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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.

Sour Notes

A Sally Freberg Mystery

 

 

We all know fiction means made-up stories, but how many realize writing it involves inventing people we wish we were? They’re usually wise, witty, well-formed physically if not downright sexy, and of course considerate, generous, heroic, etc. If writers build flaws into their protagonists to put them across as real, you can bet the flaws will be forgivable. In Sally Freberg’s case, she farts when she’s nervous. For a woman in her early sixties that’s not unusual, but it does lend comedy to a scene here and there.

 

Sally’s major asset is her musical knowledge. After all, she gives piano lessons, but she also fancies opera. And it’s in opera where all the intrigues of human skulduggery are chronicled in ways appealing to emotions and the senses. (Who can watch Rodolfo wail over dead Mimi in La Bohème without shedding tears?).

 

What does Sally do with her mastery of opera’s countless plots and conspiracies? She solves crimes, of course.

 

The character of middle-aged divorcee Sally Freberg was the invention of Norm’s coauthor, who goes by the pseudonym of Bethine Louise, a teacher who lives in Lee’s Summit, MO. Together this writing team plans more Sally stories and is working on a sequel to Sour Notes tentatively titled Disharmony.

 

Sour Notes is peopled with offbeat characters such as Ben Novak, an aging widower and anthropologist who is also Sally’s bumbling squeeze; Bianca Russo, retired clinical psychologist and Sally’s rotund housemate, the fresh breezes of whose Mediterranean frankness offset Freberg’s Scandinavian reserve; Kansas City Police Detective Rachel Rosenberg, degreed in law and criminology and a black belt in aikido, whose access to her parents’ kosher deli opens many doors; Rachel’s older love interest, Manuel Rivera, at heart a vaquero with a Pancho Villa mustache and multilayered muscles; and Karl Marx, a trained German shepherd who, when not snoozing, turns up at the proper moment to save the lives of those he loves.

 

Sour Notes is a romp from Kansas City to Santa Fe in pursuit of the slayers of Henry Decker, an archeologist who, Ben Novak believes, is the last person in the world anyone would want to kill. We visit Decker’s New Mexican pueblo digs, where near-Biblical monsoons imperil Sally, almost costing her a starring role in a sequel or series. Wisdom prohibits description here of the rescue and of Sally’s operatic resolution for the Decker killing.