The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (31 page)

After the inoculation was performed, usually by making a small incision on the upper arm and placing a piece of thread that had been exposed to smallpox pustules into the wound, those attending Hemings at the inoculation house followed her condition. Her “duly restricted” diet continued with a set menu that had a very limited range of choices. After a “Breakfast” of “tea with dry toast” and “milk porridge” or “honey and bread” or “bread with the addition of sugar and currants,” Hemings could look forward to a “Dinner” featuring various types of pudding—“bread,” “rice,” or “plum or plain pudding”—and “the production of the kitchen garden,” presumably vegetables. For “Supper” she could be given any of the items from previous meals, along with “roasted apples or potatoes.” She could not have “fish, flesh, butter, cheese, eggs or spiced food.” The Suttons did not want their patients to eat foods that they believed created a “heating quality.” So, in addition to watching the foods she ate, whatever fluid Hemings took in would have to be “perfectly cooling” to her body. After a few days “purging syrup” was administered periodically. To control the symptoms of the mild case of smallpox—chief among them, a high fever and, sometimes, very intense aches and pains—Hemings was given a dose of a serum that included, controversially even at that time, a tiny amount of “calomel,” a form of mercury. In earlier days, inoculators had used mercury more liberally, often weakening their patients to an alarming degree.
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John Adam’s description of the “Mercurial Preparations” that seemed an almost daily part of his regime under inoculation, mentions symptoms easily recognizable as mercury poisoning. By the time his wife, Abigail, was inoculated twelve years later, the Suttons had appeared on the scene and most of the extreme aspects of the process had been mitigated, including the heavy doses of mercury.
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Along with their attention to hygiene, the Suttons had a great belief, approaching mania apparently, in the benefits of fresh air. They emphasized rest, to prepare the body to take and control the mild case of smallpox. At the same time, they believed that it was important for the patient to move around. In the days after the procedure, Hemings was thus supposed to engage in moderate exercise, defined as walking around the grounds of the quarantine area for a set period of time each day. That is why the Suttons wanted their patients out in the country away from everyone else. A daily walk through a community might bring them into potentially fatal contact with others. Once Hemings developed a fever, it was to be “treated with cold water, warm tea and thin gruel by mouth.” After her “eruption appeared,” she would be directed once again to get up and walk around—and take in more fresh air. Then she would return for more rest.
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Although, or perhaps because, he had a generally low opinion of doctors, Jefferson often played the role of physician in his own life—personally nursing his daughters when they were ill, as he had his wife, giving doses of medicine to slaves, watching the schedule for that, setting their bones, and stitching up wounds.
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With Hemings’s inoculation program, there was medicine to be given and a regimen to follow that had been prepared by a celebrated physician notorious for guarding the secrets of his success. The whole business spoke to virtually every aspect of Jefferson’s personality: his boundless curiosity, his addiction to routine, his interest in progressive scientific methods, and his self-fashioning as a dutiful patriarch and competent quasi-health professional. Hemings probably had to answer many questions from him about everything that had taken place while she was under Sutton’s care in his very secretive world.

Just months into her stay in France, Hemings was living amid strangers, apart from her brother, and others familiar to her, on the opposite side of Paris from the Hôtel de Langeac. Her mother was an ocean away. She had come from a family of numerous siblings and spent most of her childhood living in a place where there were always lots of people her age and older around her. What she faced living on the outskirts of Paris was about as far from the life she had known as one could imagine. Being ill, even under controlled circumstances, is difficult. Being ill and alone in a strange country where people speak a language one cannot understand is on another order of magnitude of difficulty.

Dr. Sutton, of course, spoke English, and Hemings could communicate with him when he made his round of visits. The attendants at the house may have been bilingual or not, as the house was specifically designed to serve French-speaking patients. The Suttons’ long presence in France gave them ample opportunity, and a great financial incentive, to speak to their prospective customers—and any local attendants who worked for them—in their native language. If Sutton thought he could take over the care of Louis XV and deal with his doctors, he probably had at least some knowledge of French. This was very likely Hemings’s first really intensive experience with language immersion, when she was surrounded by people for whom English was a second language. If they talked to her in her native tongue, they would have spoken to one another in their own, sharpening her ear for French even as she wondered what they were talking about.

Hemings was at the right age to quickly achieve proficiency in French. Her son Madison recalled that, by the end of her time in Paris, she had learned to speak the language “well,” which makes sense given her age at the time she came to the country and the length of her stay there.
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When he first arrived in France, a very impressed William Short noted how much faster the teenage children of Jefferson and John and Abigail Adams picked up the language as compared with their elders. This was not a matter of formal study or educational level. The elder Americans had studied French, Jefferson for many years, themselves. Human beings are primed to learn languages, and can do that very well without studying them formally. Hemings was one year younger than Patsy Jefferson and six and eight years younger than the Adams children Short was referring to, John Quincy and Nabby, and thus well within the time period when acquiring language is easier.
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What did Sutton and his attendants make of the young African American girl who had been put into their care by the American minister to France? Did they know she was a slave? It is probably impossible to recover just how many blacks were being inoculated in the city at that time. There cannot have been very many, for there were not that many blacks in the country. Their overall small numbers in Paris as compared with Hemings’s Virginia, or the French colonies, for that matter, made blacks a less immediate threat to Parisian whites. She probably faced a different, less forbidding racial dynamic than the one that existed back in Virginia. The people at the Suttons’ inoculation house (who would have had no reason to go around thinking of themselves as “white” and attaching daily significance to that) were most likely very different from the whites she had encountered for most of her life. Still, Hemings was undoubtedly something of a curiosity at the place. Here Abigail Adams’s observation about her good nature and others’ testimony that she was very pleasant to look at may have given her an advantage as a patient. From Hemings’s standpoint, this may have been the first time she had ever been attended to by white people. In her life to date whites were the centers of attention—that of other whites and of blacks as well. Even at her young age, she had been raised to care for white children who were not much younger than she. “The Girl,” for an extended time, was now the focus of attention, being looked after by others who were there to serve and care for her.

Hard as it must have been, perhaps because it was hard, the entirety of this experience—the isolation, the facing down of an inherently frightening situation, and the process of recovery from the ordeal—helped shape Hemings’s personality just as surely as her transatlantic crossing. Those forty days alone with no tasks to perform, save relying on her own inner strength to get well, left her with no one’s interests to look after but her own. Perhaps for the first time since she was a small girl, Hemings had the perfect occasion to think intensely about herself, what her life had been to date, and what she would like to have happen in the future, and to daydream a great deal about all of that.

T
HE HOME THAT
Sally Hemings returned to after the end of her time at the inoculation house was just inside the city limits of Paris. Indeed, the Hôtel de Langeac was right next to the Grille de Chaillot, one of the many gated entry points into what was still at the time a walled city. The house, abutting the Champs-Elysées and along the rue Neuve de Berri, was more expensive than Jefferson could afford. He thought, however, that his position demanded a suitable residence for all the entertaining that he expected to do. Whatever its merits as a standard-bearer for the representative of the newly formed United States of America, the house also suited Jefferson personally.
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This residence was truly worthy of a French aristocrat. The expansive grounds entered by a way of an impressive courtyard, contained “green houses,” an extensive kitchen garden, and another “graceful” one that Jefferson pronounced “clever,” admiring its English style. Just off the entry-way into the courtyard from the rue de Berri were the porter’s lodge and servants’ quarters. The house itself, torn down in 1842, seems to have been a gem. It “had a basement, ground floor, a mezzanine,” and a top floor. Howard C. Rice, who wrote extensively about Jefferson’s time in Paris, provides a description of the sumptuous home that James and Sally Hemings came to know that is well worth reproducing.

Living at such a place gave both Hemingses ample opportunity to compare their surroundings in Paris with those they had seen in Virginia, and they could only have found Virginian residences wanting. The amenity of having indoor bathrooms was remarkable for both them and the Jeffersons. Along with the
lieux à l’anglaise
on the upper floors, the ground floor had a room designed for taking baths. The very complexity of the house, with its multiple stairways (one large formal one and two smaller private ones) and its numerous passageways leading into different areas of the mansion, no doubt piqued their interest as well. If Jefferson’s English-style garden was “clever,” so was the house designed by Jean Chalgrin, one of France’s premier architects, who later created the Arc de Triomphe. It was, in Jack McLaughlin’s words, “the most splendid house Jefferson had ever lived in.”
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Rice’s supposition that the mezzanine floor consisted of “bedrooms” and “informal apartments” is sound. All the other rooms that go into making a house a home—kitchen, dining room, parlor, master bedrooms—were accounted for in the plans for the other floors. Having a floor of available bedrooms explains why Jefferson so confidently invited guests to stay with him while in Paris: he had enough space to put them up comfortably, and he was able to play the gracious host, a role he liked very much.

Jefferson’s own living area was quite opulent. His personal quarters consisted of an oval-shaped combination library and study that looked out over the garden in which he planted traditional southern fare like sweet potatoes and Indian corn. His library-study led into his bedroom and dressing room, a setup he reproduced at Monticello years later. One of these rooms had a ceiling “richly ornamented with a painting of the rising sun,” a bit of extravagance that one does not immediately associate with republican virtues. But it was, at its core, a very practical configuration of a personal world where the maximum amount of privacy could facilitate the maximum amount of work. Even this sequestered realm was not enough for him, for there were always household matters to deal with, so long as he was at home. He solved that problem by taking an apartment at a nearby monastery, Mont Calvaire, which he called his “hermitage.” There he retreated when he felt a need to close himself off completely from the world.
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It is not known whether James and Sally Hemings lived in the adjacent servants’ quarters or whether the mezzanine floor, the entresol in architectural terms, contained rooms for servants as well. Those half-story sections within great houses, with their lower ceilings, were often designated for the use of servants or as bedrooms for people other than the master or mistress of the house. Sally Hemings’s closeness to the girls may not have made much of a difference for most of the time they were in Paris. Until their father took them out of school, they came home only on the weekend, usually on Sunday.

Whether brother and sister would have been happier with a room in the house or one in the separate, but nearby, servants’ quarters is unclear. Maids’ and cooks’ rooms within great houses were usually just simple affairs, so there may have been little difference in the relative comfort of their accommodations wherever they lived at the Hôtel de Langeac. On the other hand, James and Sally Hemings would have derived very real benefits from having some distance from Jefferson, Patsy, and Polly. Abundant evidence suggests that enslaved people benefited emotionally and culturally when they had a space apart from their owners. Greater autonomy allowed them to create their own worlds and to be their true selves within them. Complaints, grievances, and disappointments could be more openly aired, hopes and plans for the future hatched outside the earshot and eyesight of masters.
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By the time Sally Hemings arrived, her brother was well used to the splendors of the Hôtel de Langeac. What was new about his time there was his elevation at the beginning of 1788 to chef de cuisine, which drastically changed the level of his responsibilities and probably of his stress. No longer an apprentice, he was in charge of the kitchen and his assistants. His position made him responsible for every success and failure regarding a critical component in that diplomatic household. Jefferson entertained on a large scale, as he did throughout his life. Hemings’s talents were on constant display at meals that could be for a few people or for up to thirty, as at one dinner celebrating the Fourth of July. The hectic pace and pressure for perfection drove many chefs to drink, and as the years went by, Hemings himself would fall prey to that professional hazard. He had to please not only Jefferson’s exacting palate but that of the people whom Jefferson wanted to impress. He and Patsy’s early experiences having to meet Parisian fashion standards taught him a valuable lesson about the kinds of things that mattered in the city. The French were as serious about their cuisine as about fashionable attire. In fact, the two were closely related, since the presentation of food—the look—took its place alongside taste as a mark of true distinction. Every dish Hemings prepared invited a judgment by a man who was a perfectionist.

While James Hemings was busy plying his trade in 1788 and 1789, his younger sister had little to do but absorb the routine of the household. This meant getting used to the other servants, who spoke another language and had their own cultural manners. Having no apparent role in the operations of the residence for long stretches of time, she was essentially cast as an observer, watching what other people did to make things run smoothly at the place. At the beginning, Hemings really was a fifth wheel at the Hôtel de Langeac, as Abigail Adams had implied she would be. From her perspective that may not have been at all a bad thing, rather a source of immense joy as her nonessential status left her free to experience her new surroundings in more of her own way.

As she noted all that was going on around her, Hemings had to adopt a new way of looking at herself, because the role she had played in life had changed rather dramatically. She was no longer a part of pair, and there was no person for whom she was in any way responsible. With Polly away at school, those days were gone—which could be at once liberating and lonely. Because Jefferson’s almost six-year absence from Monticello had disrupted the course of life there, Hemings’s switch from doing a job that was closely associated with young slave children to playing a more adult role came late for her. And that switch took place in a completely foreign environment.

Enslaved children at Monticello above the age of ten left their roles as messengers, playmates, and minders of other younger slave children and quickly moved into the roles they would play as adults. They were designated to work as artisans or went to the fields, or “into the ground,” to use a phrase of that time. Hemings, not destined for any of those roles, was supposed to take her place as a servant with adult responsibilities in the house when she came of age. By that reckoning, when she arrived in Europe, she was a few years behind schedule and may have continued in that dream state that one of her great-nephews, the grandson of her sister Mary, described many years later when speaking of his early life at Monticello. Peter Fossett said that as a young boy he never thought of himself as a slave, because his life was so unlike that of the boys down the mountain whose situations more clearly telegraphed their status. He was dressed differently from them. He spent all of his time in or near the house without much to do and identified greatly with the people there—his own family—who focused closely on the affairs and interests of their own genetically connected world.
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Fossett’s recollections are really not surprising when one recalls that enslaved children were, in fact, children and by definition lacked the maturity and foresight of their parents. When they are allowed to, children can have priorities very different from those of adults. They tend not to be so focused on the outside world and determining their exact place in it, unless some event—the death of a close relative or, for enslaved children, the sale or mistreatment of relatives—forces them to pay attention to those things. While even extreme poverty is not on a par with slavery, it is nevertheless interesting that Fossett sounds very much like people who grew up poor who say that they did not define themselves as poverty stricken when they were small children. It was only as they grew older that they realized all they did not have.

When a child like Fossett sees others in the immediate community whose lives are more severely constricted than his, and when that child has a stable and nurturing family, as he did, one can see why he would not as a small boy have recognized or dwelled on the realities of his legal and social standing. Peter Fossett’s self-characterized childhood idyll ended at age eleven when Jefferson died and he learned in the hardest way possible that his status as a member of the Hemings family did not protect him from the vagaries of life as a slave. When all was said and done, the first-generation Hemings/Wayles slaves fared much better after Jefferson’s death than other members of the clan. Fossett’s father, Joseph, was freed, but neither his mother nor he nor any of his siblings were freed along with him. In the end, they were not so different from the people down the mountain, after all.
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Peter Fossett’s statements about his early life naturally raise a question about Sally Hemings’s state of mind during her childhood and the way she carried herself as a young girl. If Fossett, a fourth-generation Hemings, who was not a Wayles descendant, could pass through the early part of his boyhood without seeing the magnitude of his enslavement, there is little reason to think that Sally Hemings was not similarly disposed. Everything that had happened in her life pointed toward that. A blood relation to Jefferson’s wife and daughters, she had been chosen because of those relationships to be constantly in the presence of the Jefferson family and knew she was not destined for arduous physical duties in adulthood. She had older brothers who were allowed to go off on their own, work for themselves, and keep their money—money they could give to their mother and siblings or use to buy presents and clothes for their little sister. Hemings, as a child, may have dwelled even less upon her legal and social status than Peter Fossett.

Perhaps it was in part an unknowing manner in the young Sally Hemings that so disconcerted Abigail Adams, a manner exacerbated by her tangled family relations. She was both the aunt of the little girl whom she was serving and the half sister of the woman in whose house they had lived for four years before coming to Europe. Adams almost certainly had no idea of any of this when she met Hemings in London, but it was not just her knowledge that counted. It was what Hemings knew about who she was in relation to the Jeffersons that fixed her inner life and the way she presented herself to Adams and others.

In Adams’s eyes, Hemings just was not “grown up” in the way a servant girl should have been grown up—maybe with harder edges, and a more resigned or deferential demeanor. Adams was not a slaveholder, but she was familiar with the trajectory of servants’ lives. The sixteen-year-old enslaved girl she mistakenly thought Hemings to have been was supposed to be well into that defined role, and she evidently was not. Adams’s petulant comment that Hemings needed “more care” than Polly is suggestive. Hemings may have acted more like Polly’s friend than her servant, and expected some attention from Adams, as if she were still in the pre-adult stage of her life as a slave dealing with her half siblings and their spouses back in Virginia who out of a mix of guilt and paternalistic benevolence acted out more literally an old saying about servants, “She’s just like a member of the family.” Support for this appears in a reference to Hemings from one of Patsy’s French friends, Marie de Botidoux. After Patsy returned to America, Botidoux wrote to her and asked her to say hello to “Mlle [Mademoiselle] Sale [Sally]” for her.
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In rigidly hierarchical ancien régime France, the honorifics monsieur, madame, and mademoiselle were strictly reserved for those of high standing, and they were guarded jealously. One cannot say it “never” happened, but members of the French upper class did not refer to
serviteurs
by any of those titles; “Sally” should have sufficed. Patsy Jefferson was a “mademoiselle” in that world. Botidoux, for purposes of the letter, put Hemings on a par with her. The young Frenchwoman was evidently making a bow to her American friend’s sensibilities, which indicates that Patsy Jefferson’s behavior toward Hemings signaled to outsiders that she was something more than just a normal servant in the Jefferson household.