The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (79 page)

The great likelihood is that just as Hemings may have been offended by Jefferson’s mode of communication, Jefferson was probably annoyed by Hemings’s delays and demand for a writing. Here he was, a new president, “distressed” at the prospect of filling positions in an administration, and a man he had known since he was a little boy was proceeding as if they were truly operating at arm’s length. He had been Jefferson’s chef de cuisine in Paris, New York, and Philadelphia. Jefferson had paid him a salary just as if he had been a free white worker. Having James Hemings as his chef de cuisine should have been easy, yet Hemings was making it hard, demanding what Jefferson would have thought of as a symbolic show of respect. From his perspective, the real show of respect might have been his confidence in Hemings’s ability to handle such an important position, and his quick indication to Létombe that he already knew he had “a good cook” for the President’s House.

The interesting, but unanswerable, question is whether Jefferson would have responded to Hemings, had he written to him in the first instance instead of conveying his own sentiments through third parties. Hemings knew where Jefferson was just as well as Say. Why not mail the president-elect a letter, or send it by his friend? Indeed, why hadn’t he come to see Jefferson himself, as Say had done? If Hemings wanted to play the game of employer-employee, wasn’t it equally incumbent upon him to write to Jefferson seeking a position, as legions of other people would soon do?

After all these years, Hemings undoubtedly had complex feelings about Jefferson, and it is likely that Jefferson had complex feelings about him as well. It could hardly have been otherwise. Hemings’s behavior in this episode hints at some of those feelings and his state of mind at the time. His insistence that Jefferson write to him before he accepted an important job he said he wanted suggests that he had not moved fully beyond his former persona—not just as an enslaved man but as a person who had been the object of Jefferson’s special “benevolence.” For all his desire for the trappings of a formal engagement in the world of free labor, Hemings cast the older man more as father figure than as prospective employer, like a child who expects the parent to be formal in a given situation, but retains the option of informality for himself because of the parent-child relationship. Jefferson was “a miser with his time,”
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and when he saw Hemings’s reluctance to commit to the job, he quickly turned elsewhere. It was March, and he wanted his chef to start in April. With the aid of Létombe and Carlos Martínez de Irujo, the Spanish ambassador to the United States, Jefferson settled on Honoré Julien, former chef to George Washington, as the most suitable candidate. He then conducted the negotiations for Julien’s hiring wholly through Létombe—wages, terms, and starting date. He apparently never wrote to Julien himself.
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While the possible effects of Hemings’s time with Jefferson during his enslavement must always be taken into account, it is also crucial to consider his individual personality and experiences. He had been a chef, or in training to become a chef, for almost half his life. With the necessary caveats about relying too much on stereotypes, one can at least say that this profession has been known to produce some quite outsize egos. Ego, stubbornness, and a taste for dramatics may have been an inevitable part of the job, given the creativity and, particularly in the eighteenth century, hard physical labor required of a chef de cuisine. Hemings had been trained in Paris, which gave him every reason to be proud. How many other Americans, black or white, had done that in the eighteenth century? He was special, and one detects in Hemings’s demand from Jefferson the workings of a male prima donna. Recall that he beat his tutor Perrault when the hapless man dared to ask for, or asked for in the wrong way, the money that Hemings owed him. Now that he was legally free, he would have from Jefferson the dignity he deserved.

Former enslaved man, well-traveled, highly trained African American chef—all these various identities bundled into one frame made for a very complex and vulnerable man. Jefferson likely knew this about James Hemings, and, under the circumstances, his withholding attitude seems a little petty. For all his eighteenth-century limitations, Jefferson was smart enough to have figured out that Hemings’s request was about more than just a piece of paper. But he would not give in. Perhaps Jefferson’s nonresponsiveness was more than simple stubbornness or the arrogance of the former master. This was, in fact, a very delicate moment in his life. The presidency had been won, but there was no guarantee that the steady drip of indelicate items about his private life would simply go away. Things of that nature do not get better. They only get worse—especially when there is more information to be known, and a great incentive for others to find it out and publicize it. Jefferson would hardly have been paranoid if he had believed that his enemies were out there; they were, even if he did not know at this time which one would turn out to be the most virulent. Because he guarded his reaction to the public revelations about Sally Hemings so closely over the years, we cannot gauge the level of Jefferson’s concern during the period just before the major storm of publicity broke. He cannot have been totally unconcerned, because this was something over which he had no control. Opening up a direct correspondence with Sally Hemings’s brother in this climate may not have been what he wanted to do.

It is still a fascinating spectacle, however, seeing Hemings and Jefferson talk to one another through surrogates, each sending messages that the other was supposed to decipher through the filter of third-party communication. Jefferson received Evans’s letter on February 28, and his response was a masterpiece of Jeffersonian control and subtlety, all the more so because he probably figured that Hemings would actually see the letter. He was about to leave for Monticello.

And then, after a few words about his relief that Francis Say would not be coming to Washington, he added,

In other words, this was Hemings’s fault, and Jefferson wanted Evans to tell him that (or have Hemings read it) while delivering other peevish messages to the younger man. First, Jefferson expressed his confidence that Hemings’s reluctance to leave Baltimore could not possibly be related to him, since he obviously had not done anything wrong in not writing to Hemings as he asked. He refused to credit the legitimacy of Hemings’s feelings about this and instead suggested that an “attachment,” likely romantic, held Hemings in place. The “attachment” cannot have been a job, because Hemings had repeatedly stated his willingness to leave his employers to work for Jefferson. Jefferson’s turn here is somewhat reminiscent of his complaint that Dr. Stras had “debauched” Robert Hemings from him by way of his having fallen in love with Stras’s servant, Dolly. In both instances there is the intimation that the men’s sexual passions had overridden what Jefferson took to be their reason. Why else would they not want to work for him?

And then to a man who had been trained by some of the best cooks in France, and who had every reason to be proud of his accomplishments over the years, Jefferson announced that he had found another chef whose talents were “equal to [his] wishes,” that is, a chef just as talented as Hemings. He did not have to say
that
. This would be the last of the multiparty communication about getting Hemings to become the chef at the President’s House. Had Hemings accepted, he would have been the first African American to play that role, and we have missed all the stories that could have sprung from that engagement. This was, however, not the end of the story linking the two men.

If James Hemings and Jefferson ever wrote to one another after this episode, Jefferson kept no record of it. But they must have communicated, because Hemings came back to work at Monticello sometime in August while Jefferson was on his summer vacation. Whatever difficulties they had had were resolved to some degree, and Jefferson hired Hemings at twenty dollars a month, twice his normal salary. Twenty dollars was also what Jefferson had originally thought to pay Honoré Julien, but bargaining brought the salary up to twenty-five dollars a month. Julien had already started, and having two cooks in the same kitchen was out of the question.
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Even though Jefferson had a cook at Monticello, Peter Hemings, he evidently wanted to reach some rapprochement with James—perhaps going back to the old routine, with James working at Monticello when Jefferson came home and finding work on his own when Jefferson went back to Washington. That would still have given him substantial employment, for Jefferson fully intended to spend as much time at Monticello as he could. He would not repeat his behavior as secretary of state when he came home only one or two months each year.

Hemings was now in a less favorable position than he would have been had he taken the job at the President’s House. As Jefferson’s Washington-based chef, he, like Honoré Julien, could have remained in Washington and perhaps sought temporary work when Jefferson went home for vacations. Now he was going back to Monticello, getting a salary, to be sure, but in the same surroundings he had escaped five years earlier.

Hemings did, however, have the consolation of family, one that had changed in composition since he had left the mountain. His half sister Betty Brown, who almost rivaled her mother in terms of the age gap between her first and last child, had given birth to two more children, Robert and Mary. According to Jefferson’s eldest grandson, the father of these two children was likely Jefferson’s nephew Samuel Carr. Hemings’s sister Sally had lost her daughter Harriet, given birth to Beverley, lost another daughter in 1799, and had another, Harriet, in May of 1801.
¹⁵

While a good salary and being in a familiar place might, on the surface, seem to have provided Hemings with some measure of comfort, the familiar place remained a slave plantation. He was free, but his family was not. With all the places he had been to, all the things he had been able to do, how did it feel to know that his mother and the rest of his family, save for Robert, had absolutely no chance to go with him, even had they wanted to. What did he think seeing his youngest sister locked in a cycle of having Jefferson’s babies every two or three years? If they had stayed in France, she might have had a real husband. Her children would have been free from birth and not have had to depend upon their father’s living long enough to see them to adulthood or bank on the kindness of Martha and Maria, who might actually have despised their half siblings and their mother. Instead, gossip mongers were now starting to spread stories about his sister. The September 14 issue of William Rind’s
Virginia Federalist
, printed in Richmond, gave the most explicit information to date about Jefferson’s relationship with her. According to the paper, sources said that “Mr. J,” a man very high in office, had “a number of yellow children and that he is addicted to golden affections,” presumably meaning Hemings’s yellow-skinned sister.
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Robert Hemings was likely the first in the family to know that his sister’s life had been exposed, even though her name did not appear. It was only a matter of time before more specific stories appeared, but James Hemings would not live to see them.

About five days after the item about Jefferson and Sally Hemings appeared in the
Virginia Federalist
, James Hemings left Monticello. There was no reason for him to stay, because Jefferson was about to go back to Washington, and there was no need for a chef at Monticello when he was not in residence. Before Jefferson left, he paid Mrs. Snead, the midwife who had delivered his daughter, Harriet, born just four months earlier.
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What no one knew at the time, of course, was that as one life in the Hemings family was just beginning, another was about to end.

W
HEN
J
AMES
H
EMINGS
left that September of 1801, it was probably the last time any of his family on the mountain saw him alive. Sometime near the end of October, or early November, Jefferson received word at the President’s House, evidently through the network of the black community, that Hemings had killed himself. The news appears to have stunned Jefferson, and he wrote to William Evans for confirmation of what he had heard and to find out what he could about the matter. Evans wrote back to Jefferson with the terrible news. Hemings had, in fact, “committed an act of suicide.” Evans told Jefferson that Hemings had been “delirious for some days previous to his having committed the act, and it is as the General opinion that drinking too freely was the cause.”
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Jefferson wrote to Thomas Mann Randolph in December, saying that he had previously written to James Dinsmore, a white Monticello workman, about James Hemings’s “tragical end.”
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Jefferson’s letter to Dinsmore is no longer extant, so we may never know what he said to him about any additional information he had found out. When the Hemingses at Monticello learned of James’s death is unknown. The slave communication network, however, known for its speed and reach, may have brought news to Monticello around the same time Jefferson learned of it. It is possible, in fact, that it was an inquiry from the mountain that prompted Jefferson’s letter of inquiry to Evans. His passing reference in his letter to his son-in-law about Hemings’s “tragical end” hints that people on the mountain already knew of the death.