America's First Daughter: A Novel(192)
Tom tormenting Patsy in her time of grief and instigating grave site drama is a matter of record. And while we cannot know what Jefferson’s daughter saw when she came upon her father the night of her mother’s death—for she wrote that she dared not describe it—Jefferson’s letters reveal that he was suicidal at this time.
Pistols didn’t seem a far stretch and dovetailed nicely into the equally strange-but-true encounter he’d later have with a man who’d just blown off his head.
As for Patsy’s estrangement from her husband, it’s impossible to know whether Tom beat her, but we know that he beat her children. And those same children said that she suffered from his sullen moods and angry fancies. It is our belief that his documented behavior fits the pattern of a classic abuser, so we adopted that interpretation and faithfully followed the chronological deterioration of their marriage, stemming largely from financial problems, alcohol, resentments, and possible mental illness.
But we couldn’t help but notice that Patsy’s daughter Ellen mysteriously blamed the marital trouble—in part—upon Tom’s hatred for Patsy’s best friends.
William Short might’ve been one of them.
We confess to a reckless disregard for the almanac and a certain ruthlessness in condensing our heroine’s story. Patsy’s life was a long and full one, shared with one of the most iconic men of all time, a man who wrote so many letters that we know where he was, and what he was doing, almost every day of his adult life. In fact, some of his biographers required several volumes to tell the tale. Entire books are dedicated to the flight from Monticello and the Paris years alone. And because Patsy’s life was so tied up in her father’s, it was a challenge to tell her story in the space of a novel.
Extremely painful omissions had to be made. There simply wasn’t enough room to explore all the fascinating people in Patsy’s life, like the colorful Aunt Marks and the omnipresent Priscilla Hemings. Nor was there space for all the details of Patsy’s political and family circumstances, or even all the important contemporary events she witnessed.
Instead we’ve combined or simplified events for maximum dramatic punch, and the astute reader might notice subtle changes in the time line. For example, Jefferson’s famous headache in Paris occurred in September before his departure. However, we posited it slightly earlier, in our desire to consolidate the maelstrom of emotional and revolutionary events in Paris during the summer of 1789. The Merry Affair actually erupted in late 1803, but we moved it to accompany our heroine’s documented comeback. The secret trip Jefferson made to Monticello to deal with the Walker scandal coincided with a secret letter he sent to his daughter in 1803, but because the possibility of a duel dragged out for another few years, we portrayed the whole thing at once in 1805.
In short, where a shift in the chronology didn’t fundamentally change the choices faced by the people involved, we erred on the side of brevity. And to give the reader a front-row seat, we’ve sparingly placed our protagonist and other characters where they might not have been. For example, Patsy seems not to have been at her mother’s deathbed though she describes the immediate aftermath in great detail. She and her sisters were inoculated from smallpox away from Monticello. And there’s no documented evidence of Patsy attending a ball at Versailles. But during her sixteenth year her father described himself as being at Versailles “almost daily” and she was known to have danced with a member of the Polignac family—then in residence at Versailles—so it seemed a reasonable conclusion to draw. Another example is Susan, the slave that we describe as being sold on the block, who actually arranged for her own sale with the help of the Randolphs. However, since it prompted Patsy’s embittered rant against the horrors of the auction she never actually described, we thought it proper to shift the date of the sale by a few months. Moreover, where a witness appears to have been in error, such as overseer Bacon’s account of how many children Jefferson’s wife had, when she held up her fingers on her deathbed, we’ve simply corrected it.
And what of the villains? Did Charles Bankhead beat his wife to the point it hastened her death? We don’t know, but Jefferson feared for his granddaughter and took “for granted that she would fall by his hands.” What really happened at Bizarre? Again, we can’t know, so we named a culprit that best fit our story.
As for Monticello itself, we made a good-faith attempt to portray the architectural evolution, with occasional diversions, such as painting the dining room chrome yellow slightly earlier than is likely. We were aided in these endeavors by our visits to Monticello, where we were struck by the fact that Patsy is buried not beside her husband, but at her father’s feet.
Jefferson is between them in death, as he was in life.
In closing, there is no child, or nation, that is ever born without leaving scars. We have done our best to be forthright and fair about the injustices and hypocrisies of our Founding Fathers. We hope the balance struck is one that furthers understanding and creates more interest.
For a more detailed explanation of our sources, choices, and changes, visit AmericasFirstDaughter.com.
Acknowledgments
OUR DEEPEST APPRECIATION goes to the skilled and devoted staff at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. Tour guides at Monticello were patient with our sometimes outlandish questions, and Tom Nash gave us Patsy’s quip about her father and his peas. Monticello historian Christa Dierksheide was particularly generous with her time, expertise, and insights, and not least of all included the suggestion that Ann Bankhead may have “married what she knew.”