain why Rinaldi chose an unusually privileged slave 
to tell her story, a choice which may upset readers expecting a narra-
tive of the dehumanizing realities of slavery. Nor does it reflect on her 
depiction of Sally Hemings, whose decision to stay with Jefferson and 
whose motivations for urging Harriet to leave Monticello perplex Har-
riet. While some readers may consider this relationship romanticized 
by Rinaldi, historical evidence published after Wolf by the Ears implicitly 
supports Rinaldi’s view. 

With all the available written documents by—and about—Jefferson 
and absolutely none by Sally Hemings, not even one letter from her 
hand, it was inevitable that following the DNA studies new evaluations 
of Jefferson’s character would circulate, while Sally Hemings would 
remain a mystery to be speculated about. Her son Madison in his 
memoirs explains the situation Sally dealt with while in France as the 
servant to Jefferson’s daughter Maria:



26 Brian Dillon

[D]uring that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, 
and when he was called back home she was enceinte [pregnant] 
by him. He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with 
him but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the 
French language well, and in France she was free, while if she 
returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to 
return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraor-
dinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children 
should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence 
of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with 
him to Virginia. (qtd. in Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally 
Hemings 246) 

Annette Gordon-Reed, who of all historians has been most successful in 
reconstructing the lives of Sally, her siblings, and her children, evaluates 
Sally’s decision, which she made while in her mid-teens and presumably 
with the guidance of her older brother James who was living in Paris at 
the same time, in training as a chef. (The father of Sally and her five 
siblings, John Wayles, was also the father of Jefferson’s wife Martha, who 
died prior to Jefferson’s sojourn in Paris.) Having spent her previous 
years at Monticello, Sally would have noted the favoritism accorded to 
Hemings females: she “watched every female go to the fields at harvest 
time, except her sisters, mother, and whatever white females were at 
the plantation. She learned from all this that, in Jefferson’s eyes, she 
was a female to be protected from certain things, when most women 
of her same legal status received no protection at all” (The Hemingses 
of Monticello 329). Gordon-Reed also speculates on what James and 
another older brother Robert may have thought of her arrangement 
with Jefferson. As the adult children of the same white father, they may 
have “simply viewed their sister’s connection to Jefferson as a predicat-
able [sic] event in life as they knew it. . . . And if they had any degree 
of trust in his [Jefferson’s] word—that he was going to stick by his 
bargain with their sister—she was already better off than their mother 
who had not obtained freedom for any of her children” (The Hemingses 
of Monticello 447). Gordon-Reed speculates further that the Jefferson-
Hemings relationship was monogamous, lasted nearly four decades, 
and was mutually satisfying.5 Salamishah Tillet notes the uniqueness of 
this interpretation: “Ironically, Gordon-Reed’s historical romance not 
only challenges those Jefferson scholars who have vigorously denied 
the possibility that Jefferson might have coerced Hemings, but it is 
also a radical departure from canonical black feminist scholarship on 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 27

enslaved women, consent, and rape” (40). Such scholarship “suggests 
that enslaved African American women could not willingly engage in 
sexual encounters with white men without coercion” (40). 

In one extended discussion of Rinaldi’s novel, Emily Honey acknowl-
edges the constraints placed upon a Young Adult author in treating 
this historic topic:

[B]ecause she was writing for a younger audience, [Rinaldi] 
could not be nearly as explicit about sexual matters, or about the 
power dynamic that would have been involved in any relationship 
they might have had, topics that might have been too weighty 
for adolescent readers. It might have seemed better to create 
a narrative from Harriet’s perspective, one that would still deal 
with the conflicts of her race, parentage, and position as a slave, 
but would be removed enough from Sally and Jefferson to avoid 
confronting the issues head on. Therefore, Harriet becomes 
the narrator and the focus, and her relationship with Jefferson 
of primary importance—once again leaving Sally rather in the 
background, overshadowed by the white man who controlled her 
world. (Honey 75) 

In Rinaldi’s novel, Sally does tell Harriet that she negotiated with 
Jefferson while she was a teen in France: she acquired her children’s 
freedom before they were born, presumably a pre-intimacy promise 
extracted from Jefferson (191, 226). In a passage that dovetails with 
the romantic speculations Gordon-Reed promotes, Rinaldi’s version 
of Sally even asserts, on the day before Harriet is to leave Monticello 
forever, that she loved Jefferson: “‘That’s why I came back from Paris 
too. No sense lying. Didn’t say it was right. Just saying I loved him.’ It 
was the first time she had ever spoken of herself and the master to me” 
(227). This is all Harriet learns from her mother about the degree and 
duration of her mother’s intimacy with Jefferson. As Honey claims, 
for Harriet—and many YA readers—to be more specific would be too 
“weighty.” 

Yet Harriet inquires in her own way on the topic of intimacy between 
Sally Hemings and Jefferson: Harriet’s dialogues with Jefferson frame 
the novel—the first in December 1819 and the last in August 1822 when 
she departs from Monticello—and thus have prominence of place. 
Rinaldi lowers Jefferson’s pedestal by highlighting his indirect manner 
when speaking to Harriet, which veers into dishonesty by his omissions. 
In the first dialogue, in which Harriet carries in a tray of tea while  



28 Brian Dillon

Jefferson sits writing his autobiography in his “sanctum sanctorum,” 
the private rooms where he works and sleeps, previously a forbidden 
zone to Harriet, Sally is present when Harriet asks: “Will you put my 
mama in” your autobiography (5, 8)? Jefferson deflects her questions; 
he concentrates instead on praising her accomplishments, gifting her 
with a leather journal (in which she writes the narrative that is this nov-
el), and offering advice about writing. This brief exchange highlights 
one of Harriet’s primary concerns: will her mother acknowledge the 
relationship directly, and will Jefferson acknowledge it even indirectly? 

What Harriet does not learn is that the 77-year-old Jefferson ceased 
composing his autobiography after “sixty-odd pages”: he only included 
his experiences up until 1789, when he was about to leave Paris. Brodie 
proposes one reason why he abandoned his autobiography at this early 
point in his complex political and personal life: to shield “the most 
pressing secret of his life” (601), the beginning of his relationship with 
Sally Hemings. Jefferson gently instructs Harriet: “Write down what you 
see, what is important to you, whether it be the sound of a bird, the snow 
on the Blue Ridge, or the taste of your mama’s salmagundi. . . . Write 
down what you feel, Harriet. It eases the heart. You will discover that 
in your own good time” (9). He could not anticipate either the depth 
of insight evident in her narratives or her interrogation of his personal 
choices. Jefferson apparently presumed that Harriet inherited his own 
aversion to private revelations. But Rinaldi demonstrates a range of 
influences upon this 18-year-old woman that trumps the “master’s” 
habitual denial of self-disclosure. Members of both her immediate and 
extended family instruct her regarding her present identity and whether 
she should alter that identity by departing from Monticello and pass-
ing for white. Other slaves and a white architect who visits Jefferson’s 
estate to use his library also contribute direct advice to Harriet. The 
interest others take in Harriet’s future suggests she is a most fortunate 
young adult. She’s no Holden Caulfield, crudely dismissing the guid-
ance well-intentioned adults offer; instead, Harriet weighs the merits 
of what she is told, however emotionally unsettling the advice may be. 
Writing in this journal allows Harriet her first sustained attempt at self-
reflection, a task both assisted and thwarted by the variety of advice from 
others she must process. The novel’s central plot, in general terms, is 
one of self-realization, but it unfolds in a hyper-specific, extraordinary 
historical circumstance.

With rare exceptions, the individuals in this novel who move through 
the main house and over the grounds of Monticello are known to 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 29

history, though what we know (or think we know) remains in dispute 
nearly 200 years later. Rinaldi shapes her story with a crowded cast, by 
necessity: Harriet and her three brothers—Beverly, Madison, and Eston; 
Martha Randolph, Jefferson’s only living child from his marriage, her 
husband Thomas Mann Randolph, and their sprawling family (eleven 
children who lived to adulthood, three born after Harriet’s birth); 
other house slaves (such as Jefferson’s “body man,” Burwell Colbert); 
as well as, of course, Harriet’s mother and Jefferson; and a variety of 
visitors, including dignitaries and extended family members. Rinaldi 
does err in claiming that Harriet lives on the third floor of the main 
building (27, 205–06, 214). Jefferson’s daughter Martha and her chil-
dren, as well as guests, resided under the same roof as Jefferson. For 
the Hemings children to do so would have been an announcement to 
visitors of Sally’s children’s privileged status. In the year that Harriet 
was born, 1801, construction began on the “dependencies connecting 
the south pavilion with the mansion, . . . joined rooms, which included 
the kitchen, smokehouse, dairy, and slave quarters” for house slaves 
(McLaughlin 29), and this would be where Harriet and her brothers 
resided. Rinaldi’s error does not detract from the overall quality of her 
novel, as Harriet’s movements through the more public rooms of the 
house tend to be precisely circumscribed.6 The opening scene does 
emphasize, appropriately enough, Harriet’s trepidation in entering 
Jefferson’s private quarters, at his invitation and accompanied by her 
mother. 

Further selective attention to Rinaldi’s treatment of the historical 
record must be noted here, if only to test the novel’s accuracy. For 
example, Harriet presents her ancestry, tracing her roots back to her 
maternal great-grandmother, and she notes that Jefferson’s father-in-
law (and Sally’s father) bequeathed him slaves, including Sally and her 
mother Elizabeth (33–34). She recounts the anecdote from 1781 of 
Jefferson watching through a telescope as British troops approached 
Monticello, and then escaping on horseback, calm when others may 
have panicked (30–31). With the first example, which sweeps over many 
decades, and the second, which provides a close-up of one man’s con-
duct at one particular moment, Rinaldi moves her narrative forward on 
firm ground.7 Also, in regard to accuracy, mention of the scornful press 
reports of the Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship, which emerged 
even after Harriet’s birth, occurs three times. 

The novel’s authenticity, Rinaldi’s craftsmanship in filling in gaps 
plausibly, requires more interpretive labor. The reporter responsible 



30 Brian Dillon

(or the irresponsible reporter, depending upon one’s view of presiden-
tial privacy), James Callender, is not named by Harriet. She focuses on 
Jefferson’s silence in response to the published reports. When Harriet 
enters his “sanctum sanctorum” without his permission in order to 
examine her “passing” wardrobe, she is discovered by Jefferson, who 
urges her to ignore the evidence:

He was asking me not to leave. He was asking me to forget that 
my mama was sewing a wardrobe for my departure. . . . And he 
was asking me to bide by his rule, which dismissed, by silence, 
anything unpleasant in the household. He wanted me to pretend 
my mother’s efforts never took place. The way he responded over 
the years, with silence and pretense, to the savage rumors in the 
press about himself and Sally Hemings. (68)

One month following this unplanned meeting, Harriet approaches 
Jefferson as he gazes out from the portico of the Entrance Hall of the 
main house. Since they last spoke, Harriet was assaulted by Charles 
Bankhead, husband of Jefferson’s granddaughter, Anne Randolph, 
and took to her sickbed for a number of days. In this encounter, Jef-
ferson shows some concern for Harriet but feigns ignorance of the 
drunken attack that occurred under his roof: “he cannot bring himself 
to speak of it, I thought, so he is acting like he acted years ago when 
they accused him, in the press, of taking my mother for a mistress. He 
never spoke of it. And his accusers went away” (117). Again, Rinaldi is 
appropriately accurate: Jefferson made no public comment in response 
to Callender; evidence exists of Bankhead’s brutality.8 Furthermore, 
Harriet’s awareness of the pretense that Jefferson maintains and that 
her mother colludes with creates additional internal tension in an au-
thentic way as she moves towards her decision to start a new life away 
from the only home she has ever known. 

Bankhead’s assault on Harriet should be labeled partially accurate: 
no historical evidence corroborates the specific episode in Rinaldi’s 
novel. But historical evidence supports the possibility that such an 
event may have occurred. Rinaldi adapts the historical evidence pro-
vided by Brodie: one night Burwell prevented the drunken Bankhead 
from obtaining more brandy, shouting erupted, and Thomas Mann 
Randolph arrived and knocked Bankhead to the floor (Brodie 620). 
No historian identifies Harriet as the object of an attack. The novel 
situates Harriet alone initially when confronting Bankhead, and his 
violent actions against her thwarted first by Thruston (a gardener, a 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 31

character not in the historical record), followed by the arrival of Burwell 
and Randolph. Perhaps Rinaldi also relied upon the scholar Dumas 
Malone who claimed that Jefferson freed Harriet to protect her virtue 
at Monticello. Gordon-Reed, who never comments on Rinaldi’s work, 
dismisses Malone’s claim: “There is no record of a precipitating event—
a rape or attempted rape of Harriet Hemings, for example—that might 
have increased the sense of urgency to have her leave Monticello. There 
is no indication that there was a persistent but unwanted suitor with 
whom Harriet had to contend” (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 31). 

Rinaldi authentically depicts Harriet awakening to a profound 
comprehension of her vulnerability. The belatedness of her compre-
hension—Harriet is nineteen at this point—reminds readers of her 
sheltered status. This scene certainly increases “the sense of urgency” 
that compels Harriet to accept the advice to leave, and thus propels 
the plot. Rinaldi also strikes a culturally authentic note, however 
unintentional this may be: if Harriet risks a sexual assault within the 
main house, how much more vulnerable must be the slave women at 
Monticello—or on other plantations—who are never privileged enough 
to enter the master’s house? Harriet does not ponder whether other 
female slaves at Monticello or neighboring plantations would consider 
her assault an exceptional occurrence or a regular threat they are forced 
to live with, and it would be inauthentic for her to inquire about such 
acts typically conducted in secret, considering how sheltered she has 
been. Rinaldi deserves some credit for providing at least a partial view 
of this serious issue.9

Conflicting Influences: Thomas Mann Randolph and Martha Randolph

Again, before examining the four historical inaccuracies, the accuracy 
and authenticity in the characterizations of Jefferson’s daughter Martha 
Randolph and her husband Thomas Mann Randolph must be consid-
ered, especially in regard to what their characterizations reveal about 
Harriet and Jefferson. The depiction of this married couple, who never 
appear together in the novel, adheres to the historical records known 
about them. While Thomas Mann Randolph’s generosity and Martha 
Randolph’s bitterness may both be exaggerated to serve Rinaldi’s plot 
strategy, their depictions do not violate the criteria for accuracy. Rinaldi 
sets up Harriet to transform over the two and a half year period her 
narrative covers, to develop a complex, thoughtful recognition of her 
immediate life choices. Both Randolphs provoke her transformation. 



32 Brian Dillon

In particular, Thomas Mann Randolph is presented as a countervoice 
to Jefferson in his empathetic encouragement of Harriet. Jefferson’s 
son-in-law makes a number of crucial appearances in Harriet’s final 
years at Monticello. Rinaldi depicts Martha and their children residing 
at Monticello (having moved there years before the narrative begins), 
while he visits occasionally, and in the years during which Harriet keeps 
her journal he serves as governor of Virginia. Rinaldi’s favorable depic-
tion of him is the most radical departure from the conventional views 
of any particular historical individual featured in this novel. 

The first time Harriet mentions him, she attributes his alleged loneli-
ness to being married to Martha, and she asserts that “everybody” knows 
“he’s crazier than a loon” (17). Gossip about Randolph referred, to 
some degree, to his mental instability.10 (Rinaldi even depicts Randolph 
declaring, “I feel like the proverbial silly bird who cannot feel at ease 
among the swans,” a self-conscious assessment Randolph did utter, in 
a different context, of course [30; Ellis 136].) Sally Hemings springs to 
his defense: folks may label him “crazy,” but at the time of this mother-
daughter dialogue in 1820, Jefferson’s son-in-law is “about to propose to 
the legislature that all Virginia’s slaves be freed and deported,” a much 
bolder effort on behalf of slaves than anything Jefferson attempted, 
Sally says (18). “Thomas Mann Randolph, the person they all say is 
crazy. Well, if he’s crazy, that man, then I’m the Queen of France” 
(19). In their first dialogue, Randolph dismisses Harriet’s restatement 
of her mother’s claim about the state’s emancipation legislation. It will 
not pass, he accurately affirms (29).11 Though blocked in his efforts 
to reduce the number of slaves in the state, to distinguish his politi-
cal record from Jefferson’s passive acquiescence to the status quo, he 
focuses on Harriet’s potential freedom. 

The issue of determining authenticity necessarily becomes more 
elaborate when the reader must disentangle various historically based 
characters’ motives. Sally seems intent on counteracting what she per-
ceives to be her daughter’s inflated view of Jefferson. Sally had prepped 
Randolph to speak to Harriet about her choice to leave Monticello. This 
implies not only Sally’s elevated view of Randolph, but also a concern 
that her own persuasive powers may be inadequate. Furthermore, Sally 
does not request that Jefferson or Martha Randolph propose to Harriet 
that she make plans to leave, and perhaps she has not even discussed 
Harriet’s leaving with Martha Randolph. 

Randolph speaks to Harriet of Jefferson creating a “velvet trap” for 
himself at Monticello, a metaphor suggesting current comforts are a 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 33

temporary illusion and will be paid for eventually with painful conse-
quences. He questions whether Harriet would be willing to escape the 
trap by leaving Monticello. He tells Harriet that if she stays, marries, 
and bears children they will be slaves: “‘Worse than you. By then your 
master will be dead. And who’s to care about whether your children 
are slaves or not. Or if they’re sold or not.’ Well, the man had me 
there, just like a fox caught in a leg trap” (29). Harriet reveals that 
previously she never considered the potential status of her children. 
That’s a remarkable admission for a 19-year-old who has lived her 
entire life on a slave plantation. It suggests that her mother and older 
brother neglected to alert her to, arguably, her most pressing personal 
responsibility. Her lack of foresight emphasizes how contentedly she 
has dwelt in the present, as well as how unwilling her mother has been 
to discuss the choices she made when she was younger than Harriet. Is 
it authentic, “within the realm of likelihood or possibility,” to use Hintz 
and Tribunella’s criteria, that Sally would not have discussed with Har-
riet the consequences of her sexual choices or that Harriet would not 
have imagined them on her own? That seems doubtful. But in terms of 
narrative strategy, a degree of authenticity may be sacrificed in order 
for Harriet to achieve meaningful insights that readers may presume a 
19-year-old living as a (relatively privileged) slave would have acquired 
at a younger age.

The next time Harriet and the governor talk, one month later, a 
sense of urgency compels Randolph to insist that Harriet prepare to 
leave. He knows that Harriet has been assaulted by his son-in-law and, 
unlike Jefferson, openly acknowledges and even condemns Bankhead’s 
conduct. Randolph’s attitude strikes an authentic note, even if no docu-
mentation exists about his direct influence on Harriet. He regrets not 
killing Bankhead after he stabbed his son, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, 
and then delivers the fiercest, most graphic condemnation of slavery 
in the entire narrative:

Bankhead represents everything that is so despicable about this 
system we live under. And I see you as a victim, along with my 
Anne. For the same system that nurtures slavery, nurtures and 
tolerates all the evil impulses in men. It tolerates their laziness. 
And violence. It looks the other way when they turn from their 
wives to the women in the quarters and produce children like you 
and your brothers, who are left to find their way in such confu-
sion, belonging neither to the nigra nor the white community, 
yet being part of both. (101–02)



34 Brian Dillon

This is a cry of helplessness, by both a governor and a father, when 
confronting a cultural norm, and his empathy for Harriet is evident 
as he creates a parallel between his own daughter and Harriet. The 
reader must presume that Harriet does not personally know any slave 
who could articulate such antagonism, a circumstance that contributes 
to the soft focus in which her narrative views slavery. Randolph’s speech 
counteracts Jefferson’s silence: it would be hypocritical, certainly not 
authentic to what is known of Jefferson, for him to state such a condem-
nation. Randolph acts upon his moral concern: he will advise Jefferson 
about Harriet’s decision, negotiate for his wife, Martha, to tutor Harriet, 
and reveal in private to a white bachelor who has visited Monticello 
and voiced his admiration to him of Harriet that a betrothal to Harriet 
would provide cover for her, and perhaps the good deed could lead to 
marriage, which would require that Harriet pass. Effectively, Randolph 
becomes Harriet’s plot director and the behind-the-scenes hero of the 
novel, while Jefferson remains an observer.

Thomas Mann Randolph addresses Harriet like a young adult who 
will be capable of adapting to her move away from Monticello. Martha 
Randolph attempts to belittle Harriet. Rinaldi’s unflattering depiction 
of Martha may prompt readers to wonder whether Martha was so sour 
on the Hemingses and so duplicitous in her treatment of Harriet. She 
senses that her husband plotted to allow Harriet to leave, and she 
describes his legislative proposal:

All this nonsense about introducing legislation to give Virginia’s 
slaves their freedom. Freedom to do what, I ask? And how? Why, 
all the nigra servants on this place, with the exception of your 
mother, have to be led by the hand to eat, or they’d starve. That’s 
how much sense they have. You think it’s easy out in the world? 
You think all you have to do is smile and curtsy and you’ll have 
your supper? (128)

Her racist-coated assessment is challenged by the evidence of the 
network of slave laborers who maintained the property and produced 
revenue from the nailery and elsewhere (Stanton 41–89). Her intensely 
pessimistic outlook plays off against the realistic, even existential, out-
look her husband expresses to Harriet. When Thomas Mann Randolph 
develops his “velvet trap” metaphor, Harriet notes that Jefferson is 
kind to her. He responds, “Kind, eh? Well, kindness is not freedom. 
And security is not freedom. Freedom is often lonely. Nobody takes 
care of you. You take care of yourself. You think for yourself. You do 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 35

dim-witted things, and you are sorry for them. You pay for them. But 
there is no feeling in the world like freedom” (28). 

Madison does not indicate in his memoirs how Martha interacted 
with him or Sally and Harriet. Cynthia Kierner’s recent biography of 
Martha implicitly challenges the harsh depiction that Rinaldi offers. 
While Kierner’s conclusions deserve to be weighed against Rinaldi’s 
depiction, her biographical study will not lead a reader to conclude that 
Martha’s role in Wolf by the Ears is historically inaccurate. At the time in 
which Harriet writes her narrative, Martha’s mother and all her siblings 
from her parents’ marriage have been deceased for over 15 years. (Her 
mother died when she was just ten.) Such a circumstance allows us to 
understand why the father-daughter bond would be so tight. Her life 
story, Kierner asserts, “counters the rhetoric of southern patriarchy to 
the extent that she herself had significant authority and influence—
along with myriad responsibilities and obligations—throughout her 
adult life,” and it can be interpreted “as a case study of what could hap-
pen when patriarchy malfunctioned because men [both her father and 
husband] were unable or unwilling to fulfill their prescribed domestic 
roles,” especially in fending off debt (8). 

In Rinaldi’s novel, Martha complains to Harriet, “There are alto-
gether too many Hemings on this place to suit me.” She refers to herself 
as Jefferson’s “only surviving child” (131). Nearly two years later and just 
a few months prior to Harriet’s departure, Martha tells Harriet that her 
father is Peter Carr, Jefferson’s nephew, a man, she claims, her father 
indulged: “It was no way to repay my father for his kindnesses, mixing 
with the servant women and producing children in so irresponsible a 
fashion. But then, Peter Carr never was responsible. I suppose that’s 
why my father feels obligated to help Sally Hemings’ children” (183). 
The oral tradition supports not the claim itself, of course, but the ac-
curacy of Martha promoting such a claim: her eldest son, Thomas Jef-
ferson Randolph, told a nineteenth-century biographer of Carr’s role 
and attributed his information to his own mother.12 Martha defended 
her father’s reputation with the ugly tactic of smearing Sally (as well 
as her cousin Carr). Even prior to the scientific findings of the DNA 
research, Martha’s claim was demolished as a convenient fiction.13 It 
seems preposterous that Martha would not know of her father’s long-
term intimacy with Sally Hemings: that would require an excessive 
amount of willful ignorance. She also presumes that her allegations 
will not be challenged: “I know your mama hasn’t told you. And she 
never will” (182–83). 



36 Brian Dillon

When Thomas Mann Randolph talks to Harriet, he presumes she has 
been coddled at Monticello, allowed to live in a safe, cocooned world 
where few demands are made upon her. Martha Randolph adopts 
a similar stance. But note the differences: he wants her to perceive 
herself as an agent of her adult years, to make choices that assert her 
own independence. He pushes her out for her own good. He wants 
Harriet to recognize how confined she is at Monticello; Martha, in 
her complaining mode, wants her to see that she is privileged. Martha 
scorns her half-sister and essentially demands she express thanks for 
all she has been given. And she lies to her about her parentage: can 
we be sure she does not believe her own lie? Thomas Mann Randolph 
presumes Harriet is capable of imminent maturation; Martha does not. 
He presses Harriet to change her status; she urges Harriet to accept 
her status as a powerless individual who should be grateful for her 
comfortable existence. He wants Harriet to adopt a new identity who 
wields as much freedom of choice as her gender allows in the 1820s; 
she seeks to impress upon Harriet her sense of alienation from both 
the white Randolphs and the Mulberry Row slaves.

Harriet responds to the contradictory concerns this couple raises 
with an authentic intent to figure out who deserves her trust. Based 
upon her own instinctual feelings and later by the corroboration her 
brother Beverly provides from the Farm Book regarding the absence 
from Monticello of Peter Carr at the time of the Hemings children’s 
conception, Harriet clings to her belief that Jefferson is her father. She 
also will not relinquish her view of Jefferson as a man deserving pity. 
Why she does not will be examined in conjunction with Rinaldi’s four 
historical inaccuracies. 

Harriet’s In-Between Status and Her Absent Brother Tom

Harriet’s reflections on the frequent references to her absent oldest 
brother, Tom, the first of the four historical inaccuracies, highlight 
the unique in-between status she occupies at Monticello. This first 
inaccuracy deserves to be considered in light of this context. Harriet 
moves between the Mulberry Row values expressed by Thruston (the 
gardener) and Mammy Ursula (who tells folktales and dispenses advice 
regarding potions and superstitions), and the white culture’s values, 
expressed by Jefferson, Martha and Thomas Mann Randolph, and Thad 
Sandridge. This in-between status complicates in interesting ways both 
Harriet’s efforts to assert her own identity and a reader’s efforts to prove 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 37

her character achieves authenticity. Weimin Mo and Wenju Shen begin 
with the distinction between facts and values when discussing accuracy 
and authenticity yet acknowledge the conceptual vagueness with these 
terms. More specifically, they note that cultures “affect each other. They 
constantly absorb each other’s values, attitudes, and beliefs; sometimes 
they actively clash. Therefore, cultural values are not stagnant. When 
an author’s version of a culture can be accommodated inside the range 
of values acceptable within that social group, a measure of authentic-
ity has been achieved” (201). Harriet receives conflicting advice from 
members of both Monticello communities and must determine which 
values to accept and which to reject. 

In one dialogue, Jefferson, a master of indirection, suggests to Har-
riet that she may be romantically interested in Thruston. Rinaldi con-
structs this dialogue that accurately depicts Jefferson’s attitude towards 
slaves intermarrying but within the conflicted context of obligations 
made to Sally to free her children. Operating with much cunning, 
Jefferson attempts to plant a seed that would serve his current and 
long-term purposes: marriage with Thruston would keep Harriet on his 
premises until he dies.14 Their offspring would add to Jefferson’s capital 
and help offset his debt. He would be appalled if Harriet had thought 
he wanted her to stay due to her monetary value as a breeder of slaves 
(overseen, perhaps, by his daughter Martha). In fact, Harriet does not 
indicate that such a thought enters her mind, though she should be 
labeled realistic rather than cynical if it did. Lucia Stanton notes, “Like 
other slave owners, Jefferson recognized the value of family stability in 
the slave quarters and tried to discourage abroad [off-plantation] mar-
riages” (137). As he wrote in 1815 to one of his property’s overseers, 
“There is nothing I desire so much as that all the young people in the 
estate should intermarry with one another and stay at home. They are 
worth a great deal more in that case than when they have husbands 
and wives abroad” (qtd. in Stanton 137). Also, potential offspring from 
a Harriet-Thruston marriage would divert attention, Jefferson may be 
thinking, from his genetic responsibility. When Harriet introduced 
Thruston in her narrative she noted, “He is light skinned, but darker 
than I am. I’m practically white. And I’m tall. And I have reddish hair. 
And some freckles. Which ought to give a body an idea of the trouble 
I’m in right off” (21).

Thruston’s role highlights Harriet’s in-between status. She scolds 
him for speaking “like a field darkie who didn’t know any better” (20), 
a remark that acknowledges her awareness of most slaves’ illiteracy 



38 Brian Dillon

and limitations and Thruston’s choice to align himself with those at 
Monticello incapable of advancement as long as slavery persists. At this 
early point in her narrative, Harriet still seems content with her current 
status. Thruston, angry because of his recognition of the limitations on 
his potential choices, pushes back against “Miss High and Mighty,” as 
he labels Harriet in this scene: “Why should I talk like white peoples? 
. . . Ain’t never gonna get me anything. Doan wanna talk like white 
folk, anyway. Ain’t nuthin’ ‘bout them I admire” (21). She offers no 
response. This exchange segues into her encounter with Thomas Mann 
Randolph as she serves him breakfast. He scolds her in a manner that 
echoes Harriet’s confrontation with Thruston: “Talk to me. . . . Don’t 
give me that stupid darkie routine” (24). Randolph’s effort to draw 
Harriet out provokes her identity confusion, disrupts her contentment. 
And who is to blame for her extraordinary reticence with Monticello’s 
white residents? Who has sheltered her? Though tutored academically 
(8), Harriet moves in a twilight world, immersed neither in the slave 
community nor the white world of Jefferson’s extended family. Later, 
Thruston concedes that he wants to marry Harriet but that she should 
seek her freedom. Harriet fears the unpredictability of her life if she 
leaves Monticello and enters a white community yet knows that she 
does not want to marry Thruston. 

The perspective that Harriet takes of the Mulberry Row slaves is dis-
torted by her lack of regular contact with those who live there as well 
as her love for Jefferson and pitying attitude towards him. While this 
perspective fails to conform to the historical record, to achieve accuracy, 
it does achieve authenticity considering the limitations that stem from 
Harriet’s in-between status and defines her identity. In a later episode, 
Harriet silently criticizes the limited goals of two girls from Mulberry 
Row who are nearly her age—her peers and yet not her peers—who flirt 
with the well-muscled field hand Jupiter: “How stupid! Where would it 
all lead? Where would it get them? One of them will marry Jupiter and 
have baby after baby down in the slave cabins” (139). One of Harriet’s 
internal conflicts centers on her recognition that her opportunities far 
exceed the Mulberry Row residents’: neither these two young women 
nor Jupiter would be keeping a journal or tutored in French. Harriet is 
tutored by Mr. Oglesby, and once her plans for leaving begin to form, 
by Martha, with a curriculum that Jefferson oversees (which includes 
limits on reading fiction [119]). Again, though, as Sally’s child, Har-
riet proves to be an exception: “Unlike many slaveholders, Jefferson 
did not try to prevent his slaves from learning to read (although there 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 39

is evidence he frowned on the second stage of the learning process, 
writing), but he apparently took no active part in providing them with 
an education” (Stanton 68). Yet the white community’s values have up 
until recently been considered out of her reach.

In their dialogue that takes place days after Harriet has been as-
saulted by Bankhead, after Jefferson succeeds in proving to himself that 
Harriet is discreet (she does not burst out crying or accuse Jefferson of 
failing to control his own in-law and guest), he raises the issue of her 
leaving Monticello. As evident in all five of his dialogues with Harriet, 
as well as the one heated exchange she overhears between Jefferson 
and Beverly regarding her older brother’s desire to attend the newly 
formed University of Virginia, Jefferson exhibits contrary sensibilities: 
self-absorbed and emotionally guarded, yet intent on establishing a 
meaningful personal link. He admits that the influence of Sally and 
Thomas Mann Randolph prompted his willingness to allow Harriet 
to leave:

So, then, it is best that you go. I realize I was unfair to you at 
our last meeting, Harriet. I tried to impose my will upon you 
for my own selfish reasons. Yes, of course, I want you to stay, as I 
want Beverly to stay and as I wanted Tom to stay. But I must be 
a realist. There is nothing for you here. You are young and of 
a fine countenance and well bred. You must take your place in 
the world. (118) 

Presumably, Jefferson trusts that she will understand that his “own 
selfish reasons” refers to a degree of emotional neediness, however 
incapable he may be of overtly expressing such needs to her. 

The reference to Tom challenges the historical record. Rinaldi tries 
to have it both ways: in the family tree listed at the front of the book 
under the name Thomas Hemings it says, “(possibly).” Rinaldi seems 
to fashion “Tom Hemings” out of speculations in Brodie’s biography, 
which acknowledged that references in Jefferson’s Farm Book to vari-
ous individuals named Tom proved confusing rather than conclusive 
(730–31n20). Yet as the absent oldest sibling of Harriet who left Monti-
cello when Harriet was ten and passed as white, he is referred to in Wolf 
by the Ears as a real individual, not only by Jefferson and Harriet, but 
also Mammy Ursula and other slaves quartered on Mulberry Row, Sally, 
and Thomas Mann Randolph. Madison’s memoir names only Beverly, 
Harriet, and Eston as his siblings. Callender reports gossip about a son 
named Tom, but no credible historian confirms his existence.15 The 



40 Brian Dillon

novel’s references to absent Tom do not undermine in any genuine 
way the authenticity of Harriet’s internal conflict.16 They are gratuitous. 
The manner of his leaving serves as a counterexample to Jefferson’s 
wishes for Harriet’s departure: “When you go, Harriet, I would like it 
to be done right. No running off into the night like Tom. Promise me 
you will not run off” (120). Harriet will dutifully accept this advice. 
Alert readers should recognize that such an example is unnecessary for 
Rinaldi’s narrative purpose: Harriet’s efforts to please Jefferson are on 
display in every one of their scenes together. Jefferson’s wistful recol-
lections about Tom do conjure a sentimental view of the slave-holding 
ex-president, though, that the historical record fails to support, and 
thus this first of the novel’s four inaccuracies deserves our attention.

Negative stereotypes of slaves are promoted by characters whom the 
reader is discouraged from agreeing with (such as Martha Randolph), 
and Harriet confronts in a meaningful way her in-between status as 
neither wholly slave nor wholly free. Yet at times the sidelong view of 
slavery that Harriet provides from her comparatively privileged position 
as a house slave veils the documented evidence of the daily working 
conditions and inferior accommodations for the slaves of Monticello, 
thereby sentimentalizing their existence. In an early entry in her 
journal, she gushes: “I love him, I know I do. And to show how much, 
I write down here and now another truth. The nigra servants on this 
place are well treated. And well clothed and fed. Mama says the master, 
like his father, Peter Jefferson, has never used a whip on one of his 
servants. And no one goes cold or hungry” (36–37). Though Harriet 
does work occasionally in the weaver’s cottage on Mulberry Row, she 
avoids the nailery or the fields where many of the Monticello slaves were 
employed and subject to punishments. Stanton asserts that whipping 
of slaves at Monticello occurred at “levels well below those of many of 
his neighbors. The whip was, however, by no means eliminated. From 
the 1780s Jefferson employed on the Monticello plantation over twenty 
overseers with diverse temperaments and management styles. Some 
were cruel, even by the standards of the day” (15). Such cruelties are 
removed from Harriet’s line of vision. Rinaldi’s choice of narrator—
a domestic servant granted privileges unavailable to the other slaves 
Jefferson owns—significantly softens what may very well be the high 
school reader’s first literary introduction to slavery in the South in the 
early 1800s.

The division in Jefferson’s mind between the Hemings children 
and the Mulberry Row slaves lurks behind his admission that “There 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 41

is nothing for you here.” No one disputes that Sally’s children were 
relatively privileged, never sent to work in the fields or in the nailery, 
for example. His praise of her “fine countenance” and breeding, weirdly 
ironic because he does not acknowledge his role in her breeding, con-
flicts with his previously published arguments of African Americans’ 
racial inferiority. Query XIV from Notes on the State of Virginia is often 
cited as an early expression (written in 1781–82). In a question and 
answer format, Jefferson ponders why emancipation of the slaves within 
the state will not occur: 

Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus 
save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, 
the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained 
by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the 
injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinc-
tions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, 
will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will 
probably never end but in the exterminations of the one or the 
other race. (118–19)

Jefferson then labels skin color in the category of “physical and moral” 
objections: “Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty 
in the two races? . . . They are more ardent after their female: but love 
seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate 
mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient” (119). 
He compares African Americans unfavorably with Native Americans: 
“never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the 
level of plain narration” (120). Such remarks, though written decades 
before Harriet’s birth, provide some context for understanding his 
praise of her. Rinaldi’s novel implies, at least, he was capable of making 
an exception to his theory in regard to both his sentimental worries 
about absent Tom and his view of Harriet: this may be pure fantasy on 
the novelist’s part. 

Rinaldi’s depiction defies what we do know of Jefferson’s attitude 
toward slavery in his post-presidential years. To note one example, in 
a letter from 1814, Jefferson tried to discourage a wealthy neighbor, 
Edward Coles, from carrying out his plan to move his slaves to Illinois, 
where Coles intended to free them and give them land: while Jefferson 
recognizes that “the hour of emancipation is advancing,” he advocates 
that slave owners like Coles “reconcile yourself to your country and its 
unfortunate condition,” and that while such proposals are worthy of 



42 Brian Dillon

discussion, the time is not right to enact them. In this same letter he 
also asserts a point that directly echoes his sentiments regarding the 
inferiority of African Americans from his Notes: “Their amalgamation 
with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his 
country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently 
consent” (Letter to Edward Coles 350). Andrew Burstein comments, 
“Jefferson’s pseudoscience rightly diminishes him in the eyes of history 
for one inescapable reason: He did not grow over time” (125). Rin-
aldi’s depiction of Jefferson in this scene with Harriet conflicts with the 
language of this letter. She also ignored Brodie’s analysis of this letter, 
in particular the quoted sentence regarding “amalgamation” (misce-
genation). Brodie states that Jefferson’s “octoroon children had been 
subjected by Virginia society to the same degradation as the blackest 
African, and he had been pilloried for siring them. Amalgamation for 
Jefferson truly did not raise the black; it only degraded the white” (585).

Of course, it is highly unlikely that YA readers would find any in-
consistency here: Harriet indicates no awareness of Jefferson’s Notes. 
Presumably, she would not intend to please him if she was aware of 
his pseudoscientific racial theory, and knowledge of his theory would 
undermine her sentimental response to slavery. Therefore, while it is 
plausible that Harriet knows nothing of this publication from nearly 
40 years earlier or his current thoughts as expressed in his correspon-
dence, this literary criteria of authenticity is earned at the sacrifice of 
exposing Jefferson’s hypocrisy. His command that Harriet must take 
her “place in the world” sounds sententious, even paternalistic, and 
the irony, of course, is that taking her place requires disguising her 
identity. He wields language with impressive authority, yet so many 
of his statements open up rabbit holes down which he refuses to go. 
Harriet’s intense admiration for Jefferson blocks her from challenging 
as suspect any of his stated intentions for her. This contributes to her 
portrait of Jefferson as a figure deserving pity.17

Jefferson’s Confusing Claims about George Wythe and His Self-Promoting 
Recollections about the Declaration 

Harriet’s inability at crucial points in her narrative to decipher when 
Jefferson speaks in deceptive ways to manipulate her and others may 
very well be authentic: she does admit how sheltered her life has been. 
This inability is most evident in the extended scene that highlights 
Beverly’s creative intellect and his frustration with Jefferson, a scene 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 43

in which the novel’s second and third historical inaccuracies emerge. 
Working from written accounts of the previous generation’s fascination 
with the pioneering work of hot air balloons, Beverly has constructed 
one of his own, fueled not by straw or sticks but a burning claret-soaked 
sponge.18 He intends to impress Jefferson in an effort to convince him 
that he should be allowed to enroll at the newly established University 
of Virginia. Beverly and Jefferson confer about this on a hilltop near 
Mulberry Row. Hiding behind a washhouse, Harriet listens in to their 
exchange. Though this narrative strategy of overhearing crucial infor-
mation may be somewhat clumsy, the scene effectively pits a defensive 
Jefferson against a frustrated Beverly. 

Jefferson acknowledges that Beverly’s intellect warrants his admis-
sion to a university program, but he lacks the power to institute such 
race mixing even on a campus he founded. Jefferson argues by anal-
ogy: he summarizes the 1806 case of the white man who murdered 
George Wythe and a young man living with Wythe, Michael Brown. In 
addition to being Jefferson’s most influential teacher at the College of 
William and Mary, Wythe also served in the Continental Congress, and 
remained a lifelong friend. Jefferson explains to Beverly that Wythe, 
twice widowed, developed a relationship with his mulatto housekeeper, 
Lydia Broadnax, and that she bore him a son (Michael Brown), whom 
Wythe educated. In his will, Wythe left the housekeeper his home and 
other property, and for Brown half of his bank account. The other half 
was left to his white grandnephew who poisoned Wythe, Broadnax, and 
Brown in an effort to inherit it all. The will (written while Jefferson was 
president) entrusted Jefferson to be in charge of Brown. 

Rinaldi apparently relies upon Brodie to create this scene. The his-
torical evidence does not support the claim that Wythe and Broadnax 
produced a son, nor that Wythe was intimate with Broadnax, whom 
Wythe had freed and who continued to care for him as a paid servant. 
Brodie states, “Jefferson must have surmised, with many others in Vir-
ginia once the details of the will were circulated, that Lydia Broadnax 
was almost certainly Wythe’s concubine and Michael Brown his son. 
That the President believed that Wythe had waited in writing his will 
till he was certain he could count on Jefferson’s support for his son 
seems likely” (524). In Rinaldi’s scene, Jefferson speaks in a lawyerly 
manner to Beverly regarding the exact nature of the relationship: “it 
was common knowledge that the boy was Wythe’s illegitimate son” 
by his mulatto housekeeper, Lydia Broadnax (42). Bruce Chadwick 
challenges this claim: the “copious population records . . . kept at the 



44 Brian Dillon

time” never listed Broadnax as a mother; “Wythe had a long history 
of tutoring both black and white teenagers, and Michael was just one 
more” (254n3). Philip Morgan notes: “Of the fourteen witnesses who 
testified to Wythe’s poisoning, not one mentioned that Lydia Broad-
nax was his mistress or that Michael Brown was his son. No newspaper 
reported any such gossip” (58). 

Rinaldi blends some historically accurate claims with Brodie’s specu-
lations in this scene. Broadnax, Jefferson explains to Beverly, survived: 

But because, under Virginia law, no nigra can testify against 
a white, [this grandnephew] was acquitted. Leading men in 
Richmond rushed to defend him. The indictment against him 
was quashed without a trial. And a murderer was allowed to go 
free because my dear friend and mentor, a signer of the Declara-
tion of Independence, did not try to hide the fact that he had 
a mulatto mistress and could not disown his son. Now do you 
understand? (44)19

The implication is that fourteen years later, the political culture in Vir-
ginia has not progressed, and Jefferson is powerless to provoke change. 
Jefferson’s support for Beverly will not extend beyond Monticello: he 
will neither help nor hinder him in the outside world.20 Jefferson may 
fear that Beverly’s presence at the university will expose Beverly’s ances-
try and provoke newspaper writers to resurrect stories of his intimacy 
with Sally Hemings.21 He will not allow any attention to be drawn to his 
role as the father of a mixed-race child, as he may have felt such atten-
tion affected Wythe’s posthumous reputation. While Rinaldi is correct 
in depicting Jefferson as asserting that state laws prohibited testimony 
from a black person against a white person, it bears noting that Wythe 
and Jefferson had formally approved this law when they reviewed the 
state statutes decades earlier (Chadwick 228–29). Jefferson’s pleading 
insistence that he cannot push against the weight of Virginia’s white 
supremacist conventions contributes to the novel’s pattern of viewing 
him with pity, as a man with a steady moral compass whose willingness 
to guide others in the right direction is ignored. When Rinaldi’s dra-
matic dialogue—which embeds both this second inaccuracy regarding 
Wythe and the third, to be considered below—is set against the histori-
cal record, the reader’s pity may dissolve.

Jefferson’s effort to convince Beverly of his powerlessness leads him 
to refer to his early draft of the Declaration, the novel’s third historical 
inaccuracy, which he claimed called for the abolition of slavery: “But 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 45

there were those who would have seceded from the yet unformed union 
if my phrases about doing away with slavery were not struck from the 
document” (44). Jefferson’s claim accurately reflects his excised por-
tions of his draft of the historic document, in which he blamed “the 
Christian King of Great Britain” for the “horrors of the slave trade.”22 
But Jefferson only favored banning the importation of more slaves from 
Africa, not the ownership of slaves, and in 1776, he owned about 200 
slaves (McCullough 131). He did write the astonishing phrase “all men 
are created equal,” but his own life proved he did not accept this either 
literally or legally. Seeking from Beverly understanding and forgiveness 
for his passivity, Jefferson disingenuously simplifies the argument he 
crafted 44 years earlier, and thus his remarks constitute a historical 
inaccuracy. Yet his posture as a morally astute statesman powerless 
to affect change is authentic regarding the consistency in Jefferson’s 
thinking about slavery from his early years in politics to his retirement 
at Monticello. It is impossible to determine whether Rinaldi knows that 
Jefferson veers sideways from honesty here or that she presumes her 
reader will view Jefferson with suspicion. Ellis peels away Jefferson’s 
layers of obfuscation to uncover his support of the South’s status quo:

Jefferson knew . . . that many established slaveowners in the 
Tidewater region favored an end of imports because their own 
plantations were already well stocked and new arrivals only re-
duced the value of their own slave populations. Ending the trade 
in Virginia, in short, was not at all synonymous with ending slavery. 
With regard to slavery itself, Jefferson’s formulation made great 
polemic sense but historical and intellectual nonsense. It absolved 
slaveowners like himself from any responsibility of complicity in 
the establishment of an institution that was clearly at odds with 
the values on which the newly independent America was based. 
(52)  

In Rinaldi’s account, Jefferson trusts that Beverly lacks the knowledge to 
challenge him. In reporting this dialogue, Harriet lacks the knowledge 
to treat Jefferson’s claim with any skepticism. But a reader informed 
about the composition of the Declaration and alert to Jefferson’s in-
tentions should challenge his self-serving and dishonest appeals in this 
exchange with Beverly. 

Near the end of his second term as president (in 1808), a ban was 
issued against the further importation of Africans to serve as slaves. 
As historian Alan Taylor writes, “But the new law manifested no  



46 Brian Dillon

commitment to antislavery within the nation and no bar to the booming 
interstate trade in slaves. Indeed, by eliminating foreign competition, 
Virginians could sell more slaves to the lower South. The sellers also 
expected to sleep more securely as the domestic slave trade diffused 
their surplus slaves at higher prices to the south and west. By banning 
the import slave trade while expanding the interstate slave trade, the 
Virginians hoped to render slavery safer and more profitable” (104). 
From his composition of the Notes to the end of his second presidential 
term and all the way to his retirement at Monticello, Jefferson remained 
consistent in regard to slavery.

Open-Ended Closure in the Novel and the Historical Record 

Rinaldi’s choice of closure must be set against the historical record 
before proceeding to the novel’s fourth historical inaccuracy regard-
ing the Missouri Compromise. Beverly is not won over by Jefferson; 
he refuses to commiserate with Jefferson’s excuse-making. In his final 
dialogue with Harriet, late at night, with Beverly on horseback set to 
run away from Monticello, he claims he does not know where he will 
go. (Gordon-Reed notes, “There is no record of an event that led to 
[Beverly’s] departure” [Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 26].) He 
shares his breakthrough insight gleaned from the pages of Jefferson’s 
Farm Book: “I check it every chance I get. . . . To see. How he marks us 
down. . . . On bread lists. On blanket lists. We’re on those lists, you 
and me. And Mad and Eston. With all his other slaves” (211–12). While 
Harriet will soon leave in a state of sentimental ambivalence, Beverly 
leaves full of righteous anger. “When he dies, people will see those 
lists. They’ll see we were slaves. A hundred years from now that’s all 
people will see of us, all they’ll know” (212). Rinaldi’s novel responds 
to Beverly’s despair by animating the lives of what could have remained 
only names in the Farm Book.23 The novel comes full circle, from Har-
riet’s concern regarding whether Jefferson will discuss her mother 
in his autobiography to Beverly’s evidence that their mother and her 
children exist on paper only as budget items. 

The Farm Book establishes that Beverly left Monticello either in 1821 
or 1822 and Harriet in 1822 (Brodie 589–90). Rinaldi closes her story 
after Harriet details her first night away from Monticello. Gordon-Reed 
speculates that Beverly may have eased Harriet’s transition to Wash-
ington’s white culture (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 33). Rinaldi 
presents Harriet’s departure as the ultimate leave-taking of her family: 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 47

both she and Beverly presumed their parting was final, and there is no 
suggestion of a reunion at some unspecified time. The reader travels 
with Harriet only 18 miles from Monticello to the first stop on her way 
to Washington. This is the only break in the narrative from the spatial 
limitations of Monticello. A white chambermaid and her daughter tend 
to her in her room above a tavern. Though on this first night there is no 
challenge to her passing, her inadequate preparation for entering the 
world outside Monticello, her lifetime of being sheltered, is evident in 
her response to the chambermaid: “It came to me, watching the woman, 
that she was of a poorer class than I had known any white woman to be. 
. . . I never considered that there were white folk in the world worse off 
than I” (234–35). Working from Madison’s memoir and the profun-
dity of silence required by Beverly and Harriet who chose to abandon 
their black past and their bond with the third president, Gordon-Reed 
asserts that Beverly and Harriet “left Monticello as white people, with 
no learning curve for how to present themselves as Caucasians. They 
married white people who may not have known they were of African 
origin or had ever been enslaved” (The Hemingses of Monticello 285). Of 
course, if Gordon-Reed’s speculation were true, then Harriet did not 
marry someone like Thad Sandridge, and her life did not follow the 
direction in which her narrative seemed to be headed. Yet Rinaldi’s 
open-ended conclusion certainly sounds authentic. 

Lacking historical evidence that Harriet’s older brother facilitated 
her move, Rinaldi creates this scenario: Thomas Mann Randolph plots 
a meeting between Harriet and Thad Sandridge, a Harvard-educated 
northerner, an architect appalled by slavery and physically attracted to 
Harriet. Somewhat late in her narrative, Harriet reminds her reader 
that though she fended off Thruston’s appeals and suffered from a 
thwarted violent attack by a sexual predator, her romantic experiences 
are limited and make her vulnerable. Upon first meeting Thad she 
decides she’s in love with him (169). He demonstrates restraint and 
indicates his awareness of their power differential: “I’ll force you into 
no decision concerning me. I have the advantage of having known you 
for some time now. You do not know me. I would have you taste free-
dom first. With no conditions attached to it. I do not wish to be a new 
master. I wish to be your friend” (161). The romance plot is implied yet 
deferred. Thad, calmer in his ardors, indicates he favors a leisurely pace 
to whatever mutual feelings may develop. Harriet’s admission that she 
thinks she has fallen in love at first sight indicates she could benefit by 
restraining her emotions. He asks Harriet to call him by his first name 



48 Brian Dillon

and just once to call her master “Mister Jefferson.” Harriet acts upon 
this advice. The novel closes with Harriet’s description of Jefferson’s 
response to the only time she referred to him this way: “His gaze held 
mine for a moment and there, in those blue depths, I saw the shock 
and confusion, yes, even the hurt. His head went back a little, with my 
words, as if I had struck him” (247), and then he shed tears. 

Success for Harriet is achieved by evoking from Jefferson a genuine 
emotional response to her departure, though readers should question 
how long she will feel satisfaction over such a slight victory. Rinaldi gives 
this scene prominence of place. But alert readers may presume that 
while such an ending makes sense structurally, Harriet’s overbearing 
emphasis on a tear (“Tears! For me!” [248]) may indicate only that her 
movement into adulthood has barely begun. Harriet’s parting words to 
Jefferson indicate her eagerness to take directions from Thad. Drop-
ping the title “Master” in favor of “Mister Jefferson” seems to serve as a 
transgression that only Thad, Harriet, and Jefferson will know. It marks 
a shift away from subservience, but Harriet’s intentions are not thought 
through. Does she imply that if he must persist in remaining silent about 
her paternity she will address him as no more than her landlord? If 
so, his tear signifies his emotional pain. Or is it her way of indicating 
she will play along with his desire for history to be uninformed of his 
double life, that she implies she will maintain their secret? If so, then 
his tear signifies his satisfaction that Harriet has acquired, in his misted 
eyes, an adult-like acceptance of southern social conventions. 

Werner Sollors’ Neither Black Nor White Yet Both identifies concerns 
specific to the issue of closure in fiction like Wolf by the Ears: “it is not 
surprising that interracial literature has displayed a good amount of 
self-consciousness and some ambivalence about where and how the plot 
lines could be brought to a conclusion” (337). Sollors distinguishes “two 
recurring patterns of closure”: the one that Rinaldi’s novel follows is 
“the wish for ‘A World Elsewhere,’ whether or not it is realized,” with 
Harriet changing her name, securing a place to live and employment, 
with Thad’s help, and the likelihood of “a happy interracial marriage” 
(Sollors 337). (Sollors does not discuss Wolf by the Ears.) Rinaldi deserves 
credit for undermining the potential for readers to view the ending 
as absolutely optimistic. Both Thomas Mann Randolph and Martha 
Randolph attempt to check her glowing assumption of what “freedom” 
might consist of. She is reminded (accurately, by Sally) of the cautionary 
tale of her mother’s brother James: trained as a chef in France while 
living there with Jefferson, he was given his freedom by Jefferson, and 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 49

within a few years took his own life (Rinaldi 191; Gordon-Reed, The 
Hemingses of Monticello 551–54). Harriet moves from a protected estate 
where she was familiar with everyone she encountered to an urban 
area where she knows only one man (and with a knowledge colored by 
unfamiliar intense emotions). She moves from a site where her identity 
both protected her and provoked uncertainty for her to a site where 
she will assume a false identity. In her Introduction to Paradoxes of Au-
thenticity, Julia Straub defines the term in a way that applies especially 
to Rinaldi’s chosen closure, as well as the alternative closure this essay 
proposes: “Authenticity is not a key to happiness, a state of mind pow-
erful enough to iron out the ruptures in identity and life experience 
that afflict modern individuals. It can also denote conflict and needs 
to be seen as a term of crisis” (15). The anxiety Harriet expresses over 
leaving her family and the only home she has ever known for good 
certainly constitutes a “rupture” and a “crisis.” 

Beverly rebukes her for choosing to pass: “What’s festering inside 
me is that my only sister is passing into the white world and turning her 
back on her people” (141). Harriet’s response reveals how genuinely 
guilt ridden her decision makes her: “There’s days I know I’m nigra, 
and what’s mine is in those cabins down there. Days when I know it 
so much that I hate myself for wanting to leave, let alone pass!” (142) 
Families divided between those who did and did not pass: Harriet’s 
anxieties anticipate this new reality.24 Whites who abide by the legal and 
ethical code that stipulates that Harriet’s one-eighth bloodline defines 
her and denies her the freedom entitled to whites would perceive Har-
riet’s action as a form of deception. Beverly’s argument is that she is 
being dishonest towards the one-eighth blackness that should define 
her identity. Implicitly, Beverly argues that the Martha Randolphs of 
the culture should determine how and where Harriet should live. He 
presumes that Harriet will enter a privileged status and that by doing 
so she somehow harms those (such as the Mulberry Row residents) 
whose status is oppressed. But as this essay has demonstrated, Harriet 
has never been totally absorbed by either the black or white culture 
at Monticello. She is uncomfortable in the presence of whites, as her 
early remarks about serving Thomas Mann Randolph indicate. She is 
perturbed that Thruston insists on “talking like a field darkie who didn’t 
know any better” (20), and she both respects and remains skeptical 
about the folk stories and spells that Mammy Ursula taught her.25 She 
moves uneasily between two worlds, belonging in neither. If we under-
stand the ambivalence involved in Harriet’s choice, her decision to pass 



50 Brian Dillon

highlights a dimension that Kathleen Pfeiffer finds in other works of 
interracial literature: it “offers a problematic but potentially legitimate 
expression of American individualism, one that resists segregation’s 
one-drop logic and thereby undermines American’s consciously con-
structed ideology of racial difference” (2).

In her final conversation with her mother, Harriet is told that Bev-
erly passed. This complicates the reader’s efforts to understand Har-
riet’s often angry older brother. The historical record about Beverly 
is as insubstantial as it is about Harriet. Consequently, the reader is 
on unstable ground when judging the accuracy of Rinaldi’s closure. 
Rinaldi’s decision to depict Beverly as critical of Harriet’s decision to 
pass serves a meaningful purpose in her psychological development: 
she reaches her decision through intense internal struggle, without 
her older brother’s full support. Readers who move from Rinaldi’s 
conclusion to Madison’s memoir learn that Beverly and Harriet did 
pass, though Madison provides no indication that his two older siblings 
ever contacted one another again or if he ever saw them again after 
they left Monticello when he was a teenager.

Madison’s statements about Harriet create a lacuna that Rinaldi 
fleshes out in an authentic way with Thad Sandridge’s role: “Harriet 
married a white man in good standing in Washington City, whose name 
I could give, but will not, for prudential reasons” (qtd. in Gordon-Reed, 
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 246). Madison’s 1873 reminiscences 
indicate his knowledge of Harriet’s life post-Monticello is limited, that 
the color barrier he chose not to cross separated him from Harriet (and 
Beverly) for over half a century.26

She raised a family of children, and so far as I know they were 
never suspected of being tainted with African blood in the com-
munity where she lived or lives. I have not heard from her for ten 
years, and do not know whether she is dead or alive. She thought 
it to her interest, on going to Washington, to assume the role of 
a white woman, and by her dress and conduct as such I am not 
aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever 
been discovered. (qtd. in Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally 
Hemings 246)

Gordon-Reed parses the tone of this account, detecting Madison’s anger 
towards Harriet, his assumption that she was selfish, either in passing 
or in failing to maintain communication with her siblings, or both. 
The reference to Harriet’s children not being “tainted with African 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 51

blood” may be Madison’s sarcasm and resentment toward her decision 
to pass (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 45). Rinaldi again remains 
true to the testimony Madison provides in the one scene Harriet shares 
with her younger brothers as they discuss her leaving. Harriet’s state-
ments express a sweetness that she knows to be superficial: “‘Because 
of who we are, no matter where we go, we’ll always be together in our 
hearts.’ . . . They agreed with me, but I knew in my bones they were 
saying it just to make me happy. And I became more desolate than 
ever” (136–37). Madison then forecasts—accurately, according to the 
historical Madison’s memoir—that he will stay with their mother after 
they leave Monticello. The “World Elsewhere” that Harriet chooses to 
enter provokes nightmares for her as she anticipates her new life (178); 
readers may admire her bold spirit in making her move and passing 
despite her legitimate fears. 

Thruston’s role typifies Rinaldi’s ability to dramatize crucial features 
the historical record substantiates. He refers accurately to Jefferson’s 
debts that may be relieved to some degree by selling his slaves.27 In a 
dialogue with Harriet, Thruston accurately forecasts that Jefferson’s 
slaves risk being sold off and separated upon his death: he is alert to 
Jefferson’s significant financial debts and his old age, which compounds 
the urgency of his cautionary advice. Jefferson already sold Sally’s sister 
Thenia to James Monroe decades earlier and, Thruston asserts, all of 
the rest of his slaves are at risk: “Mister Bacon [Edmund Bacon, Jef-
ferson’s overseer] says the place’d be sold to pay the master’s debts. A 
bidder will come. . . . Put us on the block. For sale. ‘What’ll I get for 
this fine nigra gal? She has quality.’ They’ll sell us all. And a white man 
would pay a good price for a piece of property like you” (77, 82). While 
Thruston intended his speculative scene to terrify Harriet into fleeing 
Monticello, to step into her freedom as soon as possible, he exagger-
ated the threat to her personally. Harriet and her older brother Beverly 
were allowed to leave when they were twenty-one. Five of Jefferson’s 
slaves, including Harriet’s two younger brothers, were not sold: his will 
stipulated they be granted their freedom (Stanton 335n). Jon Kukla’s 
Mr. Jefferson’s Women contrasts the treatment following upon Jefferson’s 
death accorded to some members of the Hemings family with the more 
than 100 other slaves who called Monticello home: “With his daughter’s 
help, Jefferson finally rescued Sally Hemings and all their surviving 
children from slavery. Against some formidable obstacles—through 
thoughtful actions that implied respect, gratitude, and some measure 
of affection—their story ended in a way that suggests that promises had 
been made and were kept” (141). 



52 Brian Dillon

The residents of Mulberry Row, like Thruston, that is, the field 
hands, the nailmakers, the “superannuated” women (to use Jeffer-
son’s term from his Farm Book, which he applied to those slaves who 
could mind the children; Harriet puzzles over this term that implies 
Jefferson’s view of the material value of certain slaves [197]), and oth-
ers whom we may presume never entered the main house where the 
Hemings children were welcomed, were sold in January 1827. Families 
were divided. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the President’s grandson, 
served as executor: he “compared the wretched scene of the dispersal 
sale at Monticello to ‘a captured village in ancient times when all were 
sold as slaves’” (Kukla 141). Though Harriet’s narrative—Rinaldi’s 
novel—ends with her departure from Monticello in 1822, the reader 
may imagine the sale four and a half years later of Thruston, Jupiter, 
both girls whom Harriet observed flirting with Jupiter, and any of their 
offspring. But a reader must be aware of the historical record, must 
have knowledge that exceeds what Harriet comprehends, in order 
to claim her sentimental view of slavery is counteracted by the grim 
reality of Monticello slaves on the auction block that the novel merely 
anticipates but does not depict.

Sollors acknowledges “the structural ambivalence in plot lines that 
are brought to forced closure at a price: each resolution rests on the 
denial of another possibility that is being eliminated by the choice 
made” (358). Rinaldi chose not to close with a more definitive tragic 
ending: for example, she could have added an epilogue in which Har-
riet returns, perhaps under some form of disguise, on the January day 
in 1827 when the slaves at Monticello were put on the auction block. 
She could observe the “superannuated” Mammy Ursula, Thruston, and 
others purchased by new owners: their lack of choice over their futures 
combined with Harriet’s impotence at the sale would close the story on 
a deeply tragic—and authentic—note. Harriet’s qualified achievement 
of independence would be viewed in its rightful context against the 
lack of any choice for her former fellow slaves. Such an ending would 
be accurate to the historical circumstances and reinforce the rupture 
in Harriet’s choice to leave. 

Rinaldi’s Allusion to the Missouri Compromise and the Personal 
Consequences of Jefferson’s Grim Foresight 

In one exchange between Harriet and her mother, Sally discusses 
Jefferson’s despair following upon the debates in Congress over the 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 53

Missouri Compromise in 1819: this sets up the novel’s fourth historical 
inaccuracy. Jefferson senses that the national union achieved by allow-
ing slavery to be maintained (as discussed above on his writing of the 
Declaration) will eventually collapse. Sally explains: “He fears for the 
Union. . . . He talks about an imaginary line they are drawing across 
the country, with certain states slave and others free. He says a hideous 
evil is dividing America. He says the line will never be erased. Some 
Southern states threatened to leave the Union if Missouri wasn’t admit-
ted as a slave state. He says it fills him with terror” (98). Rinaldi allows 
Sally to speak lines that echo Jefferson’s 1820 letter to Senator-elect (of 
the new state of Maine) John Holmes: “this momentous question, like 
a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I consid-
ered it at once as the knell of the Union” (Letter 362).28 Terror is the 
appropriate anticipatory emotion for the Civil War, “which destroyed 
slavery, the political primacy of the South and the doctrine that the 
states were sovereign agents in the federal compact” (Ellis 293). But 
what Sally does not explain, and what Harriet does not know, is that 
Jefferson feared restrictions imposed by northerners on southerners’ 
expansion of slavery. He favored the interstate sale of slaves, without 
any restrictions from the North, and he feared the potential for a slave 
revolt in Virginia (Taylor 408). “The diffusion over a greater surface 
would make [slaves] individually happier, and proportionally facilitate 
the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burthen 
on a greater number of coadjutors,” his letter to Holmes stated (362). 
Sally’s account, as in the three previous examples of historic inaccura-
cies in this novel (in regard to Tom Hemings, George Wythe, and the 
composition of the Declaration), allows the reader to pity Jefferson for 
his moral stand while powerless to affect change. 

On a more personal level, the Civil War prompted Jefferson’s 
grandsons to fight against one another. Martha’s son George Wythe 
Randolph, who plays a silent, cameo role as a three-year-old sitting on 
his mother’s lap while she interrogates Harriet (125), served in the 
military for the Confederacy, including a stint as Jefferson Davis’ secre-
tary of war (Crawford 262). Two of Eston Hemings’ sons served in the 
Union Army, Beverly Jefferson and John Wayles Jefferson, who rose to 
the rank of Colonel in the Wisconsin Infantry (Stanton 274–80). Two of 
Madison Hemings’ sons crossed the color line and served in white units 
in Ohio regiments. “They would have known that had they joined one 
of the available Ohio black regiments, they would have been denied 
equal pay and equal access to advancement. . . . The Hemings brothers 



54 Brian Dillon

had identified themselves as ‘colored’ in their prewar lives. Thus every 
day spent with a thousand white soldiers must have been full of tension 
as well as the dread of discovery and its disagreeable consequences” 
(Stanton 273). In his memoirs, Madison reports that his son Thomas 
Eston Hemings died in the notorious Andersonville prison.

We do not know what any of the Hemings grandchildren thought 
of Jefferson. However arrogant it may seem to assess moral responsi-
bility from a position of roughly two hundred years, an examination 
of Jefferson’s role in the maintenance of slavery and the personal and 
national consequences of his actions—and inactions—undermines any 
naive sense of patriotic pride in the decisions of the Declaration author 
and third president. While Harriet’s view of Jefferson as deserving pity 
is authentic, considering her lack of knowledge of his various writings 
and his proximity to her, it is not a response that Jefferson deserves. By 
exploring the Hemings family’s life while at Monticello, with Rinaldi’s 
novel as a springboard, as well as the years after Jefferson’s death, a 
more richly informed response to the consequences of slavery, histori-
cally and for one young woman, will result. 

Notes

I thank Amanda Cockrell and the Children’s Literature anonymous readers for their 
patience and meaningful insights on drafts of this essay.

1Newell Bringhurst’s “A Popular but Controversial Biography” provides a useful 
overview of the response to Brodie’s book. See <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/
frontline/shows/jefferson/cron/1974brodie.html>. Six years before Brodie’s biography, 
Winthrop Jordan noted that Jefferson’s Farm Book indicated he was present at Monticello 
nine months prior to the birth of each of Sally Hemings’s children, though overall he 
was absent from Monticello for nearly two-thirds of the period when Sally Hemings 
conceived. Jordan acknowledges that the evidence available to him prevents any claims 
of certainty regarding the extent of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings. “The 
question of Jefferson’s miscegenation,” Jordan asserts, “is of limited interest and useful-
ness even if it could be satisfactorily answered” (467). Though Brodie refers respectfully 
to Jordan in the opening paragraph of her acknowledgements, she strongly disagrees 
with his view of “Jefferson’s miscegenation.”

2Jon Meacham provides thorough documentation on this matter (522–24). Joseph 
Ellis, a skeptic as late as 1998 regarding the relationship (see American Sphinx 303–07), 
asserted in 2000, “If history is an argument without end, skeptics and agnostics will still 
have a role to play in the debate. But the new scholarly consensus is that Jefferson and 
Hemings were sexual partners” (2). 

3The 2014 publication of Paula Byrne’s Belle and the release in the same year of 
the same-titled movie emphasizes the current interest in a true story of a light-skinned 
daughter of an African slave woman raised in the household of her politically powerful 
guardian. Dido Belle, whose father is a British naval captain, is raised by her great-uncle, 
the Earl of Mansfield, and comes of age at the same time that the Earl, who serves as 
England’s Lord Chief Justice, must render a verdict in the Zong appeal, the case in which 
a British slave-trading firm sought insurance company compensation for the human 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 55

“cargo” who had been tossed overboard on the Middle Passage in 1781. Granted, notable 
differences between the circumstances of Belle and Harriet Hemings exist: to note one 
crucial fact, Belle’s guardian wielded substantial political power, whereas Jefferson’s 
authority to continue or correct America’s treatment of slaves effectively ended a full 
decade prior to the events Rinaldi—through Harriet—narrates. Byrne frequently does 
remind her readers, though, that reasonable speculations must be relied upon when 
historical evidence is thin or nonexistent, as in this admission: “We simply don’t know 
whether Dido Belle was conceived by force, by mutual consensual passion, or as a ‘duty’ 
that might bring material benefits to her powerless mother” (86). Rinaldi might admit 
the same regarding Sally’s children. Byrne acknowledges that the “only way of glimps-
ing [Dido Belle’s] life is through the lives of others” (11). This parallels Rinaldi’s task 
in creating an authentic version of Harriet Hemings, who engages in many dialogues 
with others who attempt to influence her. The movie Belle takes considerable liberties 
with the available historical evidence and may be played off against Byrne’s book: time 
sequences are compressed, and Belle’s romantic life unfolds along with the debate about 
the Zong decision. This essay examines Harriet’s in-between status. Curiously, the movie 
indicates that Belle fluctuated in an uncomfortable in-between status in the Mansfield 
household, allowed neither to dine with the family nor eat in the kitchen with the ser-
vants, for example. Yet as a further reminder of the instability of all “texts,” whether a 
novel, a movie, or a historical document, Byrne asserts that proof is lacking that Belle 
“was normally excluded from family meals” (176). 

4Madison’s memoirs, which were first published in an Ohio newspaper in 1873, run 
for just four pages and are included as an appendix in Brodie’s biography, The Selected 
Writings of Thomas Jefferson, and Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Some 
caution should be used, though, if his brief text were brought into a classroom: Madison 
refers to Harriet’s life post-Monticello, and many readers would prefer not to know what 
he says until after finishing the novel.

5In 1804, Jefferson returned to Monticello from Washington in order to be with his 
fatally ill daughter Maria, the daughter Sally Hemings had escorted to France to visit 
Jefferson in 1787. “It is quite telling that he turned to Hemings during one of the most 
heartbreaking periods of his life, when he was a veritable portrait of emotional devasta-
tion. Madison Hemings’s conception in the harrowing six weeks Jefferson was at home 
to attend to his daughter shows that this extremely sensitive man sought the comfort of 
the familiar with the person who understood better than anyone besides his daughter 
Martha what Maria had meant to him” (Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello 591). 

6For example, in an early scene Harriet intends to exit the house by walking past the 
underground kitchen, which would seem to place her as emerging from the servants’ 
rooms under the south terrace, in contradiction to the later references to her third 
floor room (15). Sally, in the kitchen, sees Harriet and tells her to serve a tray of food 
to Thomas Mann Randolph in the dining room. Together, mother and daughter move 
“through the underground corridor” and then Harriet alone ascends “the stairway to 
the hall outside the dining room” (17, 19). (The website www.Monticello.org provides a 
virtual tour of the house and enables viewers to track many of Harriet’s movements.) 
Harriet conducts five dialogues with Jefferson, and for four of these the location is 
specified: two in his sanctum sanctorum, one overlooking the east balcony, and one by 
the carriage as she leaves Monticello. (Another exchange is brief, with the location of 
their meeting not specified.) Rinaldi’s depiction of people’s circulation in and around 
the great house may seem contrived at times. Typically, though, the author stipulates 
why Harriet enters a specific location, such as when Sally directs her to move from the 
kitchen up to the entrance hall overlooking the east balcony to speak with Jefferson (111) 
or to serve food to Thomas Mann Randolph, or when Randolph directs her to serve tea 
to Thad Sandridge (151–53): these set-up meetings are presented as highly unusual, as 
are Harriet’s exchanges with Jefferson in his sanctum sanctorum. 



56 Brian Dillon

7On Harriet’s ancestry, see Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello and Stanton, 
“Those Who Labor for My Happiness.” On slaves bequeathed to Jefferson upon his marriage, 
see Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello 109 and Ellis 151. The telescope incident is 
recalled in Meacham 139–40. Rinaldi relied, of course, on Brodie and earlier authors.

8On Callender, see Ellis 218–20, Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 
and Meacham 378–80. On Bankhead, see Stanton 182, Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of 
Monticello 418–19, and Kierner 168–69. 

9Though pursuing this topic may be too “weighty” (to again use Honey’s term) for YA 
readers, the following information certainly is useful. According to Lucia Stanton, “The 
extreme imbalance of power in a slave society made the whole idea of consent, when it 
concerned a female slave and a free white man, especially if he owned her, an absurdity. 
Nevertheless, it is apparent that interracial sex in Virginia and elsewhere in the South 
took every form from the most cruel exploitation to the most enduring affection” (177). 
Alan Taylor notes, “No law punished masters who raped slave women or kept them as 
concubines. Neighbors did little more than gossip so long as a master kept a low profile 
and did not marry a slave partner: a model of discretion set by Jefferson” (77). 

10See Brodie 368 and Ellis 135–36. Though acknowledging the “anxiety and rage 
that afflicted him in middle age,” Cynthia Kierner adopts a more empathetic view: she 
notes his debts, both inherited and created during his marriage to Martha; his lack of a 
dowry for some of his younger daughters, which inhibited their marriage prospects; the 
viciousness of his son-in-law Bankhead; and the difficult position he maintained as the 
son-in-law of Jefferson while residing at Monticello (77). Barbara Chase-Riboud’s 1979 
best-selling novel Sally Hemings piles up the references to Thomas Mann Randolph as a 
drunken fool accruing severe financial debts. Curiously, Rinaldi does not refer to this 
novel in her bibliography.

11As Randolph should have been aware before he began the first of his three one-year 
terms of office, the authority of Virginia’s governor “had been clearly and deliberately 
limited by the framers of the Constitution of 1776” (Gaines 116). Thus his proposal may 
have been evident even to Randolph as more provocative than practical. By modern 
standards, it certainly could not be labeled progressive: fearing violent slave rebellions, 
“he suggested that ‘a fair proportion’ of slave youths in the different parts of Virginia 
be manumitted every year. To accelerate the process, he recommended further that 
‘a double proportion of females’ over males be released annually.” He wanted “those 
manumitted under his program [to] be sent to the island of Santo Domingo, which was 
‘sufficiently near to admit of emigration at little cost,’ and where a self-governing com-
munity of liberated Negroes was already in existence” (Gaines 125). 

12See Brodie, 389–90 and Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 80.
13See Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 101–02.
14Gordon-Reed offers these valuable insights that apply not only to Harriet but to her 

mother, her aunts, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother: “Throughout their 
time at Monticello, none of the Hemings women married men from ‘down the moun-
tain’ who worked in the fields. They were either in long-term liaisons with high-status 
white males or white workers at the plantation, or they married household servants from 
other plantations who were also mixed race or, in the case of Critta Hemings [Sally’s 
older sister], a free black man. One could say that these women had no choice regard-
ing the white men, even the men who did not own them. It is also possible, of course, 
that given a choice they would have preferred white mates. That might be a disturbing 
thought from a modern perspective, with our knowledge of slavery and views about 
the value of solidarity in the face of oppression. This possibility, however, must not be 
discounted outright, especially in light of the behavior of some of the Hemings children 
and grandchildren” (Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello 121).

15Madison’s memoirs assert that Sally was impregnated by Jefferson while in France, 
that she delivered the child after they returned to Virginia, and that the child died soon 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 57

thereafter. Also, Gordon-Reed asserts that her analysis “tended to support Madison 
Hemings’s version of his family story: SH had a child in 1790, but that child did not live. 
There are no records of a child named Thomas linked to SH in TJ’s Farm Book, even 
in the years before SH and TJ’s relationship was exposed to the public.” She also exam-
ined the records of vaccinations against small pox that Jefferson maintained: “Jefferson 
vaccinated his children Beverley and Harriet in 1802, and Madison and Eston in 1816. 
All four are listed as children of Sally Hemings. There is no Hemings child named Tom 
on the list, as he certainly would have been had he existed. Again, these vaccinations 
began well before Callender ever wrote about a child named Tom at Monticello.” See 
Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello 718–19n. 

16Tom is referred to on pp. 13–14, 42, 71, 112–15, 118, 120, 123, and 157.
17An instructor intent on challenging Rinaldi’s depiction of Jefferson in this exchange 

that refers to Tom, or other scenes, could turn to any of the Jefferson documents already 
noted (from his Letters and Notes) in order to position Jefferson’s own writing against this 
fictional version. This would allow young readers, especially, to assess Rinaldi’s accuracy 
and to begin to recognize the slipperiness of historical “truth.” 

18See Meacham 166–67, 587n. Gordon-Reed refers to a balloon flight in Petersburg, 
Virginia, in perhaps 1834 that might be attributed to Beverly. Jefferson’s own interest 
in balloon flights extends over decades and is well documented. “By today’s standards 
ballooning may seem a trivial activity, a thing of sport. During Jefferson’s era it was 
considered a scientific venture with travel and even military implications. It would be 
intriguing if he passed his interest in aerial transportation on to Beverly and Madison 
Hemings, all the more so if Beverly undertook to become a balloonist” (Thomas Jefferson 
and Sally Hemings 152).

19The circumstances of the trial of Wythe’s grandnephew are more complicated than 
Jefferson’s “lesson” to Beverly indicates. The forensic reports by three of Richmond’s 
leading doctors who performed an autopsy of Wythe proved to be incompetent: they did 
not establish that he had been poisoned (Chadwick 195–215). “They did not perform any 
of the standard tests to discover arsenic and even ignored the simple 240-year-old taste 
test that would have at least alerted them to a poison of some kind. The autopsies that 
should have conclusively proved that arsenic was responsible for the deaths of Michael 
Brown and George Wythe were, in short, colossal forensics failures” (Chadwick 205). 
Also, Virginia’s governor at the time shared privileged information with the defense 
counsel, which also weakened the prosecution’s case (Chadwick 214).

20When Beverly left in 1822, there is no evidence “that Jefferson tried to bring him 
back” (Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 26).

21Had Wythe died and Michael Brown lived, Jefferson would have faced a circumstance 
that may have contrasted with how he treated his four Hemings’s children: “How would 
Jefferson have carried out Wythe’s final request about his involvement with Michael 
Brown? Would he really have brought the African American boy to Monticello or to 
the President’s House to continue his studies, or would he have used the money from 
Wythe’s estate to hire tutors for him? Brown at Monticello would indeed have been 
an interesting and problematic sight” (Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses at Monticello 594).

22Delegates to the Continental Congress “eliminated entirely Jefferson’s long pas-
sage on the slave trade. In the notes he kept of Congress’s proceedings, Jefferson said 
that change was made ‘in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia,’ which had never 
tried to restrain the slave trade and, indeed, wanted it to continue, with the consent of 
‘Northern brethren’ who had few slaves but were sensitive on the issue because they had 
been ‘pretty considerable carriers of them to others.’ Maybe so, but the very acknowledg-
ment that colonists had been in the past or were at present willing participants in the 
slave trade undermined the assertion that ‘the Christian king of Great Britain’ was alone 
responsible for that outrage on humanity” (Maier 146).



58 Brian Dillon

23The Farm Book has been examined in ways that Jefferson could not possibly have 
anticipated: “It is, in fact, highly unlikely that it ever occurred to Jefferson that his 
record of the lives of his slaves would become the subject of scholarly interest, even a 
passion among some—that his slaves’ lives would be chronicled and followed in minute 
detail, the interest in them often unmoored from any interest in him. . . . In Jefferson’s 
monumentally patriarchal and self-absorbed view, one shared by his fellow slave-owning 
planters, this was Oh, the responsibilities I have! Here is what I have done and have yet to do for 
all ‘my family’” (Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello 16).

24Among a variety of outcomes that resulted when some member(s) of a family chose 
to pass, Stanton identifies the following: “Important life passages like births, marriages, 
and deaths became painful reminders of family division, and only those remaining in 
the black community came to family reunions” (238).

25Though she appears in only three brief episodes when Harriet seeks her at her 
Mulberry Row cabin, Mammy Ursula’s role deserves attention. This “superannuated” 
woman avoids the race-segregated Sunday Baptist services where the white minister 
tells the slaves to obey their masters: this hints at her positive mentoring role (53). She 
lived at Monticello even before Jefferson and his wife first moved there (229). She not 
only validates Harriet’s decision to leave but seems to support her decision to pass, as 
though she may live vicariously through Harriet: “I’se part of this place. But you ain’t. 
You, chile, is part of somethin’ else. Somethin’ new. Out there. Go. However you wants. 
For all of us” (emphasis added, 229). 

26Eston lived as a black man near Madison in Ohio until he moved his family to 
Wisconsin, passed for white, and changed his name to E.H. Jefferson. In his memoirs, 
Madison said, “Eston married a colored woman in Virginia, and moved from there to 
Ohio, and lived in Chillicothe [Ohio] several years. In the fall of 1852 he removed to 
Wisconsin, where he died a year or two afterwards. He left three children” (qtd. in 
Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 246). Note all the information that is 
missing, including the vagueness—and inaccuracy—of the death date: Eston died in 
1856. There is no follow-up regarding what Eston and his family did after they left Ohio, 
no awareness that Eston’s sons ran Madison, Wisconsin’s oldest hotel or that they served 
in the military during the Civil War (Stanton 274–79). The implication seems to be that 
communication between Madison and his brother and his brother’s children ceased 
after Eston left Ohio and passed.

27Many biographers address the linked issue of Jefferson’s expensive tastes and sub-
stantial debts. Jack McLaughlin comments, “In spite of his exacting eye for the details of 
income and expenditure, he seldom stepped back to observe his economic landscape. 
Because he notched each financial tree, he thought he knew the forest; until it was too 
late, he had little idea of his net worth.” Though he received an annual salary of $25,000 
while serving as president, it apparently was not evident to him “that he was living well 
beyond his income during his eight years in the presidency, and that a day of reckoning 
must come” (378). Gordon-Reed offers this practical opinion that applies to the conse-
quences experienced by both Martha Randolph and her children and Sally’s children: 
“Parents are expected to attend to the well-being of their children; it is, in fact, seen as 
their highest duty. Jefferson’s handling, or, more accurately, not handling, of his finances 
in the final two decades of his life conflicted with that duty. Why wouldn’t Jefferson’s 
actions on this score count as examples of insufficient regard for his family?” (Thomas 
Jefferson and Sally Hemings 132).

28Curiously, the title of John Chester Miller’s book, which Rinaldi “borrows,” is a 
metaphor derived from this same letter Jefferson wrote in 1820 in regard to the Mis-
souri controversy (and both Miller and Rinaldi include a brief passage from the letter 
in their epigraphs). He believed slavery would only end if the slaves were expatriated. 
“But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him 
go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” He closes his letter with a 



Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record 59

remarkable emotional mixture of self-congratulation, sorrow, and blame: “I regret that 
I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation 
of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away 
by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, 
that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they 
will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than 
by scission, they would pause before they would perpetuate this act of suicide on them-
selves, and of treason against the hopes of the world” (Letter to John Holmes 362). Is it 
too extravagant a point to claim he foresees the violent division within his own country 
and among his own descendants?

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