The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (45 page)

It is doubtful that the black men whom Martha Hodes, as well as other historians, have written of, who were involved with white women before, during, and after Hemings’s and Jefferson’s time would be so easily deemed traitors as a willing Sally Hemings.
⁹
She would appear a less sympathetic version of the lead character in the opera
Aida
, who sings an impassioned and heartrending aria about the pain of being in thrall to a man who was her lover
and
also the determined enemy of her own people. We might be more comfortable with that scenario placed in a nineteenth-century Italian opera about ancient Egypt and Nubia. It provokes a completely different response when set down within the context of the still too close and painful American slave system.

For women of every color, rape has long been a notoriously underreported and unpunished crime, as male-dominated societies have liberally construed the notion of consent against women who complained about male behavior. A married woman could not complain about being forced into sex by her husband, because her marriage was seen as consent to sexual relations with him whenever he wanted. The tendency to liberally construe consent has been markedly worse for black women since the days of slavery. Powerful apologists for the institution long claimed that black women could not be raped because they were so promiscuous anyway. From their very first interactions with Africans, Europeans created a picture of black women as inherently licentious beings to justify their mistreatment of them and to degrade the black race. That notion lasted throughout the days of slavery and has continued into modern times. By the mid-nineteenth century the southern legal commentator Thomas R. R. Cobb in his treatise on southern slavery and law claimed that the rape of black women by white men was an almost unknown event precisely because one could never establish the legal trigger for a rape charge, “no consent,” because it was well known that black women always consented to sex.
¹⁰

It makes perfect sense when faced with the devastating effects of such patently vicious, yet extremely influential, thinking—no protection for black female rape victims—to adopt a position to rebut such nonsense. There are, however, some problematic conclusions that flow from countering the Cobbses of the world with the idea that no enslaved woman would ever want to consent to sex with a white man, and if there was sex, there was rape. First, rape is determined by the race of the partners without reference to anything we know about the individuals or the circumstances involved. We will always know little or nothing about the vast majority of enslaved women and the scores of them who suffered rape. One might adopt a presumption about those anonymous women in deference to their unquestionable status as victims of slavery. What we know about the way slave women were treated generally should most inform our thoughts about their lives. We are on different terrain when there is information suggesting another possible understanding about what has gone on between one specific man and one specific woman. In those very rare cases, it would be intellectually unsound to ignore evidence, or skip over reasonable inferences, in order to return to the presumption based upon the experiences of the overall group of enslaved women.

The idea of the presumptive unwillingness on the part of all enslaved women may be added to the idea that there could never have been consent between Hemings and Jefferson to sexual relations because of the unequal power distribution between them. Whether Jefferson used violence or employed his well-known charming manner with women to win Hemings over, his power was such that one could never be sure of her true desires. Therefore, Sally Hemings when she was at the Hôtel de Langeac did not—because she could not—consent to sex with Thomas Jefferson. If power is the only issue, what we may call the bright-line “no-possible-consent rule” must also include all white men, not just the legal owners of women like Hemings. White supremacy, a force strong enough to have survived slavery, gave even white men who were not the legal owners of enslaved women wildly disproportionate amounts of power over them—far more than enough to force sex upon them without real consequence.

Depending upon how many slaves he had, and how the woman fit into his work scheme, a given slave owner might have had no incentive to seek redress for the rape of his slave, if the rape did not physically impair her ability to work. Her psychological pain, though deep, would not have excused her from the fields or whatever work she was doing. If the woman became pregnant and had a child, it added to her master’s capital. No enslaved woman had the power to ensure punishment of her rapist, whether he was white, black, free, or enslaved. Differentiating between white slave owners and non–slave owners when considering an enslaved woman’s capacity to consent cuts against the centrality of power in the activity and creates space for consensual interracial sex, so long as it was carried out with white men who had no economic interest in the woman.

There are even more problematic results of the no-possible-consent rule. It suggests that the individual personalities, life stories, and dignity of enslaved women are meaningless or, in the case of “dignity,” even nonexistent. The rule also imposes a version of eternal childhood on them, no matter what their circumstances in life. Ironically, that choice, though made for different reasons, eerily echoes slave owners’ construction of all enslaved people as “children” who lacked the ability and power to make rational decisions and who needed to be kept in slavery to protect them from the vagaries and harsh realities of living as free people in a hostile world.

An issue remains: How is it possible to get at the nature of a relationship between a man and a woman like Jefferson and Hemings when neither party specifically writes or speaks to others about that relationship or their feelings? Even written words can be quite deceptive and seldom tell the whole story, for people sometimes choose, for whatever reason, to tell a story of their lives that is rosier, or grimmer, than it actually was. In the absence of words, actions may be quite telling. An event in the life of Hemings’s oldest sister Mary that took place at the same time that Hemings was in Paris dealing with Jefferson offers some insight into the varied nature of the veiled relationships between enslaved women and white men.

Back in Albemarle County

John Wayles’s legacy, which had shaped so many of the Hemings family’s experiences over the years, altered the course of their lives at the end of the 1780s. Marriage to Wayles’s daughter made Jefferson a wealthy man. Unfortunately, his debts were almost equally staggering. What is more, while serving as executors to the Wayles estate, Jefferson and his fellow executors—the husbands of Martha’s sisters—made a strategic error. They decided that there was no chance to repay Wayles’s creditors with the income his estate generated through the sale of tobacco. That would take too long, and a good amount of the payments would go solely to pay the interest on the running balance of the debt. It was better, they felt, to sell assets and pay the debt off as quickly as possible, to avoid wasteful interest payments and settle their accounts. To effectuate their plan, Jefferson and his coexecutors, as was perfectly legal for them to do, divided the estate and took their share of land and slaves.
¹¹

What seemed like a good idea at the time actually had disastrous results that hurt Jefferson financially for many years afterward. Having given themselves the Wayles assets before the estate itself paid the creditors, the creditors could now hold each executor personally liable for repayment of the debts. Had they kept the assets within the estate, Wayles’s creditors would have had to satisfy themselves out of the estate alone and could not have proceeded against the executors in their individual capacities. Problems with creditors chased Jefferson all the way to France, and in 1788 he received word that he owed more money on the Wayles debt than he had originally thought.
¹²

Jefferson’s problems with debt directly affected the Hemingses and all of the enslaved people on his plantations, and would for years to come. When he received word in Paris of his deteriorating financial situation, he saw three alternative ways to deal with the emergency: he could sell parts of his land, sell some of his slaves, or lease his slaves out. Landownership made Jefferson feel like a wealthy man, and he was loath to sell any part of his holdings, for he thought they provided the ultimate form of security for his family. He decided not to sell land. He also did not want to sell any slaves, “if the debts [could] be paid without” doing that. He characterized his “unwillingness” to take this route as being “for their [the slaves’] sake” Leasing them, he thought, was the better choice. He wrote to Nicholas Lewis, a neighbor who was overseeing Monticello in his absence, to proceed with arrangements, specifically stating that George and Ursula Granger and Elizabeth Hemings were not to be leased out at all, and that Martin and Robert Hemings could continue with whatever arrangements they had already made.
¹³

Mary Hemings, Sally’s oldest sibling, was hired out to a prosperous merchant named Thomas Bell, probably just before Jefferson’s financial crisis. She moved, along with three of her children—Molly, Joseph, and Betsy—to Bell’s home on Main Street. During the course of her time there, she and Bell began a relationship that lasted until his death in 1800 and produced two children, Robert and Sarah. The hiring out of young enslaved women must be viewed as something of a hazard for them. They were in unfamiliar surroundings with no social support, and if the man who hired them had no wife, it is difficult to imagine that the thought of sex did not at least cross his mind, or any of the minds of other men, enslaved or freed, connected to his household. Mary’s younger sister Critta conceived her son James while leased to a man named David Wood. James Hemings’s father is unknown. He was not listed in the Frm Book, so Jefferson did not own him.
¹⁴

We do not know the circumstances surrounding the origins of the Bell-Hemings connection: Did he notice her and lease her for the purpose of making her his concubine, or was it something that developed after the leasehold? In either event, things moved quickly, for her children were born soon after she was leased. However matters started, in Mary Hemings we get a rare sense, from her own actions, of an enslaved woman’s preferences regarding her choice of mate and the course of her life. Not long after Jefferson returned from Paris, Hemings specifically asked to be sold to Bell. Jefferson complied with her request and gave Nicholas Lewis, still overseeing his affairs, “power to dispose of Mary according to her desire, with such of her younger children as she chose.”
¹⁵
In an ironic twist on his practice of selling or buying slaves to unite them with family members from other plantations, Jefferson sold Mary Hemings to unite her to her white partner and their children. He knew the couple’s situation very well, and he acted in deference not just to the wishes of an enslaved woman but also to the desires of the white father of her children.

Within the extremely narrow constraints of what life offered her—ownership by Thomas Jefferson or ownership by Thomas Bell—Mary Hemings took an action that had enormous, lasting, and, in the end, quite favorable consequences for her, her two youngest children, and the Hemings family as a whole. She found in Bell a man willing to live openly with her, and to treat her and their children as if they were bound together as a legal family. She must have seen that capacity in him during the early stages of their time together. Over the years she would be able to compare notes on her life with a white man with her youngest sister, whom she honored by giving her own youngest daughter the name Sarah (also called Sally), known by the time of her marriage, in the early 1800s, as Sarah Jefferson Bell.
¹⁶

As for Sally Hemings, one might understandably want to resist vigorously eighteenth-century notions about the fitness of fifteen-or sixteen-year-olds for sexual relations and hold fast to a present-day view that would see her as a child during all her time in France, no matter what she or the people of her time would have thought of that idea. Hemings’s older sister Mary is a different matter. Nothing of what is known of Mary Hemings and the way she lived suggests that she was in any way childlike after her actual childhood ended. Under the no-possible-consent rule, her clear wish, expressed when she was well into her thirties, to live in union with Bell would be ignored, as if acknowledging this one woman’s attachment to this one man would serve to minimize the prevalence of rape in America’s slave societies. Anomalies existed in slavery as they do in every facet of the universe. By their very nature they do not destroy—but often highlight—the general principles from which they deviate.

Most interestingly of all, the no-possible-consent rule ratifies the historical equation of black women with degraded sex. During their lifetimes, if Sally and Mary Hemings had sex with black men, it was debased in some quarters because the men could not be their legal husbands. If they had sex with a white man, that was debased too. In the end, their sexuality and that of all other enslaved African American women could not (cannot) escape the appellation “degraded” by someone, for some reason—no matter what they thought of their relationships with particular men. The portrayal of black female sexuality as inherently degraded is a product of slavery and white supremacy, and it lives on as one of slavery’s chief legacies and as one of white supremacy’s continuing projects. Extreme racists spoke of what “all” enslaved women did and felt about sex and what “no” white slave owner ever did or felt. The opponents of racism and critics of slavery, deeply and justifiably concerned about the rape of enslaved women, tend to do the same in response, but from the other direction, and end up meeting their ideological antagonists on common ground: across-the-color-line sex with enslaved black women always equaled degraded sex.