Barbara Chase-Riboud

Born in Philadelphia in the late 1800s, light-skinned Hannah Elias has done things she's not proud of to survive. After attaining the life she's always dreamed, her lover's murder turns Hannah's world upside down and threatens to destroy everything she's built. When the truth of her racial identity is uncovered, thousands of protestors gather in front of her stately home. Hounded by the salacious press, the very private Mrs. Elias finds herself alone, ensnared in a scandalous trial, and accused of stealing her fortune from whites. Author of "Sally Hemings." Print run 60,000.

A Novel

The Great Mrs. Elias

The story, told in alternating time narratives, begins in 1831 when Sally is aproximately sixty years old and is visited by a census taker called Nathan Langdon. With encouragement, Sally recounts her past to him. A past that begins when she passes into the ownership of her half-sister Martha Wyles who marries Thomas Jefferson. After Martha dies, Jefferson goes to Paris where he is joined by his two daughters. Elizabeth Hemings volunteers Sally as their maid, seeing it as Sally's chance for freedom as slavery has been abolished in France. Jefferson and Sally fall in love and she returns to America with him, on the promises that they will go back to France someday and that she will be the only mistress of his estate in Monticello. Both promises are broken when Jefferson accepts political office and allows his daughter to live at Monticello after her marriage breaks down. Sally realises that nothing has or ever will change for her. A fact borne out when Jefferson dies and his will does not free her, only her last two sons, from bondage. She has not only been held in bondage by the fact of slavery, but by love as well. She has been a possession of both and only she can free herself.

Sally Hemings

The extraordinary life story of the celebrated artist and writer, as told through four decades of intimate letters to her beloved mother Barbara Chase-Riboud has led a remarkable life. After graduating from Yale’s School of Design and Architecture, she moved to Europe and spent decades traveling the world and living at the center of artistic, literary, and political circles. She became a renowned artist whose work is now in museum collections around the world. Later, she also became an award-winning poet and bestselling novelist. And along the way, she met many luminaries—from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, James Baldwin, and Mao Zedong to Toni Morrison, Pierre Cardin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Josephine Baker. I Always Knew is an intimate and vivid portrait of Chase-Riboud’s life as told through the letters she wrote to her mother, Vivian Mae, between 1957 and 1991. In candid detail, Chase-Riboud tells her mother about her life in Europe, her work as an artist, her romances, and her journeys around the world, from Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, Africa, the Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia. By turns brilliant and naïve, passionate and tender, poignant and funny, these letters show Chase-Riboud in the process of becoming who she is and who she might become. But what emerges most of all is the powerful story of a unique and remarkable relationship between a talented, ambitious, and courageous daughter and her adored mother.

A Memoir

I Always Knew

Combining fact with fiction and moving from Monticello to France and from Philadelphia to Washington, this tale portrays Thomas Jefferson's scandalous liaison with his mistress and slave, the beautiful Sally Hemings

Après l'immense succès de La Virginienne et La Grande Sultane, Barbara Chase-Riboud évoque avec émotion dans Le Nègre de l'Amistad les racines noires de la culture américaine et nous conte le destin exceptionnel d'une figure légendaire de l'émancipation africaine. En 1839, en Sierra Leone, des négriers enlèvent des guerriers du pays mendé. Vendus comme esclaves, embarqués pour Cuba, ceux-ci se mutinent et prennent la barre de l'Amistad, navire de leurs maîtres espagnols, avant d'échouer en Nouvelle-Angleterre. Leur chef Cinqué, superbe guerrier dont la noblesse impressionne le monde américain, représente l'antique tradition africaine et découvre une Amérique naissante, pleine de contradictions, avec ses abolitionnistes, ses féministes, ses conservateurs blancs jaloux de leurs privilèges et ses noirs émancipés, dont la belle Vivian Braithwaite, ardente et passionnée. Dans cette éblouissante épopée historique, Barbara Chase-Riboud réunit le vieux continent africain et le Nouveau Monde et nous donne, comme l'écrit Alex Haley, lui-même auteur de Racines, " la saga la plus fascinante qu'un siècle d'esclavage ait jamais produite ".

roman

Le nègre de l'Amistad

A shocking historical novel re-creates the tragic life of Sarah Baartman, an African bushwoman born in the colony of Good Hope, South Africa, in 1790 and the exploitation and cruelty she faced in nineteenth-century Europe as a subject of scientific curiosity, in a compelling novel of racism, sexism, and European imperialism. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Hottentot Venus

L’incroyable récit de vie de Barbara Chase-Riboud, célèbre artiste et autrice américaine, sur plus de trois décennies à travers les lettres intimes et détaillées adressées à sa mère entre 1957 et 1991. À peine âgée de 18 ans, Barbara quitte le giron familial et débarque à Paris, s’en va à Rome, revient en France, puis c’est Londres, de nouveau Paris où elle rencontre Marc Riboud le célèbre photographe. Les dés sont lancés, ils ne s’arrêteront plus de rouler au fil des rencontres, des créations, des succès, des honneurs, des amours, des défis. Commence alors une vie de voyages (Afrique, Chine, Mongolie, Union soviétique, Europe), de rencontres (Joséphine Baker, Pierre Cardin, Mao Tsé-toung), de fréquentation d’artistes (de Cartier-Bresson à Calder en passant par Salvador Dalí). Les portes du grand monde s’ouvrent, elle y brille mais n’oublie pas les exclus, les brimés, ceux dont la couleur est un fatal destin. Elle se bat. Elle ne tarde pas à mettre à ses pieds le monde de l’art contemporain, et bientôt à conquérir le public littéraire à travers plusieurs best-sellers qui ont réveillé les consciences, dont La Virginienne, succès mondial (dont la première éditrice n’est autre que Jackie Kennedy-Onassis). Ses romans sont des cris, et ses sculptures figurent dans les collections du monde entier, certaines trônent dans l’espace public. J’ai toujours su est une autobiographie sous forme de lettres, qui retrace une vie trépidante, entre Amérique et France, et à travers la planète. Un formidable récit d’émancipation et d’affirmation de soi, en toutes circonstances. Née en 1939 à Philadelphie, Barbara Chase-Riboud est romancière, plasticienne et sculptrice. Elle vit à Paris, avec des résidences à New York et Rome. Célébrée, adulée durant une vie de combats, elle revient sur le devant de la scène, avec ce livre et avec des expositions et hommages organisés autour d’elle en 2024.

J'ai toujours su

A fictional account of the relationship between American statesman Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings.

The sequel to Sally Hemings continues the fictional account of the life of Thomas Jefferson's daughter, Harriet, by his mistress and slave, Sally Hemings. Reprint.

The President's Daughter

The author weaves the tale of a group of African men seized by Spanish slave traders, the mutiny led by the slave Joseph Cinque, the courtroom battle as they face murder charges, and heartbreaking love

Echo of Lions

It is Paris, 1815. An extraordinarily shaped South African girl known as the Hottentot Venus, dressed only in feathers and beads, swings from a crystal chandelier in the duchess of Berry’s ballroom. Below her, the audience shouts insults and pornographic obscenities. Among these spectators is Napoleon’s physician and the most famous naturalist in Europe, the Baron George Cuvier, whose encounter with her will inspire a theory of race that will change European science forever. Evoking the grand tradition of such “monster” tales as Frankenstein and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Barbara Chase Riboud, prize-winning author of the classic Sally Hemings, again gives voice to an “invisible” of history. In this powerful saga, Sarah Baartman, for more than 200 years known only as the mysterious lady in the glass cage, comes vividly and unforgettably to life.

Recreated from historical facts, this novel tells the story of a young French-American girl sold into the harem of Abdulhamid, who becomes Valide, Empress of the Ottoman Empire

A Novel of the Harem

Valide

The long breath of Barbara Chase-Riboud's poems recalls poets of the antique world we know only from fragments, like Sappho. And yet here is a disquieting and sumptuous contemporary voice that seems to gather up antiquity and modernity with equal fervor and scorn. These poems are sexually charged, possessed of a courtly disdain and a strange nobility that seems to well up from below to be self-creating and unlike the verse of any other poet writing today. Certainly one secret to this work is that Chase-Riboud's poems are informed by her epic, polished bronze sculptures, as her sculptures are informed by her narrative fiction, and her fiction by her poems. The idea of the Renaissance Man is almost a cliché, but how often do we get to see what it means for an artist to be a Renaissance Woman? Chase-Riboud has been a major in sculpture, fiction, and poetry for close to half a century: selling over a million copies of her path-breaking novel Sally Hemings in the late '70s, winning the Carl Sandburg Award for her second collection of poems in the late '80s, and now, nearly thirty years later, on the heels of a major retrospective of her sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum, here is Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released, her first new and collected volume of verse.

Barbara Chase-Riboud

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