ACT II: Just the Facts, Ma’am

Time: Flashback to the 1970s

aryn, living in California, receives Fawn Brodie’s book Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History from the Book-of-the-Month club, sits down on her sofa, and begins reading. She soon becomes intrigued with the character of Tom Hemings, whom Brodie portrays in her book as the illegitimate son conceived in France by Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings.

"Here is my character for a play," Karyn thinks. "A son born to the most compelling American founding father, who would under a completely free country have been an obvious candidate for president, but because of slavery and miscegenation, could only at best pass into oblivion."

Still mulling over a play, Karyn moves with her husband and sons to Chapel Hill. She seeks out some of her neighbors, many of whom are history professors. They tell her no one in the historical community believes the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, so she decides to do some research of her own. Sitting outside on a sunny day, she starts reading through Brodie’s footnotes and appendages.

Karyn is stunned. "There’s no evidence that the historical character I wanted to center my play on ever existed at all," she says. "There's no record of such a birth in the Monticello (the Jefferson family homeplace) ledger, and Madison Hemings, Sally’s second to last child, claims Tom Hemings died at the age of two." It seems to Karyn that Fawn Brodie has thrown out the pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit her model, and where she leaves holes, she fills in with conjecture, using often the word "innuendo" to defend her position.

Suddenly, Karyn has no play. She takes six months off from her day job scoring writing samples from state competency exams and begins research on Thomas Jefferson. After all, she wants her play to be historically accurate.

Time: Seven years later. Traut is still doing research.

"I’m beginning to realize I could spend my life researching Jefferson," Traut says.

What she finds out is "a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly."

"Jefferson was a slave owner and a racist," she says. "But he was also a visionary man in so many ways, even as a slave owner because in his time it was radical to consider slaves as human beings. While he spent his life trying to abolish slavery, he still believed in separation of the races."

s for the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, Karyn finds no documents or firsthand accounts acknowledging the existence of such a child — only the coincidence of residency linking Jefferson to the paternity of the other children of Sally Hemings. She wonders, "Even if a child were conceived in France, most men in France were white, including the servants, so why would a white child born to Sally necessarily be linked with Jefferson?"

She also notes that Hemings did not conceive a child every time Jefferson was in residence and that there was no child born to Hemings after Jefferson’s retirement (in which he permanently moved back to Monticello) when Hemings was only in her mid-thirties.

"And why," Traut asks, "would Jefferson have fathered children into both slavery, which he found abominable, and African descent, which he found inferior?"

But if not Thomas Jefferson, then who?

She hits the books again and finds out that Thomas Jefferson had a brother — Randolph Jefferson, who was 12 years his junior. "Until now, I hadn’t realized Jefferson had a brother," Traut says.

Karyn learns of Randolph while reading a book titled Thomas Jefferson and Music, in which a reference is made to his brother. Apparently Jefferson paid for Randolph’s violin lessons, but Randolph used his skill only for "country fiddling" with the servants. Traut also finds out that Randolph had been married twice, unlike his older brother who promised his wife on her deathbed never to remarry. "Hmmmm," Karyn says. "I’m starting to see Randolph as possibly a rebel to his older more famous and authoritative brother. By ‘dancing with the servants,’ Randolph seemed to be living with the times rather than trying to change them as was Thomas Jefferson."

Further digging reveals a few more facts in favor of Randolph as father of Sally Hemings’ children, including that Randolph Jefferson lived 20 miles from Monticello, within easy visiting distance.

"Ah ha," Karyn thinks. "I have an original answer to an historical question. There were two Mr. Jeffersons."

Time: 1988

Karyn finally feels capable of writing an historically accurate play. The result is Saturday’s Children. The premise of the play is a conversation among three characters, two of whom try to talk the third, an African American actor, into playing Thomas Jefferson in a performance-art project. In the play, the actors battle out Jefferson’s attributes by reading aloud passages from his writings. "The point is that while we may not always agree with or like everything about Thomas Jefferson’s character, he is a person enormously worth looking at — he has a lot to give us," Karyn says.