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Norm is completing a historical novel titled Sally: Mistress of Monticello, an episodic account of the relationship between the widower Thomas Jefferson and his beautiful slave, Sally Hemings.

Each chapter, marked by a date and place, contains reference to a verifiable event. Jefferson left records of his whereabouts and associations nearly every day of his adult life—a life of achievement accompanied by frequent turbulence and loss. As author of the nonfiction Diagnosing Jefferson, Norm was able to compose dialogue and reasoned narrative based on his knowledge of Jefferson’s complex personality and day-to-day activities.

Sally, half-sister to Thomas’s late wife, is elevated from others’ portrayals as a passive and brooding victim to a self-educated, lively, and often assertive person. She bore eight children by Jefferson, four of whom survived and went free. She was a helpmate who became Monticello housemistress and was often in conflict with his daughter (and her niece) Martha Randolph.

When their affair began in Paris, Sally was a free woman, for France did not acknowledge slavery.  Pregnant with their first child from what Norm describes as a romance consummated between exceptional equals, Sally chose Thomas over freedom and returned willingly to enslavement in Virginia.

Norm contends Jefferson would not have spent 38 years faithfully—in a relationship he defended uncompromisingly and quietly—with a woman of any less character and commitment.

The Jayhawker

 

When Norm and Marsha operated The Blue Valley Gazette in the early 1980s, a country weekly newspaper serving the Stanley-Stilwell area of Johnson County, Kansas, they focused on the rich history of the region. Readers greeted that kind of material with enthusiasm and, besides a thirst for “news” of who visited whom for coffee, gave it highest priority in their demands.

One response by the mom-and-pop co-publishers was to show, by a serialized fictional account, how Kansas turned from a territory invaded by Missouri proslavers into a so-called Free State run by abolitionists. The Jayhawker ran for 114 illustrated episodes over a three-year period and captured the imagination of thousands of readers.

The intent behind the series was to show how the violence of the 1850s Border War was calmed by unusual courage—the political courage of Territorial Governor Robert J. Walker—so that a democratic outcome might launch Kansas toward statehood free of slavery.

The story opens with John Brown’s arrival in Kansas Territory. He is accompanied by Malcolm Erskine, a mixed-race drifter who is assigned a liaison role with the Shawnees then dominating the eastern portion of the Territory. A tragic outcome of this alliance turns Erskine into a fiery partisan against Missouri “bushwhackers” and drives him into leadership among retaliating Kansas “jayhawkers.”

This adventure/romance—historically accurate in times, places, events, and in the involvement of many players such as James Butler Hickok (later “Wild Bill”)—turns Erskine into a liberating hero. But Brown’s brand of vengeance tears at Malcolm’s conscience, and challenges to his own part-African identity erode Erskine’s faith and trust.

Only through the love of an unusually bright woman does he “find himself” and, at an opportune moment, does he help lead Governor Walker toward a political decision that quiets border warfare and delivers freedom to all Kansans.