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sales and artistry to that of Frederick Douglass, was the tradition’s first true man of letters, as Joyce Carol Oates recently pointed out. Brown published in a wide variety of genres, including poetry, travel writing, drama, and history, as well as fiction. Clotel ’s action commences with the auction of Jefferson’s mistress, as well as their two daughters, including Clotel herself. Clotel is later sold by the father of her child, escapes from a slave dealer only to be captured again (in the midst of Nat Turner’s rebellion), is transferred to prison, where she escapes yet again—only to leap to her death in the Potomac rather than succumb to her captors.
    To say that Brown was obsessed with the rumors of Jefferson’s relation to Sally Hemings would be an understatement: Brown
would revise and republish the story four times, once as a play in 1858, then, greatly revised, under new titles in 1860, 1864, and 1867, including a widely circulated serialized version. When Robert Purvis rose to speak about Jefferson at the anti-slavery meeting, it was Brown’s version of the Jefferson legend that he had in mind. But Jefferson’s relationship to Hemings and her children has been the stuff of the African-American oral tradition for two hundred years; even black historians addressed the subject before the recent controversy manifested itself in the works of Fawn Brodie and Annette Gordon-Reid. Indeed, I first encountered the story of Jefferson and Hemings in an old copy of Ebony magazine, dated 1954, and entitled “Thomas Jefferson’s Negro Grandchildren,” widely discussed in Mr. Coombie Carroll’s barbershop in Keyser, West Virginia, even then.
    Despite the titillating pleasure of oral reports of the Hemings-Jefferson liaison, it was Jefferson’s Notes that preoccupied black and
white abolitionists alike, containing as it did too many adamant allegations of black mental inferiority to be ignored. In fact, his statements acted as catalysts in sparking refutations of his opinions. The heated debate of black capacity and of the black’s place in nature would continue well into the twentieth century.
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    Jefferson kept a commonplace book. It was edited and published by Gilbert Chinard in 1928. One of Jefferson’s favorite citations from Horace, included therein, reads as follows:
    And, again, you cannot yourself bear to be in your company for an hour, you cannot employ your leisure aright, you shun yourself, a runaway vagabond, seeking now with wine, and now with sleep, to escape anxiety. In vain that black consort dogs and follows your flight.
    If anxiety—figured here as “that black consort”—dogged Jefferson’s steps relentlessly,
then it can also be said that Mister Jefferson is the consort who has dogged African-American politics and letters. No Founding Father has been the subject of more speeches, essays, and books in the African-American tradition than Thomas Jefferson. No other figure has been more reviled yet, paradoxically, more revered; and no other figure has had a greater shaping impact upon both the discourse of black rights and the evolution of the African-American literary tradition than Thomas Jefferson.
    The transformation of Jefferson’s image into that of a motivator took its most curious and ironic form in the work of David Walker, whose Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America was published in Boston in 1829. It was, the scholar Peter P. Hinks tells us, “one of the nineteenth century’s most incisive and vivid indictments of American racism and the insidious undermining it wrought on the black psyche.”

    Walker was never a slave; he was born to a free black woman in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1796. In 1825 he moved to Boston, where he established a second-hand clothing business.