Less is known about Polly Jefferson’s experiences in Paris than about Patsy’s, for Jefferson’s second daughter was much more in the background in the life of her first nuclear family. Patsy’s time in Paris profoundly affected her. Not long into her stay in the city, Patsy thought she might convert to Catholicism and may have even contemplated becoming a nun. Being in an atmosphere suffused with Catholic culture, rituals, and ceremonies changed the way this young woman thought about herself for a time—that, and in her daughter Ellen’s words, “a spirit of proselytism which prevailed among the nuns and which operated on the daughters of protestant parents to withdraw them from the faith of their fathers.”20
Patsy’s decision mortified Jefferson, and he proceeded to handle his daughter through his preferred method—emotional suasion (he would say “incentive”) rather than outright coercion. This man who hated confrontation and discord did not lay down the law to his daughter. Nor did he, as has been suggested, immediately take both girls out of school. He first heard of Patsy’s inclination well before the girls left the abbey. He asked her to reconsider, and then proceeded to raise her allowance fivefold, started to spend even more money on her wardrobe, and allowed her to go out to society events and to balls. He wanted her to see the world she would lose if she followed her plan.21
Jefferson’s effort killed off one problem—after receiving a taste of social life, Patsy decided that being a nun was not for her—even as it created another: she enjoyed herself so much that she did not want to go home, and even talked about renting rooms at the convent while Jefferson went on his leave of absence back to Virginia.22 Patsy knew her father very well. One of her own children said many years later that Jefferson simply never talked about anything that he did not want to talk about. After France, father and daughter apparently never again discussed her youthful flirtation with the veil.
As has already been shown, the new environment of James and Sally Hemings gave them enormous opportunities for self-fashioning. The historian Daniel Roche’s observations about Parisian servants during the years the Hemingses lived in the city are useful for considering their situation. To the ruling classes of France, Roche observed, “servants were obviously social and cultural cross breeds.” They were hardly the same as the elite, but their association with them provided access to information unavailable to the masses, who never even glimpsed the way their social “betters” lived. “Through servants, the objects and actions of the upper classes were filtered through to the lower social categories.” Certainly elements of that phenomenon could be found in the plantation system of the South, with the cross-cultural and racial pollination going both ways.23
A life lived in between two cultures at odds with each other often required special adaptations to one’s personality. This was even more the case for the Hemingses, who were not just “social and cultural crossbreeds”; they were, to follow Roche’s terminology, racial “crossbreeds.” Whether it affected their legal status or not, they could identify with what the dominant society took to be their racial “betters”—that is, white people—because they were part white and were being directly rewarded for that. Roche’s question—“who is more caught up in a web of appearances than a servant?”24—is also very useful for thinking about the ways in which eighteenth-century attitudes about race and status (along with Jefferson’s attitude and actions toward them) helped shape the Hemings siblings’ existences and self-images. The background of one visitor to the Hôtel de Langeac helps clarify the complicated and tragic positions of these two young people.
Lucy Paradise, a native Virginian who lived in London with her husband, John, socialized with Jefferson when he visited the city in 1786, and she also appeared on the scene in Paris and made something of a nuisance of herself. She seems to have been more than a bit in love with Jefferson and sought to keep contact with him by insisting that he help solve her personal problems with her husband along with their joint disastrous financial affairs, all the while adopting a bizarre and discordant posture as a married “damsel” in distress. In some of her letters she asked Jefferson, who she knew corresponded with and was friendly with her husband, to keep things she said to him secret from her husband, carving out an inappropriate private world for the two of them that could only have made Jefferson uncomfortable. Yet he was almost infinitely patient with her and responsive, to the extent he could be, to her many entreaties.25
Paradise was, of course, the daughter of Philip Ludwell III, John Wayles’s former benefactor and mentor. It made perfect sense for her to have latched onto Jefferson as a financial and personal adviser because, as noted in chapter 4, his father-in-law had been one of her designated guardians and was intimately involved in dividing up the Ludwell estate between Lucy and her sister, Hannah. Jefferson himself had witnessed the signing of that document and had at least some knowledge of her circumstances.26 When Lucy Paradise came calling in Paris, she entered a household that contained people who owed her father a great deal. James and Sally Hemings owed him their existences; Jefferson, almost that much. If Ludwell had not raised John Wayles to a level that enabled him to marry Martha Eppes, there would not have been a Martha Wayles, a Patsy or Polly Jefferson, a Hemings family, or a Wayles fortune for Jefferson to inherit. It is no wonder that he so graciously put up with Ludwell’s importuning and annoying daughter.
John Wayles was not born a gentleman. He most likely learned to act and sound like a gentleman in his service to people like Philip Ludwell, although some in his community in Virginia never totally accepted his new persona. He evidently waited on people, just as James Hemings waited on Jefferson, having the opportunity, as Roche described it, to learn the ways and mores of upper-class life so well that he could play the role when his time came—a time that could never come for his son James or any other of the Wayles-Hemings children. James Hemings was ineligible to have happen to him what happened to his father, to be chosen by a white man and raised above his station to become something other than what his birth had foretold: a wealthy landed gentleman of Virginia.
In the days before his ascent, Wayles was intelligent and impressive enough to have caught the eye of a man at the highest level of Virginia society, who saw through the shroud of class to the talented person beneath. Because Wayles’s children were part black and enslaved rather than white servants, there would be no looking past the shroud for either James or Sally Hemings, even though both may have been at least as natively intelligent as their father. Doing that would have struck at the very heart of the racially based, deliberately closed system that was American slavery. Even outside the context of slavery, allowing talented people of color to rise would have threatened the doctrine of white supremacy. The Hemings siblings’ self-fashioning within the confines of their circumstances, impressive as it was to Jefferson and his family, could get them only so far. James Hemings was intelligent enough to have been a lawyer. But Jefferson could never have thought to play Philip Ludwell and turn him into one, no matter how brilliant, energetic, or talented Hemings was. That was well beyond what American society would have accepted then and for many decades afterwards. He could, however, raise Hemings to the status of enslaved highly trained French chef. Sally Hemings, no matter how beautiful, feminine, intelligent, or talented she was, could never be a “lady” in the sense that white Virginians meant that term, or a legal wife to a wealthy white man. She could, however, be a wealthy white man’s substitute for a wife.
Sally Hemings in the Beau Monde
In the midst of the impending collapse of French society, Jefferson decided to go back to Virginia to leave his daughters with their relatives, settle his financial affairs, and then return to France briefly to finish out his mission. He had been thinking of doing this for a while, but did not make his formal request for a leave of absence until the early fall of 1788.27 His plans were not secret, and James and Sally Hemings, along with the rest of the Jefferson household, knew their time in the country was not long. Jefferson’s plan actually ha
d very different implications for the brother and the sister. If James Hemings did not want to take his freedom at that point, he could expect to return to France with Jefferson and resume his old role as chef de cuisine. Sally Hemings was more likely destined to remain in Virginia with Patsy and Polly. Going home would be the end of what had been an extraordinary experience, particularly given what had happened during her last year in Paris. She was receiving a steady monthly wage, and Jefferson spent a good amount of money on her clothing—nowhere near as lavishly as he spent on his daughter Patsy over her years in Paris, but enough to make a definite change in Hemings’s self-image and her day-to-day existence. In a relatively short period in the spring of 1789, Jefferson spent about thirty-two dollars on clothes for her—in today’s terms, a little under a thousand dollars.28
Neither Jefferson nor anyone else gave a reason for the sudden rise in his spending on Hemings, although Fawn Brodie portrayed this as signaling the beginning of the Hemings-Jefferson affair.29 Jefferson, in time-honored fashion, was rewarding and seeking to impress a young woman who was, or whom he hoped to make, his mistress. Lucia Stanton has noted, however, that the expenditures were made at the same time that Patsy Jefferson began to appear more frequently at society functions in Paris, and Jefferson started to spend even more money on her clothing after he removed his daughters from school, anticipating their return to America.30 Patsy had been going out before April 1789, but with no school in her life, she was now free to do so more frequently. According to Jefferson’s white family’s tradition, she was strictly “limited…to three balls a week” and participated in other social occasions that took her into the homes of others.31 The daughter of a diplomat had to appear dressed in a style suitable to her station, and Hemings, who went along to the balls and dinner parties as her lady’s maid, had to be properly dressed as well.
Polly Jefferson, too young to be presented into society, received no similar attention to her wardrobe. The uniform and clothing of a school-girl remained suitable attire for her. Jefferson’s spending on Polly never approached the amount he spent on Patsy. Even for the years before Patsy began her time in the Parisian social whirl, one finds more entries in Jefferson’s memorandum books for clothes, hats, and shoes for Patsy than he ever recorded for Polly. Patsy’s allowances were always larger than her younger sister’s, which one might expect, given that the older girl may have had greater need for money. Even when she was Polly’s age, Patsy received more money from her father. Jefferson denied it in later years, when Polly very delicately suggested it, but the evidence indicates that though he adored both Patsy and Polly, he favored the older sister over the younger.32
The two explanations for Jefferson’s sudden burst of spending on Hemings’s clothing are not mutually exclusive. Jefferson had the final say about whether Hemings went along to attend Patsy at parties and balls, and he knew these occasions would have meant a great deal to her. Dressing Hemings in nice clothes and allowing her to go to social functions with Patsy fits as easily with the notion that he was attempting during this period to make her feel good about him, as would buying her nice clothes just so she could wear them as she walked around the Hôtel de Langeac.
The reasons for the clothes aside, one would love to have some account of Sally Hemings, the slave girl from country Virginia, being outfitted for clothes in Paris. One day after recording one of the expenditures for clothing made “for Sally,” Jefferson noted his payment for tickets to attend “a benefit concert for [a] nine-year-old mulatto violinist” held at his daughters’ school.33 The violinist whom Jefferson went to see and support was young George Bridgetower, who made his Paris debut that year, performing three times at the renowned Concert Spirituel. Jefferson was fortunate indeed to have caught him at the beginning of what turned out to be a very long and distinguished career. Bridgetower was born in Poland to a Polish mother and a black father from Barbados, the personal servant to an English nobleman. His Paris turn was of more than merely artistic significance, as one review of his performance makes clear.
A curious debut, and what is extremely interesting is that he (Mr. Bridgetower), the young black from the colonies, who played various violin concertos with a clarity, a facility, and execution and sensibility, that is very rare to encounter at so young an age (he is not yet ten). His talent that is really precocious, is one of the best answers that can be made to the Philosophers who want to deprive those of his Nation and his color the opportunity to distinguish themselves in the Arts.34
By the end of the eighteenth century, the image of blacks had rapidly deteriorated in the face of Europe’s increasingly urgent need to justify its dependence on African slavery.35 At least some Enlightenment thinkers, however, were unwilling to abandon so easily the idea of a truly universal conception of the rights of man, and looked for any evidence they could to rebut charges of blacks’ natural inferiority and inability to advance. No less than the reputation of the entire black race was placed on Bridgetower’s young shoulders. He carried that impossible burden admirably for many years. By the age of twelve he was performing in orchestras all over England. In the 1790s, he drew the attention of the Prince of Wales, who provided him with tutors and masters of music to help him perfect his technique. Bridgetower eventually took a degree in music from Cambridge, and he later befriended Beethoven and became well known for his deft performances of his works.36
Over the years, supporters of black equality would call to Jefferson’s attention other “Bridgetowers” with the hope that he, a well-known adherent to the Enlightenment, might be impressed. Their efforts met with varying degrees of success, as Jefferson was reluctant to accept that the individuals presented to him were true measures of African capabilities, especially since most of them tended to be of mixed race. Was the individual’s genius African or European inspired? We do not know the spirit in which Jefferson went to the benefit concert for Bridgetower, how he responded to the performance, and what, if anything, he said to the young prodigy. The man who called music the passion of his soul and was especially enamored of the violin, practicing for hours at a time, could certainly be expected to want to attend a concert at his daughters’ school, no matter what the race of the performer. Still, it is unlikely that he failed to notice the great interest that this young musician’s appearance aroused and the social implications that were very publicly grafted onto it. Jefferson’s going to see Bridgetower fit well with his own interest in assessing the capabilities of people of African descent.
At the abbey Jefferson sat among an audience whose members came out to support and watch as a young child, not so different from James and Sally Hemings, began to make his way in the world, fulfilling his talent to the best of his abilities and earning the admiration of his fellow human beings. Jefferson’s own sons would all become violinists, one of whom (Eston) was a “master” of the instrument who, though never so famous as George Bridgetower, was celebrated for many years in his home community in Ohio, using as his signature tune one of the few popular songs whose melody his father bothered to copy out in his own hand and keep among his papers.37 One hopes that Bridgetower’s concert was among the social events that Hemings used her new wardrobe to attend, or at least that she and her brother heard from the Jeffersons about the young mixed-race boy who had a future that he could never have had in her own country despite his demonstrated genius.
Acting as lady’s maid to Patsy Jefferson as she explored the Parisian social circuit, Hemings was an observer, waiting while others danced, had dinner, or conversed. Though not an active participant, she was there, on the periphery with the other servants, to be sure. In these environments, however, Hemings saw things—opulent architecture, artwork, food presentation, clothing, and makeup—and heard things—music that Jefferson said was played at a far superior level in Europe than in the United States—that she would never have seen or heard back in Virginia. Hemings knew that the overwhelming majority of the people in her native Virginia, particularly the white people with
all their dangerous pretensions, would never have access to the kind of civilized world that manifested itself in Paris. She shared this distinction with her brother James, and the Jeffersons, making them a special band privy to something quite distinctive. She could always compare those who considered themselves “grand” back in Virginia with the people and the places she had seen in some of the finest homes in France. While moving in this world, Hemings, treated as an item of property in her native Virginia, gained knowledge and experience that she owned and could never be taken away, like her trip-across-the-ocean stories repeated to others many years later.
Just as those evenings in the beau monde had a deep meaning for Patsy Jefferson that she carried with her throughout her life, and helped to make her the woman she became, they had a deep meaning for Sally Hemings and shaped the woman she became. They were both young females, around one year apart, who probably looked forward to and enjoyed very much dressing up and making themselves look attractive, thinking of how they compared to other females in the room (and, no doubt, silently comparing themselves to each other) and of what effect they were having on the males. Not one of the feelings, thoughts, and yearnings of a young person was foreclosed to Sally Hemings; not a hair on her head or wish in her heart was less important than Patsy Jefferson’s. She had the misfortune to be born into a society where the people in power chose not to recognize that reality.
While the social events Hemings attended were not called for her benefit, they were calculated to awaken feelings in all young people, and their allure could not have been lost on her. These gatherings and dances were very obviously set up as opportunities for young males and females to engage with one another in a supervised setting. Patsy Jefferson, however, was not on this scene to find a husband—at least her father did not want her to be—though these occasions served that function. Dances and balls were a form of mating ritual, which is why young women had to be of a certain age to attend them. According to French custom, of which Jefferson strongly approved, ladies did not dance after they were married.38 Going to a ball was about the life and future prospects of a young unmarried woman, and Patsy Jefferson and Sally Hemings learned some important things about the basics of male-female interactions attending these events. No young female, enslaved or free, black or white, could be in this setting and watch others of her age and sex being asked to dance and not think about herself, the time and place where that might happen to her, and what her prospects in life would be.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 31