The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (22 page)

Short’s role as an intermediary between Hemings and Jefferson reveals another crucial feature of the Virginian slave society in which they lived: it was a place of densely packed social and family connections, even between masters and slaves. Short was the nephew of Robert and Henry Skipwith, through his mother, Elizabeth Skipwith. The Skipwith brothers were married to John Wayles’s daughters Tabitha and Anne Wayles, respectively. These women were James Hemings’s half sisters. Short was twelve when his uncle Robert married Tabitha Wayles, and fourteen when Henry married Anne.
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He had a connection to the Hemings family by these marriages that predated his connection to Jefferson, who came into his life prominently when he was an older teenager.

One might think that, having heard the directive “he shall immediately come on to me at Philadelphia,” Hemings would be on the first available transport out of Richmond going north. He decided instead to go immediately to Monticello. Short clearly wanted Hemings to follow Jefferson’s direction, but he told his mentor that Hemings “insisted on seeing Albemarle first.”
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Hemings knew Jefferson well enough to know that he had some leeway to interpret “immediately,” and he did that in a way that allowed him to attend to his own personal concerns. Going to France was, after all, a momentous event. Anyone not used to sea travel might be humbled by the prospect of crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Short, who expected to join Jefferson, probably knew and mentioned to Hemings that Jefferson was supposed to be away for about two years. So the young man had at least some idea of what he was facing, and it was to be nothing like his accustomed jaunts between Virginia and other towns along the eastern seaboard, where he was always within easy striking distance of home. His mother and siblings were at Monticello, and he wanted to see them before he left the country.

Hemings need not have hurried. He made it to Jefferson and Patsy in Philadelphia in enough time before they went east to catch the vessel that would take them to Europe. Robert Hemings traveled with them. Even after they arrived in Boston, following stops in New York and other parts of New England, there were additional delays as Jefferson found “on his arrival that there [was] no vessel going for France from any Eastern port.”
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During this waiting period Jefferson repaid money he had borrowed from Robert Hemings and bought him shoes and clothes. He then made arrangements for Hemings to travel through New York with “30 dollars to carry him home” to Virginia, a valediction that would cover the next five years. The next day he wrote to Nicholas Lewis, who was overseeing his plantations in his absence, to tell him that Robert Hemings should be allowed to hire himself out.
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After two weeks of waiting, James Hemings and Thomas and Patsy Jefferson left Boston Harbor on the
Ceres
, at four in the morning on July 5, 1784, with six other passengers on the ship.
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This young man, of English, African, and Welsh extraction, was the first of his family to reverse the route over the ocean his ancestors had crossed on their very different journeys to Virginia.

The voyage was uneventful, the weather fair, and the
Ceres
, a brand-new vessel, made the crossing in a mere three weeks. The party “landed at West Cowes,” on the Isle of Wight, on July 26.
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Patsy had become ill at some point and required the services of a doctor while they were in port. This delayed their departure to Portsmouth, on the mainland of England, from where they were to take a ferry across the English Channel to Le Havre, a port at the mouth of the Seine River. Unlike the smooth Atlantic voyage, the Channel crossing was an extremely choppy trek, through a terrible storm in very rude quarters. Patsy Jefferson’s cabin was so small that she had to crawl into it.
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James Hemings’s quarters would not have been any better, as he was almost certainly given an inferior berth for the trip.

Hemings and the Jeffersons arrived at Le Havre on July 31. The next day Jefferson wrote that he “gave James to bear expenses to Rouen 72f.”
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As far as we know, the young man spoke no French at the time, though he likely knew enough words or phrases to get along in a rudimentary fashion. Patsy Jefferson had received some instruction in the language before departure, and Jefferson had studied French from the time of his school years. Both had an interest in at least telling Hemings how to address the people he might meet on the journey. He went alone, through what Jefferson later described as the “fertile” and “elegantly improved” countryside of Normandy, to make arrangements for their lodgings at Rouen.
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Hemings’s destination was the ancient capital of Normandy, famous as the site where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. He accomplished his mission apparently without a problem and with great efficiency because Jefferson noted that on August 3 he had “Recd. Back from James of the money given him 36f.”
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From Rouen, Hemings and the Jeffersons made their way to Paris, on a route that took them through even more beautiful French countryside along the Seine River during harvest time. Hemings had been to the largest cities in North America and had probably seen beggars on the streets. He may not have seen so many and so aggressive a group as the ones who gathered around the Jefferson carriage at every stop. James Hemings had his first look at Paris on August 6, 1784.
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While Patsy settled into life as a student at the prestigious Abbaye de Panthemont soon after their arrival, Hemings and Jefferson lived in what would turn out to be temporary residences until October of 1785, when they moved to the Hôtel de Langeac, their permanent residence until they left country near the end of 1789. At the very beginning, there was the Hôtel d’Orléans in the rue de Richelieu for six days and then the Hôtel d’Orléans “in the rue des Petits-Augustins” for several more weeks. From there Jefferson moved into an actual house at “No 5 cul de sac Taitbout,” which he immediately set about remodeling, although he had only a one-year lease.
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In that very peripatetic first year or so in Paris, Hemings had new faces to get used to and old faces to meet in a new environment. One of Jefferson’s first orders of business after he was, to some degree, settled was to assemble a household staff. A man of his station, the diplomatic representative of a country, needed a suitable coterie of servants. Hemings could not join that group in his usual role as Jefferson’s personal attendant, because his days would be taken up training for his new profession. His replacement for a time was a man named Marc, whom Jefferson hired in late August as his “Valet de Chambre.” Marc eventually went on to become Jefferson’s maître d’hôtel until he was fired, in 1786, and replaced by Adrien Petit, who had worked for John and Abigail Adams. There were other servants, Legrand and Vendome, and a
frotteur
named Saget, whose job it was to wax the floors by sliding along on them “on foot-brushes,” which must have been as interesting a sight for Hemings to see for the first time as it is to imagine it now.
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Then there were the arrivals from America whom Hemings already knew, men who stayed with Jefferson at various points during his time in France. David Humphreys, the secretary to the American commission, came early on. Humphreys, who had been an “aide decamp to George Washington,” said that Jefferson’s “politeness and generosity” had led him to suggest that Humphreys stay with him while they were in “residence in Europe.” He did that for a while, but left France and returned to the United States in 1786.
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Jefferson’s protégé William Short joined the household as Jefferson’s private secretary. He lived off and on at the Hôtel de Langeac for the rest of Jefferson’s stay.
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While in Boston, Jefferson had met a man named Charles Williamos, who was also traveling to France, and, as a friendly gesture, offered him a place to stay while he was Paris. He should not have been so trusting. Williamos, who died sometime in 1785, was possibly a British spy, which may explain why he worked so hard during their time together in Boston to become “a very great intimate” of Jefferson’s.
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Over the coming years many more visitors floated in and out, using Jefferson’s residence as a hospitable place of rest and refuge where they could enjoy meals that James Hemings prepared.

Exciting as this adventure undoubtedly was to him, Hemings actually got off to a difficult start in Paris. He fell ill sometime in October of 1784. The nature of his illness is unknown, but it was serious enough to require the attentions of a doctor. Dr. I. MacMahon, a “physician and instructor at the Ecole Militaire” and the Jeffersons’ personal physician, treated him. He was evidently bedridden, for Jefferson also hired a nurse to take care of him until he recovered.
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He probably suffered from a more extreme version of the kind of traveler’s malaise that often afflicts people when they go abroad and are exposed to different kinds of food and a new water supply. Jefferson, sick himself around the same time, explained his own illness in those terms, saying that he had been through the “seasoning…that is the lot of most strangers” when coming to the city for the first time. We get a sense of what that first winter was like for the newly arrived Virginians from Jefferson’s complaint about the “extremely damp air” and the “very unwholesome water.”
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Jefferson’s health problems continued into the spring, but Hemings was back on his feet by December and ready to begin his training as a chef.
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Something else happened during Hemings’s and Jefferson’s first months in France that contributed to Jefferson’s acute discomfort that winter and set in motion a chain of events that changed his life and the lives of the Hemings family as well. He received word in January that, not long after he had left the country, his two-year-old daughter, Lucy, had died of whooping cough at Eppington. This very common and serious childhood disease had also carried off Elizabeth Eppes’s own daughter, Lucy, who was about the same age as Jefferson’s little girl. Lucy’s older sister, Polly, had been sick, too, but had recovered.
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Jefferson was distraught. The thought of bringing Polly over had been on his mind even before he received news of Lucy’s death. That drastic course seemed unnecessary then, because he did not expect to be in France much longer. But in May of 1785, nine months after his arrival, when he was appointed to succeed Benjamin Franklin as the American minister to France, he was adamant about having Polly with him.
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Jefferson had outlived a wife and four of his six children. He had never had the chance to get to know his youngest daughter, Lucy. After giving her over to her aunt’s care, he had been away for most of her infancy. Now, facing this new tragedy, he apparently could not bear the thought that something might happen to Polly, that she, too, could die a stranger. He wrote to the Eppes family, asking them to send his daughter, stating his preferences for how that might be done. Instead of immediately complying with his request, both Elizabeth and Francis Eppes, who had grown to love Polly as parents, and she them, embarked upon a plan of avoidance, hoping that Jefferson might change his mind about wanting his daughter to join him and her sister. In the end, it would be almost two years before Polly and the young girl who was sent along with her—James Hemings’s sister Sally—arrived in France.
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James Hemings was certainly aware of this family tragedy and was told, or able to discern, that there was some problem with getting Polly to her father, as the date for her impending arrival never seemed to materialize. The fascinating, and unanswerable, question is exactly how Hemings reacted to the news of Lucy Jefferson’s death. He was certainly close enough to Jefferson to have sympathized with him and understood his grief at the passing of his child, the one whose birth had hastened the death of his wife. This sad event could only have dredged up for both men memories of Martha Jefferson’s final struggle.

Let us consider Hemings’s situation. A man is born into a society that allows his half sister and her husband to hold him as a slave. The child of the couple—the enslaved man’s niece—dies. Does the enslaved uncle grieve for the child? Did Hemings grieve for his half sister Martha years earlier? Would Jefferson think the deaths of his wife and daughter meant anything at all to their enslaved brother and uncle? Hemings had no legal relationship to either Martha or Lucy Jefferson. While he grew up around his sister, and had thoughts and feelings about her, he certainly cannot have known his niece very well; she was a baby, and he was traveling with Jefferson while the little girl was at Eppington. Whatever emotions Lucy’s death did or did not call forth, it provided yet another opportunity for Hemings to ponder his relationship to the man who owned him. The connections between these two men are so divorced from anything resembling what could be recognized today as “normal” human relations that they can be recovered only in the imagination and, even then, only with great difficulty.

White families had the unparalleled capacity to control the flow of written information during slavery with their near-monopoly on literacy and record keeping. They were committed to, and adept at, hiding information about race mixing within their ranks and about their family relationships with black people. As a result, we lack ready prompts to help us visualize what people linked as Hemings and Jefferson were said to one another in times like these. Of course, that is what white slave owners intended—to make these matters literally unthinkable to posterity, to try to erase the identities of their black relatives in order to protect the reputations of their white families. In this way they hoped to maintain ownership over black people’s identities in perpetuity, in the manner of holding a fee simple absolute in real property—a thing that could be given up only at the owner’s choice.