The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (37 page)

Polly Jefferson, too young to be presented into society, received no similar attention to her wardrobe. The uniform and clothing of a school-girl remained suitable attire for her. Jefferson’s spending on Polly never approached the amount he spent on Patsy. Even for the years before Patsy began her time in the Parisian social whirl, one finds more entries in Jefferson’s memorandum books for clothes, hats, and shoes for Patsy than he ever recorded for Polly. Patsy’s allowances were always larger than her younger sister’s, which one might expect, given that the older girl may have had greater need for money. Even when she was Polly’s age, Patsy received more money from her father. Jefferson denied it in later years, when Polly very delicately suggested it, but the evidence indicates that though he adored both Patsy and Polly, he favored the older sister over the younger.
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The two explanations for Jefferson’s sudden burst of spending on Hemings’s clothing are not mutually exclusive. Jefferson had the final say about whether Hemings went along to attend Patsy at parties and balls, and he knew these occasions would have meant a great deal to her. Dressing Hemings in nice clothes and allowing her to go to social functions with Patsy fits as easily with the notion that he was attempting during this period to make her feel good about him, as would buying her nice clothes just so she could wear them as she walked around the Hôtel de Langeac.

The reasons for the clothes aside, one would love to have some account of Sally Hemings, the slave girl from country Virginia, being outfitted for clothes in Paris. One day after recording one of the expenditures for clothing made “for Sally,” Jefferson noted his payment for tickets to attend “a benefit concert for [a] nine-year-old mulatto violinist” held at his daughters’ school.
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The violinist whom Jefferson went to see and support was young George Bridgetower, who made his Paris debut that year, performing three times at the renowned Concert Spirituel. Jefferson was fortunate indeed to have caught him at the beginning of what turned out to be a very long and distinguished career. Bridgetower was born in Poland to a Polish mother and a black father from Barbados, the personal servant to an English nobleman. His Paris turn was of more than merely artistic significance, as one review of his performance makes clear.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the image of blacks had rapidly deteriorated in the face of Europe’s increasingly urgent need to justify its dependence on African slavery.
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At least some Enlightenment thinkers, however, were unwilling to abandon so easily the idea of a truly universal conception of the rights of man, and looked for any evidence they could to rebut charges of blacks’ natural inferiority and inability to advance. No less than the reputation of the entire black race was placed on Bridgetower’s young shoulders. He carried that impossible burden admirably for many years. By the age of twelve he was performing in orchestras all over England. In the 1790s, he drew the attention of the Prince of Wales, who provided him with tutors and masters of music to help him perfect his technique. Bridgetower eventually took a degree in music from Cambridge, and he later befriended Beethoven and became well known for his deft performances of his works.
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Over the years, supporters of black equality would call to Jefferson’s attention other “Bridgetowers” with the hope that he, a well-known adherent to the Enlightenment, might be impressed. Their efforts met with varying degrees of success, as Jefferson was reluctant to accept that the individuals presented to him were true measures of African capabilities, especially since most of them tended to be of mixed race. Was the individual’s genius African or European inspired? We do not know the spirit in which Jefferson went to the benefit concert for Bridgetower, how he responded to the performance, and what, if anything, he said to the young prodigy. The man who called music the passion of his soul and was especially enamored of the violin, practicing for hours at a time, could certainly be expected to want to attend a concert at his daughters’ school, no matter what the race of the performer. Still, it is unlikely that he failed to notice the great interest that this young musician’s appearance aroused and the social implications that were very publicly grafted onto it. Jefferson’s going to see Bridgetower fit well with his own interest in assessing the capabilities of people of African descent.

At the abbey Jefferson sat among an audience whose members came out to support and watch as a young child, not so different from James and Sally Hemings, began to make his way in the world, fulfilling his talent to the best of his abilities and earning the admiration of his fellow human beings. Jefferson’s own sons would all become violinists, one of whom (Eston) was a “master” of the instrument who, though never so famous as George Bridgetower, was celebrated for many years in his home community in Ohio, using as his signature tune one of the few popular songs whose melody his father bothered to copy out in his own hand and keep among his papers.
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One hopes that Bridgetower’s concert was among the social events that Hemings used her new wardrobe to attend, or at least that she and her brother heard from the Jeffersons about the young mixed-race boy who had a future that he could never have had in her own country despite his demonstrated genius.

Acting as lady’s maid to Patsy Jefferson as she explored the Parisian social circuit, Hemings was an observer, waiting while others danced, had dinner, or conversed. Though not an active participant, she was there, on the periphery with the other servants, to be sure. In these environments, however, Hemings saw things—opulent architecture, artwork, food presentation, clothing, and makeup—and heard things—music that Jefferson said was played at a far superior level in Europe than in the United States—that she would never have seen or heard back in Virginia. Hemings knew that the overwhelming majority of the people in her native Virginia, particularly the white people with all their dangerous pretensions, would never have access to the kind of civilized world that manifested itself in Paris. She shared this distinction with her brother James, and the Jeffersons, making them a special band privy to something quite distinctive. She could always compare those who considered themselves “grand” back in Virginia with the people and the places she had seen in some of the finest homes in France. While moving in this world, Hemings, treated as an item of property in her native Virginia, gained knowledge and experience that she owned and could never be taken away, like her trip-across-the-ocean stories repeated to others many years later.

Just as those evenings in the beau monde had a deep meaning for Patsy Jefferson that she carried with her throughout her life, and helped to make her the woman she became, they had a deep meaning for Sally Hemings and shaped the woman she became. They were both young females, around one year apart, who probably looked forward to and enjoyed very much dressing up and making themselves look attractive, thinking of how they compared to other females in the room (and, no doubt, silently comparing themselves to each other) and of what effect they were having on the males. Not one of the feelings, thoughts, and yearnings of a young person was foreclosed to Sally Hemings; not a hair on her head or wish in her heart was less important than Patsy Jefferson’s. She had the misfortune to be born into a society where the people in power chose not to recognize that reality.

While the social events Hemings attended were not called for her benefit, they were calculated to awaken feelings in all young people, and their allure could not have been lost on her. These gatherings and dances were very obviously set up as opportunities for young males and females to engage with one another in a supervised setting. Patsy Jefferson, however, was not on this scene to find a husband—at least her father did not want her to be—though these occasions served that function. Dances and balls were a form of mating ritual, which is why young women had to be of a certain age to attend them. According to French custom, of which Jefferson strongly approved, ladies did not dance after they were married.
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Going to a ball was about the life and future prospects of a young unmarried woman, and Patsy Jefferson and Sally Hemings learned some important things about the basics of male-female interactions attending these events. No young female, enslaved or free, black or white, could be in this setting and watch others of her age and sex being asked to dance and not think about herself, the time and place where that might happen to her, and what her prospects in life would be.

A
T SOME POINT,
it is impossible to say when, a major shift occurred in the nature of the relationship between the Hemingses and the Jeffersons. It may be that no one but Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson knew that the change had taken place until after, perhaps even well after, it had happened. When speaking of the beginning of his parents’ relationship in France, their son Madison Hemings simply said, “[D]uring that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine,” with no elaboration on how that happened or exactly when. The only marker of the onset of sexual activity for Hemings is that she gave birth to a child in 1790 in the months after she returned from France. The conception of that child took place during her final months, if not actual last month, in Paris.
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The timing of Hemings’s pregnancy suggests that what happened between them evolved over time, but did not get serious until near the end of their stay, setting up a confrontation about her future as a woman and a mother. If we cannot say when Hemings became “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine,” a mere glance at the setup of life at the Hôtel de Langeac reveals circumstances highly conducive to its happening.

A teenage girl had been sent to live with a heterosexual middle-aged man who was not her blood relative. There was no female counterpart to the man in the household—no wife, no sister, no maiden aunt—no age and socially equivalent female whose very presence would have influenced the way all parties interacted with one another. Indeed, there was no steady adult female presence at all. The dangers inherent to this situation are apparent, and would be so apparent at any point in history that we can be sure that neither Patsy nor Polly Jefferson would ever have faced them. Jefferson’s daughters would never have been sent to live with a man under those circumstances. Reliance on the character or restraint of the man would not have been enough. For it would have been thought foolish to place a male and female in a situation where anyone’s character or willpower had to be tested—to put social and, in this case, racial strictures in dubious battle with biology.

The situation at Jefferson’s residence presented, if you will, a more extreme version of the Captain Ramsey problem, “more extreme” because more than two years were available for something to go wrong at the Hôtel de Langeac, instead of just several weeks on Ramsey’s ship. It was an inappropriate circumstance that was not made acceptable because Hemings was “just” an African American slave girl. To remove the designation “inappropriate” from Jefferson and Hemings’s living arrangement in Paris because slaveholders ignored such considerations is to accept and promote their version of a status quo in which the embedded hazards of that arrangement did not exist; it banishes the reality of young female slaves’ physical and emotional vulnerability in odd deference to the southern planter elite’s preferred image of who they were in relation to their slaves. Topsy-turvy, slave owners’ self-reports are allowed to define the boundaries and character of the institution at the expense of the real-life experiences of those whom they enslaved.

As Abigail Adams seemed not to think (did not care enough to think) there was anything wrong in sending Hemings unaccompanied on a six-week cruise with a group of sailors, it probably never occurred to Jefferson that there was any problem with having Hemings in his household for an extended period of time. On the day he decided to bring her from London to Paris, Polly Jefferson, not Sally Hemings, was likely foremost in his mind. Over the preceding months that had turned into years after he had determined that Polly had to make the trip to France, he had been sick with worry about her Atlantic voyage, and the news that all had gone well naturally overshadowed any incidental details about her traveling partner.

Although it would have been entirely natural for Jefferson to be curious to see his beloved wife’s half sister almost grown up, his most probable thoughts about Hemings centered on her connection to Polly. Hemings was her longtime companion, and he wanted to make sure that his daughter was as comfortable in her new surroundings as she could be. Hemings could play her designated role in that process—a continuation of the role that Jefferson himself had chosen for her by sending her to Eppington with his daughter—only if she was at his residence, even though that meant she would be living there without the presence of an adult female. In the almost unthinkable event that a pretty, free, white, sweet-natured, and intelligent teenage girl had been sent to live with Jefferson under the same circumstances, no one would have been surprised if the end result had been that he became infatuated with her and, perhaps, wanted to marry her. One suspects that only a family seeking the title “Mrs. Thomas Jefferson” for its daughter would have tolerated that type of living arrangement for her.

Infatuation can exist without the will or ability to marry, and, of course, marriage was precluded for Hemings and Jefferson. The elemental problem with the way they lived in France, however, still remained. The “protections” offered to enslaved women as substitutes for the concept of inappropriateness were the supposedly ironclad dictates of racism—“all women of color were so degraded that only a tiny category of white men, the totally depraved or hopelessly immoral, would be attracted to them, so those women generally had nothing to worry about during slavery”—and class superiority—“southern gentlemen did not get intimately involved with their female social inferiors.” Those notions would be worth merely laughing at if they had not totally trivialized the lives of a great many African American enslaved families.

What of his daughters? Patsy Jefferson was the most important person in her father’s life until the day he died. Yet she was not a counterpart to him in the way that a wife would have been, even though there has been a tendency to treat the father and daughter as if they were, at least symbolically, a married couple. Patsy was not Jefferson’s wife. As a daughter, she had a separate role that could not as effectively check the development of her father’s response to Hemings or, for that matter, Hemings’s response to him. The kind of unspoken day-to-day shorthand that passes between husbands and wives would not have required so blatant a statement as “Thomas, stop gazing at Sally.” A husband’s memory of many admonitions, spoken or unspoken, about what he is or is not supposed to do, often shapes his behavior, especially when the wife is physically present. As a purely logistical matter, Patsy was away from the Hôtel de Langeac during the week. Whole days went by when neither she nor her younger sister would have been in a position to observe Hemings and their father at the residence.

Jefferson did not go out to an office every day: he worked where he lived. Just as his daughters had their own world among their classmates at the abbey that their father knew of only at second hand, or not at all, the Hemingses and Jefferson lived in their own private universe at the Hôtel de Langeac. That world on the rue de Berri contained the kinds of rituals, chance encounters, tensions, domestic mishaps, and humorous incidents that make up daily life. For better or worse, the intimacy of a house where one steps away from the world outside and performs the most private functions in life creates a knowingness among fellow residents, a unique culture that excludes others who do no have the same experience in the daily life of that culture.

Even had Hemings lived with Jefferson’s daughters at school for all her time there and been at the residence only when they came home, her presence in the close circle of the household would still have been problematic. As things turned out, it was when the four actually did live together full-time for over half a year, after Jefferson took his daughters out of school in preparation for their return to Virginia, that Hemings and Jefferson became more fatefully involved. She was a young, unattached female, at the very least, a natural object of attention, platonic or otherwise, for a heterosexual male—no matter how many other people were at the residence.

“There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me, nor anything that moves,”
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Jefferson wrote to his daughter Patsy in 1790. With that extremely self-aware declaration, confirmed by virtually every aspect of his life, he could not fail to be interested in the progress of a girl whom he had known since childhood, who had been suddenly taken out of her environment, one he knew very well was vastly different from the milieu she was now in. That she was a person of color thrown into this circumstance was the kind of thing that interested him.

Jefferson observed black people (sometimes one wishes he had not) and fancied himself an expert on the subject. Of all the white southern members of the founding generation, he devoted the most time to thinking about blacks as a group—what they did, what they were like, and how they responded in certain situations. He searched out albinos among slaves to try to figure out the mystery of their coloring. He wrote out algebraic formulations showing what percentage of “white” blood a black person had to have before he or she became white. And then, of course, there are the well-known and unfortunate passages in
Notes on the State of Virginia
, where he commented on what he took to be the greater attractiveness, talent, and intelligence of mixed-race blacks compared with those who were not.
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What better, more readily available object of observation: a mixed-race African American girl taken out of her context and forced to make adjustments to her new life under his very eyes.

Most important of all for the dynamic between Hemings, Jefferson, and his daughters in Paris, the traditional conception of marriage made the marriage bed the wellspring of the rights and obligations flowing between husbands and wives. Patsy and Polly Jefferson were certainly not in that arena with their father, and thus had no wifely claim on his sexual life. In Western culture, wives have (at least) the right to expect and demand sexual fidelity from their husbands.
Do not have sex with anyone but me!
Daughters do not have the right to demand that their fathers abstain from sex on their behalf. For unlike wives, they have nothing to give in return for such a requirement, since they are not supposed to provide an outlet for their father’s sexuality.

That Jefferson was a widower helped concretely shape the course of his relationship to Hemings while they were in France. It was not just that he did not have a wife who could provide a psychological affirmative check on his emotions and behavior. It was that his lack of a wife ensured that Hemings was in his view and thoughts in ways that she would not have been had he been married. A year after Hemings’s arrival, Jefferson complained in a letter to his friend James Madison about the complications of his domestic life in Paris that “called for an almost womanly attention to the details of the household.” He found being in that position “perplexing, disgusting and inconsistent with business.”
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He felt emasculated. So perilous was his financial state that he had to attend to every facet of running the residence, no matter how small, to make sure there was no waste. Jefferson’s language conveys his indignation: here was the minister to France, forced to act like a housewife looking for ways to scrimp and save. If Hemings had come to Paris with Martha Jefferson at the helm of domestic life at the Hôtel de Langeac, Martha would have had the primary responsibility for thinking of something for her to do and noticing whether she was fitting in with the plan for the household.

Instead, as soon as Hemings arrived at the residence, she, by necessity, became the object of Jefferson’s attention. First, there was the matter of her inoculation. Thinking that it had to be done drew Jefferson’s and probably everyone else’s attention to her. Hemings could not have been in top form when she returned to the Hôtel de Langeac after having endured both an inoculation-induced mild case of smallpox and the restrictive diet that she was put on while under Dr. Sutton’s care. It was the woman of the house’s job to attend to the sickness of house servants—if not to nurse them, at least to watch their condition to see when and if they were well enough to return to their duties. Jefferson had to be involved in this in some way, observing Hemings when she was in a particularly vulnerable state. Playing this role drew upon individual affect and emotion, making use of the kind of intimate sympathy that women of the day were supposed to have in greater abundance than males. This required something more than just paying the bill. It required exactly the kind of “womanly attention” to household duties that Jefferson referred to in his letter to Madison.
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At the most primary level, the practical result of being unmarried was that Jefferson had to talk directly to Hemings more than he would have had to if she had been under the charge of his wife. And we can think of how the greater number of interactions in the daily life of their household shaped the way they came to view each other. Jefferson’s overall easiness of manner with people familiar to him and his long history with Hemings’s family to that date suggest that his encounters with her would have been similarly “smooth and even,” as Madison Hemings described his temperament. The preferred social atmosphere for Jefferson was an amiable one, and he had a great ability, as genuinely smart and sensitive people do, to speak to others at whatever level he found them and make them feel at ease. As one observer has noted, “Jefferson valued above all else amiability—‘good humor,’ as he called it—in a friend rating it above integrity, industry, and science.” Jefferson said that if he had to choose, he and most people would prefer to associate “with a good-humoured, light principled man, than with an ill-tempered rigorist in morality.”
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Abundant evidence shows that he had similar preference for amiable women, and the young Hemings was described as that.