The 16 Year Old Black Woman In the American Empire Negotiations

SHE WAS THERE, PART OF THE CONVERSATION. PERIOD.

All of it, from the dawn of consciousness, “we” are just “making up” (including power, racism, equality, freedom, oppression, hope, dispair). In America we are addicted to the delusional idea of a lone superhero, and, it’s almost always a white male. TRUTH: It’s always a symphony of people and circumstances (think of your own life).

“We” is the operative word. Everything of human organization is weaving a myth from the phantoms of the imagination. No matter how much research, written history of anything is an author fabricating a story through the lens of the author’s reality. Then a reader filters the written work through their, the readers, reality. The original events were transitory sights, sounds, smells, events and bundles of emotion fabricated by all the event participants in a story they were making up as they went along. To call history non-fiction is absurd. Fantasy, on the other hand, is truth — it starts and stays in the realm of imagination.

Since the dawn of consciousness (consciousness seems to be more than two edged sword, it’s seems a magical multi-edged experience) we used “consciousness” to form 1) bands, 2) tribes, 3) chiefdoms and 4) states (nation/countries) — we “made it up”, fabricated all of it as a myth. Everything — language, culture, cooperations, agriculture, churches, educational systems, inventions, revolutions, military organizations, nations, policing, neighborhoods, economics, markets, money, “the” scientific method (note, “Structure of Scientific Revolution, T. Kuhn), art and fashion are just “stories” — we fabricate them out of thin air by shared myth.

Once a myth is of sufficient size the beneficiaries at the top of the pyramid have great incentive to perpetuate the myth. The lie takes on a life of it’s own and all power requires a lie. Imagine you are CEO of a Fortune 100 company. Of course you have air conditioned parking, beautiful office, perks, a jet airplane at your disposal, celebrity status and are being paid $12,000,000 a year. Be honest — do you really think you’d be inclined to do anything truly radical or innovative? Even the trickle down participants at the bottom will support the pyramid until a tipping point.

So, corporations decline and are replaced as their myth becomes irrelevant. So do cultures, fashion, economies, religion and nations. A lot of books have been written about incentives and disincentives of true innovation (new myth).

Ok, to the point, to illustrate. The following is the idea written between two guys really gung-ho about liberty and equality with freedom through representation. Excerpt of letter by Thomas Jefferson (a slave holder who had children with a slave Sally Hemings) in a letter to James Madison (also a slave holder). He is comparing 1) absence of government, 2) some form of representative government, or, 3) some form of totalitarian government.

“ … The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has it’s evils too: the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing. Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem (I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery). Even this evil [turbulence] is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

Remember, we are making all this up, have been for at least 10,000 years. We are still, for the moment, seemingly free to “remake” it up. We don’t “know”.

It is altogether plausible Sally Hemings was a patriot, actor deserving same billing on same stage, with Jefferson. She had learned French during her 2+ years as a free woman in France and was (while in France) paid wages by Jefferson. The degree of sexual harassment by her employer is unknown, what is known is that pregnant by Jefferson at age 16 (technically under current laws a rape). Nevertheless she negotiated with Jefferson, the US Ambassador to France, that her child by him would be freed and any future shared children would be freed. On those conditions she voluntarily returned to America. Jefferson’s estate stayed true to their agreement and Sally lived her last years free with one of her 6 freed children. This is a remarkable commitment to the theoretical but contradicted ideals of the United States by a disadvantaged woman and is an example of amazing negotiation and insight. African Americans have repeatedly chosen in the face of contradiction to carry this heavy burden through labor, soldiers during civil war, Buffalo soldiering, heroic participation in two world wars and following wars as well as the entire time wrestling oppression and death during the long and ongoing struggle for civil equality. If it was a movie tickets wouldn’t sell because it would be too epic and too unbelievable.

We hail as hero myth perpetuators and ignore or even oppress myth improvers.

So, Sally Hemings was in the conversation. History will record Jefferson’s time in France (1784–1789) and his friendship with Monroe (influenced by Heming). Related to all of it is the transformation into an empire of the United States by doubling it’s size via Monroe’s negotiation of the Louisiana Purchase 1803. Monroe and Jefferson both anti-Federalist doing a very Alexander Hamilton move of Federal purchase of huge territory which was inhabited by 60,000 Americans of which 30,000 only counted as 60% American because they were slaves.

I say Sally Hemings created the empire of America. Why not she was there, my account of her as the catalyst cannot be disproven. Anyone who doesn’t think we are just making this all up and the myth is a constant set of morphing contradictions is just not honest. It’s crazy, nature uses whatever or whoever it wants and loves doers and has little regard for complainers. Sally was a doer, my fantasy credits her with the American empire.

It took me a while for this stream of consciousness to come to the point I was searching for. It’s this: We don’t “know” history. Sally Hemings may have been the reason for the American empire. She was THERE. Through trial by rape and gross inequality she was undeterred and unbelievably resilient in negotiating as a matter of evidence. Someone who could do that very plausibly (in fact more likely as an observer) may have seen French willingness to sell in North America and been persistently lobbying “buy out the French”. I try to observe the way things work in the little team of my business Orugahome. (Oruga is Spanish for caterpillar) No “one” is the creator or author of anything, that’s not how — best, honest I can tell — how it works. The feet of clay of the American Empire is the false narrative of the American Experience ego’s preoccupation with assigning heroic and personal exceptionalism to one (usually) man. The elephant in the living room presents itself again and again in everyone’s life. Unless a pathological egomaniac (example D.J. Trump) any reflection will lead us to say “it doesn’t work that way, it’s always a symphony of sources and contributors”.