The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (40 page)

Jefferson knew that the young girl living in his house in Paris would never be able to perform the social duties of a legal wife. She was, however, well suited to perform the personal ones that were evidently more important to him—being a familiar presence, telling him what he needed to hear about what was happening on the farm, having sex, attending to his needs, being the person of his private world who listened to him complain or voice fears about matters that he might not want to reveal to others, sharing talk of his very grandiose plans for restructuring Monticello—a project that was dear to his heart for decades and that directly involved members of her family. In the years after their return from France, Jefferson fixed Hemings’s life at Monticello so that she was able to do all these things with a minimum amount of friction in his household.

Hagar’s Children in Paris

One item in Jefferson’s correspondence with Maria Cosway stands out for reasons that have little to do with what he thought of her. The letter, written in April of 1788, is remarkable for the insight it gives into Jefferson’s thoughts and for a hint of his frame of mind in the spring of that year. He wrote it just after he returned from his tour through northern Europe, a trip that he thoroughly enjoyed, perhaps so much so that he was a very poor correspondent. He did not write a single letter to Cosway during that time, and she was deeply hurt by that, as he learned upon returning to the Hôtel de Langeac and finding a very angry letter from her. Jefferson attempted to mollify Cosway by telling her of his journey, revealing that at various points he deeply yearned for her company. He also made a recondite sexual reference (a joke about a man’s penis size) from the novel
Tristram Shandy
that clearly went over Cosway’s head, as many other things he said to her seemed to. At another point in the letter, Jefferson included one passage, startling in ways that Cosway probably did not grasp. When describing his trip to an art museum in Düsseldorf, Jefferson wrote,

Fawn Brodie, who famously relied on Freud to analyze Jefferson, was the first to highlight this passage, but the implications of Jefferson’s wish are not far enough below the surface to even be considered Freudian. The painting referenced the Old Testament story of Abraham and his wife, Sarah. When Sarah became too old to give Abraham a child, she brought him one of her own servants, Hagar, to become his concubine with the idea that should Hagar conceive and bear a child, Sarah would take the child and raise it as her own. Significantly for how the story played out, Hagar was not of Sarah’s and Abraham’s people. She was an Egyptian. The biblical story is not so much about sex as about the desperate need to provide an heir for the husband’s line at any cost—giving up, at the wife’s insistence, her right to sexual fidelity and accepting an heir who would be of mixed blood. Jefferson did not want to be Abraham so that he could have more children. It was the erotic nature of the story—the “delicious” depiction of the event—that so struck him that he expressed the depth of his feeling with resort to exaggeration: the chance to have Hagar in his bed would have been worth dying for.

Jefferson used the term “delicious” to denote things that were delightful or pleasing to him, not necessarily in a sexual way, though in this context the word seems to have carried that meaning. Van der Werff painted a scene in which an older man sitting in his bed is being given a beautiful young woman to sleep with. For those who knew the story, as Jefferson did, any notion of guilt about what is taking place is diminished because the person giving the young woman to the man is his own wife. After he had kept faith with her through their many childless years and refused to cast her aside for another wife, Sarah does this for her husband Abraham. Depicting her with her hand over her heart and a determined expression on her face, Van der Werff conveys the years of their struggle culminating with Sarah’s solution to their problem. She is saying to her husband, “This is what should happen, and it is all right.”

What makes his wish so telling is that Jefferson knew it was not an impossible, or even an improbable, one to fulfill. We might think about this differently if, say, John Adams or some other non-slaveholding northerner had made such a comment, filing it away as just another meaningless male fantasy. One commentator has posited that Jefferson was actually thinking of Maria Cosway as the metaphorical slave girl Hagar, bypassing the reference’s infinitely more obvious parallel to Hemings. Even if he had been thinking of Cosway, it does not move us far from Sally Hemings to suggest that of all the reveries available to him, Jefferson would so rapturously fantasize the determinedly free and very white Cosway into the role of a young enslaved woman of a different race.
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It is simply impossible to write slavery out of the life, personality, and even the very existence of Thomas Jefferson. Whatever he said about slaves, in any context, requires attention. When he explicitly fantasizes about being given a slave girl to go to bed with, one cannot ignore the fact that his relationship to slave girls was anything but metaphorical. Jefferson lived in a world where having a young slave woman of another race to sleep with was always a real possibility. The products of those types of situations, Hagar’s children, were all around him. For that reason it is doubtful that he would ever have written to a fellow Virginian—especially a female—that he at any point dreamed of having someone give him a slave girl to sleep with, because he knew their minds would immediately turn to the Abrahams and Hagars in their own communities. Every Virginian knew that Jefferson could be given a slave girl, and he could keep her. As he wrote those words to Cosway, there was such a girl who had been sent to live with him sitting, sleeping (perhaps already in his own bed), or sewing in his house. That enslaved girl, the somewhat ironically named Sarah, was in his life solely because she had been brought there by his wife.

The situation at the Hôtel de Langeac was incendiary precisely because Sally Hemings was not just a young slave girl: she was his deceased wife’s half sister. Neither Hemings’s status as a slave nor shifting ideas about race could have trumped genetics. Half sisters can resemble each other physically, or in the tone and timbre of voice, and mannerisms. Moreover, even before they were together in Paris, the Hemingses and Jeffersons lived in close proximity to one another and interacted on a daily basis, creating, as this did all over the South, a mixed culture of shared language, expressions, sayings, and norms of presentation. Hemings spent her formative years with Jefferson’s daughters, and her manner of speaking was probably not markedly different from either of theirs. We get a telling clue about the way Jefferson’s daughters sounded, at least as young people, from Patsy Jefferson’s phonetic spelling of “windows” as “winders” as she complained about the windowless cabin on her trip across the English Channel and then rhapsodically described the beauty of the stained-glass “winders” in French churches and cathedrals.
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There is no gene for black speech, nor do speech patterns depend upon one’s level of education. That is why it is impossible to spot illiterates just by listening to them talk. The historian Melvin Patrick Ely has shown, through a brilliant job of historical detective work, that our modern-day perceptions about the speech patterns of enslaved southern blacks are faulty. By close reading of the letters and other documents of white and black residents of Prince Edward County, Virginia, during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ely shows just how much alike black and white southerners in the pre–Civil War years sounded. Idioms and speech patterns that are today seen as distinctively African American were commonly used by black and white alike.
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That should not surprise, given that the two races lived together more closely during slavery than at any other time in American history. These transplants from other continents created and learned how to speak southern American speech together. In light of this, the snobbish observation of a perennial Jefferson critic, Henry Lee, whose family kept one foot in England well into the nineteenth century, that Jefferson’s diction was far from perfect, perhaps gives some clue as to the way Jefferson sounded. It is possible that Lee, and other Virginian elites holding on to the culture and ways of England, including the way of speaking, resisted the development of what today would be recognized as a southern accent—a way of speaking born of the interaction between Europeans and Africans.

The determination to render black speech as always vastly—and uniformly—different from that of whites grew out of a desire to cast African Americans as alien beings, in much the same way that Jim Crow was designed to communicate the message of essential differences between the races. Even Sojourner Truth, whose first language was Dutch, and who would have spoken English with a Dutch accent, is depicted as speaking in the same manner as slaves from Anglophone communities.
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But just as Jim Crow created a level of physical separation between the races that did not exist, and could never have existed, during slavery, conventional renderings of the speech of enslaved people have created a distorted picture of both black and white conversational styles.

Three of the four children Sally Hemings reared to adulthood lived successfully as white people among other whites. Her two eldest, Beverley and Harriet, left Monticello as white people, with no learning curve for how to present themselves as Caucasians. They married white people who may not have known they were of African origin or had ever been enslaved. They would not have been able to do this had they spoken in the stereotypical dialect attributed to every black person throughout American history up until today. It is not at all uncommon to see in journalism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the speech of blacks recorded in a form of dialect that supposedly conveys the person’s “authentic” blackness (read differentness) while the speech of whites who speak in ways that could also easily be put into a form of dialect are faithfully reproduced in standard English. None of Hemings’s children had any more contact with whites growing up than she did. They probably had even less on a one-on-one daily basis.

That the Hemingses had a different overall presentation from other slaves at Monticello, as members of the Jefferson family asserted, meshed with Jefferson’s desire not to be reminded that those who served him most closely were, in fact, black slaves. If Hemings did resemble his wife in any way, physically or through the use of common expressions, as so often happens with people who spend time with each other, one can imagine the emotions that this evoked in Jefferson, bidden and unbidden. Had he been able to accept the first appointment to France, he would have experienced the country he had come to love so much with his wife.

Even without a family resemblance, there was virtually no way that Hemings and Jefferson could talk with each other without the conscious or unconscious memory of Martha Wayles Jefferson hovering between them. She was why they knew each other. She was why they had come to be living together in a strange land away from family and the society that had formed both of them. What would a man be thinking while talking with a young female who was his slave, but also the sister of his much loved and lost wife? What would a young enslaved female be thinking as she talked to a man who was her master, knowing that he had been married to her sister? Had Hemings been free and white, they would not have been thinking of marrying each other, because that would have been against the laws of their time. In Virginia, under the influence of English law, a man who married his deceased wife’s sister was engaging in incest.
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Hemings and Jefferson lived in a world obsessed with family connections. Kinship ties were enormously important to enslaved people who tried hard to defend them against the depredations of slavery. Blood and family were important to white Virginians as well, but they added the component of racism to the equation, introducing the notion of “black” blood and “white” blood. Hemings embodied the clash between the values of blood and family and racist views about blood and race, so that white supremacy and slavery complicated her connection to her sister Martha. Enslaved families had different responses to their blood connection to whites. Some thought them meaningful and kept the ties alive through their naming practices and dealings with those families after slavery. Others—one could venture, the vast majority of slaves, indifferent or hostile to their blood ties to white families, or deeply ashamed of them—never made anything of biological relationships to whites. It was a part of them that meant nothing. This was a rational response reflecting the fact that their particular ties were most often the result of rape and that their white relatives usually ignored or even strenuously denied the existence of blood ties to them.

Jefferson’s relations with Hemings’s family show that his own strong feelings about the meaning of blood and family were never totally overridden by his feelings about blood and race. That the Hemingses’ relationship to his wife was biological, rather than legal, meant that he had no external guide for dealing with the connection and had to decide on his own how to handle it. He could ignore it altogether, openly recognize it and make something real of the connection, or make gestures that acknowledged it in a more oblique fashion. Jefferson chose the last course. We do not know all that the Hemings siblings’ relationship to his wife meant to him, but we have some idea from his overall treatment of them that it meant a great deal. He viewed the family through the prism of his sentimentality about his wife and the life he had hoped to build with her, and this seems to have affected the way some members of the family viewed him in return.