Q. You started out as a sculptor and I've become familiar with you as a writer, which I think career wise was your second move. I would like to know if you've been writing all your life or if you just felt so compelled to write the stories of Sally Hemings and her daughter Harriet.

A. First of all writing isn't my second choice. Writing is a parallel vocation that came about exactly as you described. I found the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson such a compelling story. I spoke to every single writer friend I knew begging them to write this story and all of them had different projects and different ideas and finally one of them said if you're going to talk about this woman for the past year why don't you take a year out of your life and write it. Of course the book took three years to write. But I had been writing poetry practically all my life.

My first book of poetry was published in 1974. My editor was Toni Morrison. My publisher was Random House. And it was called "From Memphis and Peking." It was a series of poems, some of them dating from my trip to China, (because I was the first American woman to go to China after the revolution), some of them love poems, some of them connected with France, and then there was a long poem "Anna" which was a kind of biographical poem about my great, great grandmother. So now that all these biographies are coming to the fore, someone said the other day, "you did this twenty years ago", and it's true. So that's how the writing started, with poetry.

When I found the Sally Hemings story I said "I'm not a narrative writer. I'm not a novelist I'm a poet, which means I'm a sprinter not a long distance runner. I can't write this book." And Toni Morrison said "well Barbara I can't get you any money for this project unless you write a big historical novel. No one wants a kind of Diary of Anne Frank, young slave girl in pre-revolutionary France, can't sell it." So I dropped the whole idea for about a year. Then I visited Jacqueline Onassis in Scarpios one summer, (because we spent the summers in Greece at that time), and we sat on the beach and talked about presidents. We talked about the wives. We talked about power. We talked about women who lived in the shadow of great men. We talked about everything and I picked it up again. By the time I had finished it Onassis had died. Jacqueline had moved back to New York and she was working for Doubleday. So she began to call my agent "has Barbara turned in the manuscript?" Finally the day I turned it in she called and so it was Viking who published it with her as the editor. It was one of her very first books.

Q. How did you discover the Sally Hemings story? Obviously when you write a biography you have to do a lot of research. How was that process for you?

A. I discovered the story through a biography written by Vaughn Brody in the early seventies who had devoted one chapter in this huge book on Jefferson, something like 800 pages, presenting Sally Hemings. Of course the book was reviewed only on this one chapter. The idea of Jefferson having a mistress of color and having seven children with her, and that she was also his half sister in law was something that Jeffersonians did not want to deal with. And it was something that had been suppressed from American History. When this book came out it was a first novel. I had to label it as a novel even though it was faction and it was based on historical facts, many of which of course I could research because I was in Paris.

The story began in Paris in 1784-85. That was my connection really with the story, aside from the fact that it was an extraordinary story, the fact was it began in Paris, and ended in Virginia. I took on this cabal of Jeffersonians. It got to the point when there was a talk about a movie, a mini-series, and they started trying to influence people not to do the film. They got school children in Virginia to write letters saying "don't do this to Thomas Jefferson." They wouldn't let Sunday Morning CBS do my interview on the premises of Monticello until Sunday Morning said "OK we're going to film this outside the gates of Monticello and we're going to announce on national television that you wouldn't let us on the premises."

But the most extraordinary thing that happened was that on the third of July, (the book had come out in April and I had mentioned in the book a staircase that went from the foot of his bed up into an alcove over his bed, which was in his bedroom on the first floor), somehow that staircase got torn out. It was literally torn out in a rage, because there was no plaster, no nothing. I didn't find this out until much later when I went back to Monticello and found the gaping hole, But the screenwriter who was writing the script was there on the third of July and the staircase was there, and when he went back on the fifth of July the staircase had disappeared.

When I went with another reporter, I said just for a lark "let's get in line and take the tourist's tour." So we came into Jefferson's bedroom and there was this long explanation, and there was a gaping hole where the staircase had been. So I said "excuse me, um, where is the staircase?" The woman, who must have been there for eighty five years, looked at me and said "what staircase? I didn't know anything about a staircase." At this point I told the photographer "take a photograph of the gaping hole." So he was trying to photograph and she was trying to prevent him from photographing.

I was having hysterics. The reporter was scribbling, scribbling, scribbling. Finally I went to see the curator, who is not the present cuartor, and I asked "what did you guys do with the staircase?" He said "Barbara, you're being paranoid. We had decided to take out the staircase long ago. I'll show you the minutes." Of course he never showed me the minutes. He said "We decided it wasn't authentic." I said "OK what was there before?" He said "steps." I said "you realize that Jefferson so hated staircases that he practically didn't put a staircase in his house. This tiny little staircase had to have a reason for being." And it was there. In 1826, when Jefferson died, there are engravings of his bedroom, and there's a little staircase, the door that's open and a little staircase that goes up, for whatever reason, whether it was connected with Sally Hemings or not. That staircase was part of a National Monument. The story now is that the staircase was Victorian, because they found, when they tore it out that night, Victorian tools, Victorian nails under it. Well of course that's like saying let's break all the windows in Monticello and not replace them because they're not authentic window panes to begin with.

Q. What does that to say to you about our present state, that there is so much invested in denying what Sally Hemings and her history represents to us?

A. I think it is very telling. I think it says a lot about what Americans think about themselves as far as American history is concerned. And because Jefferson embodies our national identity anything that touches him is something that touches a very raw nerve with American historians. There is a kind of mythology that the second race in America just happened, doesn't have any history of it's own, or if it does it has black history, whatever that is, and that there's no connection between American history and people of color in this country, which is ridiculous. We all arrived at exactly the same date. It touches the very core of the idea that this is a white man's country, that is was built by white men and nobody else had anything to do with it.

It is also the last taboo. The idea of miscegenation and mixed marriages in America has been fought in the courts up until 1967 when the last statute was struck down in Virginia ironically enough. But every state in the union had laws against mixing the races, whatever that means, since we're all one race to begin with. I think it's that. And it's a gut thing because we identify with America as Americans and as this sort of pure democracy that has sprung up out of nowhere. We have no secrets. We have no scandals. We have no unjust wars. We had no slavery. Slavery was thrust upon us by England. We didn't have anything to do with it.

But of course as with the point I make in the book, Jefferson himself could have abolished slavery with the revolution, because he had written in the Declaration of Independence a clause which would have eliminated slavery with the victory of the revolution. North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia said "you leave that clause in there and we're walking out of here and you won't have a declaration, you won't have a war." So by general consensus it was the only clause that was eliminated from the declaration. This is one of the great tragedies of the United States and no one knows this. I've spoken to lawyers who have said the same thing. Of course when I speak to Jeffersonians they say "oh everybody knows that." No it's not true. You're taught that the Declaration of Independence was this that and the other but the things that were written out are not discussed.

Q. And how better to bring all that to light than to look at Thomas Jefferson's personal life.

A. To look at his personal life which is a microcosm of the United States of America.

Q. William Wells Brown wrote a book called "The Presidents Daughter" in 1854, which was published in London. What do you know about the history of that book and what role did it play in the writing of your book?
A. It was the first book published by an African American, period. Wells was a runaway slave who was taken up by abolitionists in London. The book tells in fictional form the sort of legend of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Now I had already written Sally Hemings and turned in the book when I discovered this Wells novel. In my book I dedicate my novel to the fact that the first African American novel was on this subject. It's a famous book. It went through two or three editions in which he changed a few things. It was a bestseller. It was not historically accurate. He just made up the story. But the idea was that Jefferson had this daughter. At the end the sort of contradictions of her life come together in a way that she commits suicide. So it's a very romantic, very nineteenth century novel which is a milestone in American literature.

We're still affected by this relationship, and it's a very peculiar relationship. I mean you can not generalize what happened with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. The fact is that because the story was suppressed number one, it becomes a kind of underground unconscious feeling in America which we don't even know why something is wrong or why we feel uncomfortable with a certain idea, but we do. We feel uncomfortable with the idea of interracial couples. We feel uncomfortable with the idea of American slavery and industrial slavery as it was developed and as it was maintained by the constitution in America. America was supposed to have been born out of these great patriotic ideas but America was born with slavery as an institution as well, and unless you understand that there's no way to understand race relations today. That kind of undercurrent of rage and resentment goes back to the beginning.

When Jefferson wrote the declaration there were six million people in this country and almost half of them were black. So you have a revolution which automatically erased a quarter of the population at the time. There are all kinds of very subtle ways in which this is taught, the way this is felt, and which falsifies the relationship of Blacks to American history, the relationship of Blacks and Whites together, the relationship of Americans to their beginnings, the relationship of immigrants who came later. It's extremely interesting. Living abroad I get another perspective, which helped me immensely with the book.

It helped me to see Jefferson and Sally Hemings as two people caught in a kind of personal tragedy. Jefferson's wife died. This whole idea of slave/mistress goes back three generations, because Jefferson's father in law was also Sally Hemings' father. The two women in his life, his two wives if you like, were sired by the same man. They were half sisters. This is pretty dramatic when one is a white southern woman and the other is a "black slave." What happened is that Sally Hemings mother had seven children with Jefferson's father in law, and when Jefferson's father in law died his wife inherited all these children that were still slaves, because at that time your status came not from the father but from the mother. That meant that if your mother was a slave you were a slave.

So from a very early age Sally Hemings had been brought up on the plantation of Thomas Jefferson with this father figure of Thomas Jefferson, and a very intimate relationship with her white family because her mother was the housekeeper at Monticello and she had also raised Jefferson's wife. She raised her own children. She raised the white children. Perhaps Hemings looked like her half sister. Perhaps she spoke like her. Perhaps there were movements, eye movements, hair movements, who knows. We have no portraits of Hemings or his wife, because when she died he destroyed all her letters, all her portraits, so it's a total mystery. And this too, the idea of erasing history, the idea of the invisibility of these women, both the white and the black as a matter of fact, because of Jefferson's rage of the fact that his wife left him.

When he went to Paris as ambassador to the court of Lous XVI he took his eldest daughter with him, who was more or less the same age as Sally Hemings. He left his two younger children in Virginia and his second daughter died of a childhood disease, I think it was Scarlet fever. In a panic he sent for his last daughter. Supposedly she was supposed to have traveled with a mammy from the plantation chosen by Elizabeth Hemings. Sally Hemings found herself on the boat with Jefferson's youngest daughter. She was fourteen and they made the trip from Virginia to Paris by themselves. These two children. They were met in London by John Adams and his wife and sort of sheltered in London until Jefferson's butler could come pick them up and bring them to Paris. Jefferson was involved with another woman in Paris by the name of Maria Cosway and he didn't want to leave Paris at that time.

So then you have a triangle. You have the other woman, who is an Italian noblewoman, you have Sally Hemings who brings the voice of Virginia, the face of her sister, who knows, and you have of course the eldest daughter who realized what was going on. The other thing that really annoys me about Jeffersonian historians is the fact that they could say "well Jefferson would never do anything under the roof of the house that his daughters lived in. Imagine if they found out." Of course they knew. The whole race of southern American women knew what their men were doing with their female slaves.

Q. You've been commissioned to do a memorial for the African burial ground in New York City.. I'd like you to talk about what it is you are creating and how you feel about that whole project.

A. For me this is a wonderful project because it is a kind of accumulation of all the trends in my life. It is literature, it is history, it is poetry and it's sculpture. So in this one monument I can pull in all the strings of my life and make one monument to the idea that there is an interaction between literature and poetry and sculpture. Of course the historical aspect of the monument really fascinates me because it is a of story New York , of black New York from the end of the seventeenth century.

The African burial ground extends under all of Wall street. Wall street is built on the bones of the people who built New York. This too is a sort of final irony. I adore irony and I use a lot of it in my books. The idea of finally having some kind of commemoration of this parallel history of New York is fascinating and of course it is politically fraught at the moment because there was not going to be any kind of commemoration at all. The reason why it was a burial ground is because Blacks could not be buried in White cemeteries. So they were given this land which was swampland outside the walls of old New York, and this was where they gathered. It was the only place actually where they could physically gather, because one of the Black Codes stated that no more than ten Negroes could associate together at the same time in the same place because of this paranoiac fear of slave revolts.

So the only time they were allowed to gather together for any reason was for a funeral. They did so in this burial ground. Of course the burial ground suddenly found itself under one of these huge federal buildings, and when they started digging up bones instead of dirt, they had to stop the project, they had to bring in the archaeologists, they had to excavate. When they excavated they discovered the burial ground and they went back and looked a the old maps of New York. They discovered that it was listed and that they had a perimeter and it was Wall Street. They've excavated four hundred skeletons. There about ten thousand people buried there. What they have done is turned over the bones to Howard University to study and eventually they will be reinterred. There's a little, little plot of land which they've left open as a kind of memorial to the cemetery. They did not tear down the forty eight story building. And so the little Champs Elysee really, this little quarter acre or whatever it is, is a symbol of the lives of all these people of the past two or three centuries.

Q. Is that where your sculpture will be placed?

A. My sculpture will be on the inside of the building. There's a long gallery which runs along the outside of the building which is all glass. I'm hoping and praying and planning that there will be nothing outside, that they will simply leave the little Champs Elysee there just as a mound of grass and perhaps build an underground crypt without having a sculpture on the outside. But of course this is not something that I have any control over. You will see my sculpture on Broadway through to the African burial site and it will be in gilded bronze and very New York. I'm just happy that it came about.