The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (67 page)

Now here James Hemings was again, in the spring of 1791, traveling by himself to meet up with two men who were companions to one another, but not to him. One wonders if he ever thought of simply continuing north, as he drove alone, or at any point when he was away from the two men he was driving around the countryside. After Jefferson and Madison rejoined him, the trio went as far north as Lake Champlain, and it would have been a relatively easy matter to have disappeared into Canada and take his chances there. When they crossed into New England, going through states where slavery had been abolished, Hemings could have balked at going back home with Jefferson.
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He did not. His situation, working and receiving a steady salary, suited him for the time being.

In the midst of the spectacular scenery of upstate New York, on June 1, the travelers came upon what would have been to Hemings one of the most intriguing parts of the journey, one that had particular resonance for his life. They were at Fort George, near Lake George, a beautiful area with “mountains of considerable height the entire length of the lake.” The one house found on the “East Side” of the lake was “owned & inhabited by a free Negro,” in Madison’s words.

This entry is in stark contrast to the rest of Madison’s otherwise relatively spare and almost exclusively “scientific” travel journal. The future president was clearly fascinated by this man, whose existence was a total rebuke to his way of life on almost every level. There were certainly free blacks who had farms in Virginia in 1791, before and after that time, but probably few, if any, had such an extensive holding or employed so many white people. Actually, the man was a rebuke to the way of life for New Yorkers as well, for despite the movement toward abolition, slavery still had a firm hold in parts of the state.
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What Jefferson thought of the man is unknown, because he made no reference to him, but it is hard to believe that he and Madison did not talk about the man, given the closeness of their association on the journey and Madison’s obvious interest in him. Jefferson devoted his journal entries, for most of the trip, almost entirely to descriptions of the flora and fauna observed along the way, noting how many land and water miles they traveled, along with rating the quality of the inns where they lodged on their journey. Aside from his writings about the Hessian fly, he concentrated on transcribing the vocabulary of the Unquachog Indians, whose language had disappeared so thoroughly that only “three persons…old women” could speak it. His only notation about the people at Fort George was that there were “very few inhabitants around the lake.”
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More than all the other blacks whom people brought to Jefferson’s attention to “prove” blacks’ worthiness, this man, working his 250-acre farm, presented the single greatest challenge to Jefferson’s, if not America’s, imagination. Could the country incorporate not just a handful of genius almanac writers, poets, or painters, or musicians but legions of ordinary black men and women who wanted to enjoy the blessings of the American continent and political experiment—the rich land, access to credit to run a farm or build a business, and the ability to participate as a full citizen in a democratic system?

This black man was living the life that Jefferson dreamed of for free white men—a self-sufficient yeoman farmer with a basic education who was able to become a functioning and productive member of society. He gave other people jobs, white people, who if they worked hard and managed their money well, might be able to have their own farms, hire people, and continue the cycle. This “Negro” farmer would in modern parlance be called a “role model” or, not long ago, a “credit to his race.” Despite the condescension often contained in those designations, they really have had a meaning in the African American community as blacks have gone about the business of trying to maintain a healthy self-image and build a culture in a hostile environment. Madison was impressed, and Hemings would have been too.

Return to Philadelphia: Petit and Banneker

After a journey of over eight hundred miles, Hemings returned to Philadelphia and settled back into his routine as chef and butler.
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There were constant reminders of his life in France. The furniture Jefferson had bought there filled the renovated house, and at least part of the look of the interior of the Hôtel de Langeac was re-created right there on High Street. Letters from Jefferson’s friends still in France arrived, and though Jefferson’s records would not reveal this, it is possible that Hemings himself had communications from people he had met in the country. Other items evoked physically intimate memories for him. The bedding he had used in France and that of his sister Sally had arrived in the country just before he started the northern tour. Jefferson wrote to his daughter that he was shipping them home, that James’s bedding was to be kept for him, and that Sally Hemings was to be given hers to keep.
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The most potent reminder of Paris arrived in July of 1791 when Adrien Petit came to Philadelphia, answering Jefferson’s entreaty of the year before to come and be his “housekeeper” at a very generous salary. This was luring him back into the work force because after Jefferson left Paris he had retired from service and gone back to his native Champagne to live with his mother. He quickly became bored with his life there, telling William Short “qu’il meure d’ennui,” and decided to take the offer, which was both an adventure and an opportunity.
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Jefferson had grown accustomed to a certain style of living in France and wanted to re-create that to the extent that it could be done in the United States. Bringing the maître d’Hôtel de Langeac to the United States fit perfectly with his desire to be comforted in his immediate surroundings—having the same people in his circle following familiar routines and procedures. So intent was he on having Petit back in his household that he did not even bother to look for another person to fulfill that role. When Maria Jefferson came to live with her father in the fall of 1791, a small core of those who had resided at the Hôtel de Langeac, without Sally Hemings and Martha Randolph, was reunited.

Petit worked for Jefferson until he resigned his post as secretary of state in 1793, he and James Hemings re-creating the old division of labor that had existed at the Hôtel de Langeac. Petit was in charge of the overall running of the household, doing the grocery shopping and preparing the desserts, which Jefferson said was absolutely required of his maître d’hôtel.
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So Hemings and Petit collaborated on food preparation from before the meals were prepared to the end, for Petit’s desserts had to complement Hemings’s dinners. The two men likely accompanied one another on early morning excursions to the market to find the best fare for the table.

Petit’s arrival, along with the French furniture and paintings, completed the Francophile cast to the house on High Street. Even Jefferson’s coachman, François Seche, was of French extraction. Petit may not have been terribly comfortable in English, for all of the correspondence between himself and Jefferson was in French. So French was probably very much in the air as Hemings, Jefferson, and Petit interacted with one another in the household—out of both necessity (Petit’s) and self-interest (Hemings’s and Jefferson’s). After over five years abroad, and a heavy investment in learning French, both Americans no doubt very much wanted to preserve as much of the language as they could. Jefferson, for a time, very noticeably kept the style of dress of a man who had spent time at the French court.

All of this contributed to the picture of Jefferson as a “cosmopolitan and artistic pacesetter” in a city that had become a more “sophisticated place” than it was when he first lived there as a young revolutionary.
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The furniture, paintings, and knowledge of Jefferson’s service in Paris alone would not have set his image so firmly in the eyes of those observing him. Hemings and Petit brought the food and language of France, the country’s most distinctive treasures, to Jefferson’s household. The interior of the house was designed to be viewed, and when Jefferson’s guests, people as diverse in political views as Benjamin Rush and Alexander Hamilton, wandered through the dining room, or “salon,” as Petit called it, and parlor admiring the paintings, they perhaps overheard snippets of French pass between Petit and Hemings, or when Jefferson made a request or gave an order to his transplanted maître d’.
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The entirety of this presentation—French furniture, people, and food—enhanced the authenticity of Jefferson’s effort to re-create a little part of Paris in the heart of Philadelphia. Here was definitely a case where the personal was political. The Francophilia displayed so openly in Jefferson’s home gave ammunition to his political foes as the French Revolution grew more out of control and bloody. What probably seemed a charming affectation on his part at first took on a more sinister import as the 1790s unfolded.

The idea of home was never very far away from Hemings, as letters and packages were going to and coming from Monticello. Approaching Christmases away from the mountain, in 1791 and 1792, each year Jefferson sent home boxes containing a football field length of linen and material for Sally, Critta, and Betsy Hemings. The 1792 packet included “2. peices of linen. 52. yards, 9. pairs of cotton stockings (3 of them small) 13. yds. cotton in three patterns, 36. yds. Calimanco, 9. yards of muslin.” Whether he or James, or both of them, went shopping for all this is unknown. Jefferson also noted that “Bob” (Robert Hemings) was “to have a share of the linen.” He had “promised” to send Hemings “a new suit of clothes” but “instead” sent him “a suit of superfine ratteen” of his own, which Jefferson had “scarcely ever worn.” He mentioned that he had forgotten to buy stockings for Robert, and asked his daughter Martha to purchase some from “Colo. Bell’s on [his] account.”
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The most maddening aspect of James Hemings’s story is that both his voice and the conversations he had with his family and people like Petit are lost to us. Their situation was extraordinary—a French white servant and an American black slave who had worked together for the same man on two continents. Both understood the position they occupied in Jefferson’s life and were willing to use their knowledge to their advantage when the occasion warranted. James Hemings’s time would come near the end of his stay in Philadelphia, whereas Petit’s moment of truth with Jefferson came just a bit earlier, during one particularly incendiary time in the life of the household. Petit’s days in Philadelphia were not easy. While he and Hemings apparently got along well, he had a difficult time with Jefferson’s other employees, and it caused a great amount of turmoil in the household, becoming so intense that it disrupted the harmony that Jefferson always sought to maintain.

The coachman, Seche, along with his wife and children, lived in an “apartment” on the grounds of Jefferson’s Philadelphia residence. Petit and Seche’s wife fell into a simmering conflict that grew to full-scale war when the wife alleged that Petit engaged in sodomy and that he loved men. She had apparently said many other things to him that he found objectionable, but he was unwilling to ignore this. He wrote to Jefferson, who had gone with James Hemings to Monticello for a visit, saying essentially that it was either Seche’s wife or him. If she was not immediately removed from the household, he would return to France.
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Jefferson’s response to Petit was on par with his letter to his daughter after she wrote to him complaining about Thomas Mann Randolph’s impending marriage to Gabriella Harvie, in terms of the clarity of the voice that comes through in the letter. When matters were really serious, Jefferson’s tone in letters became almost conversational—not in the sense of employing informal language, which he did not, but in terms of his ability to convey effectively a true connection to the recipient of his letter. At those times, he managed to establish a sense of intimacy unhindered by the form of writing on a page, bridging the geographical distance between himself and whomever he was writing to, allowing the person to
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what he was saying and how he was saying it, not merely to read his words.

Even though he wrote back to Petit in French, Jefferson’s “voice” comes through very clearly in the different language. His first sentence immediately reassured: “It was yesterday, my friend, that I received your letter of July 28.” He did not address directly what Seche’s wife had said, nor did he attempt to analyze any of the details that had set Petit off. Instead, he concentrated on making it plain that the matter would be handled entirely to Petit’s satisfaction. He ended by eloquently invoking an expression of his long association with Petit and his regard for him, saying to his furious employee that since he had sought him out in France and waited a whole year for him to arrive he should know that he was not going to allow anyone to make him let him go so quickly, and then, finally, “je suis et serai toujours votre ami” (I am and always will be your friend).
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That same day Jefferson wrote to George Taylor, who was handling his affairs in Philadelphia in his absence. Without mentioning the substance of the dispute, he instructed his agent to let Seche and his wife know where he stood. Taylor was to tell Seche that he “had such long experience of the fidelity of Petit, and value[d] him so much, that [he] would not have a moment’s hesitation to say that no person shall stay about the house who treats him [Petit] ill.”
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