The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (32 page)

Indeed, one wonders what the Jefferson daughters told people about who Hemings was. Their father had hidden James Hemings’s status in his letter to Paul Bentalou and was, in effect, hiding both Hemingses by not registering them. All three girls had an incentive to play down the relationship they bore to one another under American law. Patsy’s impassioned outburst before Hemings arrived, about wishing that all the “negroes” were free, shows that she had taken to heart some of her father’s pronouncements and was emboldened by having lived comfortably and well—in better surroundings than she had ever been in before—without chattel slavery. Treating Hemings more as a companion, one who her friends would think to mention in their letters, may have been a way to minimize guilt. Polly followed the same course. She passed along Hemings’s message of regards in a letter she wrote to Angelica Church’s daughter, Catharine (Kitty), in a way that emphasized casual closeness rather than distance. Sometimes when Jefferson went to pick Polly up from school on the weekends, Kitty came along to stay at the Hôtel de Langeac. Hemings knew her well enough to think that a greeting might be in order and welcomed, and Polly agreed with her and carried out Hemings’s wishes.
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The family connections at play make the girls’ situation even more intriguing. Patsy was the image of her father, while Polly was said to have looked liker her mother, Hemings’s half sister. It is entirely possible that Polly and Sally (and perhaps even James) resembled each other, which would have provoked all kinds of questions in the minds of those who saw the Hemingses and Jeffersons together. Sex between masters and servants/slaves was not unknown in France, and the presence of mixed-race servants and slaves from the colonies was clear evidence of across-the-color-line sex in French society. In addition, it was not unheard of in eighteenth-century French society for poorer relations to be servants (
femmes de chambre
,
valets de chambre
) in the homes of their wealthier cousins. The French would have understood the configuration of the Jefferson/Wayles household very well.
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The City

While the Hôtel de Langeac was certainly the center of James and Sally Hemings’s universes in Paris, neither sibling’s life was bound solely by the interior of the place. They were not galley slaves chained to a bench within the hold of a ship. Nor will it do to think of them as being in the same circumstances as slaves, in the field or house, embedded in the isolated and deeply rural environment of their home at Monticello. Indeed, during their time in Paris, they were able to move through an expansive world as if they were free persons of color. Brother and sister were now city dwellers, in the largest city in Europe, home to over 700,000 people.
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Though they did not live in the heart of the city—their neighborhood was a relatively new one pushing toward the city’s boundary—they were part of it and were touched by attributes of the metropolis that radiated out from its center. A much reproduced engraving depicting the Hôtel de Langeac, and the scene just outside of it, a mere eight years before the Hemingses lived there, tells part of the story of what their new status as urbanites meant.
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The engraving displays a spectacular view of the Champs-Elysées stretching out toward the heart of Paris. In the rue de Berri, which led into the residence, there are no fewer than twenty people and two carriages. Across the street is a government building housing officials in the customs service, and on either side of the Champs-Elysées are households with no connection to the residents of the Hôtel de Langeac, save their mutual presence in the neighborhood. This mix of intimacy and impersonality is a mark of urban life, where people can live and work in close proximity to one another and be as friendly or as distant as they choose, producing a very different set of expectations about social life than exists in the country. In our times, technology brings the values and mores of urban life into the villages and homes of people living in the most remote parts of the globe, giving them some inkling of what life is like in the big city. As eighteenth-century provincials abroad, James and Sally Hemings had no similar template. There was much they had to learn and get used to.

One of the first things to get used to was the pace of this new setting. Although there are predictable and definite patterns of city life, there are also daily surprises—faces that one has never seen or transactions among strangers that break up the monotony of the day in a way that makes life seem more hurried and transitory. With more people to encounter, more situations to figure out quickly (and more things to be wary of), city dwellers become “sharp,” a word that has both positive and negative connotations. Those who are “wised up” about the world may be less subject to being fooled, but if they are not careful they can also become jaded.

We see some of this in Patsy Jefferson’s lament about how her father was cheated when they first arrived in France, being grossly overcharged for having luggage transported from the port at Le Havre to their lodgings.
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She was shocked. It is very likely, though, that the Jeffersons and the Hemingses were more attuned to the possibility of being hoodwinked during transactions with strangers. This loss of innocence, at the same time, brought increased awareness and sophistication. This ever-changing, quick-moving aspect of city living was very much a feature of life in the place where James and Sally Hemings lived. The Grille de Chaillot brought in visitors or immigrants from the villages and towns of France on a steady basis, people moving with all their possessions, dressed in different types of clothing, creating a show that was at once a spectacle and a routine. Just by being at the Hôtel de Langeac, the Hemingses encountered the outside world in various ways every day.

James Hemings’s five-year sojourn in Paris and his sister’s of a little more than two years gave them ample time to get to know what one historian of Paris in the eighteenth century calls the “regular rhythms and meanings that structured the lives of most of the city’s inhabitants.”
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Monticello moved solely to rhythms set by the needs of Jefferson and his family. He did not control Paris; nor could he even control what went on in the area immediately surrounding his house. Life was more contingent for everyone—circumstances and situations were more up for grabs—sometimes literally.

Near the end of their stay, when the government office that operated across the street closed and moved its employees elsewhere, taking the security detail with them, the Hôtel de Langeac was periodically burglarized. Jefferson eventually had to ask for special police protection for the residence, making the appeal on behalf of the “inhabitants of this quarter.” His was just one of a number of “other houses in the neighborhood,”
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which one could never say about Monticello. Cities have a way of cutting people down to size, as was, no doubt, obvious to the young African Americans in his household. Jefferson could only appear a much smaller person in this much larger place.

The Hemingses did not live apart from the culture that surrounded them. They were in a city that lived on rituals that they learned about from their own observation and from the servants with whom they worked. Secular and religious festivals abounded within the Catholic country, celebrating the lives of numerous saints and observing various holy days, which noticeably took the Hemings’s fellow servants out of the workplace on some days or formed the basis of their conversation on the days leading up to or following the events. Some of those holidays had their own special features that involved both private and public gestures—one bought a turkey for Mardi Gras or one participated in parades on other special days.
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Parisians celebrated Carnival with “feasting, dancing, and ribaldry” to mark “both the end of winter and the beginning of Lent, usually in February.”
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Brother and sister did not have to go very far to witness some of the spectacles of Parisian life, because they sometimes took place right outside their home. The Promenade à Longchamps brought all classes of French society together to parade up the Champs-Elysées to attend a concert at the nearby Abbey of Longchamps. The spectacle could go on for three days.
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One of the balconies of the Hôtel de Langeac provided a perfect site from which to view the proceedings, and on at least one occasion Jefferson invited his friends to do that. Although neither Hemings ever went to school, taking in the rules and rituals of this vibrant city and complicated culture was an education for both of them. These two young people saw more of the world and experienced more of what was in it than did the vast majority of their countrymen, white or black, who during that time lived and died without venturing far beyond the confines of the isolated farms where they were born.

James Hemings attempted a more formal approach to his education in French culture, for he was very serious about improving his French. Just before his sister Sally came to Paris, he hired a local man to teach him French grammar. Sally may have been included when she arrived. There is no indication how he found Perrault, and it is perhaps significant that Hemings did not turn to any of Jefferson’s French servants to help him with the language. He may have had good reason not to. Little is known about the French servants at the Hôtel de Langeac, but it is well known that a large majority of the servants in Paris came to the city from villages speaking the languages and dialects of their home region. There was no national French identity in the 1780s. By some estimates, that would not arise until the latter half of the nineteenth century. Eugen Weber, the great historian of France, has offered that the abbé Grégoire, who conducted a survey in 1790 to determine the prevalence of French speaking in the country, was being overly optimistic when he found that “3 million [out of a population of about 20 million] could speak French,”
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the language of the elites in the country, predominantly those in Paris. Those new arrivals to the city worked hard to make themselves understood as they gained proficiency in what was a foreign tongue, but it was often a struggle for them. Even the servants who spoke French natively spoke the language “of the streets and market,” which often disregarded the grammar and pronunciation of “proper French.”

At the other end of the scale stood a smaller group of servants who mastered several languages with the aim of getting better positions and making themselves useful to masters who traveled the Continent. When advertising their services, they carefully noted their language skills.
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It seems unlikely that any of the servants at the Hôtel de Langeac were in this last category. If they had been, barring other difficulties, such as a lack of time or a clash of personalities with Hemings, at least one of them should have been willing to give basic lessons for a price. Adrien Petit spoke French, though his letters reveal a man with only a basic education.
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As maître d’hôtel, he may have been far too busy to undertake the job or simply was not, in Hemings’s view, the right person. His association with Perrault is the first indication that Hemings thought he might have a future in France. Speaking French as best he could, while being a native English-speaker, made him attractive as an employee in a culture that was, in the 1780s, enamored both of servants of African descent and of English culture.
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Perrault, who emerges as a somewhat sad character from his description of his relations with Hemings, wrote to Jefferson at the beginning of 1789, complaining that Hemings owed him money for some of the twenty-one months’ worth of tutoring he had provided. Perrault sought redress from Jefferson after having approached Hemings about the unpaid fees with outstandingly bad results. The letter makes clear that Hemings had quite a temper and was not a man to be trifled with. The report of the event comes from Perrault alone, so no one knows what he said to Hemings or how he said it, but in his version Hemings insulted him and overwhelmed him physically, kicking him and hitting him with his fists. Perrault apparently did not fight back, and he suggested that he had been seriously hurt during the assault.
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Assuming Perrault was white, one wonders how his skirmish with Hemings would have played out in Virginia. Slaves did attack whites, and those altercations sometimes ended up in court or were more often punished by plantation justice. There also must have been times when slaves and whites fought with no serious consequences for the slave, either because the white person involved chose not to press the issue or because the slave’s master had some reason to side with the slave. It would thus not be right to say that we know for sure that Hemings would never have hit a white man in Virginia. Perhaps his years in France, four by the time of this encounter, had emboldened him to think that he had the right to take this action if he felt that Perrault deserved a good beating. We do not know how Jefferson reacted to this. There is no record that he ever paid Perrault; it was not his debt. But if he had any suspicions before, he certainly knew for a fact after Perrault’s letter that he had in James Hemings a very volatile and forceful personality.

While Sally Hemings did not have much of a formal occupation during her first year in Paris, there were many things for her to see and learn; and she did not have to go far to do that, with all that was going on in her immediate neighborhood. This was important because, as a female, she probably did not have as much freedom to wander around Paris as her brother. But James was there to squire her about, and he was likely eager to do that because she was family and because he had been the lone African American in the household for so long. Even with a more restricted range of motion, the Champs-Elysées was right outside her home. She could venture a short way down from the Hôtel de Langeac and see a statue of King Louis XV or continue on that route to view the Château des Tuileries. A trip down the rue de Berri would bring her to the very fashionable, then as now, rue du Fauborg-Saint-Honoré and the relatively new site of church built in the style “of a Roman basilica.”
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