My first encounter with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis took place in 1974 in probably the most privileged, secluded, protected place on earth, the Greek island Skorpios belonging to her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, with a backdrop of arguably the most beautiful private vessel in the world, the treasure-laden Christina. That summer, we were visiting our best friends from Paris, Clem Wood, an American writer, and his wife, Jessie de Vilmorin, and their eight children, on the island of Speccia, only a helicopter ride from Skorpios. And every summer thereafter, Jacqueline would call us up and invite us to her island, which she laughingly called the Island of Dr. No, and with eight children plus my two, plus cousins and assorted child friends, brought the total in three summer houses to fifteen. There was never a summer when a child emergency prevented us from accepting the invitation. But to my surprise, this year was different, and this year I would sit on the deserted beach at Skorpios guarded by the thirty heavily armed sailors of the Christina and explain to one of the most privileged and protected woman on earth what I thought it had been like to be an enslaved American woman of color, the absolute property of one of the most powerful white men in existence—the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson.
The Onassises had greeted us at the helicopter pad, this mythic couple both dressed in white pants and black t-shirts, framed by the Christina, and beginning after lunch I was drawn into a conversation with the woman who would eventually be the impetus and instigator of my escorting the then-invisible Sally Hemings through the front door of history and controversial fame.
Why it should have been this particular woman remains even today a mystery to me and a subject of amazement at the unfolding of this story.
But after lunch, sitting on the beach while boats filled with paparazzi circled the island with telephoto camera lenses that resembled bazookas, I told Jacqueine the story of Sally Hemings, my desire that the world know who she was, and my own frustration at perhaps not having the skills or the stamina. “I’m a poet, a sprinter—not a long-distance runner,” I said, “and no one seems to be interested in the life of an American Revolution–era enslaved Black woman.” Random House, my publisher, had turned down the idea. Toni Morrison, my editor, had washed her hands of getting me an advance. I had begged every writer I knew to take on the story, including Morrison—everyone was involved in their own projects. Finally, it was Morrison who said, You’ve been talking about this woman for years. Why don’t you just sit down and write it yourself? How long would it take? Three months?”
It took three years from the time a concerned Jacqueline Onassis had turned to me and said, “You must write this story,” to the time it was published at Viking Press with her as my acquiring editor—the second job of her life, the first having been as first lady of the United States. I realized that sitting beside me in a black one-piece swimsuit was one of the few women in the world who could explain political power and ambition, American sex and American autocracy, the back stairs at the White House and the intolerable glare and flame of living history. Who else? And she listened all weekend, and she asked questions and took notes, and we forged a friendship that lasted twenty years, through more than one book, and that spanned the rest of her life.
By the time I had finished the manuscript, Onassis was dead, and Jacqueline was back in New York with a job as an acquiring editor at her friend Harold Guinzburg’s publishing house Viking as a balm for her second widowhood.
She had been calling my agent Lynn Nesbit for months, asking if I had turned in my manuscript. The day I did, Nesbit sent it to her, and Viking bought the rights. This, more than anything, protected its fate. No one except Jacqueline and the editorial and production staff at Viking had seen the manuscript nor knew its subject matter. It was safe from controversy and censure until the day the first proofs were sent out. So no one had or could or did destroy it. Pandora’s Box and the question of human property and Thomas Jefferson was opened forever.
The Jeffersonians made the mistake of attacking the book instead of ignoring it and sealed its fate as a bestseller, with a million and a half copies in print, and a Literary Guild Selection. By this time, Jacqueline had left Viking over their publication about a fictional failed assassination plot against Ted Kennedy. She could not stay, she said, as Viking chose the thriller over her. Jacqueline was not allowed to take me with her. So I remained at Viking.
And if we hadn’t sat on that beach on that weekend and she hadn’t nudged me to keep going and not to give up, I might have given in to victimhood and never finished what I had accidentally started, which of course resulted in the famous DNA testing by Dr. Eugene Foster that proved me right. And Sally Hemings took on a life her own, a historical life for which I am eternally grateful.
We used to laugh a lot about the fact that I could never get my mouth around “Jackie O.” “You and my mother,” she would say, “are the only people in the world who call me Jacqueline.”
I pronounced her name “Jack-line” with an accent on the last syllable using the French pronunciation. We would sometimes lapse into French with each other, and she would pronounce Barbara as “Barr-ba-rra” in her soft and deliberately inauthentic Swiss finishing school whisper.
We found that we had mothers who resembled each other and who had instilled in us both the golden rule of survival: never accept the role of victim. Or as my grandmother had put it, never letting people know you are carrying a heavy burden, “Making things look easy is a matter of politeness, letting people know you are carrying a heavy burden is a third-world attitude toward life.”
In other words, great tragedy you accept with bravery, victimization—never!
Little did I know that day I met her sitting on the beach together on the island of Skorpios, gazing at the purity of the Ionic Sea, watching the paparazzi circle the island again and again like sharks that my life would be changed more than once and forever by her and the eighteenth-century enslaved Virginian Sally Hemings. “You simply have to write this book. You must tell the story of this woman!” she said.
And if Jacqueline were exploring her DNA today, her North African ancestry would probably draw one of her enigmatic mischievous smiles. Even though she insisted in the 1960s that this side of her family was Jewish. She had thick, unruly, curly hair that she managed by straightening and heavy lacquering to tame it into her 1950s signature coiffure. But the curly roots were always lurking at the temples in what Black women called “the roots going back.” Insanely beautiful in real life, cool and passionate at the same time, able and willing to make a strategic marriage, intelligent, fatalistic, and brave, she switched from one of the most elegant, refined, and beautiful men in the world to one of the most vulgar and physically ugly yet fascinating ones, and then back again at the end of her life. One of the last things I wrote about her was in a long poem Helicopter, my elegy to violent, life-changing, non-negotiable events and tragedies of human existence—my Wasteland.
The enigmatic and mysterious Aristotle Onassis remained in the foreground and clarified for me many things about Jacqueline and her relationship with such a man. A man who was dead less than a year later, Jacqueline a widow again and a new editor at Viking Press in New York, thousands of miles away from this haunting paradise, having acquired and published the story of another survivor of an earthly paradise for the privileged few in Monticello. Jacqueline had acquired my book for Viking. She and I had begun a long and surprising literary partnership.
America, especially now, owes her the fact of politeness, of bravery, of civility, of physical and mental beauty. She changed my life, she enriched my life, she gave me courage. She helped resurrect the Virginians—both of them, Black and White, male and female—and who knows but that she may still have words for us. Perhaps not on her 100th birthday, but perhaps on her 150th birthday or her 200th birthday, another eternal Virginian, to help us through difficult times and warring epochs and racial dissonances.
So this is the story of our twenty-year friendship until her death on May 19, 1994, and well beyond, with the uncanny involvement with three of my most important books: Sally Hemings, Amistad: Echo of Lions, Helicopter and finally this book. It consists of letters written on her blue-and-white Tiffany stationery.
Jacqueline’s ancestors Anthony and Abraham van Salee were among the first settlers of New Amsterdam, later to be renamed New York. Abraham was the son of Jan Janszoon, a Dutch pirate who converted to Islam and had a North African concubine of mixed race who conceived Anthony. Anthony arrived in New York in 1664, perhaps the first Muslim in the colonies, and found success. He was described at the time as tawny, half Moroccan, a former Black slave, and “mulatto.” One of the Van Salee descendants, John van Salee de Grane, received a formal education as a doctor and joined the Medical Society of Massachusetts, serving as a surgeon for the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War.
It is thought that Jacqueline was not the first White House inhabitant with African blood. President Warren G. Harding shared her Van Salee ancestry, as did the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, and Humphrey Bogart.
A strangely American ancestry, as strange as any Virginian American, full of adventures and boldness, perseverance and ambition, somehow weaving the most exceptional threads of fortune into the uniqueness of the typically American character—the bold and the cruel as well as the free and the brave. An exceptional destiny in an exceptional world that only we could have invented. Our lives ebbed and flowed into three literary adventures, many quiet lunches at home or at the Stanford, a happenstance meeting in the Charles De Gaulle Airport when Onassis was dying at the American Hospital in Paris, a blind date at Roseland with the poet John Ashbery, a date she found for me to cheer me up during my divorce, a photomat picture with my husband Marc when they were in Peking. But mostly letters and words. She, fastidious enough to have her pantyhose and her sheets iron-pressed after her siesta, was always afraid of becoming a bag lady—we both were, but my chances were a lot better than hers. We both adored our mothers and often quoted them, and we both adored our children and felt guilty about being working mothers. Although she was not happy with my divorce, at the end, we both turned to rock-solid men of great stability, balance, and intelligence. Her sense of humor and of irony, her great intellect and funny accent, made her beloved. And her courage made others around her brave.
A note to the Reader:
At this point in my narrative, I had planned to introduce a selection of a dozen or so letters to me from Jacqueline as a substitute for the silent voice of [my mother] Vivian Mae, but copyright law prevents this.
An astounding thing happened in the aftermath. I recognized that an extraordinary empathy had occurred between these two historical women—one in the public eye forever and the other, never—creating a kind of armor of invincibility around this subject. Nobody knew. Nobody cared. Nobody questioned Jacqueline’s little insignificant self-help book project.
Sally Hemings and Jacqueline Onassis had taken on a new and bizarre convergence: I am convinced that Sally Hemings might never have emerged as a historical figure at all without the benign protection of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Quite simply, my novel might never have been published at all considering the intense suppression that the story had endured for two hundred years before and thirty-eight years after its publication.
In a sense, Jacqueline had played the role of guardian angel of Hemings.
By the time Sally Hemings: A Novel was published, Jacqueline had quit Viking, unable to take me along with her, and the brouhaha around Jefferson and Hemings erupted. The Jeffersonians threatened CBS, Viking cut the print run, cancelled the book tour, and declared that the book was “one Black woman’s opinion.”
Eighteen years later, in 1997, when the celebrated DNA study proved me right, the Jeffersonians continued their attempts to erase both me and Sally Hemings from the American history that they still controlled. We never discussed this. I never had a chance to thank her for firstly championing Sally Hemings, pursuing the project unceasingly, and succeeding as my acquiring editor against all odds.
She believed that this was “normal.” I believed that it was right, providential, and brave and that her devotion to me was neither naïve nor triumphant—it was like Vivian Mae herself: steadfast, intelligent, honest, loyal, and Divine.
Thank you, Jacqueline, for having existed, for having made and endured history, the best and the most deplorable—you got the victory.
Excerpted from I Always Knew: A Memoir by Barbara Chase-Riboud. Copyright © 2022 by Barbara Chase-Riboud. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
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