A New Spin on Nation’s Treasured History : Books: It’s a story of sex, slavery and a popular President. And Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel about Thomas Jefferson may be more than fiction.

When we last saw Tom and Sally, they were back on the farm, entertaining friends, watching their children grow up and slowly, inexorably, going broke.

He was, of course, our improvident third President, Thomas Jefferson, settling into uneasy retirement at Monticello, his northern Virginia plantation.

And she was the mysterious Sally Hemings, a Monticello slave, with whom, according to some historians, Jefferson had seven children.

“She’s a woman who’s been erased from American history for no good reason except that she was inconvenient,” says writer Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose second novel about Hemings and her offspring will be released in October.

The titillating story of sex, slavery and the President has been gossiped about, indignantly dismissed and periodically resurrected since 1802, when a Virginia newspaper reported scandalous charges of miscegenation during Jefferson’s first term in the White House. It was America’s first presidential character controversy.

With Chase-Riboud’s book about to surface and a new Merchant-Ivory movie, “Jefferson in Paris,” complete with an on-screen Sally-and-Tom liaison, coming out early next year, chroniclers are bracing for a new round of an old debate.

“It’s all kind of tiresome by now,” grumps Daniel P. Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello as a museum and national monument. “Nobody has advanced much new evidence, but some people seem to be absolutely fixated on it.”

Nothing has given the story more of a popular buzz in recent years than Chase-Riboud’s 1979 best-selling novel, “Sally Hemings”; her sharp portrayals of an American icon and his impressionable servant gave the tale a strong whiff of plausibility.

Now, Chase-Riboud, a Philadelphia native who has lived in Paris for most of the past 33 years, revisits the story in “The President’s Daughter,” which follows the meandering life of Harriet Hemings, Tom and Sally’s fifth putative child, a runaway slave living in Philadelphia and passing for white. Along with the new book, Ballantine Books is re-releasing the first one in a paperback edition.

*

Recently, there has been something of a feverish glow about the ever-busy Chase-Riboud, like an extraterrestrial body hurtling through the atmosphere. A successful sculptor and an award-winning poet, as well as the author of four historical novels, she is up to her neck in artistic projects.

But nothing has consumed Chase-Riboud in the past 15 years as much as her championing of Sally Hemings. It’s as if the ghost of the often-maligned slave had somehow reached through the ether and latched onto the novelist, refusing to let go until her claim to legitimacy was acknowledged.

At times, Hemings’ presence has seemed downright eerie. As when Chase-Riboud selected a name for a character in the new book--a slave girl freed by Harriet Hemings and brought to Philadelphia. Chase-Riboud settled on Thenia, for its antiquated, classical sound.

She was almost finished with the book, she says, when she got word from a Virginia researcher that a newly discovered 1799 letter from Jefferson announced the news that a child had been born to Sally Hemings. Her name? Thenia.

“Now that I don’t know how to explain,” Chase-Riboud says. “It’s strictly voodoo.”

In the new novel, Chase-Riboud once again uses the theme of slavery for a bitter rumination on America’s preoccupation with race. Jefferson, the proverbial “framer” of the Declaration of Independence, serves as a kind of Rosetta stone for the race issue, she says.

“He embodies the American identity. Anything that touches him, or his relationship with the world, touches that identity.”

The Tom-and-Sally scenario is scornfully dismissed as “totally out of character” by the patrician historians who guard the Jefferson legacy. But the same historians acknowledge that Jefferson once propositioned a friend’s wife and that, while in France, he engaged in an affair with a married English woman. Both of those women were white.

“What they’re saying is that Thomas Jefferson could never have done anything so ignoble as to fall in love with a black woman,” Chase-Riboud says.

*

In a life that itself often sounds like the plot of a romantic novel, Chase-Riboud, a slim woman with high cheekbones, has always been quick to challenge those kinds of assumptions.

One of her bitterest memories is being accused by a fifth-grade teacher of plagiarizing a poem. “I remember it as clearly as if it happened yesterday,” says Chase-Riboud, draped on a couch in her elegantly informal apartment in the Montparnasse section of Paris. “She wanted me to confess in front of the entire class.”

Enter Vivian Brathwaite Chase, the girl’s Canadian-born mother, a descendant of fugitive slaves with an unshakable belief in her daughter’s abilities. After what Chase-Riboud calls a historic fight in the principal’s office, “My mother said she’d never send me back to the school again and she never did.”

Under her mother’s tutelage, it was a given that Chase-Riboud would excel in everything, particularly the arts. She led a classic “art brat” life filled with dance, music and art classes. “There was not one free moment is my small life,” she says, laughing.

But despite winning a scholarship to Temple University, Chase-Riboud continued to find Philadelphia an oppressive red-brick city suffused with Southern attitudes.

After completing her master’s in fine arts at Yale, she left in 1960 to live in England. By 1961, she had settled in Paris, where she met and married photojournalist Marc Riboud, with whom she has two grown sons.

For the past 13 years, she has been married to Italian art dealer Sergio Tosi. They divide their time between their Paris home, an apartment in a 16th-Century palazzo in Rome and a house on Capri.

Although Chase-Riboud sometimes gropes for English words, lapsing into French, she insists that she’s not an expatriate. “There’s no such thing in the (late) 20th Century,” she says. “I can get on the Concorde and fly to New York in a few hours.”

Indeed, her multiple careers often bring her back to the United States on publishing or art business.

Her imposing sculptures--often combining seemingly incompatible materials, such as braided silk and shards of polished bronze--are in, among others, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum. Her second book of poems, “Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra,” won the 1988 Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize.

*

Chase-Riboud became intrigued with the Sally Hemings story after reading Fawn Brodie’s 1974 biography, “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History,” citing one piece of circumstantial evidence after another to suggest that Jefferson fathered the Hemings children.

For Chase-Riboud, it was a “fantastic love story,” with the added interest of having taken place partly in Paris. In Brodie’s scenario, Hemings was in Paris in 1788-89, when Jefferson was ambassador, and she came back to Virginia pregnant by him.

Chase-Riboud plunged into the project, which took her 2 1/2 years to turn out. The result surpassed even her own expectations, winning the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize that year for the best American novel written by a woman.

But she wasn’t ready for the scathing thumbs-down she got from the academic Jeffersonians. When CBS announced plans to turn the book into a TV movie, venerable Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone pressed the network to drop it. The Hemings relationship was “virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson’s moral standards,” he said. The network folded.

Virginius Dabney, a respected Jefferson authority, published a polemic attacking Brodie and Chase-Riboud. It wasn’t the President who “sired the brood” of Hemings children (some of whom had a striking resemblance to Jefferson) but his nephew, Dabney insisted.

“To have historians rebutting a novel--absolutely incredible,” says Chase-Riboud starchily.

But Chase-Riboud is most outraged at the actions of the administrators of Monticello, who modified the architecture of the national monument in trying to squelch the Hemings story, she contends.

In her novel, Chase-Riboud describes a stairway in Jefferson’s bedroom, leading to a small room above, which the novelist surmised was Hemings’ bedroom. The stairway existed until shortly after the novel came out.

“They ripped it out on July 4th, 1979, leaving a gaping hole,” Chase-Riboud says. “What kind of rage must they have experienced to do that?”

Jordan, the Monticello director, concedes that the stairway--leading to a storage closet, he sayswas removed. But he insists that it was probably installed in the Victorian era, long after Jefferson died.

“There’s physical evidence--the kind of wood and nails used in that period,” he says.

Jordan, a historian, acknowledges that sexual relations between dissolute masters and their slaves were common in the Old South. Hemings was, in fact, Jefferson’s sister-in-law, having been fathered by the same white plantation owner who fathered Martha Wayles Jefferson, the President’s wife.

“But Jefferson railed against miscegenation,” Jordan says. “The key here is the man himself. Was he like everybody else? The record suggests that this guy was different.”

*

Chase-Riboud is suspicious of all the affirmations about Jefferson’s upright character. America is in a longstanding state of denial about race, she says. “Why was miscegenation ever a crime?” she asks. “Because it went against the myth that the races were pure.”

Treating Jefferson as the granite-faced denizen of Mt. Rushmore, without recognizing complicated relationships with the people around him, is another example of denial, she contends.

Both Jefferson and Hemings are in “The President’s Daughter.” But the book focuses on Harriet, a plucky Philadelphia woman with a knack for being at the right spot at the historically significant moment. She stands at Jefferson’s deathbed. She runs a station on the Underground Railroad. She listens to Lincoln deliver his Gettysburg Address.

Chase-Riboud pictures Harriet married to a prominent white man, listening with tight-lipped disapproval to the racist comments of white Philadelphians and living in dread that her racial identity will be discovered and she’ll be returned to slavery.

Another Chase-Riboud character is Adrian Petit, modeled roughly after the French-born major-domo of Monticello, Hugues Petit. This is the author’s little joke on her Jeffersonian antagonists.

Chase-Riboud’s fictional Adrian has somehow gotten ensnared in academic research. All the historians who have written biographical studies of Jefferson in the past 15 years cite “Adrian Petit” as a real figure.

“They present themselves as scientific historians, writing the truth,” she says. “But history is only one person’s point of view or one society’s point of view.”

Musing about history and historians, Chase-Riboud remembers one of her favorite quotes from Voltaire.

“There is no history,” she says, “only fictions of various degrees of plausibility.”