The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (27 page)

Even though the references to Hemings in Adams’s letters are brief, they reveal other important truths about the world in which she lived. First, Hemings was a “girl,” in terms not just of her gender or age but of the amount of respect that whites, upper class and not, could be expected to give her. Her personhood was ignored. In the Adams correspondence she literally had no name. After almost two weeks in the Adams household, and three letters from Abigail Adams to Jefferson specifically referring to her, Hemings was still “The Girl,” even though it is inconceivable that Adams did not know her name was Sally.

Adams was not doing anything unusual. That was the way most whites dealt with black slaves and, if they had them, white servants; that manner of dealing communicated to them their subordinate status in the world. Think, however, of a life lived daily under the power of that kind of profound social dismissal. Even if Hemings did not know what Adams had written to Jefferson about her, it is unlikely that an attitude revealed so freely on paper was not discernible in face-to-face interactions, especially since it probably never occurred to Adams that she was expressing any attitude that had to be hidden.

Hemings surely knew the social realities of her time—that there were people who felt she was unworthy of being called by her name—yet could still feel the sting of being dismissed or discounted as a person. She, and other slaves and black people, knew from their intimate family relations what it felt like to be a person who mattered—to be someone’s mother, someone’s daughter, sister, or friend. Those experiences as valued members of a family or a community provided a critical counterpoint to the world they lived in with the whites with whom they were forced to interact. It is a safe assumption that a person who has a name would prefer to be called by it. Enslaved people could not force whites to give them the dignity of using their names, and they often had to appear as if all the slights and dismissals did not matter when, often, they mattered very much. It was a rare enslaved person who got to record her observations of the whites who controlled her life, so we do not know what Sally Hemings thought of Abigail Adams’s character.

An even more telling detail is Adams’s recounting of Captain Ramsey’s “opinion” that Hemings would be of “so little Service that he had better carry her back with him.” Although willing to offer Jefferson a wealth of advice about other things, Adams had no preferences about this issue that she was willing to express openly. Her nonchalance about Hemings’s welfare is striking and highlights the distance between the enslaved girl and her charge. Jefferson was unwilling, because he would have thought it neither wise nor proper, to send his daughter on a five-week voyage with a ship full of men with no woman attached to her. He understood, as people have throughout the ages, that young females need to be protected from the sexual attention of males and, when they are of a certain age, from the effects of their own emergent sexuality. These concerns are expressed through the concept of the “appropriate” and the “inappropriate” in male-female relations. Without requiring openness about the delicate topic of sexuality, this shorthand saves members of the community from having to cast aspersions on the character of a man who may never do the thing feared—flirt inappropriately with a young girl, make a sexual advance or comment. Designating a male-female situation inappropriate also acknowledges that some young females do in fact want male attention, even when it is not what is best for them. The age of consent in eighteenth-century Virginia was ten.
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There prevailed then an understanding about girls and sex very different from that of our day. Rather than let people drift into a circumstance where the character of an individual male had to be tested, or where the preferences of a young female were left unchecked, steps were taken to ensure that the people were never in questionable circumstances.

There is no evidence that any of these considerations entered into Abigail Adams’s or Captain Ramsey’s mind about Sally Hemings. It apparently did not occur to them that, whether she would actually have been harmed or not, it would have been simply inappropriate for her to go, without female support, on a multiweek ocean voyage with Ramsey and his crew. Had Hemings been a free white girl, Ramsey would have consulted her father before making so momentous a determination about her life, and turned to her mother in her father’s absence. Even if he had considered it in passing, he probably would have kept it to himself, not wanting to appear unmannerly before the genteel Adams, who would have seen that he was overstepping a boundary. She would have wondered about him if he had offered to take a sixteen-year-old unchaperoned white girl off in that way.

Hemings had no parents to consult, or to be a force that Ramsey and Adams had to reckon with even if they were not present. John Wayles was dead; had he been living, the circumstances of Hemings’s birth would likely have precluded an outsider from approaching him as a father on her behalf. Elizabeth Hemings was certainly in no position to demand anything for her daughter. She may not have wanted her to make the trip at all. Without a “legal father” and with a mother who was not in law, the most logical person to have consulted was the man who owned Hemings: Jefferson.

Captain Ramsey had communicated with the Eppeses before the trip.
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Perhaps they relayed Jefferson’s instructions about the slave woman going back after delivering Polly to France, and this may have prompted his suggestion. That is not the import of Adams’s letter, which highlighted Ramsey’s belief that Hemings was too immature to be of service—presumably to Polly—and that was why she should go back to Virginia with him. Whatever Jefferson had written two years before, the circumstances had changed dramatically. The Eppeses knew they had not sent the mature woman Jefferson requested. As an enslaved woman, the almost thirty-year-old Isabel Hern might well have been vulnerable on the voyage, too—but not so vulnerable as fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings.

Recall Jefferson’s correspondence with Paul Bentalou, who sought his help in trying to get the French ministry to allow him to keep his nine-year-old slave in France. Bentalou expressed his great fear that his family would have to send the boy home alone. He said his wife’s “feelings would be very much hurt,” at the thought that on the trip he might be “Ill used by a Captain” or “spoiled…by the bad example of sailors” because of his tender age.
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The Bentalous were thinking enough about the realities of life to know that the young slave boy traveling for weeks by himself would be at the mercy of whoever was on the ship. His devalued status made him fair game for insults or anything else so long as he suffered no serious physical damage.

A teenage enslaved girl voyaging across the Atlantic alone would have been in at least as much peril as the nine-year-old boy whom Bentalou was talking about; and her London hosts should have known this. Captain Ramsey might well have appointed himself responsible, but for all Hemings or Adams knew, once Polly Jefferson was not attached to the teenage enslaved girl, he could have become the “ill-us[ing]” captain of the Bentalous’ very perceptive formulation, with no inclination to rein in or closely monitor his crew. Abigail Adams had not known Ramsey long enough to make a real judgment about this.

The unwillingness to see Hemings as a person of value and the complete inattention to her vulnerability as an adolescent—and her even greater vulnerability as a female slave—were the kinds of things that have gotten enslaved and servant girls into trouble throughout history. It is impossible to write the story of the lives of these girls without always being aware of the ways in which sexual exploitation—either the potential for it or the actual experience of it—was a constant threat in their lives. Because they were left uncloaked by the support and protections given to higher-status females, the dynamics of their interactions with higher-status males were very different from those of the interactions between males and females of equal rank, and they must be analyzed differently.

Hemings’s predicament as an “uncloaked” female, then, requires a hard look at the attitude of Captain Ramsey, whose reported comments about her are the earliest male responses to Hemings that exist in the historical record. Although he may actually have had absolutely nothing untoward on his mind, Ramsey’s very quick, and extremely presumptuous, suggestion, on the very day he arrived in port, even before he had any word from Jefferson about what he wanted to have done—that he “better carry her [Hemings] back with him”—is worth pausing over. Ramsey appears just a bit too eager. What was it to him that Hemings would be of “little service” to Polly, especially now that she would be safely under her father’s care? This seems a strange call for him to have made about another man’s servant—indeed, a higher-status man’s servant—especially since he and Adams believed at the time that Jefferson would be coming to London straightaway and be able to see Hemings for himself.

Just days after he left Hemings and Polly with Abigail Adams in London, Ramsey wrote to Jefferson. After praising Polly’s virtues and noting their mutual attachment to one another, he offered to bring her to Paris himself, if no arrangement had been made for her trip. He did not mention to Jefferson the idea of carrying Sally Hemings back to Virginia with him.
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By that time, he evidently thought better of it or more seriously about how the suggestion might sound to Jefferson, for it really was quite a thing for him to act as if the configuration of Jefferson’s household was his concern.

Adams’s statement that Jefferson “should be the judge” of whether Hemings stayed in Europe or went home shows that she immediately apprehended the problem with Ramsey’s suggestion. Unlike the captain, however, Adams thought this was an important enough issue that she could not let the matter drop. In three of the four letters she wrote to Jefferson during a two-week period, she felt compelled, in tones from veiled to very frank, to disparage Hemings’s capacity to take care of Polly on her own. That she should take this tack is especially intriguing because she knew all along that Hemings would not be Polly’s main caregiver in Paris anyway and that Jefferson could never have been counting on her, or anyone else, to play that role. Polly, as Adams specifically noted somewhat ruefully to Jefferson in one of the letters that referred to Hemings, would soon join Patsy at the “convent” and would be under the everyday care of nuns. She dreaded the prospect, but she could not reasonably have thought that Jefferson would have sent his older daughter to school and not his younger one.
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Adams knew that, even if the “old nurse” had made the trip with Polly, she would have been similarly eclipsed as the sole caretaker of Jefferson’s daughter. The issue was not the relative skill of Polly’s companion from Virginia; it was that Polly’s circumstances in Paris would make any full-time nurse superfluous. Adams’s warnings about Sally Hemings’s specific unsuitability were really meaningless in this context.

Oddly enough, this passive effort to convince Jefferson of Hemings’s uselessness was really insensitive to Polly’s needs, though both Ramsey and Adams professed to care so much about them. The Eppeses sent Hemings when Hern could not make the trip precisely because she had been with Polly all her life. There were other enslaved women from Monticello who could have gone, but they did not turn to them. Hemings’s mother, Elizabeth, had no very small children to care for at that point. Her older children could have looked after their younger siblings during the several months or so that it would have taken to travel to England and return immediately to Virginia as Jefferson had originally planned.

Despite Adams’s extreme praise of Polly’s preternatural maturity, some of her other comments sound a discordant note. Her description of the way Polly clung, almost desperately, to each adult who came into her life for any length of time is inconsistent with the picture of her being a well-adjusted and wise-beyond-her-years child. At first Polly did not want to leave Captain Ramsey. Then she did not want to part with Abigail Adams, whom she had known for only six days. Adams wrote that she had been “so often deceived” that she did not want to leave whoever was the last person who had charge of her.
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Polly was evidently traumatized by the events leading up to her arrival in Europe, and given the circumstances of her life to that time, one understands why. Hemings was, no doubt, a comforting presence to the little girl. Taking her away from Polly would seem to have been the last thing for anyone to think of doing.

In the end Captain Ramsey’s and Adams’s expressions of doubt about Hemings were couched as their mere observations that she would be of no use to Polly, when what they really were trying to convey to Jefferson was that Sally Hemings would be of no use to him in his household. And because of that, neither of them seemed to think she should go to Paris. One wonders why they cared so much. Fawn Brodie’s explanation for Ramsey’s and Adams’s responses to Hemings very reasonably centered on her appearance. The very course of females’ lives may turn on whether people find them attractive. The eighteenth century was no different on this point. Even as standards of beauty have varied from culture to culture, and epoch to epoch, the concept of attractive versus unattractive has always operated in human affairs. Hemings was a very attractive young female, an attribute that could awaken one response in Ramsey (sexual desire or just a more platonic wish to be around such a person) and quite another in Abigail Adams, who would be greatly attuned to how others—namely men—would view her.

Brodie suggested that the quite astute Adams took one look at Hemings, saw a beautiful young girl, and made the silent determination that it was not a very good idea to send her to live on a long-term basis with an unmarried man who was, for all she knew, lonely.
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No matter how opinionated and blunt Adams may have been throughout her life, if that was truly the root of her concern, she could never have conveyed that sentiment to Jefferson. On the other hand, if we take seriously Adams’s statement that Hemings was still young enough to require supervision herself, she may have thought that the last thing her friend the minister needed to take on, in addition to his already long list of duties, was the responsibility for a teenage girl with time on her hands. That was something Adams could have said outright. But she did not, and instead repeatedly voiced concerns about a problem she knew did not exist.