Amazing Rhythm Aces – "Third Rate Romance" (1975)

She was staring at her coffee cup

He was trying to keep his courage up

By applying booze

I recently wrote about a Family Feud episode where one of the survey questions was “If all the U.S. presidents were alive, single, and ready to mingle, who would you date?”  

The two most popular answers were John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama.  Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Bill Clinton, and Thomas Jefferson were the other Presidents mentioned by the survey’s respondents.

The members of the two families playing Family Feud that day managed to name six of those seven Presidents.  The one that they didn’t get was Thomas Jefferson.

Both the families who competed in the particular Family Feud were both African-American.  Given the nature of our third President’s relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, I would think that Jefferson would be the last President that any African-American woman would want to date.

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On New Year’s Day 1772, the 28-year-old Thomas Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton.

Jefferson’s bride was only 23, but she was already a widow.  (Her first husband, Bathurst Skelton, had been just 24 when he had died in September 1768.  The couple’s three-year-old son had died in June 1771.)

Martha Jefferson died in 1782, only months after giving birth to the couple’s sixth child.  (That child reportedly weighed over 16 pounds at birth.)  Four of their children died before reaching their third birthday.

Thomas Jefferson lived 44 years after Martha’s death.  She had not had good relationships with her two stepmothers, and before her death she asked him to promise that he would never remarry.  

He never did.

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In 1787, when Jefferson was the American ambassador to France, Sally Hemings accompanied Jefferson’s nine-year-old daughter Maria to Paris.

Hemings, who was only 14 years old at the time, was a slave who Jefferson had inherited from his wife’s father, John Wayles, in 1773.

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal was
a miniseries that aired on CBS in 2000

Wayles was not only Sally Hemings’s owner, he was her father.  In fact, Sally was only one of six children Wayles fathered with Sally’s mother, Elizabeth Hemings, who Wayles had owned for her entire life.  

Does it seem odd that some of the children fathered by John Wayles – who was a white Englishman – were born free, while his other children were born into slavery?  That’s because of partus sequitur ventrem – “that which is born follows the womb” – which was a legal doctrine that provided that the children of enslaved mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. 

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In 1789, Jefferson – accompanied by his daughter and Sally Hemings – left Paris to return to the United States and become George Washington’s Secretary of State.  

It is believed that Hemings became pregnant by Jefferson at some point during their time together in Paris.  That child died shortly after Hemings returned to the U.S.

Hemings gave birth to six more children between 1795 and 1808.  Based on DNA evidence, it is now generally accepted that Jefferson was the father of at least one of those children, and perhaps all of them.

Click here to watch a Saturday Night Live sketch about Jefferson and Hemings.

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In theory, Sally Hemings became a free woman the moment she entered France in 1787 – slavery was illegal in France.  But she continued to act as Jefferson’s servant, and chose to return to Virginia with him two years later.

One of Hemings’s sons later said that his mother agreed to resume her life as an enslaved person because Jefferson had promised that he would free her children when they became of age if she did.

But Hemings was only 16 and possibly pregnant when Jefferson left France in 1789.  It’s not clear that she had much choice except to return to Virginia with him – how would she have supported herself if she had remained in France instead?

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Jefferson never spoke about his feelings for Sally Hemings, but his actions after returning from France were not inconsistent with the belief of her descendants that he “loved her dearly.”

Annette Gordon-Reed, the author of a book about Jefferson and Hemings, believes that his feelings for her went well beyond lust:

While lust can last minutes, months, or even a few years, it cannot typically span the decades during which [Jefferson and Hemings] were involved. It simply takes more than lust to sustain an interest in another person over such an extended time period.

Jefferson had access to many other women at Monticello who could have satisfied his carnal interests.  Yet, so far as the record shows, he remained fixated on Sally Hemings, arranging her life at Monticello so that she interacted with him on a daily basis for almost four decades.  Despite the brutal public attention focused on the pair after James Callender exposed their relationship in 1802, Jefferson continued to have children with Hemings. Their children . . . were named for people important to him. His white daughter was said to have wanted Jefferson to send Hemings and their children away so as to spare him further embarrassment. He declined.

But before you turn the Jefferson-Hemings relationship into some kind of rom-com, think about this:

In the U.S., where Hemings was enslaved to Jefferson, he exercised near total legal, economic, and physical control over her life.  As an enslaved person, Hemings would not have been able to refuse sexual access without risk of punishment, sale, or violence, and any absence of recorded force reflects the structural secrecy and power imbalance inherent in slavery rather than evidence of voluntariness.  Under these conditions, meaningful consent is generally considered impossible.  Many historians and scholars therefore describe Jefferson's actions as sexual exploitation or a “forced embrace” within chattel slavery.

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The Amazing Rhythm Aces released 18 albums over a 30-year-plus period, but only their first single  made much of an impression on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart.

“Third Rate Romance” was written by the group’s lead singer, the late Russell Smith, and released in 1975 on their first album, Stacked Deck.

The female one-night-stander says “I’ve never really done this kind of thing before,” and asks her male paramour if he has.  “Yes, I have,” he replies, “but only a time or two.”

I have a feeling both of them may have been fibbing.

Click here to listen to “Third Rate Romance.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.