Jefferson’s own living area was quite opulent. His personal quarters consisted of an oval-shaped combination library and study that looked out over the garden in which he planted traditional southern fare like sweet potatoes and Indian corn. His library-study led into his bedroom and dressing room, a setup he reproduced at Monticello years later. One of these rooms had a ceiling “richly ornamented with a painting of the rising sun,” a bit of extravagance that one does not immediately associate with republican virtues. But it was, at its core, a very practical configuration of a personal world where the maximum amount of privacy could facilitate the maximum amount of work. Even this sequestered realm was not enough for him, for there were always household matters to deal with, so long as he was at home. He solved that problem by taking an apartment at a nearby monastery, Mont Calvaire, which he called his “hermitage.” There he retreated when he felt a need to close himself off completely from the world.4
It is not known whether James and Sally Hemings lived in the adjacent servants’ quarters or whether the mezzanine floor, the entresol in architectural terms, contained rooms for servants as well. Those half-story sections within great houses, with their lower ceilings, were often designated for the use of servants or as bedrooms for people other than the master or mistress of the house. Sally Hemings’s closeness to the girls may not have made much of a difference for most of the time they were in Paris. Until their father took them out of school, they came home only on the weekend, usually on Sunday.
Whether brother and sister would have been happier with a room in the house or one in the separate, but nearby, servants’ quarters is unclear. Maids’ and cooks’ rooms within great houses were usually just simple affairs, so there may have been little difference in the relative comfort of their accommodations wherever they lived at the Hôtel de Langeac. On the other hand, James and Sally Hemings would have derived very real benefits from having some distance from Jefferson, Patsy, and Polly. Abundant evidence suggests that enslaved people benefited emotionally and culturally when they had a space apart from their owners. Greater autonomy allowed them to create their own worlds and to be their true selves within them. Complaints, grievances, and disappointments could be more openly aired, hopes and plans for the future hatched outside the earshot and eyesight of masters.5
By the time Sally Hemings arrived, her brother was well used to the splendors of the Hôtel de Langeac. What was new about his time there was his elevation at the beginning of 1788 to chef de cuisine, which drastically changed the level of his responsibilities and probably of his stress. No longer an apprentice, he was in charge of the kitchen and his assistants. His position made him responsible for every success and failure regarding a critical component in that diplomatic household. Jefferson entertained on a large scale, as he did throughout his life. Hemings’s talents were on constant display at meals that could be for a few people or for up to thirty, as at one dinner celebrating the Fourth of July. The hectic pace and pressure for perfection drove many chefs to drink, and as the years went by, Hemings himself would fall prey to that professional hazard. He had to please not only Jefferson’s exacting palate but that of the people whom Jefferson wanted to impress. He and Patsy’s early experiences having to meet Parisian fashion standards taught him a valuable lesson about the kinds of things that mattered in the city. The French were as serious about their cuisine as about fashionable attire. In fact, the two were closely related, since the presentation of food—the look—took its place alongside taste as a mark of true distinction. Every dish Hemings prepared invited a judgment by a man who was a perfectionist.
While James Hemings was busy plying his trade in 1788 and 1789, his younger sister had little to do but absorb the routine of the household. This meant getting used to the other servants, who spoke another language and had their own cultural manners. Having no apparent role in the operations of the residence for long stretches of time, she was essentially cast as an observer, watching what other people did to make things run smoothly at the place. At the beginning, Hemings really was a fifth wheel at the Hôtel de Langeac, as Abigail Adams had implied she would be. From her perspective that may not have been at all a bad thing, rather a source of immense joy as her nonessential status left her free to experience her new surroundings in more of her own way.
As she noted all that was going on around her, Hemings had to adopt a new way of looking at herself, because the role she had played in life had changed rather dramatically. She was no longer a part of pair, and there was no person for whom she was in any way responsible. With Polly away at school, those days were gone—which could be at once liberating and lonely. Because Jefferson’s almost six-year absence from Monticello had disrupted the course of life there, Hemings’s switch from doing a job that was closely associated with young slave children to playing a more adult role came late for her. And that switch took place in a completely foreign environment.
Enslaved children at Monticello above the age of ten left their roles as messengers, playmates, and minders of other younger slave children and quickly moved into the roles they would play as adults. They were designated to work as artisans or went to the fields, or “into the ground,” to use a phrase of that time. Hemings, not destined for any of those roles, was supposed to take her place as a servant with adult responsibilities in the house when she came of age. By that reckoning, when she arrived in Europe, she was a few years behind schedule and may have continued in that dream state that one of her great-nephews, the grandson of her sister Mary, described many years later when speaking of his early life at Monticello. Peter Fossett said that as a young boy he never thought of himself as a slave, because his life was so unlike that of the boys down the mountain whose situations more clearly telegraphed their status. He was dressed differently from them. He spent all of his time in or near the house without much to do and identified greatly with the people there—his own family—who focused closely on the affairs and interests of their own genetically connected world.6
Fossett’s recollections are really not surprising when one recalls that enslaved children were, in fact, children and by definition lacked the maturity and foresight of their parents. When they are allowed to, children can have priorities very different from those of adults. They tend not to be so focused on the outside world and determining their exact place in it, unless some event—the death of a close relative or, for enslaved children, the sale or mistreatment of relatives—forces them to pay attention to those things. While even extreme poverty is not on a par with slavery, it is nevertheless interesting that Fossett sounds very much like people who grew up poor who say that they did not define themselves as poverty stricken when they were small children. It was only as they grew older that they realized all they did not have.
When a child like Fossett sees others in the immediate community whose lives are more severely constricted than his, and when that child has a stable and nurturing family, as he did, one can see why he would not as a small boy have recognized or dwelled on the realities of his legal and social standing. Peter Fossett’s self-characterized childhood idyll ended at age eleven when Jefferson died and he learned in the hardest way possible that his status as a member of the Hemings family did not protect him from the vagaries of life as a slave. When all was said and done, the first-generation Hemings/Wayles slaves fared much better after Jefferson’s death than other members of the clan. Fossett’s father, Joseph, was freed, but neither his mother nor he nor any of his siblings were freed along with him. In the end, they were not so different from the people down the mountain, after all.7
Peter Fossett’s statements about his early life naturally raise a question about Sally Hemings’s state of mind during her childhood and the way she carried herself as a young girl. If Fossett, a fourth-generation Hemings, who was not a Wayles descendant, could pass through the early part of his boyhood without seeing the magnitude of his enslavement, there is little reason to think that Sally Hemings was not similarly disposed. Every
thing that had happened in her life pointed toward that. A blood relation to Jefferson’s wife and daughters, she had been chosen because of those relationships to be constantly in the presence of the Jefferson family and knew she was not destined for arduous physical duties in adulthood. She had older brothers who were allowed to go off on their own, work for themselves, and keep their money—money they could give to their mother and siblings or use to buy presents and clothes for their little sister. Hemings, as a child, may have dwelled even less upon her legal and social status than Peter Fossett.
Perhaps it was in part an unknowing manner in the young Sally Hemings that so disconcerted Abigail Adams, a manner exacerbated by her tangled family relations. She was both the aunt of the little girl whom she was serving and the half sister of the woman in whose house they had lived for four years before coming to Europe. Adams almost certainly had no idea of any of this when she met Hemings in London, but it was not just her knowledge that counted. It was what Hemings knew about who she was in relation to the Jeffersons that fixed her inner life and the way she presented herself to Adams and others.
In Adams’s eyes, Hemings just was not “grown up” in the way a servant girl should have been grown up—maybe with harder edges, and a more resigned or deferential demeanor. Adams was not a slaveholder, but she was familiar with the trajectory of servants’ lives. The sixteen-year-old enslaved girl she mistakenly thought Hemings to have been was supposed to be well into that defined role, and she evidently was not. Adams’s petulant comment that Hemings needed “more care” than Polly is suggestive. Hemings may have acted more like Polly’s friend than her servant, and expected some attention from Adams, as if she were still in the pre-adult stage of her life as a slave dealing with her half siblings and their spouses back in Virginia who out of a mix of guilt and paternalistic benevolence acted out more literally an old saying about servants, “She’s just like a member of the family.” Support for this appears in a reference to Hemings from one of Patsy’s French friends, Marie de Botidoux. After Patsy returned to America, Botidoux wrote to her and asked her to say hello to “Mlle [Mademoiselle] Sale [Sally]” for her.8 In rigidly hierarchical ancien régime France, the honorifics monsieur, madame, and mademoiselle were strictly reserved for those of high standing, and they were guarded jealously. One cannot say it “never” happened, but members of the French upper class did not refer to serviteurs by any of those titles; “Sally” should have sufficed. Patsy Jefferson was a “mademoiselle” in that world. Botidoux, for purposes of the letter, put Hemings on a par with her. The young Frenchwoman was evidently making a bow to her American friend’s sensibilities, which indicates that Patsy Jefferson’s behavior toward Hemings signaled to outsiders that she was something more than just a normal servant in the Jefferson household.
Indeed, one wonders what the Jefferson daughters told people about who Hemings was. Their father had hidden James Hemings’s status in his letter to Paul Bentalou and was, in effect, hiding both Hemingses by not registering them. All three girls had an incentive to play down the relationship they bore to one another under American law. Patsy’s impassioned outburst before Hemings arrived, about wishing that all the “negroes” were free, shows that she had taken to heart some of her father’s pronouncements and was emboldened by having lived comfortably and well—in better surroundings than she had ever been in before—without chattel slavery. Treating Hemings more as a companion, one who her friends would think to mention in their letters, may have been a way to minimize guilt. Polly followed the same course. She passed along Hemings’s message of regards in a letter she wrote to Angelica Church’s daughter, Catharine (Kitty), in a way that emphasized casual closeness rather than distance. Sometimes when Jefferson went to pick Polly up from school on the weekends, Kitty came along to stay at the Hôtel de Langeac. Hemings knew her well enough to think that a greeting might be in order and welcomed, and Polly agreed with her and carried out Hemings’s wishes.9
The family connections at play make the girls’ situation even more intriguing. Patsy was the image of her father, while Polly was said to have looked liker her mother, Hemings’s half sister. It is entirely possible that Polly and Sally (and perhaps even James) resembled each other, which would have provoked all kinds of questions in the minds of those who saw the Hemingses and Jeffersons together. Sex between masters and servants/slaves was not unknown in France, and the presence of mixed-race servants and slaves from the colonies was clear evidence of across-the-color-line sex in French society. In addition, it was not unheard of in eighteenth-century French society for poorer relations to be servants (femmes de chambre, valets de chambre) in the homes of their wealthier cousins. The French would have understood the configuration of the Jefferson/Wayles household very well.10
The City
While the Hôtel de Langeac was certainly the center of James and Sally Hemings’s universes in Paris, neither sibling’s life was bound solely by the interior of the place. They were not galley slaves chained to a bench within the hold of a ship. Nor will it do to think of them as being in the same circumstances as slaves, in the field or house, embedded in the isolated and deeply rural environment of their home at Monticello. Indeed, during their time in Paris, they were able to move through an expansive world as if they were free persons of color. Brother and sister were now city dwellers, in the largest city in Europe, home to over 700,000 people.11 Though they did not live in the heart of the city—their neighborhood was a relatively new one pushing toward the city’s boundary—they were part of it and were touched by attributes of the metropolis that radiated out from its center. A much reproduced engraving depicting the Hôtel de Langeac, and the scene just outside of it, a mere eight years before the Hemingses lived there, tells part of the story of what their new status as urbanites meant.12
The engraving displays a spectacular view of the Champs-Elysées stretching out toward the heart of Paris. In the rue de Berri, which led into the residence, there are no fewer than twenty people and two carriages. Across the street is a government building housing officials in the customs service, and on either side of the Champs-Elysées are households with no connection to the residents of the Hôtel de Langeac, save their mutual presence in the neighborhood. This mix of intimacy and impersonality is a mark of urban life, where people can live and work in close proximity to one another and be as friendly or as distant as they choose, producing a very different set of expectations about social life than exists in the country. In our times, technology brings the values and mores of urban life into the villages and homes of people living in the most remote parts of the globe, giving them some inkling of what life is like in the big city. As eighteenth-century provincials abroad, James and Sally Hemings had no similar template. There was much they had to learn and get used to.
One of the first things to get used to was the pace of this new setting. Although there are predictable and definite patterns of city life, there are also daily surprises—faces that one has never seen or transactions among strangers that break up the monotony of the day in a way that makes life seem more hurried and transitory. With more people to encounter, more situations to figure out quickly (and more things to be wary of), city dwellers become “sharp,” a word that has both positive and negative connotations. Those who are “wised up” about the world may be less subject to being fooled, but if they are not careful they can also become jaded.
We see some of this in Patsy Jefferson’s lament about how her father was cheated when they first arrived in France, being grossly overcharged for having luggage transported from the port at Le Havre to their lodgings.13 She was shocked. It is very likely, though, that the Jeffersons and the Hemingses were more attuned to the possibility of being hoodwinked during transactions with strangers. This loss of innocence, at the same time, brought increased awareness and sophistication. This ever-changing, quick-moving aspect of city living was very much a feature of life in the place where James and Sally Hemings lived. The Grille de Chaillot br
ought in visitors or immigrants from the villages and towns of France on a steady basis, people moving with all their possessions, dressed in different types of clothing, creating a show that was at once a spectacle and a routine. Just by being at the Hôtel de Langeac, the Hemingses encountered the outside world in various ways every day.
James Hemings’s five-year sojourn in Paris and his sister’s of a little more than two years gave them ample time to get to know what one historian of Paris in the eighteenth century calls the “regular rhythms and meanings that structured the lives of most of the city’s inhabitants.”14 Monticello moved solely to rhythms set by the needs of Jefferson and his family. He did not control Paris; nor could he even control what went on in the area immediately surrounding his house. Life was more contingent for everyone—circumstances and situations were more up for grabs—sometimes literally.
Near the end of their stay, when the government office that operated across the street closed and moved its employees elsewhere, taking the security detail with them, the Hôtel de Langeac was periodically burglarized. Jefferson eventually had to ask for special police protection for the residence, making the appeal on behalf of the “inhabitants of this quarter.” His was just one of a number of “other houses in the neighborhood,”15 which one could never say about Monticello. Cities have a way of cutting people down to size, as was, no doubt, obvious to the young African Americans in his household. Jefferson could only appear a much smaller person in this much larger place.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 27