The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (41 page)

That is part of the problem. It would be easier to understand the lives of the Hemingses if Jefferson had sent the Hemings-Wayles children to one of his outlying plantations, and if they had grown up as the hidden-away enslaved blood relatives. Rather than doing that, he, probably on the example of his wife and out of loyalty to her, fixed the Hemingses’ lives so that they always remained very close to him, which had the confusing effect (for him and the family) of further melding and highlighting their incongruous identities as slaves and family members. Jefferson sought to ameliorate the complications of their dual status by giving the Hemingses back as many attributes of free people as he could without totally removing them from the state of slavery—at least until he freed Robert and James Hemings.

Life in Paris then, far more than in Virginia, was much better suited to the way Jefferson conducted his relationships with the family. James Hemings took on even more of the attributes of a free man—becoming a professional, getting wages, hiring a tutor, and striking other men when the occasion warranted. Sally Hemings took on attributes of a free woman in a different way. She was made, for a period, a wage earner, which acknowledged her ownership interest in her labor. But it was labor of a distinctive sort. Keeping Jefferson’s and his daughters’ living quarters in order and sewing were not deep signifiers of the degraded status of African American enslaved females. The division of labor between males and females in society in general required a typical white farmer’s wife to pick up after her husband and family, and women of all races and classes sewed—from royalty to peasantry: Marie Antoinette, Martha Washington, Jefferson’s female relatives. One of the few identifiable possessions of Martha Jefferson that remains is her thread case. That Jefferson kept it as a memento suggests its importance as a trigger for memories of her, her femininity, and her role in his domestic life.

What did Sally Hemings make of all of this in a place where she considered herself to be free? Though this new status represented a change in her attitude about herself and about Jefferson, this important knowledge melded with all that Hemings knew about her origins and their way of life back home. By Virginia society’s dictates, Jefferson was far above her—not just in terms of his capacity to wield power but in terms of his very being. He was supposedly a “better” version of human being than she, and she was supposed to believe that was actually true. While she did not know them personally, Hemings knew that her father and grandfathers were white men just like Jefferson and that she shared the same father with the woman to whom Jefferson had been married. Her blood ran in the veins of Jefferson’s daughters. What Jefferson or other white people did or did not make of such a situation was never the complete story, and Hemings would not necessarily have accepted the idea that she was some lower order of human being than Thomas Jefferson. Even if Hemings had been 100 percent black, we could not assume that she would have accepted the idea that Jefferson was superior just because he was white.

Oppressed people do not always internalize the stories their oppressors tell about them. They often, in fact, develop their own internal narratives about who they are, ones that can be enormously self-regarding and vaguely, or even vigorously, contemptuous of their overlords. Think of the actions and reasoning of those slaves who, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, began to accept Christianity: they appropriated some of the stories of the Christian Bible to their own use, most particularly the story of the Israelites who lived under the thumb of the pharaoh. The pharaoh (white society) was the bad guy who ruled, not because he was “better” than the Israelites (enslaved black people), who were actually the favored of God, but because of his willingness to do evil to the fullest extent. Being powerful and successful on earth through evildoing was not a true mark of superiority. The children of Israel were the chosen ones who in time, if they passed the test and showed sufficient faith in God, would be delivered from the pharaoh’s evil ways. The real meaning those narratives held for blacks during slavery had to remain hidden, buried deep within religious songs and rituals, and in seemingly accommodating behavior. That is what Paul Laurence Dunbar meant when he spoke of black Americans throughout history wearing “the Mask” and hiding their true feelings about their circumstances. That tendency clearly unnerved Jefferson, and that was why in the
Notes on the State of Virginia
he showed such discomfort about “that immovable veil of black which covers the emotions” of African people. One can never know, he was complaining, what those people are really thinking and feeling.
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It must also be said, however, that the way Jefferson treated Hemings and her family probably made her more favorably disposed toward him than hostile. That was certainly the response of other family members. We know little about Sally Hemings’s attitudes about her life as a slave. What we have to go on, as we try to reconstruct her biography as completely as possible, is what others have said about what Hemings did and how she felt and what we can make of the various known details of her personal history, of which there is actually more to consider than has been generally allowed. To do this we will step away from strict narrative for the following four chapters to analyze closely the world of the enigmatic enslaved woman whose name has gone down in history with Thomas Jefferson’s.

T
HERE HAS BEEN
a tendency throughout American history, and into the present day, to see black people as symbols or representations rather than as individual human beings. Even when specific details about an individual life are available for interpretation, those details are often ignored or dismissed in favor of falling back on all the supposed verities about black life and black people in general. For African Americans social history almost invariably overwhelms biography, obscuring the contingencies within personal lives that are the very things historians and biographers normally rely upon to create meaningful depictions of events and lives in the past.

When we think of the young Sally Hemings in Paris dealing with Thomas Jefferson, we must acknowledge that she was born into a cohort—eighteenth-century enslaved black women—whose humanity and femininity were constantly assaulted by slavery and white supremacy. While the experiences typical to that cohort are highly relevant as a starting point for looking at Hemings, they can never be an end in themselves. For Hemings lived in her own skin, and cannot simply be defined through the enumerated experiences of the group—enslaved black females.

Taking account of the larger social context in which Hemings lived is essential, so long as that does not involve relying on stereotypes, whose very purpose is to cut off access to, or treat as invisible, truths about an individual’s life that do not conform to conventional wisdom. There is, in fact, no one context to consult in regard to Sally Hemings: she lived many and had the multiple identities that are the normal part of the human makeup. The people and places she encountered gave her multiple personal contexts—the circle of her mother and siblings, her extended family, the larger enslaved community at Monticello, her community in Paris, Jefferson, his white family, and, finally, her own children. Those associations, of varying degrees of intimacy, shaped her inner life and outlook, and becoming familiar with them—and taking them as seriously as one would take them in another human being’s life—offers the surest way to develop a picture of who Sally Hemings was.

“Unguarded Intimacy”

The first thing that one notes about Hemings the individual is that she did not know her father, who died the year she was born. As was alluded to in chapter 1, there is reason to believe that he may have gotten to see her, though she could have had no memory of him. Sally Hemings carried the same first name as John Wayles’s eldest daughter with his second wife, Tabitha Cocke, a little girl who died in infancy or in early childhood. Writing in his family Bible, Jefferson listed her name above her younger sisters with the simple notation that “Sarah Wayles” had died.
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It was not uncommon in those days of high childhood mortality for parents to name children after their deceased siblings. This suggests that Sarah Hemings was born before her father died, in May of 1773, and that she came to Paris, in July of 1787, some months past her fourteenth birthday.

Even though there was little chance John Wayles could have the kind of relationship to Hemings that fathers in legal marriages had with their daughters, or the kind that even some enslaved fathers had with theirs, not ever having seen one of the people who was responsible for her being alive shaped part of her identity. Brenda Stevenson, writing of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, has wisely cautioned against painting too rosy a picture of plucky slaves prevailing against all odds. Many enslaved families, simply crushed beneath the weight of slavery’s depredations, exhibited all the traits of families in severe distress: child and spousal abuse, alcoholism, and depression. At the same time, as Stevenson and others have made clear, there is no denying that family life was important to enslaved people.
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While we will never know the precise inner workings of the families of all Monticello slaves, one thing is clear: it was a place of stable two-parent families who had extended kin networks in the immediate vicinity. Like all families, each had its own unique characteristics: some couples may have loved each other more or less than other couples, they may have had ways of dealing with their children different from those of other parents, or the children in one household may have been better behaved or kinder to one another than children in other families. Whatever their internal characteristics, they were all together, which was not the case in the overall slave society, where families were regularly disrupted by sale, particularly in the post-Revolutionary period during which the Hemingses lived at Monticello. It was not even the case on Jefferson’s others plantations, for when he sold slaves for economic purposes (as opposed to disciplinary reasons or to unite families) or gave them to his relatives, they were mainly from his outlying farms. Because of the services they provided to him and his family as house slaves and artisans, building and maintaining Monticello, and because he lived a very long time, the enslaved people atop the mountain formed a familiar and tightly knit community.
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In the Monticello that Hemings knew most intimately in her early childhood, the one that had formed her view of the world by the time she was in Paris, most of the enslaved children had mothers and fathers. George and Ursula Granger, who were very closely associated with the Hemingses, lived with their children. Jupiter Evans and his wife, Suckey, had a least one daughter who was a contemporary of Hemings, as did James and Cate Hubbard, the Gillettes and Hern families. Even the children of liaisons between enslaved women and the white men on the mountain, like Joseph Fossett and John Hemings, got the chance at least to see the man who fathered them, whether they had extensive relationships with him or not. And before he left for France, Hemings knew Jefferson as the loving and attentive father of the little girls with whom she spent her time.

Seeing the face and figure of one’s father or mother is important for many reasons. It provides information about appearance: which parent one favors, why one is tall rather than short, why one has a particular type or color of hair and eyes. Paying attention to these things is part of the way people create their identities. It mattered, perhaps in ways that were not altogether positive, that Patsy Jefferson was tall like her father and resembled him facially and that Polly was “low” like her mother and had her facial features.
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Although the eighteenth-century understanding of genetics was primitive, people did notice that personality traits, not just physical ones, ran in families. Even if a father rejected an offspring, there was enough of a belief system about the meaning of “blood” relations that, no matter what the law said, Sally Hemings knew that aspects of John Wayles were inside of her. Without getting the chance to observe him, she could not have seen for herself just what those aspects were. Something would always be missing. The orphan inventing stories about, or pining for, the lost unknown parent is enough of a cliché of the literature and history of all ages for us to know that Hemings, at the very least, wondered about John Wayles and knew that she missed valuable information about herself because he was not there. This is even more likely if she knew that she shared a name with her father’s lost daughter. The Sarah Wayles–Sarah Hemings connection might explain why, despite all of John Wayles’s evident faults, at least two of Sally Hemings’s offspring chose to give Wayles’s name to one of their children, keeping the name alive for future generations.
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Wayles meant something to their mother.

We can return to the metaphor of the uncloaked female when thinking about Hemings’s identity as a fatherless young girl in Paris. Enslaved children who grew up knowing their mothers and fathers had a psychological buffer between them and the people who legally owned them. White masters were the ultimate authorities in their lives when it really counted—their mothers and fathers could not protect them from work assignments or sale, for example, and that was an ever-present reality. It is also clear that enslaved children thought of their parents as authority figures, protectors in certain circumstances, sources of comfort, and people who deserved respect and sympathy.
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The recollections of enslaved people, their naming practices, and the overwhelming evidence of their extreme sorrow at separation testify to the meaningfulness of connections between enslaved parents and their children. Those connections were born of the myriad mundane interactions that families engage in on a daily basis and that bind people together. At Monticello there were many issues that children looked to their parents to resolve—disputes with siblings or other children, illnesses that mothers attended to, fears in the night to be calmed, and tasks that one learned from one’s mother or father. There was someone beside the master, at Monticello usually two people, that enslaved children looked to to handle the sorts of issues they faced.

In Virginia, Hemings had her mother. In France, she had neither mother nor father to look to for parental counsel and support. Her brother James, though eight years older, would not have had the true authority of a parent, since he was not even close to being her oldest sibling. Of her nine older brothers and sisters, he was sixth on the list in order of age. While he was no doubt a respected and loved older brother, who provided emotional support and guidance, he was probably not equipped to be cast in the role of father figure. Without question Jefferson was the male authority figure at the Hôtel de Langeac, and he occupied that role without the buffer of any other adult Hemings could have looked to.

Whether largely cultivated or simply a natural part of his personality, Jefferson was well suited to the related roles of mentor, adviser, confessor, and patriarch. He offered himself in those capacities, and others sought him out to play those roles, in a wide variety of contexts. Although he could appear diffident upon first meeting, that impression usually melted after a few moments in his company. His overall demeanor made him approachable, and numerous anecdotes and examples from whites and blacks, enslaved and free, testify to that. People would greet a man they took to be a raw-boned farmer or office clerk, he would begin to talk, and it was only then that they realized this was no ordinary man. Jefferson’s personal informality, which might fit well in the modern world, surprised, confused, irritated, and sometimes infuriated many of his contemporaries who equated the level of one’s dignity with the level of one’s formality. They deemed his loose and easy manner a questionable presentation for one who occupied important leadership roles within his society. Others were charmed by an effortless presentation that inspired a sense of instant intimacy and, later, deep loyalty.
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The role that primarily fit the realities of Jefferson’s life as the owner of Sally Hemings—at least as he would have understood it—was that of the patriarch, with everything that attended that designation. That was, almost certainly, his earliest presentation of himself to her at the Hôtel de Langeac, which likely contributed to what happened between them there. One of the first acts that Jefferson performed when Hemings arrived in Paris was in keeping with his role as the patriarch of the household. He saw to her inoculation at great expense, although there was probably no reason for him to tell her how much it actually cost him. But, if he had let her know how expensive Sutton’s services were, it might have awakened a sense of gratitude in her. Later on, Jefferson would use the large amount of money he had spent on James Hemings’s apprenticeships in France as a reason to delay his emancipation until he had trained another to take his place as Jefferson’s chef. Jefferson believed that the special things he did “for” the Hemingses—and that is how he would have seen it—should have provoked in them a special degree of loyalty to and affection for him. They evidently saw things differently, but that was his expectation.

Hemings understood Jefferson’s action as one that had the positive effect of protecting her for life from what she knew was a gruesome disease. This placed him, very early in her stay, into the role of protector, something that would have been very meaningful to any young girl in a new environment operating without parental support in a foreign country. And calling upon Dr. Sutton to care for Hemings, when he knew that the Suttons were the best at what they did and had consulted at the highest levels of royalty and the nobility throughout Europe, was no doubt meaningful to Jefferson, too. It was something that he could, in his own self-regarding, eighteenth-century white male way, internalize as further evidence of his “goodness” and “soundness” as a patriarch. He had paid dearly to have Hemings, a slave girl, taken care of by a doctor to a king. Though he had the sensibility for it, irony was not always Jefferson’s strong suit, but here he knew and could always remember and appreciate over the years that he had engineered this very ironic turn in Hemings’s life.

Just as Jefferson had no wife to buffer and to filter his gestures toward Hemings and her responses to them, Hemings was equally exposed to him. History and literature are replete with examples of the potential hazards of older male–younger female interactions when the male is in a position of authority. These pairings inspire concern, and not solely because of legitimate fears about overreaching males. There is an understanding, though a much less comfortable one, that young females—and most uncomfortably of all, teenage girls—are emotional and sexual beings, too. The fear is that older males will take advantage of their sexuality to their own ends, not that they will address a sexuality that does not yet exist.

Ideally, an older male–younger female pair may stave off sexual tension by settling into a quasi–father/daughter relationship, despite their ostensible official or legal roles. The problem with that is the term “quasi.” If they are heterosexual, males and females who are not too closely related to each other are generally known to be potential sexual partners. It does not help the construction of a safe quasi–father/daughter relationship that the traditional conception of marriage or romantic relationships, and here we speak of the Anglo-American context that shaped Hemings’s and Jefferson’s lives, put the husband and wife, or husband and wifelike figures, in a position not far from that of a father and daughter.