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FREEDOMWAYS                 SECOND QUARTER 1980

makes Hemings passive and docile.

At age fourteen, Hemings was ordered to accompany Polly, Jefferson's daughter, on a trip to Paris to join the then Ambassador Jefferson. Hemings became the Ambassador's servant also, despite her newly acquired status of freedom on French soil where slavery was outlawed. The U.S. Ambassador was forty years old and Sally Hemings fifteen when she dreamed of freedom and studied the French language. Her brother James, the only well-developed Afro-American character, encouraged his sister, only to witness the slave-holding Jefferson defy French law. Chase-Riboud writes, "The feeble groping for James's dream had been erased by the force of a man's body and a man's will." Jefferson raped Sally Hemings and at this point the young woman became an erotic legend. The significance of the sexual exploitation of women did not escape later writers such as Dr. Du Bois. He commented,

I shall forgive the white South much in its final judgment day: I shall forgive its slavery, for slavery is a world-old habit. . .but one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this world nor the world to come: its wanton and continued and persistent insulting of the Blach womanhood which it sought and seeks to prostitute to its lust. . . .

Jefferson, who wrote a clause advocating the freeing of African slaves in the Declaration of Independence, was unwilling to free his concubine even after his death. This leads me to doubt Sally Hemmings as a love story. Also, Hemings only returned to Monticello after Jefferson's promises of "extraordinary privileges" for his pregnant concubine. Sally Hemings survived her concubinage and achieved the goal of freedom for some of her children. This is a valuable book, although the concubine's rage has been muted by the gentleness of its author.

Carole E. Gregory

TWO COLLECTIONS OF UNUSUAL STRENGTH

SNAKE-BACK SOLOS: SELECTED POEMS 1969-1977. By Quincy Troupe. I. Reed Books, 1925 Seventh Ave., New York 10026. 80 pages. $5.95.
CHANCES ARE FEW. By Lorenzo Thomas. Blue Wind Press. Berkeley, Calif. 116 pages. $5.45

QUINCY TROUPE's Snake-Back Solos and Lorenzo Thomas's Chance are Few are beautiful new collections of poems published by alternative presses. Troupe and Thomas are extensively published poets, both in their thirties, who have played prominent roles on the black literary stage for several years. Their individual

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