The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (46 page)

While those sensitive to the plight of black female slaves like Sally and Mary Hemings paint a vastly more realistic picture of slavery than can be found in the ravings of the likes of Thomas R. R. Cobb, analyzing black-white sexuality during slavery strictly through the vehicle of edicts carries the risks inherent in all bright-line rules. These shorthand formulations, beneficial (and especially necessary in law) as easy-to-apply tools for setting uniform standards on important matters, hinder historical inquiry. They make it unnecessary to pay attention to details, discern patterns, and note sometimes even sharp distinctions between given situations, putting one on a more comforting voyage of reiteration rather than one of potentially disconcerting discovery.

To ensure that everyone gets the vital message that the rape of black women was endemic to slavery, the no-possible-consent rule says that whether Jefferson used force or charm on Hemings is of no great moment. Social history trumps individual biography. But one can safely say that for Hemings, who lived her life as a person, not a statistic, the difference between being forced, physically or psychologically, by a man and being charmed by him would have made all the difference in the world to her inner life, a thing that was and is, indeed, always of great moment.

Celia, Sally Hemings, and Mary Hemings

Though we are greatly attuned to the problem of inequalities of power in sexual relationships—teacher-student, employer-employee—those situations pale in comparison with the power differential between a master and a slave. To own another human being, in a legal system that gave great deference to the rights of private property, meant that a master’s use of a slave for work, or for sex, was really his business. No case illustrates that more profoundly than that of Celia, another enslaved teenager whose life has achieved nearly iconic status, though not to the extent of Sally Hemings’s. Celia, who had no known last name, lived during a different point in the progress of slavery in the United States than Hemings—the 1840s and 1850s—and she lived in a state, Missouri, that was more conflicted about the institution than Hemings’s Virginia.
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Her story is illustrative, however, for what it says about the brutal reality of the lives of enslaved women across the length and breadth of the American South. Celia’s life was far more emblematic of the plight of female slaves than Sally Hemings’s and considering it for a moment will help illuminate Hemings’s situation in Paris and that of her sister Mary unfolding at the same time Charlottesville.

Celia’s master, Robert Newsom, was a widower, like Jefferson. He had two sons and two daughters. Unlike Jefferson, he was a very small-scale slave owner. Before he bought Celia, he had only five slaves, all male. He purchased fourteen-year-old Celia, evidently, for the sole purpose of sexual gratification. He raped her on the road home from the auction at which he had bought her. At some point, he built a house for her just behind his own. There followed five years in which Newsom continued to prey upon Celia until she decided that she could take it no longer.
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While at Newsom’s farm, Celia became involved with George, one of the enslaved men on the plantation. George greatly resented Newsom, and he demanded that Celia stop allowing Newsom to come to her home for sex, a very strange request because George knew that Celia did not welcome Newsom’s attentions and that their master was heedless of Celia’s disdain for him. By the very clear terms and conditions of that society, George’s responses and actions made absolutely no sense. He was a slave, Celia was too, and Newsom was their legal master. George, however, was a man despite what the law and society’s rules told him about what he was allowed to feel and do. Legal and social rules could never overcome his very human feelings—jealousy over, anger and possessiveness toward, a woman to whom he was attracted.
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One day, when Newsom told Celia he was coming later on that evening to the house that he had built for her, she warned him not to. Newsom, not surprisingly, paid no attention to this and said he would do as he pleased. When he came over that night and tried to approach Celia, she struck him with a large stick that she had brought into her home for this occasion. Newsom, she said later, seemed surprised by her attack but recovered and came toward her again. That time she landed a blow to the head that killed him. After thinking about how to dispose of Newsom’s body, Celia decided to burn it in her fireplace, and spent the rest of the evening into the next morning doing just that. Later that day, she came upon Newsom’s grandson playing in a nearby tree. She offered him some chestnuts if he would help her remove the large amount of ashes that had accumulated in her fireplace. The young boy eagerly agreed, and proceeded to gather up and then dump the ashes of what he did not know was his grandfather in the forest behind their house.
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During George’s interrogation, Celia was identified as Newsom’s murderer, and she confessed. Her court-appointed lawyers tried to do the best they could with a case in which a slave woman had confessed to the murder of her master. As an enslaved black person, Celia could not testify, but her counsel managed to get before the jury as much evidence about Newsom’s sexual mistreatment of Celia as possible. Many in the surrounding community followed the case, and a good number of the predominately white citizens sympathized with Celia. They sympathized so much that a group of them broke her out of jail, with the aim of preventing the carrying out of the death sentence that had been imposed after she was found guilty of murder. At the end of the trial, the judge issued instructions for the jury, one of which stated that Newsom owned Celia, and if he came to her house to have sex, or for any other purpose, he had the right to have his demands complied with. Celia, as an enslaved woman, had no honor to protect and could not, therefore, resist his advances as a white woman could. Celia was hanged.
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That encapsulates the legal reality under which enslaved women lived across all the years of slavery, and there is no denying that many white slave owners took full advantage of that and raped black women with impunity. The question is whether having a degree of power, even total power, means that all holders of it will exercise it to the same extent or in the same way. Not
all
of anyone ever
always
does anything. We can know and keep in mind the obscene amount of power that slave owners possessed as we talk about that group of individuals who held, and those who lived under, that power. That cannot be the end of a responsible inquiry when thinking about specific people within those respective groups. One of the fascinating parts of Celia’s story, for example, was the Newsom family’s response. It would have been entirely possible for them, upon hearing Celia’s confession, to have exacted some punishment against her before the authorities entered the picture. Missouri, like other states, prohibited the wanton killing of a slave, but if slaves died during the course of legitimate “correction,” there was no sanction against the master.

If ever there was a moment when a slave owner was tempted to bring about a slave’s death, it was upon hearing how Newsom died and how Celia involved his grandson in the disposal of his body. Some members of other slave-owning families faced with this story would have “corrected” Celia to death right away. The Newsoms did not, and not because they were thoughtful and caring people—the daughters were absolutely of no help to Celia when she complained about Newsom’s behavior. They acquiesced in the torture of another human being. The sons, the most likely candidates for exacting the punishment, may just not have been the kind of people who could kill someone with their own hands. They knew Celia would be killed eventually, and they were not prepared to do that when they did not have to.

Killing is more extreme than rape, but the analogy is still instructive because it dramatically raises the issues of individual will and personality. The tremendously disproportionate amount of power that slave owners, and all white men, had over slave women made rape prevalent, but it was not universal. One simply cannot say that being a slave owner made every white man equally prone to wanting to have sex with slave women or to raping them, that every slave owner would rape any slave woman who refused his advances, or that every slave owner actively preferred his sexual encounters with slave women to be violent and unwanted. While these ideas capture something very real and basic about the nature of slavery, they do not account for every situation.

Celia could not have more emphatically demonstrated that she wanted no part of Robert Newsom. The touch of having the grandson unwittingly dispose of his grandfather’s ashes was her curse on the generations, exacting a blood punishment for what Newsom had done to her. On the other hand, Mary Hemings took actions that show that she was amenable to being with a man who owned her just as surely as Newsom owned Celia. Sally Hemings’s situation was different still from Celia and her own sister Mary’s. Neither of those women ever had any personal recourse to law in their dealings with the men in their lives. To see Celia’s life as being the same as the lives of Mary and Sally Hemings, solely because they shared a legal status, obscures the true horror of her daily existence and Robert Newsom’s monstrous nature. Celia despised the man who owned her, and he wounded her immeasurably with his sadism. Had there been any route away from Newsom (if Missouri had had France’s version of free soil) and the hell she endured living on his farm, Celia would have taken it without a moment’s hesitation. In fact, she did take a route, one that she must have known would ultimately lead to her death—an act that shows the depth of her pain and her justifiable hatred of Newsom and his family.

It would be cruel, and nonsensical, to demand that every enslaved woman kill the master who was raping her, lest she be seen as consenting to the sex between them. What we have in Mary and Sally Hemings was something more than just a failure to kill or to resist actively (and foolishly) in some fashion. Both women gave strong indications, during the time of their relationships and after the men they lived with died, that their attitude toward the white men in their lives was different from Celia’s, and for good reason. Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Bell were not to them what Robert Newsom was to Celia.

Both Hemings sisters had very firm internal understandings about how they might influence the course of their lives so that they could have what many of the women of their day, black and white, wanted—the ability, during their measured time on earth, to associate with a man who would take care of them and provide the best possible lives for their children with some chance of stability in an unstable world. Mary Hemings experienced firsthand what this instability meant. Although she found a place for herself with Bell, unlike her sister Sally, she experienced one of the harshest aspects of enslaved motherhood. As will be discussed in a later chapter, four of her six children were taken from her. The liaison with Bell ensured that any new children she had would be protected. The contingencies of the lives of Sally and Mary Hemings were such that Jefferson and Bell, for whatever reason—their personalities, their feelings about the women involved—supported these sisters’ aspirations. As a result both women, in their own way, achieved exactly what they wanted. That their very elemental desires as women were met in the context of slave-master, black-white relationships is troubling because they mix something that seems almost sacred (the human desire for a secure family life) with something deeply profane (slavery).

The profanity of slavery does not define the entirety of the lives of enslaved people so that everything any one of them ever did, felt, or thought—everyone they touched, every situation in which they were involved, every connection they made—was degraded. There is an inherent danger in automatically transforming women like Sally and Mary Hemings into something they themselves may never have thought they were in order to convey a message about the overall character of slavery—to treat these women as vehicles rather than as persons. No individual’s life, hopes, struggles, and dreams should be sacrificed to that instrumentalist end.

The title alone of the historian Walter Johnson’s
Soul by Soul
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captures the enormity of slavery’s inhumanity and suggests at least one way to go about illuminating it in the pages of history. Slavery was not just one, enormous act of oppression against a nameless, interchangeable mass of people. It was millions of separate assassinations and attempted assassinations of individual spirits carried out over centuries. When we encounter some of those spirits responding to their circumstances as human beings respond and using whatever means available to them to maintain or assert their humanity in the face of the onslaught, their individual efforts should not be minimized or ignored, because they could never alone have killed off the institution of slavery. That is far too heavy a load to place on people whose burdens in life were already almost unimaginably heavy.

Perhaps enslaved women like Sally and Mary Hemings who sought transformation of their lives through their associations with men were too few in number to care about, and talking of them gives us an unrealistic perception of the lives of women in bondage. On the other hand, there is both time and reason enough to explore every single part of black life under slavery, because each item contributes to our understanding of exactly how that institution and white supremacy shaped the American consciousness. No piece of the puzzle is too small or unessential to play its vital role in helping to bring that whole picture into view. Sally Hemings’s story in France as she began a phase that would cover the next thirty-eight years of her life with one of the most important men in history is just such an item—small and anomalous, but still an instructive window into the workings of a world that no longer exists but whose legacies are still with us.