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“DURING THAT TIME”
AT SOME POINT, it is impossible to say when, a major shift occurred in the nature of the relationship between the Hemingses and the Jeffersons. It may be that no one but Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson knew that the change had taken place until after, perhaps even well after, it had happened. When speaking of the beginning of his parents’ relationship in France, their son Madison Hemings simply said, “[D]uring that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine,” with no elaboration on how that happened or exactly when. The only marker of the onset of sexual activity for Hemings is that she gave birth to a child in 1790 in the months after she returned from France. The conception of that child took place during her final months, if not actual last month, in Paris.1
The timing of Hemings’s pregnancy suggests that what happened between them evolved over time, but did not get serious until near the end of their stay, setting up a confrontation about her future as a woman and a mother. If we cannot say when Hemings became “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine,” a mere glance at the setup of life at the Hôtel de Langeac reveals circumstances highly conducive to its happening.
A teenage girl had been sent to live with a heterosexual middle-aged man who was not her blood relative. There was no female counterpart to the man in the household—no wife, no sister, no maiden aunt—no age and socially equivalent female whose very presence would have influenced the way all parties interacted with one another. Indeed, there was no steady adult female presence at all. The dangers inherent to this situation are apparent, and would be so apparent at any point in history that we can be sure that neither Patsy nor Polly Jefferson would ever have faced them. Jefferson’s daughters would never have been sent to live with a man under those circumstances. Reliance on the character or restraint of the man would not have been enough. For it would have been thought foolish to place a male and female in a situation where anyone’s character or willpower had to be tested—to put social and, in this case, racial strictures in dubious battle with biology.
The situation at Jefferson’s residence presented, if you will, a more extreme version of the Captain Ramsey problem, “more extreme” because more than two years were available for something to go wrong at the Hôtel de Langeac, instead of just several weeks on Ramsey’s ship. It was an inappropriate circumstance that was not made acceptable because Hemings was “just” an African American slave girl. To remove the designation “inappropriate” from Jefferson and Hemings’s living arrangement in Paris because slaveholders ignored such considerations is to accept and promote their version of a status quo in which the embedded hazards of that arrangement did not exist; it banishes the reality of young female slaves’ physical and emotional vulnerability in odd deference to the southern planter elite’s preferred image of who they were in relation to their slaves. Topsy-turvy, slave owners’ self-reports are allowed to define the boundaries and character of the institution at the expense of the real-life experiences of those whom they enslaved.
As Abigail Adams seemed not to think (did not care enough to think) there was anything wrong in sending Hemings unaccompanied on a six-week cruise with a group of sailors, it probably never occurred to Jefferson that there was any problem with having Hemings in his household for an extended period of time. On the day he decided to bring her from London to Paris, Polly Jefferson, not Sally Hemings, was likely foremost in his mind. Over the preceding months that had turned into years after he had determined that Polly had to make the trip to France, he had been sick with worry about her Atlantic voyage, and the news that all had gone well naturally overshadowed any incidental details about her traveling partner.
Although it would have been entirely natural for Jefferson to be curious to see his beloved wife’s half sister almost grown up, his most probable thoughts about Hemings centered on her connection to Polly. Hemings was her longtime companion, and he wanted to make sure that his daughter was as comfortable in her new surroundings as she could be. Hemings could play her designated role in that process—a continuation of the role that Jefferson himself had chosen for her by sending her to Eppington with his daughter—only if she was at his residence, even though that meant she would be living there without the presence of an adult female. In the almost unthinkable event that a pretty, free, white, sweet-natured, and intelligent teenage girl had been sent to live with Jefferson under the same circumstances, no one would have been surprised if the end result had been that he became infatuated with her and, perhaps, wanted to marry her. One suspects that only a family seeking the title “Mrs. Thomas Jefferson” for its daughter would have tolerated that type of living arrangement for her.
Infatuation can exist without the will or ability to marry, and, of course, marriage was precluded for Hemings and Jefferson. The elemental problem with the way they lived in France, however, still remained. The “protections” offered to enslaved women as substitutes for the concept of inappropriateness were the supposedly ironclad dictates of racism—“all women of color were so degraded that only a tiny category of white men, the totally depraved or hopelessly immoral, would be attracted to them, so those women generally had nothing to worry about during slavery”—and class superiority—“southern gentlemen did not get intimately involved with their female social inferiors.” Those notions would be worth merely laughing at if they had not totally trivialized the lives of a great many African American enslaved families.
What of his daughters? Patsy Jefferson was the most important person in her father’s life until the day he died. Yet she was not a counterpart to him in the way that a wife would have been, even though there has been a tendency to treat the father and daughter as if they were, at least symbolically, a married couple. Patsy was not Jefferson’s wife. As a daughter, she had a separate role that could not as effectively check the development of her father’s response to Hemings or, for that matter, Hemings’s response to him. The kind of unspoken day-to-day shorthand that passes between husbands and wives would not have required so blatant a statement as “Thomas, stop gazing at Sally.” A husband’s memory of many admonitions, spoken or unspoken, about what he is or is not supposed to do, often shapes his behavior, especially when the wife is physically present. As a purely logistical matter, Patsy was away from the Hôtel de Langeac during the week. Whole days went by when neither she nor her younger sister would have been in a position to observe Hemings and their father at the residence.
Jefferson did not go out to an office every day: he worked where he lived. Just as his daughters had their own world among their classmates at the abbey that their father knew of only at second hand, or not at all, the Hemingses and Jefferson lived in their own private universe at the Hôtel de Langeac. That world on the rue de Berri contained the kinds of rituals, chance encounters, tensions, domestic mishaps, and humorous incidents that make up daily life. For better or worse, the intimacy of a house where one steps away from the world outside and performs the most private functions in life creates a knowingness among fellow residents, a unique culture that excludes others who do no have the same experience in the daily life of that culture.
Even had Hemings lived with Jefferson’s daughters at school for all her time there and been at the residence only when they came home, her presence in the close circle of the household would still have been problematic. As things turned out, it was when the four actually did live together full-time for over half a year, after Jefferson took his daughters out of school in preparation for their return to Virginia, that Hemings and Jefferson became more fatefully involved. She was a young, unattached female, at the very least, a natural object of attention, platonic or otherwise, for a heterosexual male—no matter how many other people were at the residence.
“There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me, nor anything that moves,”2 Jefferson wrote to his daughter Patsy in 1790. With that extremely self-aware declaration, confirmed by virtually every aspect of his life, he could not fail to be interested in
the progress of a girl whom he had known since childhood, who had been suddenly taken out of her environment, one he knew very well was vastly different from the milieu she was now in. That she was a person of color thrown into this circumstance was the kind of thing that interested him.
Jefferson observed black people (sometimes one wishes he had not) and fancied himself an expert on the subject. Of all the white southern members of the founding generation, he devoted the most time to thinking about blacks as a group—what they did, what they were like, and how they responded in certain situations. He searched out albinos among slaves to try to figure out the mystery of their coloring. He wrote out algebraic formulations showing what percentage of “white” blood a black person had to have before he or she became white. And then, of course, there are the well-known and unfortunate passages in Notes on the State of Virginia, where he commented on what he took to be the greater attractiveness, talent, and intelligence of mixed-race blacks compared with those who were not.3 What better, more readily available object of observation: a mixed-race African American girl taken out of her context and forced to make adjustments to her new life under his very eyes.
Most important of all for the dynamic between Hemings, Jefferson, and his daughters in Paris, the traditional conception of marriage made the marriage bed the wellspring of the rights and obligations flowing between husbands and wives. Patsy and Polly Jefferson were certainly not in that arena with their father, and thus had no wifely claim on his sexual life. In Western culture, wives have (at least) the right to expect and demand sexual fidelity from their husbands. Do not have sex with anyone but me! Daughters do not have the right to demand that their fathers abstain from sex on their behalf. For unlike wives, they have nothing to give in return for such a requirement, since they are not supposed to provide an outlet for their father’s sexuality.
That Jefferson was a widower helped concretely shape the course of his relationship to Hemings while they were in France. It was not just that he did not have a wife who could provide a psychological affirmative check on his emotions and behavior. It was that his lack of a wife ensured that Hemings was in his view and thoughts in ways that she would not have been had he been married. A year after Hemings’s arrival, Jefferson complained in a letter to his friend James Madison about the complications of his domestic life in Paris that “called for an almost womanly attention to the details of the household.” He found being in that position “perplexing, disgusting and inconsistent with business.”4 He felt emasculated. So perilous was his financial state that he had to attend to every facet of running the residence, no matter how small, to make sure there was no waste. Jefferson’s language conveys his indignation: here was the minister to France, forced to act like a housewife looking for ways to scrimp and save. If Hemings had come to Paris with Martha Jefferson at the helm of domestic life at the Hôtel de Langeac, Martha would have had the primary responsibility for thinking of something for her to do and noticing whether she was fitting in with the plan for the household.
Instead, as soon as Hemings arrived at the residence, she, by necessity, became the object of Jefferson’s attention. First, there was the matter of her inoculation. Thinking that it had to be done drew Jefferson’s and probably everyone else’s attention to her. Hemings could not have been in top form when she returned to the Hôtel de Langeac after having endured both an inoculation-induced mild case of smallpox and the restrictive diet that she was put on while under Dr. Sutton’s care. It was the woman of the house’s job to attend to the sickness of house servants—if not to nurse them, at least to watch their condition to see when and if they were well enough to return to their duties. Jefferson had to be involved in this in some way, observing Hemings when she was in a particularly vulnerable state. Playing this role drew upon individual affect and emotion, making use of the kind of intimate sympathy that women of the day were supposed to have in greater abundance than males. This required something more than just paying the bill. It required exactly the kind of “womanly attention” to household duties that Jefferson referred to in his letter to Madison.5
At the most primary level, the practical result of being unmarried was that Jefferson had to talk directly to Hemings more than he would have had to if she had been under the charge of his wife. And we can think of how the greater number of interactions in the daily life of their household shaped the way they came to view each other. Jefferson’s overall easiness of manner with people familiar to him and his long history with Hemings’s family to that date suggest that his encounters with her would have been similarly “smooth and even,” as Madison Hemings described his temperament. The preferred social atmosphere for Jefferson was an amiable one, and he had a great ability, as genuinely smart and sensitive people do, to speak to others at whatever level he found them and make them feel at ease. As one observer has noted, “Jefferson valued above all else amiability—‘good humor,’ as he called it—in a friend rating it above integrity, industry, and science.” Jefferson said that if he had to choose, he and most people would prefer to associate “with a good-humoured, light principled man, than with an ill-tempered rigorist in morality.”6 Abundant evidence shows that he had similar preference for amiable women, and the young Hemings was described as that.
Because both of them were out of their places, Hemings and Jefferson had more good reason to want to talk to each other than they would have had in Virginia in a household with many layers of her older relatives between the two of them. When one is abroad, and past the initial thrill of burying oneself in a foreign culture, familiar faces, accents, and manners can be quite comforting, even if found in a person whom one might have virtually ignored at home. The teenage Hemings might not have had very much to say to Jefferson at Monticello. In France, however, he and her brother were her most familiar links to Virginia. Just by being together in a foreign land, all three had more to say to one another, certainly more interesting things, than if they had been at home. The quality and substance of their conversations had to have been different since they could not have centered on issues that grew out of their surrounding slave society, because they were not in one.
The accounts of many who knew him, enslaved and free, confirm that Jefferson was a veritable font of information, which he conveyed at a moment’s notice to any and all who asked for it—or did not. This impressed many. Isaac Jefferson, who portrayed him as the man to go to for answers, admired Jefferson’s “mighty head” tremendously. Not all were charmed. The supremely educated and cosmopolitan John Quincy Adams often found Jefferson’s disquisitions tiresome. There were altruistic reasons for Jefferson’s behavior. His desire to spread knowledge to others was a part of his unshakable belief in the benefits of progress; the more people knew, the better the world would eventually become. He took no proprietary interests in his ideas and thoughts, and did not believe others should either.7
At the same time, there must also have been something personally gratifying (ego-enhancing) to Jefferson to be the person in the room who knew things, the one to whom others looked for answers, and whose intellect impressed people at all stations of life. His dealings with Isaac Jefferson show that he wanted to be that person, even for those who were not considered his social equals. It could not have been very hard for him to have impressed a fifteen-or sixteen-year-old girl, and there is no reason to suppose that he would not have been quite happy to do that. Sally Hemings, more like Isaac Jefferson than John Quincy Adams in her relationship to him, would have felt entirely comfortable looking to Jefferson on occasion to help sort out the new territory that she had to negotiate in Paris.
For his part, Jefferson enthusiastically welcomed contact with Americans, and his letters to family and friends and his attempt to re-create a Virginia garden at the Hôtel de Langeac betray hints of his homesickness.8 In Hemings he had a late envoy from Virginia, his “country,” as he called it, who could talk to him about people and places he knew and had not seen for years. She also brought valuable infor
mation about his daughters’ lives at Eppington—both that of Polly, whom he had to get to know, and that of Lucy, whom he would never get to know. She was also another person who spoke English, a critical thing for a man who wrote and read French well, but was never at home speaking the language.
Then there is the simple matter that Jefferson very much liked attractive females, and Hemings was attractive. All of the women associated with him—his wife, Maria Cosway, and Sally Hemings—were thought exceptionally good-looking in their day, a criterion that evidently meant a lot to him. He loved beautiful things. An agreeable personality in a woman was important, but not quite enough for Jefferson. There is no portrait of her, but men of both races noted Hemings’s beauty, as well as that of her sisters and daughter.9
For the world and time in which she lived, the African American Hemings had attributes associated with white standards of beauty. In addition to pronouncing her “very handsome,” a term used in those days to denote feminine beauty as well as masculine attractiveness, Isaac Jefferson described her as “mighty near white” with “straight hair down her back.”10 Her son Madison had light gray eyes. A man well acquainted with her youngest son, Eston, who like all her children was genetically “whiter” than she, described him as “light bronze colored” with “a visible admixture of negro blood.”11 His brother Madison had a similar appearance. The Hemings brothers did not get those traits from their extremely fair-skinned, European-looking father, whose skin did not tan in the sun, but burned and peeled when he did not wear a hat. Eston Hemings’s wife, Julia, was said to have looked more like a white person than he. This suggests that Sally Hemings was a light-skinned, very obviously black woman—someone whose racial makeup could be immediately discerned upon looking at her—a “bright mulatto,” just as Isaac Jefferson described her.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 32