Read The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Online
Authors: Annette Gordon-Reed
J
AMES AND
S
ALLY
Hemings had many months to contemplate their possible return to Virginia. Jefferson had, in fact, been preparing to go home long before he received official word that his request for a leave of absence had been granted; he had packed his bags to be ready to go on a moment’s notice.
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The Hemingses, as well as his daughters, were expected to return with him, and were likely as much on tenterhooks as he, for they, too, had to be ready to leave as soon as word arrived. When it was clear that return to America was imminent, Sally Hemings was pregnant, and her pregnancy created a problem that she and Jefferson had to address and sort out. Madison Hemings described what happened:
But during that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called back home she was
enciente
by him. He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him, but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be reenslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia.
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There is much to consider about this very simple, yet powerful, explanation of what happened between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson in France. First, it could only have been a shorthand version of all that actually happened, all the words that passed between these two. There is no way to know whether Hemings first thought of staying in France before or after her pregnancy, whether the struggle with Jefferson was a relatively short one or one that took place with varying degrees of intensity over the months that he hung in suspension waiting for permission to return to America. One thing is clear: the events described were not the heedless work of a passing conversation. The stakes were extremely high for both, but highest for Hemings. She knew all too well what slavery meant, and she lived with the hard knowledge that, were she to return to Virginia, every child from her womb would follow her condition. In this moment and place, she was in the best position she would ever be in to walk away from
partus sequitur ventrem
forever. Most important of all, she could do that without having to depend upon the benevolence of any one man—to trust Jefferson, over French law, with her life and the lives of her children.
Another option, of course, was open to Hemings. Abortion was not unknown to women of all colors and statuses in Hemings’s time. Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, once warned a sister-in-law that if taken in certain quantities, a particular medicine could induce an abortion, and doctors believed that some women, in this case white women, were using the medicine she referred to for that purpose. Masters sometimes suspected that enslaved women were controlling their fertility through contraceptives or abortion, perhaps with the aid of enslaved midwives who understood the dilemma their sisters faced. A moment normally associated with hope for the future (impending motherhood) was firmly embedded in the unhopeful present-day circumstances of their enslavement.
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We cannot know what Hemings thought about abortion for herself or whether the thought of not keeping her baby even crossed her mind. She was away from the network of her mother and female siblings who could counsel her and, as far as we know, without a network of women of color to confide in and discuss a matter so personal. Indeed, one wonders how much preparation Hemings had actually had for womanhood. She left Monticello for Eppington in 1783 when she was ten years old. If her mother went with her, she did not stay, for, as was noted earlier, Jefferson’s correspondence with his gardener places Elizabeth Hemings at Monticello in February of 1785. At Eppington, Hemings’s half sister Elizabeth Eppes was the only known maternal figure in her life, and the nature of their day-to-day relationship is completely unknown. Between her time at Eppington and in France, Hemings appears to have gone through all the female rites of passage without the aid and comfort of the women who were her most natural allies—her mother, sisters, and other African American females.
Jefferson’s comments on fertility rates among Native Americans may provide some insight into his likely thoughts about whether anything could be done about Hemings’s pregnancy. While criticizing Native American men for the way they treated women, he posited that as a result of male behavior “they raise fewer children than we [black and white people] do.” He went on to be specific about the nature of the “problem”:
The causes of this are to be found, not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance. The women very frequently attending the men in their parties of war and of hunting, child-bearing becomes extremely inconvenient to them. It is said, therefore, that they have learnt the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable; and that it even extends to prevent conception for a considerable time after.
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One gets the sense from that passage, in the context of his overall discussion, that Jefferson viewed abortion and contraception as things that people resorted to in extreme circumstances, measures undertaken to ensure the outright survival of a person or a community. What had happened with Hemings was a not uncommon feature of southern planters’ way of life. This is how he had come to know her and her family. Though problematic, Hemings’s pregnancy probably did not rise, in Jefferson’s view, to the level of being trapped in a cycle of endless war and periodic famine.
Hemings’s son described his mother as “implicitly” relying on his father, which goes to the mystery at the heart of Sally Hemings’s life: Why would she trust Jefferson, and why would she, under any circumstances, return to Virginia with him? Trading immediate freedom for herself and her progeny for a life at Monticello with him and a
promise
of eventual freedom for her children was not an even exchange. There was something in the gap between those two conditions—some desired prospect on the other side of the ocean—that motivated her.
Femininity and Echoes from the Past
It is all too easy to ignore how being female shaped Hemings’s desires and expectations and focus in on the thing that makes her so different from us today: she was born enslaved. By the time they were in France together, Jefferson had already helped set the terms for the development of Hemings’s view of herself as a female. As the authority figure at Monticello, he sent a strong message to her when he acted to protect what he considered to be the femininity of Hemings and her female relatives, while failing to show similar concerns for other enslaved women on his plantations. Hemings watched every female go to the fields at harvest time, except her sisters, mother, and whatever white females were at the plantation.
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She learned from all this that, in Jefferson’s eyes, she was a female to be protected from certain things, when most women of her same legal status received no protection at all. It is a cliché that revolutions in societies occur not at the point of maximum misery but during periods of rising expectations. The same can be said of individuals. Those who are taught to expect things often wind up thinking that they deserve whatever they have, and that they have the right to expect more.
Whatever Hemings felt about her status as a female, the dominant society placed enslaved women—actually all black women in her time—outside of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century conceptions of “the feminine.” Their identities and prospects were aligned with those of the males alongside whom they worked. As scholars have noted, the “slave” in America has been constructed as male.
6
Discussions of resistance and agency among enslaved people—when individuals defied authority or exploited cracks within the system to alter some terms of the master-slave relationship—emphasize stereotypically male behavior and do not usually include the actions of enslaved women that were outgrowths of their femininity.
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The femininity (womanhood) of enslaved women is most often portrayed through their status as mothers, victims of rape, or degraded sexual objects. Hemings embraced the first role and sought, with ultimate success, to protect herself in it. She apparently did not see herself in either of the last two roles, which puts her into something of a historical and cultural bind, trapped between both gender-and race-related stereotypes that inhibit nuanced considerations of her life.
Patriarchal societies often separate women into categories of wives, potential wives, and whores. That we have yet to move fully beyond this has implications for the way Hemings and her life with Jefferson are viewed in modern times. With no access to legal marriage, the indispensable ingredient to respectable femininity for sexually active white women, Hemings is almost inevitably marked for degraded womanhood. Her use of Jefferson’s attraction to her to seek and receive benefits from him would not, in a traditional formulation, be considered an exercise in respectable will, because it resulted neither in formal freedom nor in marriage. She would be viewed differently had she used her femininity and sexuality to “marry” and have seven children with a black man. Even though her marriage would have had no legal validity, and she would have remained enslaved, our modern notions of humanity would grant her a safe harbor from debased womanhood. Operating with Jefferson—a white man in a world run on white supremacy, and her master in a slave society—Hemings is in problematic territory all around.
Hemings’s use of her femininity does not fit the conventional conception of either an act of conquest (in her society, a white man taking an enslaved woman) or an act of rebellion (a black man taking a white woman). For women’s sexuality is most often portrayed as an act of submission—forced or acquiesced in, but submission and surrender nevertheless. The sex act is
done
to the woman. Being the object of an action is the very opposite of resistance, defined as aggressive acts or direct confrontation on some varying level that turns the master into the “object” acted upon. The motherhood that often comes with sex—the searing, life-defining (life-threatening) responsibility for carrying, bearing, and nurturing the next generation—is often sentimentalized. It is seldom, if ever, given the weight of, or glorified in the manner of, brutal conquest or even feckless rebellion usually associated with males.
Throughout history, women of all cultures, races, and statuses have been expected (and forced) to deploy their motherhood and sacrifice their children, in service of whatever male project, conquest or rebellion, is on the table at any given moment. That many women, because of their unique experiences and responsibilities—their vulnerability to their children, their senses of family—may have had other priorities or a completely different understanding about how best to conduct themselves in a time of social or cultural crisis has seldom been deemed important. Women’s work has never been taken so seriously as men’s work—unless, of course, it resembles men’s work.
Because she is ineligible for the mantles of respectable womanhood, conqueror, or rebel, there is no ready vocabulary to describe the young Hemings in Paris who decided to return to America with Jefferson beyond that of presumptive rape victim—so traumatized beyond the power of reason that she did not know better than to negotiate with and trust her rapist—or collaborating whore. One suspects that even an enslaved woman who decided to kill her children rather than have them be slaves (again violence, destruction, or direct conflict as the essence of resistance) might receive more grudging respect than a woman who saved her children, and the rest of her line, from slavery by agreeing to be the partner of the man who held her in bondage. This is likely so even if, in her eyes, she was making the kind of rational calculation that women, at all levels of society, have very often made when considering the pros and cons of a life with a particular male. However dramatic (and perhaps quasi-romantic, at least from afar), infanticide was contrary to what most enslaved women saw as their duties to their children.
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A far more telling view of their sense of responsibility is that when women ran away from slavery, they almost always ran with children in tow and, therefore, were far less successful at escaping than male slaves, who tended to run by themselves.
9
One knows infanticide occurred, but one can scarcely fathom the pain of a mother who felt compelled to kill her child rather than give him or her up to the slave system. There can be no more graphic statement about slavery’s evil nature, and the hopelessness it could engender, than having the giver of a life end the life given. The mother “saves” the child at enormous cost to herself and is redeemed from the sin of killing by her own deep suffering. Hemings, described by her son as having been well treated by Jefferson, and by one contemporary commentator in the 1800s as “pampered,” is ineligible for such self-immolating redemption. She did not lose her children in a show of resistance born of utter hopelessness. Instead, she wanted to be (and got to be) in the position to experience their childhoods and prepare them for their lives as adults in which she knew they would be free people.
10
Even without Jefferson’s intervention, it is doubtful that Hemings thought being a slave was more at the core of her existence than being female; she could cease to be the one, never the other. Their numbers were still small when she was growing up, but there were free black people in Virginia, and their numbers would grow in the years after she returned to America.
11
The world sent her a very definite and hard message about enslavement at the same time as it conveyed another powerful message about what was to be her role in life as a woman—partner to a man and a mother. Those roles were tenuous because the law did not protect her in either of them. They were not, however, meaningless to her.