Exciting as this adventure undoubtedly was to him, Hemings actually got off to a difficult start in Paris. He fell ill sometime in October of 1784. The nature of his illness is unknown, but it was serious enough to require the attentions of a doctor. Dr. I. MacMahon, a “physician and instructor at the Ecole Militaire” and the Jeffersons’ personal physician, treated him. He was evidently bedridden, for Jefferson also hired a nurse to take care of him until he recovered.31 He probably suffered from a more extreme version of the kind of traveler’s malaise that often afflicts people when they go abroad and are exposed to different kinds of food and a new water supply. Jefferson, sick himself around the same time, explained his own illness in those terms, saying that he had been through the “seasoning…that is the lot of most strangers” when coming to the city for the first time. We get a sense of what that first winter was like for the newly arrived Virginians from Jefferson’s complaint about the “extremely damp air” and the “very unwholesome water.”32 Jefferson’s health problems continued into the spring, but Hemings was back on his feet by December and ready to begin his training as a chef.33
Something else happened during Hemings’s and Jefferson’s first months in France that contributed to Jefferson’s acute discomfort that winter and set in motion a chain of events that changed his life and the lives of the Hemings family as well. He received word in January that, not long after he had left the country, his two-year-old daughter, Lucy, had died of whooping cough at Eppington. This very common and serious childhood disease had also carried off Elizabeth Eppes’s own daughter, Lucy, who was about the same age as Jefferson’s little girl. Lucy’s older sister, Polly, had been sick, too, but had recovered.34 Jefferson was distraught. The thought of bringing Polly over had been on his mind even before he received news of Lucy’s death. That drastic course seemed unnecessary then, because he did not expect to be in France much longer. But in May of 1785, nine months after his arrival, when he was appointed to succeed Benjamin Franklin as the American minister to France, he was adamant about having Polly with him.35
Jefferson had outlived a wife and four of his six children. He had never had the chance to get to know his youngest daughter, Lucy. After giving her over to her aunt’s care, he had been away for most of her infancy. Now, facing this new tragedy, he apparently could not bear the thought that something might happen to Polly, that she, too, could die a stranger. He wrote to the Eppes family, asking them to send his daughter, stating his preferences for how that might be done. Instead of immediately complying with his request, both Elizabeth and Francis Eppes, who had grown to love Polly as parents, and she them, embarked upon a plan of avoidance, hoping that Jefferson might change his mind about wanting his daughter to join him and her sister. In the end, it would be almost two years before Polly and the young girl who was sent along with her—James Hemings’s sister Sally—arrived in France.36
James Hemings was certainly aware of this family tragedy and was told, or able to discern, that there was some problem with getting Polly to her father, as the date for her impending arrival never seemed to materialize. The fascinating, and unanswerable, question is exactly how Hemings reacted to the news of Lucy Jefferson’s death. He was certainly close enough to Jefferson to have sympathized with him and understood his grief at the passing of his child, the one whose birth had hastened the death of his wife. This sad event could only have dredged up for both men memories of Martha Jefferson’s final struggle.
Let us consider Hemings’s situation. A man is born into a society that allows his half sister and her husband to hold him as a slave. The child of the couple—the enslaved man’s niece—dies. Does the enslaved uncle grieve for the child? Did Hemings grieve for his half sister Martha years earlier? Would Jefferson think the deaths of his wife and daughter meant anything at all to their enslaved brother and uncle? Hemings had no legal relationship to either Martha or Lucy Jefferson. While he grew up around his sister, and had thoughts and feelings about her, he certainly cannot have known his niece very well; she was a baby, and he was traveling with Jefferson while the little girl was at Eppington. Whatever emotions Lucy’s death did or did not call forth, it provided yet another opportunity for Hemings to ponder his relationship to the man who owned him. The connections between these two men are so divorced from anything resembling what could be recognized today as “normal” human relations that they can be recovered only in the imagination and, even then, only with great difficulty.
White families had the unparalleled capacity to control the flow of written information during slavery with their near-monopoly on literacy and record keeping. They were committed to, and adept at, hiding information about race mixing within their ranks and about their family relationships with black people. As a result, we lack ready prompts to help us visualize what people linked as Hemings and Jefferson were said to one another in times like these. Of course, that is what white slave owners intended—to make these matters literally unthinkable to posterity, to try to erase the identities of their black relatives in order to protect the reputations of their white families. In this way they hoped to maintain ownership over black people’s identities in perpetuity, in the manner of holding a fee simple absolute in real property—a thing that could be given up only at the owner’s choice.
Becoming a Chef
In the weeks before learning of Lucy Jefferson’s death, Hemings had started his apprenticeship with his first teacher, Combeaux, whom Jefferson paid 150 francs to begin the training. Combeaux was Jefferson’s traiteur (caterer), and he was also a “restaurant keeper” in the city.37 Although Jefferson gave no address for his establishment, it must have been relatively close to the Hôtel de Langeac. Hemings continued with Combeaux until February of 1786, mastering the technique of French cooking that would form the basis of his career during the rest of his time in slavery and after he became a free man.38 While Combeaux and the French people Hemings worked with may have spoken some English, he was probably largely immersed in French and forced to communicate as best he could. He apparently did not do so well early on. During that same February, Jefferson sent the following humorous message to Elizabeth Hemings through Antonio Giannini, his gardener at Monticello: “James is well. He has forgot how to speak English, and has not learnt to speak French.”39
Jefferson, who was obviously exaggerating the situation for comic effect, may well have secretly sympathized with Hemings’s plight. Although he could read French well, he never became as comfortable with the language as his daughters. One understands why. They were young girls, and he was in his early forties when he went to France, and it was simply more difficult for him to pick up the language. Martha revealed that her father did not know how to speak to people when they arrived in France. Again, that is no surprise because the only way to learn to speak a language is through practice. However many years he studied with his tutor, Jefferson cannot have had much opportunity to practice speaking French. He himself admitted that he could not write the language, but his biographer Dumas Malone would not take him at his word on this.40 Jefferson evidently meant that writing French was not as easy for him as reading it, that it did not come as quickly to him as other mental tasks.
Though not as young as Patsy Jefferson, Hemings was younger than Jefferson and better suited to achieving some level of proficiency in conversational French. Jefferson made the comment about Hemings’s struggles with the language just eighteen months into his time in France, very early to expect fluency in a new language. He had over three more years after Jefferson’s report to achieve the kind of breakthrough that can occur almost overnight when the basic system of a language is suddenly and inexplicably revealed. Unlike Jefferson, who had some familiarity with the structure and vocabulary of French, Hemings likely had next to nothing to start with, other than what the Jeffersons may have taught him so that he could at least greet people and make his basic desires known. Though he began with the disadvantage of no previous introduction to the language, he had the advantage
of youth and energy. Unlike Jefferson, who frequented English-speaking salons and had relations with other English-speakers, Hemings was thrust, during his apprenticeships and when he was at the Hôtel de Langeac, into a world where English was not spoken.
There was a sad coda to Jefferson’s communications with Giannini about Hemings. When the gardener wrote back, he passed along Elizabeth Hemings’s “compliments” to her son and word that his sister Lucy, nine years old, had died.41 The cause of her death is not known. This was likely a terrible blow to Hemings. His mother had been unusually lucky for a woman of her status, indeed for any woman of that time. Losing family members was an almost unheard-of thing for the Hemingses. Lucy is the only one among Elizabeth Hemings’s many children who is known to have died as a child. Jefferson was more used to this, if such a death was ever really gotten “used to.” He had lost several siblings by the time he was a young man.42 Now Hemings’s youngest sister was the thirteen-year-old Sally. He had no idea that Lucy’s death would be the catalyst for bringing her to join him on what was surely the time of his life.
Despite all the bad news from home, both Hemings and Jefferson continued on: Hemings learning his trade and Jefferson his. When his apprenticeship with Combeaux ended, Hemings graduated to more specialized training: learning the art of French pastry making. He had several teachers, but by far the most impressive was one of the prince de Condé’s cooks. The prince, Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, was a member of the royal family and lived on a very extravagant country estate several hours outside of Paris called Chantilly, which made Monticello (even in all its later incarnations) appear decidedly déclassé. Its architecture, grounds, and art collection were impeccable. The stables, considered “the grandest in the world,” could house 240 horses. Chantilly had been known since the days of Louis XIV, who dined there, for the sumptuous meals the prince’s cooks prepared.43 Hemings was indeed learning with a master, with results that extended beyond his lifetime and live on in recipes that survive at Monticello today.
Hemings first worked with the prince’s cook “one day in town, five days in the country, and four after their return to town.”44 The lessons were particularly expensive and got him into a bit of trouble with Philip Mazzei, a Jefferson friend who had arranged for them. Mazzei described the problem to Jefferson in a letter in April of 1787. According to Mazzei, Hemings said he did not know until he arrived at the country estate that the lessons would cost “12 francs a day,” with his “maintenance” included in the price. The cook claimed that he had told Hemings the price before they left, but Mazzei was annoyed at Hemings. He reasoned that even if the young man had not known how much it would cost until he got to the country, he should not have taken the four additional lessons when they returned to town. He was evidently concerned that Hemings’s “improvident or unwary” decision would cost Jefferson too much money.45 The prince’s cook offered to continue with Hemings whenever the prince was in residence in Paris, and to “take [James] to Burgundy during the session of Parliament there.” Another cook, evidently associated with the prince’s household, offered to work with Hemings for “100 francs a month if the arrangement [was] by the year at 200 francs by the month.”46 Jefferson, on a trip through the south of France, wrote back to Mazzei as concerned about the price of the lessons as his friend was.47
Though Mazzei presented this as a problem of Hemings’s making, even a cursory consideration of what happened reveals that he, not James Hemings, made the most “improvident” decision. Mazzei, through his “good offices,”48 had arranged to have a man in the employ of an important member of the French royal family, a cook in what was surely one of the most celebrated kitchens in the country, take on his friend’s servant as a pupil. He was not dealing with Combeaux the traiteur. Mazzei surely knew that such an arrangement would not come cheap. Yet, he did not bother to determine in advance how many lessons would be involved and how much each would cost—in other words, to proceed carefully—and then tell Jefferson so that he could decide whether the price was bearable to him. If he did not have time to reach his friend, he could have made the decision on Jefferson’s behalf. That would have been the most sensible course of action, especially since Mazzei was making a deal with Jefferson’s money, not his own. Instead, he left it to James Hemings to decide that twelve francs a day was too much and that he should not get as many lessons from the prince’s cook as he could, and then Mazzei chastised Hemings when he made the “wrong” decision.
Was it so clearly a bad decision? Consider the terms of the new cook’s offer to train Hemings, which can be taken as a measure of what at least he thought was the market for his services. Even if Mazzei and Jefferson thought the cook’s offer—100 francs per month if there was a contract for a year, and 200 if it was month to month—was too high, it still reflected the very reasonable practice, then and now, of charging more for short-term contracts for high-end services than for long-term contracts. The price of a day-to-day contract is not merely a year-to-year contract divided by 365 days.
Why would Hemings know how much the celebrated prince de Condé’s cook was going to mark up his charges for training him on a day-to-day contract and whether that markup was definitely too much for Jefferson? Hemings had seen enough of Jefferson to know how extravagant he could be. They were, after all, living in a resplendent mansion that had a complement of servants and was being filled with the expensive furniture Jefferson was purchasing. High-priced cooking lessons could well have been just another of his extravagances. Had Mazzei inquired about the cost ahead of time, the matter could have been resolved before there were any hard feelings. But he professed ignorance of all of the arrangements, though by any measure it was exactly his job, as one acting as Jefferson’s agent, to be informed about them. And when it looked as if his plan was going to cost his friend a lot of money, a fact that no doubt embarrassed him, he shifted the blame for his own negligence onto James Hemings.
Hemings was in no position to turn around and chastise Mazzei for the lack of forethought that had led to this debacle, certainly not in a fashion that would have made its way into history books as a comment on Mazzei’s capabilities and character. It was Mazzei and Jefferson who had the power through their letters to characterize for posterity the nature of this problem and in doing so define James Hemings and his role in this matter in their own way, one that preserved a sense of Mazzei’s basic competence while diminishing Hemings’s. These men were of the same class and race, and whatever he may have thought about it in his own mind, Jefferson could not, in the letter responding to Mazzei about all of this, acknowledge his friend’s error by asking the obvious question: Mr. Mazzei, why didn’t you find out how much it was going to cost me before you sent James out to work with the prince’s cook?
8
JAMES HEMINGS: THE PROVINICIAL ABROAD
THE IDEA OF Paris as a liberating force in the lives of Americans is a cliché of long standing, and it is often said that the city liberated Thomas Jefferson. In Henry Adams’s formulation, he was able “to breathe with perfect satisfaction nowhere except in the liberal, literary, and scientific air of Paris in 1789.”1 For the first and last time in his life, he lived in a society with a large social cohort whose intelligence, erudition, and accomplishments matched or exceeded his own. No place could have provided a more perfect respite from the wreckage of his personal life. Here this ever forward-thinking man began to overcome, as much as he could, the pain of his wife’s death and to open himself to the possibilities of making a new future with the family and the acquaintances still left to him. Never again would he know such a complete marriage of his interests—social, personal, political, aesthetic, and cultural—as he experienced during his five years in France.
James Hemings was a particular kind of American in Paris, an enslaved one. Talk of his “liberation” in that place must encompass more than just the abstract or psychological. Certainly Hemings had an individual personality that was ripe for development in a place with very differ
ent morals and mores, a language he had to learn, and a great cuisine that he was to study and to master. In all his previous travels with Jefferson, Hemings had never encountered the opulence of the architecture on display in the churches, cathedrals, and some of the private residences where he trained as a chef and that he passed on a daily basis. He was from a frontier society, and he had come to the very opposite of that—a visibly old country, whose battles, successes, and values were on display in the buildings, statues, streets, and public areas he would come to know well. Young men of rank took the grand tour though the great cities of Europe, with Paris as an obligatory stop, as a way of finishing their educations and preparing themselves for their lives as gentlemen. Hemings, of course, was not considered a man “of rank” and would never lead a gentleman’s existence. But his journey from the Virginia wilderness to what passed for cities in the United States and to the sophistication of Paris was perhaps even more personally transformative for him than it would have been for most gentleman travelers. The distance between the life he had led and the one he would experience in Paris was far greater than it was for members of the upper classes seeing the city for the first time. There was much more for Hemings to learn, about himself, the society he had come from, and the man who owned him.
The knowledge, for example, that Jefferson and his daughter—among the elite of Virginia society—were considered poorly dressed by Parisian standards, and quickly had to have clothes made so that they could appear in polite society, was a revelation.2 He had come of age in a world that told him, and other enslaved black people, that their white masters were at the very pinnacle of human existence, achievement, and refinement. Yet, here was a society in which his master, though greatly respected and admired by those who knew him, took on the aspect of a hick.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 19