The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (36 page)

Over the next few years Short wrote excitedly of his secret love to friends in Virginia, one of whom became worried that the more Short “persisted in his infatuation,” the harder it would be to say ‘the
adieu à jamais
which you must sooner or later bid—to Paris.’”
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Short explained that the “monotony” of his life in Paris had been relieved by his newfound association. The Royers’ daughter, who had a string of Christian names but was known familiarly as Lilite, was never specifically identified in these letters. Instead, Short and his correspondents, referred to her as the “Belle of St. Germain” or “the fair Pomona of the village” or “his secret love.” Short was more open about her in his journal of expenses, and his entries track the progress of his growing affection for Lilite, with numerous references to the cost of trips to the park and other places he took her and of buying her what seems like an almost unhealthy amount of candy and other sweets. Short’s infatuation took a different turn when Lilite got married at age sixteen. Despite her new status, he continued to visit her and her husband, writing to friends of his consuming love for the young girl until the end of the 1780s.
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Why Lilite’s parents and, more particularly her husband, tolerated Short’s presence over the years is a mystery. If his feelings for her were obvious to others, they were obvious to the people who actually saw them together. Whether Short and Lilite had sex before her marriage, and whether her husband, Henri Denis, was cuckolded will likely remain unknown, but neither possibility can be dismissed out of hand. Though unsavory, it is not unheard of for families, or even husbands, to look the other way when a more prosperous and well-connected man—particularly one who they know will not be around forever—takes an interest in a woman of the family. Short did, in fact, become a benefactor to Lilite’s sons for many years.
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No word of the situation with Lilite appears in the correspondence between Jefferson and Short. It may have been the kind of thing that Short felt more comfortable sharing with his contemporaries in Virginia than with a man who was his father figure. Certainly if he chose to share this with Jefferson, it would have made sense for him not put his mentor in the position of writing about his love for the teenage girl in letters, especially after she got married. They lived in the same house and could handle matters requiring circumspection in a delicate and tactful way. Short’s predicament with Lilite—and, as we shall see, Jefferson’s with Sally Hemings at the Hôtel de Langeac—supports an observation that may not have the force of a law of physics but is strong enough to be taken seriously: one has to be very careful about mixing teenage girls and heterosexual adult males in intimate circumstances.

While their father and his protégé explored all that life in France had to offer, Patsy and Polly Jefferson were in a place where they would not have been in America: a Catholic boarding school. It may be difficult in today’s more inclusive times to appreciate what a departure from the norm this was for that era. Jefferson decided to enroll them there because he had learned that it was one of the most, if not the most, well-regarded schools in the city. There was to be no religious proselytizing, as he took care to note to one of his friends who had expressed concern, and he was satisfied that all would be well.
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Less is known about Polly Jefferson’s experiences in Paris than about Patsy’s, for Jefferson’s second daughter was much more in the background in the life of her first nuclear family. Patsy’s time in Paris profoundly affected her. Not long into her stay in the city, Patsy thought she might convert to Catholicism and may have even contemplated becoming a nun. Being in an atmosphere suffused with Catholic culture, rituals, and ceremonies changed the way this young woman thought about herself for a time—that, and in her daughter Ellen’s words, “a spirit of proselytism which prevailed among the nuns and which operated on the daughters of protestant parents to withdraw them from the faith of their fathers.”
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Patsy’s decision mortified Jefferson, and he proceeded to handle his daughter through his preferred method—emotional suasion (he would say “incentive”) rather than outright coercion. This man who hated confrontation and discord did not lay down the law to his daughter. Nor did he, as has been suggested, immediately take both girls out of school. He first heard of Patsy’s inclination well before the girls left the abbey. He asked her to reconsider, and then proceeded to raise her allowance fivefold, started to spend even more money on her wardrobe, and allowed her to go out to society events and to balls. He wanted her to see the world she would lose if she followed her plan.
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Jefferson’s effort killed off one problem—after receiving a taste of social life, Patsy decided that being a nun was not for her—even as it created another: she enjoyed herself so much that she did not want to go home, and even talked about renting rooms at the convent while Jefferson went on his leave of absence back to Virginia.
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Patsy knew her father very well. One of her own children said many years later that Jefferson simply never talked about anything that he did not want to talk about. After France, father and daughter apparently never again discussed her youthful flirtation with the veil.

As has already been shown, the new environment of James and Sally Hemings gave them enormous opportunities for self-fashioning. The historian Daniel Roche’s observations about Parisian servants during the years the Hemingses lived in the city are useful for considering their situation. To the ruling classes of France, Roche observed, “servants were obviously social and cultural cross breeds.” They were hardly the same as the elite, but their association with them provided access to information unavailable to the masses, who never even glimpsed the way their social “betters” lived. “Through servants, the objects and actions of the upper classes were filtered through to the lower social categories.” Certainly elements of that phenomenon could be found in the plantation system of the South, with the cross-cultural and racial pollination going both ways.
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A life lived in between two cultures at odds with each other often required special adaptations to one’s personality. This was even more the case for the Hemingses, who were not just “social and cultural crossbreeds”; they were, to follow Roche’s terminology, racial “crossbreeds.” Whether it affected their legal status or not, they could identify with what the dominant society took to be their racial “betters”—that is, white people—because they were part white and were being directly rewarded for that. Roche’s question—“who is more caught up in a web of appearances than a servant?”
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—is also very useful for thinking about the ways in which eighteenth-century attitudes about race and status (along with Jefferson’s attitude and actions toward them) helped shape the Hemings siblings’ existences and self-images. The background of one visitor to the Hôtel de Langeac helps clarify the complicated and tragic positions of these two young people.

Lucy Paradise, a native Virginian who lived in London with her husband, John, socialized with Jefferson when he visited the city in 1786, and she also appeared on the scene in Paris and made something of a nuisance of herself. She seems to have been more than a bit in love with Jefferson and sought to keep contact with him by insisting that he help solve her personal problems with her husband along with their joint disastrous financial affairs, all the while adopting a bizarre and discordant posture as a married “damsel” in distress. In some of her letters she asked Jefferson, who she knew corresponded with and was friendly with her husband, to keep things she said to him secret from her husband, carving out an inappropriate private world for the two of them that could only have made Jefferson uncomfortable. Yet he was almost infinitely patient with her and responsive, to the extent he could be, to her many entreaties.
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Paradise was, of course, the daughter of Philip Ludwell III, John Wayles’s former benefactor and mentor. It made perfect sense for her to have latched onto Jefferson as a financial and personal adviser because, as noted in chapter 4, his father-in-law had been one of her designated guardians and was intimately involved in dividing up the Ludwell estate between Lucy and her sister, Hannah. Jefferson himself had witnessed the signing of that document and had at least some knowledge of her circumstances.
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When Lucy Paradise came calling in Paris, she entered a household that contained people who owed her father a great deal. James and Sally Hemings owed him their existences; Jefferson, almost that much. If Ludwell had not raised John Wayles to a level that enabled him to marry Martha Eppes, there would not have been a Martha Wayles, a Patsy or Polly Jefferson, a Hemings family, or a Wayles fortune for Jefferson to inherit. It is no wonder that he so graciously put up with Ludwell’s importuning and annoying daughter.

John Wayles was not born a gentleman. He most likely learned to act and sound like a gentleman in his service to people like Philip Ludwell, although some in his community in Virginia never totally accepted his new persona. He evidently waited on people, just as James Hemings waited on Jefferson, having the opportunity, as Roche described it, to learn the ways and mores of upper-class life so well that he could play the role when his time came—a time that could never come for his son James or any other of the Wayles-Hemings children. James Hemings was ineligible to have happen to him what happened to his father, to be chosen by a white man and raised above his station to become something other than what his birth had foretold: a wealthy landed gentleman of Virginia.

In the days before his ascent, Wayles was intelligent and impressive enough to have caught the eye of a man at the highest level of Virginia society, who saw through the shroud of class to the talented person beneath. Because Wayles’s children were part black and enslaved rather than white servants, there would be no looking past the shroud for either James or Sally Hemings, even though both may have been at least as natively intelligent as their father. Doing that would have struck at the very heart of the racially based, deliberately closed system that was American slavery. Even outside the context of slavery, allowing talented people of color to rise would have threatened the doctrine of white supremacy. The Hemings siblings’ self-fashioning within the confines of their circumstances, impressive as it was to Jefferson and his family, could get them only so far. James Hemings was intelligent enough to have been a lawyer. But Jefferson could never have thought to play Philip Ludwell and turn him into one, no matter how brilliant, energetic, or talented Hemings was. That was well beyond what American society would have accepted then and for many decades afterwards. He could, however, raise Hemings to the status of enslaved highly trained French chef. Sally Hemings, no matter how beautiful, feminine, intelligent, or talented she was, could never be a “lady” in the sense that white Virginians meant that term, or a legal wife to a wealthy white man. She could, however, be a wealthy white man’s substitute for a wife.

Sally Hemings in the Beau Monde

In the midst of the impending collapse of French society, Jefferson decided to go back to Virginia to leave his daughters with their relatives, settle his financial affairs, and then return to France briefly to finish out his mission. He had been thinking of doing this for a while, but did not make his formal request for a leave of absence until the early fall of 1788.
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His plans were not secret, and James and Sally Hemings, along with the rest of the Jefferson household, knew their time in the country was not long. Jefferson’s plan actually had very different implications for the brother and the sister. If James Hemings did not want to take his freedom at that point, he could expect to return to France with Jefferson and resume his old role as chef de cuisine. Sally Hemings was more likely destined to remain in Virginia with Patsy and Polly. Going home would be the end of what had been an extraordinary experience, particularly given what had happened during her last year in Paris. She was receiving a steady monthly wage, and Jefferson spent a good amount of money on her clothing—nowhere near as lavishly as he spent on his daughter Patsy over her years in Paris, but enough to make a definite change in Hemings’s self-image and her day-to-day existence. In a relatively short period in the spring of 1789, Jefferson spent about thirty-two dollars on clothes for her—in today’s terms, a little under a thousand dollars.
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Neither Jefferson nor anyone else gave a reason for the sudden rise in his spending on Hemings, although Fawn Brodie portrayed this as signaling the beginning of the Hemings-Jefferson affair.
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Jefferson, in time-honored fashion, was rewarding and seeking to impress a young woman who was, or whom he hoped to make, his mistress. Lucia Stanton has noted, however, that the expenditures were made at the same time that Patsy Jefferson began to appear more frequently at society functions in Paris, and Jefferson started to spend even more money on her clothing after he removed his daughters from school, anticipating their return to America.
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Patsy had been going out before April 1789, but with no school in her life, she was now free to do so more frequently. According to Jefferson’s white family’s tradition, she was strictly “limited…to three balls a week” and participated in other social occasions that took her into the homes of others.
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The daughter of a diplomat had to appear dressed in a style suitable to her station, and Hemings, who went along to the balls and dinner parties as her lady’s maid, had to be properly dressed as well.