Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (27 page)

Madison learned to read and write when he “induced” the white children to teach him. There is a clue in his recollections to a book they used in their lessons. A great deal of attention has focused on Madison's use of the French word
enceinte
(pregnant), which Jefferson's defenders have pounced on as evidence that his statement was written by the newspaper editor S. F. Wetmore. Madison might have learned the word from his mother, but a more intriguing possibility is that when Jefferson's grandchildren taught him, they used Jefferson's favorite novel, Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
, where the word
enceinte
appears on an early page.
¹²
The novel opens with a ribald joke about the moment of conception, but the joke would have carried a special double entendre in the mind of a child of Sally Hemings:

As Madison read those lines, he would only have to lift his eyes to his young Randolph tutor to get an idea of what a different figure he might have made—someone known openly and honestly to the world as a sprig of Jefferson's tree.

Jefferson wrote in
Notes on the State of Virginia
that when he gazed into the faces of dark-skinned slaves, he saw nothing but “eternal monotony…that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions.” But the light-skinned faces of his Hemings children—his own face barely veiled—would have unsettled him, so he kept them at a physical and emotional distance.

When Harriet Hemings left Monticello to head north forever in 1822, Jefferson had his overseer Bacon give her the traveling money.
^*
He did not share a final, intimate moment with his daughter to hand her the money himself. Perhaps he had never acknowledged her existence and did not want to start then. He wrote “run” (for “runaway”) next to Harriet's name in the Farm Book, so his daughter appeared in his records as a fugitive.

Madison did not mention that his father talked to him about going free, but Jefferson did talk about manumission with at least two other slaves who were freed in his will: his butler, Burwell Colbert, and the blacksmith Joseph Fossett.

After Jefferson's death Madison and Eston Hemings took their mother to live in Charlottesville, where their racial identity oscillated along the either-or axis according to the eyes and intentions of whites. The 1830 census taker listed all of them as white, but when a special census of free blacks was taken three years later, they were classified as mulatto.
¹³
Their racial identity may have shifted because the special 1833 census, ordered by Virginia's government after the Nat Turner uprising in 1831, enumerated free blacks for the purpose of determining how many of them were willing to immigrate to Africa. The census taker may have pushed them to leave by making them officially mulattoes.
^†

In providing some background to Madison's memoir, Dumas Malone noted the fierce “anti-Negro sentiment” that Hemings confronted in his new home in Ohio: “The county seat was so hostile to black settlement that as late as 1888…a Negro had never been allowed to live within the town limits.” This extreme hostility Madison endured in Ohio may explain the element of family tension in his memoir. He was the only surviving Hemings child willing to make a public statement about their origins, and he was the only Hemings-Jefferson offspring who still regarded himself as black.
^*
Madison's siblings had entered the realm of denial. Eston and his family had decided to cross over into the white world; Beverly and Harriet had long since crossed over, as Madison described in surprising detail:

Proud of his African blood, Madison seemed disappointed and even bitter that his siblings passed into the white world, notably in his remark that Harriet “thought it to her interest…to assume the role of a white woman.” Because his siblings had all crossed the color line into whiteness and silence, this story and others like it were buried and denied, even by the offspring of the hidden unions. The slave era was over, and the truth of that era would be lost if Madison did not speak up, as if to say, as Ishmael does in
Moby-Dick
: “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

 

After Jefferson's death Sally Hemings moved into a house in Charlottesville with her sons Madison and Eston, then in their early twenties. They had been freed in Jefferson's will, but she had not been; the will didn't even mention her. In the appraisement of slaves after Jefferson's death, Hemings, then just over fifty, had been adjudged an old woman of no value. Sally was “given her time” by Jefferson's daughter, an informal, quasi-manumission by which Sally could legally remain in Virginia but was not required to provide any further service. In his will Jefferson asked his executors to petition the Virginia legislature to grant permission to Madison and Eston to remain in the state, which was done. Without this special permission, they would have been required to leave the commonwealth under the provisions of the 1806 removal law.

A year after Sally Hemings's death in 1835, the brothers left Charlottesville for Ohio with their wives and children.
The Cleveland American
reported the presence of an unnamed mixed-race child of Thomas Jefferson's in 1845, stating, “Notwithstanding all the services and sacrifices of Jefferson in the establishment of the freedom of this country, his own son, now living in Ohio, is not allowed a vote, or an oath in a court of justice!”
¹⁵
Though Eston won esteem by his skill as a musician and his sterling character, his race irredeemably condemned him. According to a newspaper article published after his death: “notwithstanding all his accomplishments and deserts, a great gulf, an impassable gulf” separated Eston Hemings and white people, “even the lowest of them.” Another newspaper account was blunt: “a nigger was a nigger in those days and that settled it.”
¹⁶

Eston crossed the line into whiteness around 1850. He moved his family from Ohio, where they were well known, to Madison, Wisconsin, where they were not, dropped the name Hemings for Jefferson, and passed as a white person, as did his wife and three children. Eston was remembered in one newspaper account as “Quiet, unobtrusive, polite and decidedly intelligent.” The account continued, “he was soon very well and favorably known to all classes of our citizens, for his personal appearance and gentlemanly manners attracted everybody's attention to him.”

He could not conceal his remarkable resemblance to Thomas Jefferson. “It was rumored,” said one newspaper in 1902, “that he was a natural son of President Thomas Jefferson, a good many people accepted the story as truth, from the intrinsic evidence of his striking resemblance to Jefferson.”
¹⁷
One of Eston's acquaintances, on a trip to Washington with several other men from Ohio, was stunned when the group came to a statue of the third president: “‘Gentlemen, who in Chillicothe looks the most like that statue?' I asked. Instantly came the unanimous answer, ‘Why, Eston Hemings!'” The man who noticed Eston's “striking” likeness to the statue pointedly asked Eston about it, and Eston responded that his mother “belonged to Mr. Jefferson…and she never was married.”

A friend of Eston's son Beverly either guessed a Thomas Jefferson connection or was told about it. When Beverly Jefferson died in 1908, the
Chicago Tribune
's obituary did not mention descent from Jefferson, but shortly afterward it printed the following letter: “His death deserves more than a passing notice, as he was a grandson of Thomas Jefferson, father of the doctrines of the democratic party, hence one of the FFV [First Families of Virginia]. Beverly Jefferson was one of God's noblemen—gentle, kindly, courteous, charitable. He was friendly to everybody in his home city, and he will be missed there quite as much or more, perhaps, than any other citizen.”
¹⁸

Choosing the surname Jefferson might seem an odd way to hide one's identity, but Eston's features made it impossible to deny that he had some blood tie to the third president. His twentieth-century descendants believed they were descended from an unnamed Jefferson “uncle,” most likely a cover story devised in the late nineteenth century to hide the family's descent not so much from Thomas Jefferson as from Sally Hemings. If it became known they were descended from Hemings, they would no longer be white people, but colored.

The secrets buried in slavery time formed a minefield; the borderland of the parallel worlds was literally deadly, as I discovered from an article dating to World War I from
The Washington Post
, “Drafted Man, Classed as Colored, Commits Suicide in an Ohio Camp.” The article reported an incident involving one Alfred Lord, a white twenty-seven-year-old Ohio man drafted to serve in the army in the fall of 1917. “I'm ready,” he told a reporter as he climbed aboard a train in his hometown of Mineral City with 105 other young men, their departure hailed by a large, flag-waving crowd of well-wishers. When the army physician examined him at the induction camp in Chillicothe, something did not seem quite right: “the surgeon did not pass him. Instead he called in other surgeons. They, too, examined Lord. There were whispered conferences. ‘We are sorry to tell you this,' one of the surgeons said, finally, ‘but there is evidence that there is negro blood in your veins. You will have to go into a negro regiment.' Lord…although of dark complexion, always had thought himself white, and…had associated with white men all his life…. That night he committed suicide.”
¹⁹
The article did not say what sign revealed his Negro blood. In any case, Lord changed in a blink from being one thing to being another, an instantaneous and fatal metamorphosis.

Eston's son John Wayles Jefferson, white enough to attain the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Eighth Wisconsin Infantry, lived through such an instant of icy terror when he encountered a childhood friend who knew his carefully hidden background as a colored man in another state, another time. The acquaintance recalled that the colonel “begged me not to tell the fact that he had colored blood in his veins, which he said was not suspected by any of his command.”
²⁰

When Monticello's historians went to interview Hemings descendants, they found photographs from the early twentieth century of Eston's grandson and a friend dressed as pickaninnies, wearing blackface and striking comical “colored” poses, including ogling white girls with the sort of leer that would get a real black man lynched. The grandson had been raised by his grandmother, Eston's wife, who was born in Virginia under slavery. Either the photographs were savagely ironic—the make-believe pickaninny had no idea he was descended from slaves—or the young man
did
know and the little joke bespoke a savage self-hatred.
²¹

The brutal racial order split the Hemings family apart and drove some of them underground. The Monticello historians found that Madison's son “disappeared and may be the source of stories among his sisters' descendants of a mysterious and silent visitor who looked like a white man, with white beard and blue, staring eyes. He slipped in and out of town to visit older family members but never formed ties with the younger generations.”
²²
The family said that two of Madison's sons never married “perhaps because of concerns about revealing skin color” in their offspring. Some of the grandsons passed for white; their sisters remained black, and though they all lived in southern Ohio they dared not meet—“we never heard from them,” one descendant told the historians. A great-grandson of Madison Hemings's passed as a swarthy European, “adopting a variety of European accents along with his fictitious identities.” In need of help and care in his final days, he sought out his sister, who took him in, to the bafflement of her children: “We didn't understand who [he] was because [he] had an Italian accent…. And then we found out actually he was our uncle. And that [he] had crossed over, he had been white.”

Another descendant of Madison Hemings's related a bitter moment in his grandmother's life, when she was not notified of the death of her brother, who had passed for white and married a white woman years before. He had remained in touch, however, through cards and phone calls on certain meaningful occasions. His new family did not send word across the color line until months after he died, perhaps to ensure that no part of the black family appeared at the funeral. One descendant told the historians, “The blacks don't like it because you're light-skinned and the whites know you're black so you're just stuck there.” Another added, “They used to call us white niggers.”
²³