TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever
This post was originally written as a critical response for my modern theater class in February 2020. This is less of a review and more of a discussion of how the play uses, or rather chooses not to use, its historical context.
TW: discussion of sexual abuse and power imbalance
While TJ Loves Sally 4Ever discusses the concept of inheritance for women, especially women of color, I think the play failed to recognize the full historical gravity of the events it sought to portray. Although the play seeks to make the viewer uncomfortable and angry through the discussion of racism and sexual harassment, I believe that taking its history and source material into consideration, it does not go far enough.
While the play spoke to gender roles and the long history of sexual abuse, it did not even begin to touch on why it is that we know Sally Hemings’ name from our history books while many of the other women whose stories we inherit have been forgotten. At a certain point in the play shortly after TJ first tries to make a move on Sally, two actors roll in a white board from offstage with the name Sally Hemings on it. At this moment, Sally in the play says something along the lines of “do you know this name?” followed by, something along the lines of “if you haven’t, look it up.” In this moment, they forfeit a opportunity to teach, in exchange for telling a new story that is related but far from the story’s namesake. By not absolutely assuring audience’s familiarity with Sally Hemings, it dismisses the importance of the connection almost entirely. By using her name in this way to create an example of her and the women like her, I believe there is a responsibility to uphold her story and identity that I don’t think this play adhered to.
We are drawn to retell her story because the history of Sally Hemings is a powerful one. She came to Thomas Jefferson as a product of his marriage. After his wife died, Thomas Jefferson used Hemings for sex for years. He fathered all 6 of Hemings’ children, something that only recently the estate acknowledged as fact, and only recently began to recognize her ancestors as those of the founding father. Also notable is while she was considered a possession of Martha Jefferson, genetically speaking she was also her half-sister which means Hemings’ mother was sexually abused by Martha Jefferson’s father. As Sally Hemings was known to be one-fourth of African descent, this gives us another piece of context—we know her mother was sexually abused, and it is possible that her mother’s mother was as well. In this, the conversation of inheritance in the play fails to recognize one of the most important aspects inherent in the story of Sally Hemings. That is, for one woman to make the history books, there exists a long line of women whose names we have forgotten and even then, it is merely under the example of powerful men. That being said, beneath the plot of this play is the inherent erasure of women’s stories that does not even begin to reach the surface.
Another thing that is important to the history that this production aims to speak to is the status of Thomas Jefferson. In the play, TJ, his “ancestor of sorts,” is portrayed as a publicly disgusting caricature with a low level of intelligence. This is far from the depiction of Thomas Jefferson that we have come to understand. He was an aristocrat, the ambassador to France, the creator of the state department, instrumental in the creation of the constitution and the third president ever of the United States which, less than 250 years after its foundation, has grown, for better or worse, to be the leading example for democratic institutions on a world scale. Not to mention his reach far exceeds history books in that he is the namesake for colleges, monuments, major city streets and his face is on our currency. In this, once again, this production fails to speak to the gravity of the history represented in Sally Hemings. While the power differential between a dean of a school and a student is large and disturbing for the play’s audience, it hardly covers the full range of which women and women of color in particular have been subject to the wills of larger than life, brilliant, wicked, and powerful men.
With this, I have little doubt that this piece of theatre played it safe in regard to how it portrayed this story in relation to its historical context. It addressed and combatted the all too common instances of sexual assault at the hands of a white man with power at the expense of a black woman with little to none—something that its small Brooklyn audience would have no qualms with. In the end, the play asks us to step into a better future, without fully exploring the past we are coming from. In doing this, by creating a story that is all too common out of the influence of one that is exceptional in so many ways, it dulled the real questions that exist in this understanding of history through the eyes of Sally Hemings’ story. What does it mean now, as this play is being put on, in 2020 (an election year and 232 years after the ratification of the constitution) that this was one of the men who established these government institutions and traditions? What does it mean that his name and face still occupy so many of our public spaces? If Sally Hemings is just one of these women who contribute to this inheritance of the story of sexual violence brought about by powerful men that seems almost too relatable to a modern population, who else’s stories have we been failing to acknowledge and have let get swept away in the revisions of history?
