The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (51 page)

Hemings did not have to sort these matters out by herself. Her brother’s presence in the household raises the question of just whose idea it was to stay in France in the first place. Madison Hemings was speaking of his origins, and how he and his siblings came to be free four decades before the Civil War ended slavery. His mother and, to a degree, his father were the heroes of his story. He did not mention Uncle James, who had died in 1801, four years before he was born. What happened in France involved not just Sally Hemings. If she knew that slaves were supposed to be free in France, James Hemings, who had lived there more than twice as long as she, knew the law as well and most likely told his sister. This is not to say that Sally needed James to tell her that being free was better than being enslaved. It is to say that she should not be thought of as a person alone. Her brother, an intelligent and spirited man, was an invaluable asset, and the plan to stay in Paris was evidently a joint effort between the two.

The very creative twenty-four-year old James Hemings had already been putting himself in the position to stay in France even before his sister arrived. His hiring of Perrault to be his tutor should be viewed against the backdrop of one important fact of life for French servants: they were a highly ambitious lot. As we noted in chapter 11, French was a second language to the majority of them. The better French they spoke, the better jobs they got, and those seeking new or different employment often advertised their facility in French or other languages. Hemings, immersed in the culture of Parisian servants for over five years, observed firsthand their customs, struggles, and preoccupations. He was literate in English, and Perrault’s lessons evidently included enough tuition in French to teach him to read the language at a basic level, certainly enough to read postings or advertisements for services that could give him a sense of what people were looking for in servants. Before he left slavery and Monticello, and turned the kitchen over to his younger brother Peter, he wrote out an extensive list of the cooking utensils in a firm hand with very few misspellings.
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Working with Perrault was a substantial investment of money and time for the future that made little sense if he thought his future was exclusively in Virginia. His timing is instructive. He hired Perrault when he was near the end of this apprenticeship, after he had gotten along well enough to make it through several years communicating with his French teachers. Money was not the issue. Jefferson had been giving him that even before he became chef de cuisine. Seeking to improve his French grammar would not have improved his cooking skills so much as made him more attractive to potential French employers.

And then there was Paris’ small community of color, concerned enough about the welfare of its members to pass information around about the status of blacks in the country. Sally Hemings had a special reason for thinking of this community. She did not likely consider staying in France without thinking of what the future might hold in the way of marriage and companionship. Although only around a thousand
gens de couleur
lived in all of Paris, the vast majority of them, concentrated in a small number of neighborhoods, were males in their late teens and early twenties—exactly suitable for a young woman approaching her seventeenth birthday.
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Some among those unattached men, victims of the heavily skewed ratio of black males to females, surely would have welcomed a young and attractive woman like Hemings, though she spoke French only as a second language. It was not altogether inconceivable that the well-to-do mixed-race sons of white colonial fathers were potential mates, their social standing within their own hierarchical communities notwithstanding. In most cases, their mothers or grandmothers had been slaves, and though her white father had left her no property, Hemings’s chief asset, along with her good looks, was that she could easily have fit into their caste. Being American may have made her seem even more exotically attractive.

The law against interracial marriage was not always enforced, so white men were in the available pool of mates for Hemings as well. She could not have known this, of course, but not long after she left the country, the Revolution abrogated the prohibitions against intermarriage. Even after the law was restored during the Napoleonic era, the French version of the one-drop rule went in reverse: people who had any European ancestry were allowed to marry white partners without restriction.
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The rigid class system, however, made a formal marriage with a man from the upper classes virtually impossible. The most Hemings could expect from a white man at that level of society was to become his mistress and remain in France or travel with him to a French colony in the West Indies, Indian Ocean, or Senegal.
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At some point, the maxim “The devil you know is better than the one you don’t know” likely came into play. But had Hemings decided to break away from Jefferson and start a new life with her brother, she would have had the chance to be the mother of children who were free at birth and she could have had a legal marriage and the social respectability that would elude her totally in Virginia living with Jefferson. None of her children would have felt compelled to leave her, one another, and their family history behind in order to escape the racism of nineteenth-century America. The descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s oldest son and youngest daughter are unknown to us because they knew they could not live safely as people of African origin in the country their father helped found.

History provides a clear picture of what was just around the corner for France in the coming decade, and what James and Sally Hemings might have faced had they remained in Paris with revolution imminent, and some violence was already under way. Patsy Jefferson recalled seeing the “sixty thousand citizens flourishing swords, scythes, and pruning hooks”
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march in the streets of Paris, and both she and her father resorted to gallows humor about people losing their heads. The memory of the charged atmosphere and the tumult in the city stayed with her for decades. Sally and James Hemings were there for all of this, too. Neither they nor anyone else could have known just how difficult matters would become in France—that much of the society they knew would be swept away by the Terror. The kind of upper-class Frenchmen for whom James Hemings was most qualified to cook, and the women whom Sally Hemings could have attended, soon would be under siege or dead.

Robert Darnton has argued that the French Revolution unleashed “a sense of boundless possibility,” giving “ordinary people” the idea that they could act to influence their fate instead of being merely consigned to it.
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Sally and James Hemings were no ordinary people. They had been born slaves and were now in a place that offered an opportunity for a brand-new life. Like many enslaved people during the American Revolution, the Hemings siblings had reason to welcome the dramatic change promised by the first stirrings of the French Revolution. Rather than being frightening, the talk of upending rules and creating a new type of society was likely energizing to these two young people. Tradition and the status quo represented comfort and safety to privileged white people, but they held nothing for the Hemingses except the continuation of slavery.

While a conflagration of major proportions loomed in France, there is no reason to suppose that James and Sally Hemings would have fared better in Virginia’s racially based slave society than in Paris even with all its revolution-inspired troubles. If they had stayed in France, they would have joined the ranks of people of all races and cultures who throughout human history have braved unknown territory and built lives for themselves amid hostile, isolated, and barren wildernesses—as well as forbidding, cramped, and chaotic urban environments. The risks of hardship and failure are inevitable facts of life for free people of any color. Courage was not foreclosed to either of them.

Jefferson, however, was a very persuasive man. As we will see, his leverage over James Hemings brought the young man back to the United States and, for a time, to Monticello, until his emancipation. As for Sally Hemings, one wonders whether her threat to stay in France for the sake of freedom was not, in the end, merely a ploy she used to get what she really wanted: to go home with assurances that she could expect a certain type of life at Monticello with the rest of the Hemingses and Jefferson, along with his “solemn pledge” that
partus sequitur ventrem
would end in her line forever.

A
T FIRST GLANCE
the terse presentation of how Hemings and Jefferson resolved the standoff between them at the Hôtel de Langeac has the look of a deal between two parties who, if not exactly operating at arm’s length, were at least bargaining in a manner that seems unworthy of a man and a woman with any true emotional bond between them. Their son’s description of the agreement as a “treaty”
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calls to mind diplomats from two foreign nations drawing up terms for the cessation of hostilities or forming an alliance for trade or united defense against a common enemy. This runs counter to romantic conventional wisdom about the way women and men act when they are emotionally attached to each other and are embarking on a life together. In that convention, a particular conception of “love” occupies center stage; it blots out all talk of things practical and utilitarian, as if their very mention would cheapen the value of any truly heartfelt sentiments existing between the man and the woman.

Because Jefferson was more powerful than Hemings, and a vastly more important actor in world history, the temptation to focus on his thoughts and likely feelings is great, as though his legal ownership of her in America obviated the need to consider her actions in France. She, a mere object of his power, could never have influenced him or the course of her life, in any way. The historiography of slavery has long since moved beyond the notion that slave owners were deity-like in their omnipotence and that slaves really were actual chattel, like pieces of furniture lacking consciences and will. It is now well recognized that within their admittedly limited sphere, enslaved people helped shape the contours of the master-slave relationship, both as actors and as reactors.
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Whatever her situation in Virginia, Hemings had a sphere of influence much larger in France; Jefferson, a much diminished one. His power as a master was not coterminous with his whiteness. Although Jefferson was white wherever he went, he did not carry the legal powers of a Virginia slave owner wherever he went. One cannot speak seriously about the meaning and application of law without addressing the always pivotal question of
jurisdiction
—when and where the law speaks. Virginia slave law did not speak in France. There was, then, no way for Jefferson to legitimately exercise the power those laws gave him. Just as he did not carry his power as a master everywhere, the Hemingses did not carry their Virginia-induced powerlessness as slaves to France as if their legal condition had been truly grafted onto their skin, as white Virginians tried to make it. There was no such thing as an immutable slave character that endured beyond geographical, political, social, and legal boundaries.

Problems remain as we try to recover as much as we can of Hemings and Jefferson, the flesh-and-blood individuals operating in those final months in France. Unexamined conventional wisdom inhibits clear assessments of this extraordinary pair. In modern times a marriage is often treated as proof that love exists between the two people who join in matrimony. That Hemings was born into a society that did not allow her to have a legal marriage confuses and makes it hard to see, and easy to disparage, the idea of love and, what we may call, authenticity in any bond she formed. With no law to serve as a guide for how to think of her relationship, we assume all was chaos or insignificance. There are other stumbling blocks: the assumption that all black-white sex under slavery was degraded per se, the idea that Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman, was simply too indelibly degraded to be considered “lovable” by a man like Jefferson, and that Jefferson, a slave owner, was simply too implacably evil for Hemings to have loved. Under these rules, the “treaty” their son described could not have grown out of any non-meretricious attachment-based or “decent” sentiment. These notions—operating together or on their own—make up the very complex American response to matters involving not only slavery but even more particularly race and gender.

Love and the authenticity it supposedly gives to relationships are inherently difficult concepts to capture in any venue, but there is no question that slavery complicates matters almost exponentially, given the moral, social, and political implications of such a discussion. For modern observers the glaring problem with the idea of love between a slave and master is that southern apologists for slavery, near the end of the institution and long afterward, set teeth on edge with their endless talk about “the love” that existed between black and white in old-time Dixie, as if affection between discrete individuals could ever mitigate the inhumanity of the southern slave system or affect an individual’s overall commitment to white supremacy. Human beings, creatures with the capacity to observe and reason, understand the concept of “exceptions”—that persons, things, or rules can vary from an accepted norm. “
This black person, that white person, is different from all the others.
” It is quite instructive that all the talk never extended to love between males and females like a Sally Hemings and a Thomas Jefferson, who were eligible to engage in what people of their day would have thought of as “normal” heterosexual intercourse.
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Very importantly for Hemings and Jefferson, if we look closely at how we think we know when love and authenticity exist between a man and a woman, and when we are firm in our understanding that it did not and could not have existed, we can see the almost hidden hand of the law and the very open hand of white supremacy leading us to exalt the humanity of whites and to seriously discount the humanity of blacks in much the same manner as was done during slavery. This becomes clear when we try to get at the nature of Hemings’s response to Jefferson at the Hôtel de Langeac by comparing her unprotected status in her relationship with him to that of her sister Martha Wayles, who was protected in her relationship with the very same man.

The Cover of Marriage

When Martha Wayles Skelton decided that she would marry and live the rest of what would be her altogether too brief life with Thomas Jefferson, she did not have to ask certain questions or make a “treaty” with him. Legal marriage itself was “the treaty,” such an important one that society did not leave it to them to set their own basic terms. The deal between a man and a woman was the community’s business as well as the couple’s, and certain core terms were therefore set down as a matter of law, both religious and civil. By the time Martha and Thomas married centuries of English law (adopted in large measure in the new American context) had already set down the terms of engagement between men and women who were casting their lot together as married partners. Whether the couple loved each other or not, and for most of the history of marriage love was not the preeminent consideration, the parties had certain rights and obligations that were explicitly set forth.

Martha did not have to ask Thomas whether he would take good care of her. That was in the deal called coverture. He covered her with his protection and in return gained the right to control all of her property and to direct the course of her life. She ceased to exist as a separate legal person, hence Blackstone’s famous description of marriage, the husband and wife became one, and the one was the husband.
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Martha did not have to ask whether Thomas would take care of the children they had together and whether they would receive a patrimony from him. Laws about a father’s duty of support and children’s inheritance rights—a very elaborate array of rules—took care of that as well. Neither Martha nor Thomas had to wonder whether they were going to have sex, because that was part of the legal understanding of what made a marriage as well. In their time, marriage was the symbol of the union of male and female and what that union could achieve. If the two became one physically, and they were both healthy, they would produce children, which was what traditional marriage was supposed to be about. An unconsummated marriage was not a true one. If at some point one of the parties refused to have sex, that was considered abandonment of the marriage bed and was a ground for divorce.
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No couple in Virginia eligible for legal marriage had to talk to their potential spouses about any of these matters at all.

This was, for Jefferson’s time, an efficient system for the smooth operation of Anglo-American family relationships. Legal marriage existed for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with slavery and white supremacy. Still, the availability of marriage to whites and the denial of it to enslaved black people served as yet another means of advancing both—strengthening and beautifying whites in their relationships with each other and weakening and degrading blacks in their relationships with each other and whenever they were involved with whites. With no opportunity for legal marriage, Sally Hemings, unlike her sister Martha, was operating without the benefit of any written rules. The plan for her life at Monticello with Jefferson was made up to suit their particular circumstances, and the carrying out of that plan depended not upon law but upon Hemings’s ability to hold Jefferson in some serious fashion over the years and, more importantly, the quality of his personal character and his willingness to remain committed to her.

It is not all surprising, therefore, that Hemings and Jefferson talked of the very matters that were among the core issues addressed in the basic marriage contract for free couples in the world in which they lived: the treatment of the woman, the man’s duty’s and obligations toward the children, and what the children would receive from the man when they became adults, questions that men and women in every type of society from time immemorial have had to address. That the two would be having sex was implicit in the understanding that Hemings was going to have more children and that provision would be made for them as well as the one about to be born—the particular one that Hemings most wanted: their freedom.

That whites who wanted to marry never had to ask these most basic and practical questions moved their unions beyond the realm of more obvious deal making and horse-trading. Upper-class families did their share of negotiating about property matters before marriage, when they chose to do so. But for the most part the premarital negotiations that went on for white couples of means reflected their families’ desire to help the new couple as they started out in life, augmenting the basic terms of the marriage contract.
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With the need to negotiate the most elemental terms out of the way, Anglo-American legal unions evolved to the point where they could easily be portrayed as about something inevitably greater—more pure and romantic—than a deal (a “treaty,” if you will) in which a man and a woman figure out how they are going to have steady access to sex and company in their lives with a partner acceptable to them, raise the children that come from that sex, and determine what they will do about their respective items of property.

An upper-class, married white woman in Virginia, no matter how her status was obtained—as part of a plan to unite large property holdings, to rein in the impulses of a headstrong girl, or to achieve a step up in her family’s circumstances—could never have been a rape victim or degraded sexual object in her marriage. The marriage contract made her consent to sex implicit and all the resulting sexual activity “clean.” A married white man, no matter how he came to be the husband of the bride—with the aid of family force or from a desire to gain wealth—could never have been a rapist or one who tainted the notion of true love in the relationship by bringing ambition for material or social gain into the plan for union. The law created a reality beyond itself and its purposes. It told a story about the lives of those whom it protected—men and women like Thomas and Martha—supposedly defining their basic natures and the quality of their characters, almost the very state of their souls.

The cover of legal marriage made every white “wife” an honorable woman, presumptively morally and spiritually superior to any enslaved woman, actually any black woman. This attitude prevailed among whites long after Hemings’s time and shaped the way black people and their families and sexuality were viewed, the coupling of blackness with the degradation of slavery having done its work. As late as the 1950s, some newspapers in southern states refused to apply the honorific “Mrs.” to even legally married black women. This had nothing to do with the disabilities of slavery—it had been abolished—and nothing to do with protective veil of legal matrimony: these women had it. When all was said and done, “honor” and dignity were racially based. No black woman, even a lawfully wedded one, could ever have had either, or certainly their honor and dignity could not have been recognized on an equal footing with that of white women’s in any public forum.
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Because they were legally married, the question whether Thomas Jefferson loved Martha Wayles Skelton as he first got to know her would never have been asked. We assume we know what he was thinking and feeling simply because he married her. Even raising the question might be considered an insult to their memory. The truth is that we do not know exactly what the young Thomas was thinking when he encountered Martha, the beautiful and rich widow. We do not even know when and where he first encountered her. What percentage of his initial attraction to her was that ineffable feeling that draws one human being to another in a heartfelt way that we all respect and honor as one of the highest expressions of our emotions? And what percentage of the attraction was the reality that a legal marriage to a woman whose father was very rich and well connected in the society in which Jefferson wanted to rise would bring him vast wealth that he might never have achieved on his own—a mercenary concern that is not a part of the kind of “love” that we long for and revere? The fact is we simply cannot know.