A Fictional Interview with Robert Hemmings
at the Declaration House (Graff House)
TRAVEL IN TIME WITH DAN | The Graff House, Philadelphia — June 1776
| ⚠️ AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is a fictional historical interview. Robert Hemings (his name is more commonly spelled with one “m”; even though he signed his own name with two “M” when signing his name to his daughter’s 1812 marriage certificate). Robert (1762–1819) was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson and served as his valet, including during the seventeen days Jefferson spent drafting the Declaration of Independence at the Graff House. Hemings was the older half-brother of Sally Hemings. He was permitted to negotiate his own freedom from Jefferson in 1794, nearly two decades after the events depicted here. The historical facts are real. The dialogue is creative fiction, and Hemings’s specific words and thoughts in this conversation are imagined, as no first-hand written account from him survives. |
📍 SETTING: A narrow back room of the Graff House, evening. Upstairs, the scratch of a quill is audible through the floorboards. A young man sets down a basin of water he has just carried up and pauses in the stairwell before returning below.
Dan: Robert, you’ve been running this entire household for seventeen days now, so Mr. Jefferson can write undisturbed on this second floor of the Graff house. What does that actually look like, day to day?
Hemmings: Everything he does not have to think about, I think about instead. His meals, his linens, his correspondence carried and fetched, the small comforts that let a man sit at a desk for hours without his mind wandering to anything but the page in front of him. He is writing about the rights owed to all men. I am making sure nothing interrupts his ability to do so. I expect you can see the trouble in that arrangement without my needing to explain it to you.
Dan: I can. Does he ever say anything about it — the contradiction of it?
Hemmings: Not directly, and I have long since stopped expecting him to. Men writing about liberty rarely pause to examine who is standing quietly in the doorway making that writing possible. I do not believe he is unaware of me. I believe he has found it more comfortable not to look too closely at what my presence here actually means for the words he is choosing.
Dan: The document he’s writing talks about natural rights, the consent of the governed, the right to overthrow an unjust government. Does any of that land differently for you, hearing it in the periphery?
Hemmings: Every word of it lands differently for me than it does for him, and differently still than it will for the men who eventually sign it. He writes of rights he believes belong to all men by nature. I am, at this moment, a man to whom those same rights are being deliberately denied by the very hand writing them. I do not know if there is a word sharp enough for that particular kind of irony. Paradox comes close, but paradox suggests something puzzling rather than something simply unjust.
Dan: You’ll eventually negotiate your own freedom from him — years from now, not today. Does that future feel real to you standing here in 1776, or is it just a hope you’re not allowed to fully believe in yet?
Hemmings: I do not have the luxury of certainty about it, so I choose instead to treat it as something I intend to make happen rather than something I am waiting to be granted. I watch him closely. I have learned what matters to him and what he is willing to bargain over. If freedom ever comes for me, it will not be because the words from the quill on that paper that I supplied him finally applied to me. It will be because I made myself useful enough, patient enough, and persistent enough that granting it became the path of least resistance for him. That is a smaller kind of justice than the document promises. It is the kind actually available to me.
Dan: If you could add one line to what he’s writing, what would it say?
Hemmings: That the ideas a man commits to paper are only as honest as the household he goes home to that same evening. He does not need my permission to write about liberty. I would simply ask that whoever reads his words two hundred years from now also ask who was carrying the water while he wrote them.
Dan: Profound! Thanks for your time today, Robert.
Robert Hemings managed Thomas Jefferson’s household throughout the seventeen days Jefferson spent drafting the Declaration of Independence at the Graff House, and would go on to negotiate his own freedom from Jefferson nearly two decades later, in 1794. The house itself was demolished long ago and rebuilt for the 1976 Bicentennial, raising its own quieter question about the difference between preserving history and reconstructing an idea of it. The leadership lesson from the Declaration House cuts both ways: leaders are remembered for the ideas they inspire in others, but the full measure of any leader also includes an honest look at who made that leader’s focus and comfort possible — and at what cost.
Uncovering History. Inspiring Leadership.
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