The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (48 page)

Having a child was perhaps the most serious matter that confronted women. Females who faced motherhood during Hemings’s time—enslaved, free, black, white, and red—confronted the immediate issue of surviving the ordeal of pregnancy. They knew that even if they survived, at least some of their children would likely die because no society had figured out how to save its children from deadly childhood diseases that are of little import in the developed world today. The death of children was not the only stalker of slave mothers and potential mothers like Hemings. She and other enslaved women faced the added, unspeakable reality that they could be separated from their children by sale. Above all of slavery’s depredations, the separation of children from their families crystallized the system’s barbarity so clearly that slave owners claimed that it rarely happened or spent endless time talking about how loath they were to do it—just before they did it. While enslaved women knew that nothing could be done to ensure that they would never lose children to early deaths, and that this tragedy could affect all women, separation from children by sale happened
only
to them. That shaped their identities as women. Hemings, like other enslaved girls, must have dreamed of a future in which her motherhood would never be blighted by such a moment.
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T
HERE IS A
more elusive set of influences to consider when thinking of the development of Hemings’s expectations about her relationship with a man. Although a child of both Africa and Europe, who grew up surrounded predominately by European culture and values, Hemings had a connection to African culture that was actually quite close. She was raised by a woman whose mother was an African. We do not know how long Elizabeth Hemings had her mother, but parents can transmit cultural information about proper sex roles very early on in the lives of their children. Even if she was without her mother, Hemings grew up in a time and place where African women were very much present. The always entrepreneurial John Wayles was importing them, selling some, and keeping others. While the intermixture with Europeans had altered the family’s African features, one doubts that all traces of African culture, conscious or unconscious, had been expunged from the family after only one generation. This is particularly so since the Hemingses’ African heritage came through a woman, who as a mother in those days was primarily responsible for the care of her child, and was in a better position to transmit culture—language, religious beliefs, and values—to her children than a father was.
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Without precise knowledge of where Hemings’s grandmother came from in Africa, it is impossible to say specifically what attitudes would have been passed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter about the proper place of females in relationship to men. Africa was and is a land of enormous cultural diversity. There were, however, some points of commonality across the ethnicities that were most typically part of the Atlantic slave trade. Women on the African continent were defined very much by their family relations and marital status, and they acquiesced in rules in order to gain the important status of wife, which led to the equally important, and perhaps even more important, status of mother in Africa’s many matrifocal societies.
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Regarding the question of who would be the father of her children, Hemings, like girls of every race and status, had to consider what type of man she would end up with in life. Having sex with a man and going to death’s door in order to bear children by him was thought to be a woman’s duty. It was not an enterprise entered into lightly by any woman who had the opportunity to shape that experience. Not just any man who came along would do. Just as one can safely assume that enslaved men sought the prettiest wives they could attract, enslaved women took notice of the sometimes small degrees of status that existed among the men of their community. Slaves’ imaginations allowed them to play out in their own minds hopes and preferences about the future courses of their lives, even if the chances of bringing them to fruition were limited. Had she been free and white, with greater power and potential mobility, Hemings would have had access to a wider variety of partners for legal marriage. In reality, she had even fewer chances to choose among a range of partners than had her brothers, whose personal mobility was far greater than that of the average enslaved man, and greater still when compared with that of the average enslaved woman. Her brother Robert found his wife in Fredericksburg, Virginia, when he was there working on his own.
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As a general rule, enslaved males had far larger engagements with the outside world than females had, which meant that they could more easily pick partners from surrounding plantations and towns. In fact, men carried out most of the interplantation traveling to see spouses. Account records from local stores in several Virginia counties show that enslaved “men outnumbered women by a large margin as store customers” and were the chief buyers of products for their wives and children. Views about a woman’s proper place and, most likely, the demands of children meant that slave women had fewer occasions than men to leave, or were less able to leave, their home plantations in search of spouses in towns or on other nearby farms.
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Had Hemings never been in Paris, her choice of mates at Monticello would have been perhaps even more limited than that of other enslaved women on the plantation. Her racial background contributed to her identity and undoubtedly affected her views about who would be attractive as a companion and as father of her children. Race and American slavery were so intertwined that it may be hard to imagine that any slave could have separated the two and developed a sense of self and a set of priorities that confounded the rules about the way those defined as “white,” and those defined as “black” or “mulatto,” were supposed to feel and think. In slavery and outside of it, members of Hemings’s family—female and male—developed a practice of having children with, and marrying when that was available, people who looked something like themselves, which is what most people in the world tend to do.
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Jefferson probably resembled Hemings more than the average male slave on the plantation did, in terms of hair texture, skin color, and eye color. This is not to say that she would never under any circumstances have welcomed a partner with skin darker than her own or tightly curled hair, as allowances must always be made for the vagaries of attraction. It is human beings we are dealing with, after all, and no one has devised a precise formula or foolproof predictor of personal taste, and black couples and families come in all shades.

Although Hemings was probably not thinking in strictly legal terms about the racial makeup of the child she was carrying in Paris when she was deciding whether to come home with Jefferson, Virginia statutory law on racial categorizations, as Jefferson noted many years later, would make all of her children by him legally white. We know Hemings wanted to free her children from slavery, and Jefferson’s actions show he wanted that as well. No one has ever said that Hemings thought it important to free them from blackness, too. However, that is exactly the route that three of her four children took when they left both slavery and the black community to live as white people. The one child of hers who did remain in the black community, Madison Hemings, married a woman who was fair-skinned enough that some of their children were able to pass into the white world. We do not know whether the Hemings-Jefferson offspring were raised to do that, but it would not be surprising, particularly given their father’s stated values, if that was a part of a plan or at least a very strong hope.

While it is perfectly acceptable not to want one’s children to be slaves, the notion of escaping from blackness may raise some hackles today, a reaction, it must be noted, that comes from the relative safety of the twenty-first century. It also comes after more than a century of the one-drop rule adopted in the wake of the South’s defeat in the Civil War. In the decades following the end of slavery, southern whites became far more strident about racial classifications than they had been in Hemings’s and Jefferson’s time. The legal rule was supposed to send a message about the “contaminating” nature of blackness. Instead, blacks absorbed the concept and used it to forge political, if not always social, cohesion among themselves. This way of operating eventually turned blacks in the United States into a force to be reckoned with in ways unknown in other parts of the black diaspora (Brazil, for example) where the putatively “enlightened” sliding-scale approaches to race have effectively choked off political and social assaults on the doctrine of white supremacy. Frederick Douglass was clear about what the American linkage of race and slavery taught people of African origin like Sally Hemings years before the legalized one-drop rule, and this recognition explains how blacks of all shades were able to come together so forcefully in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to work for racial justice for people of color. Douglass wrote,

Sally Hemings knew this and certainly would not have thought of herself as a white person, because she was not. But the political uses of black solidarity across the various shades, hair types, and facial features of all people with differing degrees of African ancestry, a very modern consciousness, would not necessarily have been available to her either.

Blacks in the eighteenth century who were in the position to do so-religious figures and community leaders in urban areas of the North, for example—did make appeals to people of African origin on the basis of their heritage. Free people joined organizations and secret societies that promoted black solidarity, and slaves felt loyalty to one another because of their shared oppression. Even with that, eighteenth-century people of African origin, like Hemings, did not have the same sense of African American identity as blacks in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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They could see themselves as black (“Negro” or “colored” the more common usage) and yet have a completely different understanding of what that actually meant in terms of how they should go about their personal lives. There was not then, as is there is not now, one way to be black.

Eighteenth-century African Americans were themselves from Africa or were, like Hemings, the recent descendants of people who had come to America as members of different ethnic groups with no idea that they were supposed to be part of a single entity called the black “race.” That was an invention of whites. The process of melding together African people of diverse origins took place over time, driven, in part, by white society’s need to destroy African identities so that blacks would fit more easily into the slave society they were creating on the American continent. The historian Michael A. Gomez emphasizes that slaves’ “embrace of race…was not imposed upon the community but was a concept suggested by the logic and reality of the servile condition and adopted and fashioned by those of African descent to suit their own purpose.”
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That is certainly true. It is also true that, had it been left up to them, most Africans probably would have preferred to maintain even more of their distinctive ethnic identities than they were able to under the tremendous pressure from whites to give them up.

The Hemingses were in a more complicated position, with even fewer reasons than people who were “all black” or “all white” to believe in a world of fixed, bipolar racial categories. While they understood and accepted that they were part African, identity seems to have been a plastic rather than a static thing for them. Unmoored from any one racial destiny, their line could extend through blacks or through whites. Madison Hemings spoke openly of his “full-blooded” African great-grandmother without a trace of discomfort, and even with a touch of pride, when he did not have to mention her at all, much less emphasize her African heritage and that she may have come directly from the continent. She appeared right along with his English and Welsh forebears as a defining part of his heritage. At the same time he pointed to, and mildly disparaged, his sister Harriet’s decision to marry a white man and live totally in the white world, which in American society required leaving blackness and, painfully for him, her family behind.
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Attitudes about race clearly played a role in this as well. The young Sally Hemings had been in a society where blackness, slavery, and a degraded legal and social status were inextricably linked. To be black, even to be free and black, was to live in a world with extremely limited horizons. Yet her sister had been married to Jefferson. She among all enslaved people would have felt the arbitrariness of the link between a notion of race and a severely restricted status. Life in France enlarged Hemings’s sense of entitlement and belief that she should have some hand in shaping her future and that of her offspring.

We have the advantage today of knowing that the American story of blackness, slavery, and second-class status was going to end—or at least that slavery would end. We also have the example of a black community that has, by and large, bound itself together as a culture despite differences in skin color. It really has been left to specific individuals and families to decide how seriously they will adhere to color consciousness despite its patently obvious links to white supremacy.