President Tom and "Dashing Sally"

A few years ago, while we were watching a humdrum programme on TV (I would guess, from the context, that it was "Who Do You Think You Are?") that my mother pointed out to me an obvious yet seldom-acknowledged fact. The subject of the documentary, a black Brit with roots in the Caribbean, was distressed to learn that he or she (I can't for the life of me remember who it was!) was descended not only from slaves - a fact which, after all, they must always have know - but also from slave owners. Mum, in her blunt, observant way, pointed out that anyone with eyes could see that this had been the norm throughout the Americas, as most African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans look distinctly different from the modern-day inhabitants of West Africa - and, one must presume, from their own ancestors who were shipped to American plantation during the days of the slave trade. She was, of course, completely right. In the United States, miscegenation (described by Barack Obama as an "ugly, humpbacked word", and at the time of slavery usually denoting the result of a white man taking advantage of an enslaved woman) seems to have been something of a Southern tradition. The most infamous example, of course, is the alleged liaison between President Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, which is thought to have resulted in four surviving children (three of whom, interestingly, ultimately made the decision to "pass for white" and move into the white community).

For anyone who wants to know the whole story, Annette Gordon-Reed's "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy" summarises all the known evidence for and against Jefferson's paternity. (Let me say in passing that despite being written before a DNA test proved that at least one of Sally Hemings' children was fathered by a male from the Jefferson line, the evidence for the prosecution is pretty compelling. All of Sally's children were conceived when Jefferson was home at Monticello -a remarkable coincidence given that he was a national political figure who spent ten to eleven months of the year away from home. The boys bore a striking resemblance to the former President, in one case so striking that visitors to Monticello were frequently visibly startled. All four children were freed at the age of twenty-one or thereabouts - and were among a handful of slaves to be set free during Jefferson's lifetime). In short, while it is hard to see how the charge can ever be proved irrefutably, given the evidence, it takes quite an imaginative leap not to come to the conclusion that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings' children.

However, Gordon-Reed, a law professor whose clear, logical style of exposition clearly owes much to her profession, goes further than that. First of all, I was impressed by her objective, non-judgemental tone througout. As a black woman whose ancestors presumably suffered the same injustices as Sally and her family, one might expect her to be angry - heck, I was angry - at the abuses that happened under the system of slavery. However, none of that comes across in her writing. She even addresses the thorny question of why Sally might have believed such a liaison to be in her best interests and why an affair with her master might well have been - well, "a good career option" isn't quite the phrase, but a good opportunity nonetheless. In short, she does well to avoid presentism and instead displays a remarkable ability to comprehend the very different mindset that held sway during the period she is writing about.

If Gordon-Reed's primary objective was to provide a clear-headed examination of the evidence for and against Jefferson's paternity of Sally Hemings' children, then her secondary objective was equally important; what is more, since I was already acquainted with the Jefferson/Hemings story, this was the real revelation for me. Gordon-Reed demonstrates that historians, from the 19th century to our own time, have sought to exonerate Jefferson from the charges laid against him - and, in doing so, have demonstrated clear bias in terms of the sources and information they deem relevant to the understanding of their subject. Above all, they have routinely discounted sources based on the oral testimonies of blacks (former slaves at Monticello, for example, as well as Madison Hemings, the alleged second son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings) on the grounds that oral sources and family tradition are hopelessly unreliable in terms of providing accurate historical information. At the same time, however, they have been perfectly happy to accept similar reports from white sources (for example, rumours that did the rounds in the vicinity of Monticello, the oral testimony of Jefferson's former overseer - who was not even present at Monticello until after the birth of Hemings' last child - and the family tradition recounted by Jefferson's grandchildren.) "An American Controversy", then, is not merely a clear-headed reexamination of what was arguably America's first presidential sex scandal, but also an exposition of the source-related bias inherent in so much of what is written about the antebellum South.

Writerly naval-gazing

And now for something totally different - a few musings, not from the point of view of a reader, but from the point of view of a writer. I don't know why - maybe it's the analytical mode I've become locked into as a result of working full-time on my thesis - but lately I've been in an unusually reflective mood, and every time I pick up my pen to write I find myself thinking about how I operate as a writer. Here are some of my observations:

1) I am fascinated to an unusual degree by other times and places, and often merely reading about them doesn’t do the trick. I really need to know what it felt like to live, say, in 1920s America or in Russia during the Second World War. Short of acquiring a Tardis, the closest I’ll ever get is trying to “write myself there”, and I think that’s why I do it.

2) Inspiration is not a problem for me (touch nearest available wooden surface!) At the moment, my writing notebooks – yes, I have several – are full of potential plots for stories and novels, in various stages of development. Moreover, once I start writing, these have a tendency to spiral off in all sorts of unexpected directions, often becoming unmanageable monsters in the process! No, my problem is buckling down to the hard work of actually writing a story, and then editing and polishing it until I have a final version. I’m too embarrassed to say how many half-finished projects are currently inhabiting my bedside cabinet.

3) My strongest source of inspiration is music. Quite a few of my stories – and certainly some of my favourites – have begun when I was listening to a particular piece of music (usually when walking home late at night) and a germ of an idea entered my brain. This then sprouted a plot and characters and became a story – or in one case, a novella.

4) I don’t seem to be able to write “anonymous” characters. No matter how short or insignificant their appearance in the story, they all seem to end up with a name, background, motivations – the lot.

5) I’m a busy grad student, and logically speaking, writing should interfere with my scholarly life and make me less productive. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I find that when I use my free time well, work just kind of “slots into place – so when I spend an hour or two every day writing and generally being productive, I’m just as efficient during my eight or so hours of study.

Bluestockings

I have to confess to a strange, somewhat perverse prediliction: I have a weakness for what you might call "vintage sexism". While the racial attitudes of bygone eras leave me more nauseated than amused, I find hilarious comments from Victorian and Edwardian chaps along the lines of "The fairer sex should not tax their minds unduly with education, or their reproductive organs will wither and die." (Needless to say, their modern-day equivalents, the posts on newspaper comment pages and the BBC's "Have Your Say" section that read along the lines of "Women can regurgitate facts but they lack the incisive analytical minds men have", all posted by men who appear to spend their days spurting verbal diarrhoea all over the Internet, are less funny - to say nothing of the repulsive attitudes towards women's education still found in some parts of the world).

Anyway, to return to my initial subject, it was my amusement at the sexist attitudes of the past, coupled with my belated realisation that my own current institution (Cambridge University) did not grant degrees to women until 1948, that led me to pick up Jane Robinson's "Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education". I expected to find it fascinating, and it was - I raced through it over the weekend, and by the end I was still desperate to know more. As a women who has gone through the education system to postgraduate level without my gender being an issue or even being mentioned (the only sexism I've ever encountered was at Oxford, and that came from old members of my college unhappy about the negative impact the admission of women had had on the performance of Trinity's rugby team - an infrequent and minor annoyance rather than a persistent obstacle to my enjoyment of the university experience), it was truly humbling to think about those pioneering young women who challenged the universities, the Establishment and often their families as well, to achieve something to which their intelligence and ambition should have entitled them automatically. I was left wondering: would I have possessed the courage and spark to do likewise, orwould I have resigned myself to a life of respectable but dull domesticity, circumscribed by the narrow limits of home, family and propriety? I don't know - and reading "Bluestockings" reminded me how lucky I am that I never need to find out. I want to put a copy of this book into the hands of every girl or young woman who's ever told me that she's not a feminist, or that women's lives weren't so bad back in the days before feminism. This was a welcome reminder of just how far we've come.

Looking back at New Labour

I'm writing this just three days before our next General Election here in the UK - in which , despite widespread popular mistrust of the Conservative leader David Cameron and the recent surge in support for the Liberal Democrats, New Labour is expected to lose power after thirteen years. The upcoming election was not the reason I chose to pick up Andrew Rawnsley's "Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour" during a few days off and a recent trip to London. Nevertheless, this look back at the halcyon days of Labour's first term proved to be an excellent choice, dredging up a lot of forgotten memories from the time when I first became interested in politics and rekindling my interest in local UK politics just when I needed it most.

The General Election of 1 May 1997, in which Tony Blair swept into 10 Downing Street at the head of a landslide victory for Labour - is the first election I have any memory of at all. (In fact, despite being only 11 at the time, I even got a chance to participate after a fashion. Our school held a "mock election", in which sixth formers signed up to be "candidates" for the major parties and presented their case during assembly. Everyone in the school then "voted" during break time on polling day. Although I voted Green - presumably because I wanted to be different from everybody else - our school bucked the national trend with a crushing defeat of Labour by the Tories, presumably because most girls voted for whoever Daddy supported). In spite of this early experience of the thrill of democracy, it wasn't until a couple of years later that I really started to get interested in politics, and my early memories of that burgeoning interest are intimately bound up with the personalities and events of Labour's first term. While the big names of the pre-1997 era (Michael Heseltine, Roy Hattersley, Neil Kinnock) seem to me like figures from some long-distant past, the cast of Rawnsley's book (Robin Cook, Clare Short, Mo Mowlam, Peter Mandelson, even the hapless Ron Davies with his embarrassing nocturnal safari on Clapham Common) are very familiar indeed. These were the individuals who - in all their power-hungry, feuding, voter-punching, badger-spotting glory - got me interested in politics in the first place, and "Servants of the People" provided both a nostalgia trip and a much-needed fleshing out of many of the incidents and scandals of which I had gained only a very sketchy (and no doubt tabloid-influenced) idea at the time.

As a behind-the-scenes account of the early years of the New Labour government, then, Rawnsley's book looks unlikely to be surpassed - although an electoral implosion on Thursday could give birth to a few explosive autobiographies (by the likes of Brown and Mandelson) which might provide fodder for an expanded edition. As a guide to the current state of the party, it is rather more limited. For one thing, most of the events it describes happened a decade or more ago. Many of Rawnsley's protagonists have either faded into the political background (Clare Short, John Prescott, David Blunkett - even, at least in theory, Tony Blair himself) or, in the case of Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam, departed this life altogether. Of the major players, so far as I can recall only Brown, Mandelson and Jack Straw are still prominent members of the Government - although I will confess I did experience a minor thrill whenever I came across a prominent member of the present Cabinet (David Miliband, Harriet Harman, Ed Balls) in an earlier incarnation as a policy planner or lowly aide.

Moreover, I don't think that Rawnsley's focus on the bitter intra-party feuds during Labour's first term (notably the infamous division between Blairites and Brownites), relevant though it is to a study of that period, is particularly helpful when it comes to understanding the problems afflicting the party today. I see these as stemming from a combination of factors including a massive loss of credibility after Iraq, the economic crisis, Brown's personal shortcomings as a leader, and (in my opinion very significantly) the malaise that inevitably afflicts any government that has been in power for thirteen years. In order to get some perspective on the current state of the Labour Party, I will need to pick up Rawnsley's more recent book, "The End of the Party", just as soon as a library near me thinks to obtain a copy.

The book is, however, well worth reading for two main reasons. First of all, New Labour's rise to power changed the British political landscape, just as Thatcherism had done during the 1980s. If you don't believe me, take a look at the current leaders of the Liberal Democrats (Nick Clegg) and the Conservatives (David Cameron). Both men, particularly Cameron, have adopted a public persona that owes a lot to Tony Blair. Secondly, "Servants of the People" really is a goldmine of useful - and often hilarious - anecdotes. Ron Davies' nocturnal mishap on Clapham Common is here, of course, as are other New Labour "classics" such as Euan Blair's drunken post-GCSE revels and John Prescott's infamous left hook on the campaign trail. My favourite, however, was the reminder of a gloriously awful conference speech by the grand old lady of the Conservative Party, Baroness Thatcher herself. Brits who were above the minimum age of political awareness in 2001 will no doubt remember her "Mummy Returns" speech. As Rawnsley puts it, "the former Conservative Prime Minister surely had no idea that she was comparing herself to the disinterred monster of a horror movie." And on that note, I'm off to search for the clip on YouTube.