The Hemingses did not live apart from the culture that surrounded them. They were in a city that lived on rituals that they learned about from their own observation and from the servants with whom they worked. Secular and religious festivals abounded within the Catholic country, celebrating the lives of numerous saints and observing various holy days, which noticeably took the Hemings’s fellow servants out of the workplace on some days or formed the basis of their conversation on the days leading up to or following the events. Some of those holidays had their own special features that involved both private and public gestures—one bought a turkey for Mardi Gras or one participated in parades on other special days.16
Parisians celebrated Carnival with “feasting, dancing, and ribaldry” to mark “both the end of winter and the beginning of Lent, usually in February.”17 Brother and sister did not have to go very far to witness some of the spectacles of Parisian life, because they sometimes took place right outside their home. The Promenade à Longchamps brought all classes of French society together to parade up the Champs-Elysées to attend a concert at the nearby Abbey of Longchamps. The spectacle could go on for three days.18 One of the balconies of the Hôtel de Langeac provided a perfect site from which to view the proceedings, and on at least one occasion Jefferson invited his friends to do that. Although neither Hemings ever went to school, taking in the rules and rituals of this vibrant city and complicated culture was an education for both of them. These two young people saw more of the world and experienced more of what was in it than did the vast majority of their countrymen, white or black, who during that time lived and died without venturing far beyond the confines of the isolated farms where they were born.
James Hemings attempted a more formal approach to his education in French culture, for he was very serious about improving his French. Just before his sister Sally came to Paris, he hired a local man to teach him French grammar. Sally may have been included when she arrived. There is no indication how he found Perrault, and it is perhaps significant that Hemings did not turn to any of Jefferson’s French servants to help him with the language. He may have had good reason not to. Little is known about the French servants at the Hôtel de Langeac, but it is well known that a large majority of the servants in Paris came to the city from villages speaking the languages and dialects of their home region. There was no national French identity in the 1780s. By some estimates, that would not arise until the latter half of the nineteenth century. Eugen Weber, the great historian of France, has offered that the abbé Grégoire, who conducted a survey in 1790 to determine the prevalence of French speaking in the country, was being overly optimistic when he found that “3 million [out of a population of about 20 million] could speak French,”19 the language of the elites in the country, predominantly those in Paris. Those new arrivals to the city worked hard to make themselves understood as they gained proficiency in what was a foreign tongue, but it was often a struggle for them. Even the servants who spoke French natively spoke the language “of the streets and market,” which often disregarded the grammar and pronunciation of “proper French.”
At the other end of the scale stood a smaller group of servants who mastered several languages with the aim of getting better positions and making themselves useful to masters who traveled the Continent. When advertising their services, they carefully noted their language skills.20 It seems unlikely that any of the servants at the Hôtel de Langeac were in this last category. If they had been, barring other difficulties, such as a lack of time or a clash of personalities with Hemings, at least one of them should have been willing to give basic lessons for a price. Adrien Petit spoke French, though his letters reveal a man with only a basic education.21 As maître d’hôtel, he may have been far too busy to undertake the job or simply was not, in Hemings’s view, the right person. His association with Perrault is the first indication that Hemings thought he might have a future in France. Speaking French as best he could, while being a native English-speaker, made him attractive as an employee in a culture that was, in the 1780s, enamored both of servants of African descent and of English culture.22
Perrault, who emerges as a somewhat sad character from his description of his relations with Hemings, wrote to Jefferson at the beginning of 1789, complaining that Hemings owed him money for some of the twenty-one months’ worth of tutoring he had provided. Perrault sought redress from Jefferson after having approached Hemings about the unpaid fees with outstandingly bad results. The letter makes clear that Hemings had quite a temper and was not a man to be trifled with. The report of the event comes from Perrault alone, so no one knows what he said to Hemings or how he said it, but in his version Hemings insulted him and overwhelmed him physically, kicking him and hitting him with his fists. Perrault apparently did not fight back, and he suggested that he had been seriously hurt during the assault.23
Assuming Perrault was white, one wonders how his skirmish with Hemings would have played out in Virginia. Slaves did attack whites, and those altercations sometimes ended up in court or were more often punished by plantation justice. There also must have been times when slaves and whites fought with no serious consequences for the slave, either because the white person involved chose not to press the issue or because the slave’s master had some reason to side with the slave. It would thus not be right to say that we know for sure that Hemings would never have hit a white man in Virginia. Perhaps his years in France, four by the time of this encounter, had emboldened him to think that he had the right to take this action if he felt that Perrault deserved a good beating. We do not know how Jefferson reacted to this. There is no record that he ever paid Perrault; it was not his debt. But if he had any suspicions before, he certainly knew for a fact after Perrault’s letter that he had in James Hemings a very volatile and forceful personality.
While Sally Hemings did not have much of a formal occupation during her first year in Paris, there were many things for her to see and learn; and she did not have to go far to do that, with all that was going on in her immediate neighborhood. This was important because, as a female, she probably did not have as much freedom to wander around Paris as her brother. But James was there to squire her about, and he was likely eager to do that because she was family and because he had been the lone African American in the household for so long. Even with a more restricted range of motion, the Champs-Elysées was right outside her home. She could venture a short way down from the Hôtel de Langeac and see a statue of King Louis XV or continue on that route to view the Château des Tuileries. A trip down the rue de Berri would bring her to the very fashionable, then as now, rue du Fauborg-Saint-Honoré and the relatively new site of church built in the style “of a Roman basilica.”24
None of this required great effort on the young girl’s part, and there was ample opportunity for “people watching” on a scene that changed each day. Carriage rides with Jefferson and his daughters, or even on her journey to and from the Suttons’ inoculation house outside Paris, brought a new world to her. Most important of all, none of these rich and enlightening visual experiences required having any money or special social status; enslaved and free, black and white, could look upon the products of French civilization and be impressed, disquieted, stunned, or simply moved. And while her brother had been in the city long enough to take his experience somewhat for granted, Sally Hemings probably had not. She was there just long enough to get comfortable and to remain excited about all that she was seeing and learning.
One of the things Hemings learned fairly early on was how it felt to receive pay for one’s work. In January of 1788 she received her first recorded wages—twenty-four livres, plus an additional twelve as a New Year’s tip.25 She was paid the same amount as James Hemings, in his very important role as chef de cuisine. One can only surmise that Jefferson had not thought things through, for this was a little unfair to James. There is a probable answer to the anomaly. She received no recorded pay in February, either because she did no work or because Jefferson made an adju
stment for the seemingly inappropriate January payment, thus spreading the twenty-four livres over two months. He then left on a seven-week tour of northern Europe at the very beginning of March. Hemings did not receive pay again until November of the same year; when she did, the wage was half that of her brother, Jefferson having concluded that this was the appropriate rate for her. Working women of that time in France typically received half the pay of men, even when they did the same job. Twelve livres was also the amount Jefferson gave to his daughter Patsy as an allowance for most of her time in France. Despite the cut, Hemings’s salary of twelve livres per month was actually well above that of the average female live-in servant in Paris.26
It has been suggested that Sally Hemings was apprenticed during the months when she received no salary and that this accounts for the absence of payments to her during certain periods of her stay in Paris.27 There is, however, no evidence for that, and there almost certainly would have been, had this actually happened. Jefferson’s memorandum books show no record of payment for Hemings to be apprenticed to anyone for the fifteen months that she received no wages. No artisan would have trained her for that amount of time for no pay, and may not have been able to in a Paris dominated by trade guilds. And though he did from time to time fail to record purchases or expenses, Jefferson would have at some point recorded so extensive an ongoing obligation.
Having an informal status did not mean that Hemings was not expected to help out around the house. There surely were many times when she could run errands for her brother or assist him when he had to prepare meals for larger than normal dinner parties. She also had a skill—sewing—that could be put to immediate use without Jefferson’s thinking to put her on a fixed salary for doing it. He viewed sewing as one of the foundations of a woman’s domestic life and advised his daughters that resort to “the needle” would be necessary for the smooth running of their households once they became married women, providing vital services to their families even as it relieved their own ennui.28 In fact, Jefferson believed that sewing was even better for women than reading. In a circumstance where other essential jobs at the residence were already taken care of, it would be natural for him to turn to that most basic task performed by plantation women and girls, upper and lower class, white and black, alike.
Sewing and mending clothing were skills that were in perpetual use during Hemings’s time. Jefferson certainly had someone to perform those tasks before she arrived, but it would have been a simple matter to turn any extra mending that needed to be done over to Hemings without thinking to make this into a formal daily job for which she would be paid regularly. The times when Hemings had no set job in Paris fore-shadow what was to come at Monticello. When Jefferson was away for long stretches during his public life, and his daughters were married and moved away, the Hemings women had nothing to do, and that did not bother Jefferson. When he was president, he declined to purchase a female slave for Monticello because, he said, he already had too many house servants in “idleness,” but he made no move to employ them. He told his overseer not to give them anything to do, and he leased out other slaves, but not Sally Hemings and her female relatives.29
Still, Hemings’s return to regularly paid status during the latter part of 1788 is intriguing. Petit was in charge of the household servants, paying them wages with the money Jefferson gave him for that purpose. There are no indications from either him or Jefferson what her job was. As is so often true with Jefferson, in the absence of a direct statement of why he did something, information from other sources (sometimes documents he created for other reasons) clarify an opaque situation. The pay scale of French servants in this period, where Hemings’s salary fit on that scale, and her later role at Monticello provide a good answer to the question of what her job was in Paris. Jefferson paid all of his servants the going rate, actually a little above it, for their designated jobs. He evidently consulted people about what a maître d’ hôtel or a valet de chambre, for example, should receive in the way of wages. When he began to pay Sally Hemings, he paid her at the rate of the highest-level female serviteur within a French household, which would be a cook or a femme de chambre.30 Her brother was the chef, so there was no other role for her, beside femme de chambre, that merited so high a rate of pay—but, whose chamber?
Hemings did not get paid twelve livres per month simply to be the femme de chambre to Patsy and Polly when they came home on Sundays, which they had been doing ever since she and Polly had arrived in Paris and for which Hemings had not been paid. The evidence indicates that it was at the Hôtel de Langeac that Hemings began to act in what would be her roles as an adult at Monticello: chambermaid to Jefferson, a seamstress doing “light sewing”31 for the household, and helping out Patsy and Polly as they needed. Jefferson never had a designated housekeeper at the Hôtel de Langeac. One of his servants, presumably the porter, was responsible for the upkeep of the place, doing the heavy lifting and cleaning. The luxury of having Hemings arrive as an extra servant—a female servant at that—lay in her ability to efficiently manage his personal belongings. Who better to take care of his wardrobe and linens than a person who knew how to mend clothing and other items if required? The even greater efficiency was that she could, as he apparently thought she would, continue in this capacity once they returned home. Just as Jefferson intended it to be for her brother, the Hôtel de Langeac was a training ground for Sally Hemings’s life at Monticello.
Knowing Hemings’s most likely job, however, does not explain why her formal employment suddenly returned in November. Given their later lives, one immediately wonders whether the resumption of her regular employment marks the time when Jefferson became more seriously interested in her or, if not, when their relationship actually began. Did she become his permanent femme de chambre because she was already his mistress and this role provided an excuse for her to be in his rooms, was he merely thinking of having her as a mistress and set up circumstances that would put them in close contact, or did he become seriously interested in her only after having encountered her daily in the intimate setting of his living quarters? Liaisons between masters and chambermaids, enslaved and not, have been prevalent enough in all ages to be the stuff of cliché. In the eighteenth-century France of Hemings and Jefferson, some men refused to marry women who had been femmes de chambre to males, knowing what could happen when unrelated men and women come into contact with one another in the man’s private chamber.32 The woman, under the power of the master, could be sexually violated or abused, or the man and woman, interacting with each other in this very intimate and suggestive setting, could develop a mutual attraction. While an evolving relationship growing out of the cumulative effect of daily interactions would not explain what led Jefferson to give Hemings a regular job that November, it is more likely what happened. She had been paid wages once before without any reason to think that it was the result of any sexual interaction between them, and her wages ceased for eight months.
The feeling of being paid for her work, in a place where she considered herself to be a free person, could only have been empowering to Sally Hemings. For the first time in her life, she had something that belonged to her that she had worked for. Work, and payment for it, tends to foster a sense of independence and encourages thoughts about the future. Writing of Harriet Jacobs, Virginia Cope has noted that Jacobs’s “initial act of freedom consist[ed] of walking into a Philadelphia shop and making a purchase,”33 a moment of supreme importance to one who had lived as an item of property and could now confound her status by purchasing her own. The moment riveted Jacobs. Even though she had not worked for the money, which she used to buy gloves and veils to help shield her from the prying eyes of slave catchers, Jacobs’s participation in the market transformed her sense of self.
Hemings, working for a set salary, was in an even greater position than Jacobs to feel the effects of having money and the ability to transact business. There were now new things to consider about the way she lived. She could decide to sa
ve or to spend—thinking of what to spend her money on or what she might be saving for—all this in a society that offered a dizzying array of choices about how, when, and whether to become a consumer. Any money she did not save she could spend on clothing or use to go with her brother to museums, or to the many low-cost theaters that were cropping up to serve lower-class patrons—there was no Jim Crow in eighteenth-century Paris. She could give charity to those who had no money, or buy gifts for people back home. Paris, unlike Virginia, provided a world outside her own thoughts that was right at hand to strengthen her powers of imagination. The people who saw her would have had no reason to doubt that she was anything other than a free person of color, confirming the very different and expanded options open to her in this new place. With no suffocating community ethos upholding her enslavement, Sally Hemings, like Jefferson, was able to breathe the air of liberal eighteenth-century Paris with “perfect satisfaction.”
Having a thing in hand almost naturally raises expectations about getting other things. Perhaps Hemings might receive a raise, or if she did work for others, she might be paid more, and someday she might even be able to work for herself. People dream, despite whatever supposed realties may be before them, and dreamers were all around both Hemingses, their new cohort in Paris—their fellow French servants. The experience of managing their own money caused many among their number in ancien régime France to think of their jobs as a launching pad to better things. They wanted their own businesses or situations that would take them from under the immediate thumb of a master, and their aspirations ranged from the grandiose, and nearly unachievable, to mundane wishes that were actually within their grasp. For the grandiose, the West Indies held a special allure as a place to go to make fortunes. A number of servants, spurred by stories about the incredible turns of luck of a minuscule number of people, saved their money with the idea of going to the French colonies and becoming wealthy planters. Cooks with far less impressive training than James Hemings placed advertisements in newspapers offering their services to families traveling to the islands, hoping to break away at some point and buy their own plantations. That this actually happened on occasion no doubt fueled these aspirations, even though the rarity of the occasions suggested how unlikely an outcome this really was.34
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