Hemings understood Jefferson’s action as one that had the positive effect of protecting her for life from what she knew was a gruesome disease. This placed him, very early in her stay, into the role of protector, something that would have been very meaningful to any young girl in a new environment operating without parental support in a foreign country. And calling upon Dr. Sutton to care for Hemings, when he knew that the Suttons were the best at what they did and had consulted at the highest levels of royalty and the nobility throughout Europe, was no doubt meaningful to Jefferson, too. It was something that he could, in his own self-regarding, eighteenth-century white male way, internalize as further evidence of his “goodness” and “soundness” as a patriarch. He had paid dearly to have Hemings, a slave girl, taken care of by a doctor to a king. Though he had the sensibility for it, irony was not always Jefferson’s strong suit, but here he knew and could always remember and appreciate over the years that he had engineered this very ironic turn in Hemings’s life.
Just as Jefferson had no wife to buffer and to filter his gestures toward Hemings and her responses to them, Hemings was equally exposed to him. History and literature are replete with examples of the potential hazards of older male–younger female interactions when the male is in a position of authority. These pairings inspire concern, and not solely because of legitimate fears about overreaching males. There is an understanding, though a much less comfortable one, that young females—and most uncomfortably of all, teenage girls—are emotional and sexual beings, too. The fear is that older males will take advantage of their sexuality to their own ends, not that they will address a sexuality that does not yet exist.
Ideally, an older male–younger female pair may stave off sexual tension by settling into a quasi–father/daughter relationship, despite their ostensible official or legal roles. The problem with that is the term “quasi.” If they are heterosexual, males and females who are not too closely related to each other are generally known to be potential sexual partners. It does not help the construction of a safe quasi–father/daughter relationship that the traditional conception of marriage or romantic relationships, and here we speak of the Anglo-American context that shaped Hemings’s and Jefferson’s lives, put the husband and wife, or husband and wifelike figures, in a position not far from that of a father and daughter.
In the traditional formulation the man assumed authority over the woman and took over from the father the roles of protector, adviser, and rule maker, hence the idea of a father “giving” his daughter away in marriage to the new man in her life. Women were not only supposed to submit to this arrangement; they were taught to actively look for a male who could perform those tasks at the highest level—to be the greatest protector, the wisest adviser, and most thoughtful rule maker. That was the reason they performed the “little offices” that Jefferson referred to when writing about peasant women working in the fields who in the depths of drudgery still attempted to make themselves pleasing to the eye in order to attract mates.
That the traditional order has fashioned husbands and wives—and husband and wife substitutes—along the lines of fathers and daughters poses acute problems for intergenerational males and females thrown into close contact. Throughout history when the male teacher/guardian/coach closely interacts with the female student/ward/athlete, or any situation where there is no incest taboo to check their feelings and behavior, there is always a great danger of their sliding out of the quasi–father/daughter configuration into the role of lovers or potential spouses. Jefferson and Hemings, locked in the patriarch and erstwhile “child” paradigm in Paris, were from the start at great risk of doing just that.
There is no inevitability in all this, and there was nothing inevitable about Hemings and Jefferson. Some males and females will simply never come close to being attracted to one another, while others in these delicate pairings who do feel the tug of emotional connection develop a firm determination to keep to their allotted sides of the barrier no matter what. That is much easier to do when preventive measures are taken. The male and female do not socialize with each other without others present. They keep appropriate physical distance between themselves and confine their conversations, as much as they can, to whatever strictly defined business they are supposed to be doing. This is much harder to do when the male and female are living in a household together for a long time, with no real supervision of their behavior, indeed when the man has no one at all to answer to.
Compare Hemings and Jefferson’s situation to that of another notorious couple who lived during their lifetime. In 1817, thirty-year-old Henry Lee of Westmoreland County, Virginia, married Anne McCarty. Along with his new role as husband, Henry became at the same time the legal guardian of his wife’s seventeen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, who after the marriage came to live with the couple at the Lees’ renowned family seat, Stratford Hall. When the couple lost their young daughter, and Anne became depressed and sexually unavailable to her husband, Henry turned to her younger sister and got her pregnant. In the family’s telling of the story, it was only when his wife became unresponsive to him that Henry took an interest in Elizabeth.8
It may or may not be true that Henry did not immediately look upon his young ward in a sexual way once she entered his household. Unquestionably, however, that Henry and Elizabeth were in close daily proximity to each other—even with his wife there—made it easier, and likelier, for them to develop a bond that grew into something more than it should have been. Henry suggested this himself in a letter of 1833 when he tried to minimize the magnitude of his actions by noting that while his affair with Elizabeth was “atrocious,” “no instinct of blood [was] interposed” between them and that he and “his wife’s sister” had been “thrown into a state of the most unguarded intimacy.”9 The intensity of their living arrangement, Henry was saying, tripped them up. He also offered that it should not be surprising that a man who loved one woman might be able to develop an attraction to her sister. Cynthia A. Kierner has pointed out that the three most notorious sex scandals in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Virginia—including Hemings and Jefferson and Lee and Elizabeth McCarty—involved men who were the lovers of their wives’ sisters. In each case the men and women in the relationships, owing to family circumstances, were living for extended periods in the same household.10
Jefferson was involved in far too many aspects of Hemings’s life in France to be as detached from her as a suitable quasi–father figure should have been. Her ill-defined role in the household meant that there was no one thing to focus upon that could set firm boundaries for his attitudes toward her. Life in Paris demanded from him a higher degree of vigilance about Hemings, as well as about the other Virginians in his household, than if they had all been at Monticello. His Virginia domain extended from the top of his mountain, down its sides, and over thousands of acres from its base. One had to travel some distance to leave it and his influence. That was not true in Paris. As soon as Hemings stepped out of Jefferson’s courtyard, she was out of territory he controlled. And there were actually places for her to go on foot in the immediate environs of the Hôtel de Langeac. They were at the inner edge of a large and vibrant city that beckoned, and their neighborhood bordered other fashionable ones with interesting places and sights to see. Could Hemings go out into those places? How far could she go? Could she go alone? How long could she stay gone?
Jefferson had solved the problem of being principally responsible for adolescent girls in the city by having his daughters away in boarding school all week long. Hemings, though not his daughter, was still there in the residence and as the youngest person at the Hôtel de Langeac most of the time—and as a female—was the one who other members of the household would have thought needed some form of supervision and protection. And though she was a wage-earning employee during her last year in the city and saw herself as free, even masters of free servants exerted some influence over the comings and goings of their employees. Although the minister to France
certainly had much more pressing things to do than to see to Hemings, and her brother and Petit were primarily responsible for this, a man so curious and controlling as Jefferson certainly had at least some interest in what Hemings was doing, where she was going every day, and, some say, in setting the rules to govern the life of a young girl for whom he had ultimate responsibility.
The extremely personal nature of Jefferson’s involvement with Hemings comes through clearly when one considers his buying clothes for her, a fraught endeavor for males and females under any circumstances. Here he was not making general orders for his servants’ day-to-day clothing in France, or sitting at Monticello ordering so many yards of “negro cloth” for a large number of enslaved females who, if he knew them at all, he knew them by name and not much more. When they got the cutout cloth, those enslaved women were supposed to sew their clothes themselves. Jefferson had clothes made for Hemings, a female who was not at all detached from him and who lived in his close circle. Very importantly, Jefferson bought these clothes for her so that she could go out into a world as far removed from American slavery as one can imagine.
Although Hemings drew enough of a salary to shop for herself, and her brother could buy things for her, too, having Jefferson purchase her clothing was a different experience altogether. This whole process was new to her and could only have been exciting. As most girls her age would be, Hemings was probably thrilled to be outfitted in new clothes, particularly since it did not diminish her own personal store of cash. She had to have fittings and, when the garments were completed, to try on whatever was bought—a sense of anticipation and then fulfillment. Jefferson noted payments for purchases for her on days or weeks when there were no payments for either of his daughters, suggesting that buying clothes for Hemings was carried out separately from buying clothes for them.11 It is highly unlikely that the sixteen-year-old girl picked which clothing shops in Paris to go to and went to them by herself or, if the tailor came to the Hôtel de Langeac, picked which tailor it would be—at least not when Jefferson was paying the bill. There had to have been some determination other than her own about what was appropriate in terms of style and cost, and what items were needed at all—dresses, lingerie, shoes.
It is an understatement to say that Jefferson was never averse to shopping for anything and seemed to look for any excuse to do so.12 It would have made practical sense for him to accompany Hemings on these excursions, or be present if the tailor came to their home to work, because he had to pay for whatever she bought. Patsy and Polly were still at the abbey, and one wonders whether their father would have taken Patsy out of school just for this. If Hemings shopped with someone besides Jefferson, or alone, she still had to tell him how much she had spent and, as a matter of simple courtesy, show him what she had bought with his money. Jefferson then saw her in the clothes he paid for when she went out socially with Patsy alone or when he accompanied them.
The spate of shopping for Hemings drew attention to her appearance, to Jefferson’s interest in that and in her acquisition of items designed to enhance her looks. Both knew that it was he who had made the enhancement in her life, this good thing, possible. Neither the dynamic between master and slave nor the separate spheres of black and white (artificially created conceptions both) could override the meaning this activity carried in the complex dance between male and female. When a male buys clothes for a female who is not his daughter or wife, it almost immediately raises the intimacy level between him and the female recipient of his gifts, in ways that can make it much more difficult for the two to keep a safe emotional distance from each other. It too much resembles what happens between couples who are romantically involved with each other for the participants not to make that connection, even if just for fleeting moments. This was definitely not the way to maintain a “quasi–father/daughter” relationship, particularly in an intense environment where the results of Jefferson’s actions and Hemings’s responses to them would be far more direct and concentrated than if they had been back in Virginia.
At the Hôtel de Langeac, Jefferson was not playing “great white father” to upwards of two hundred men and women spread out over his plantations who harbored no illusions about the ultimate meaning of his self-identification as a benevolent patriarch—that it masked the fundamental reality that master and slave were in a state of war with one another. That was, in fact, Jefferson’s view of what slavery meant, and he believed that it was the slaves’ view as well, which is why he predicted that, if blacks were freed en masse, they would initiate a race war to exact revenge for what had been done to them.13 In Paris he was playing great white father in face-to-face encounters with a young girl who had been raised to believe that the contours of her relationship with him were shaped by more than just her enslaved status. An important blood tie between the natural antagonists changed the dynamic of the conflict. The conflict was still there, though carried out on different, more psychologically complex and somewhat more flexible, terms of engagement.
The small size of their Virginia-born circle simply enlarged the potential problems inherent to their unique circumstances. Had the Hemings clan been transported as a group to Paris, the atmosphere in the household would have been very different. This is not to say that Hemings and Jefferson could never have begun an affair in Virginia. A stint in Paris was not a prerequisite to master-slave liaisons under American slavery. But living there as they did, for as long as they did, made it easier. Significantly for the pair, no one was watching them in the same way. Virginia’s slave society, with all its expectations, customs, and mores that moved like a not so invisible hand to hold each person in his or her place for the sake of the system, was on another continent.
The people with whom Jefferson was most closely allied in France were staunch abolitionists, and at least one of them, his great friend Lafayette, was heavily involved in promoting the interests of blacks outside of slavery. Jefferson corresponded with, and admired, the enormously respected marquis de Condorcet, one of France’s foremost abolitionists. Though Condorcet argued for gradual emancipation, because he believed that slaves had to be prepared to become free citizens, he insisted on the equality of black people and was withering in his criticism of the character of the slave-owning class. In Virginia when an exemplar of that class, the far beyond egregious Archibald Cary, came to visit, he regularly beat Isaac Jefferson when he as a young boy was late opening the entry gate on the road leading up to Monticello. We can safely assume that nothing like that was going on at the rue de Berri. With no reason to attend every moment to those types of outside influences, those kinds of people, in very critical ways, the Hemingses and Jeffersons were able to make at least some of their own rules as they went along.14
Under these circumstances it is doubtful that Hemings and Jefferson moved through the Hôtel de Langeac like enemy combatants, as one might assume their legal and social relationship demanded. We are used to seeing a universe of difference between enslaved people and other members of society who lived under the power of upper-class free white males. Jefferson, on the other hand, saw points of immediate commonality. His worldview took in “women, children, and slaves” as individuals whose similar attributes required that they be put under the protection (read control) of white men. White men exerted different degrees of control over the individuals in those categories, their power operating along a continuum. Still, each type and level of control complemented the other and reinforced the basic notion of white male supremacy.
Jefferson as a husband could have forced his wife, Martha, to have sex—there was no such thing as marital rape—he took over her legal personhood and had the primary legal right to the labor of her children. He could not sell Martha or her children, as he could Sally Hemings, their children, or any of his other slaves. That difference was crucial; but for Jefferson it was not equally enduring. He actually foresaw a day when white men would lose the more extensive power they held over slaves, and thought that it would be right if they lost it. He
probably did not foresee a day when men would or should, cease to be the rulers of the women and children in their lives, for Jefferson believed that slavery violated natural law while male dominance, tempered by restraint, was a tenet of natural law.
As her time in France passed, Hemings was at once slave, child, and woman—during the days of the week when Jefferson’s daughters were away, a singular figure as the lone Virginia female in his household. There is no reason to suppose that she, the woman/child living under this patriarchal cover, would not have responded to any displays of male protectiveness and any truly positive attention from Jefferson in the same way that most females of her day, in the American context and others, were trained to respond to them—as welcome and positive things. The political, legal, and social meaning of slavery and the distortions of human relations that it worked, though mitigated in the French setting, were present. The very basic human requirement of finding a way to live daily life with the people in one’s immediate surroundings—taking in and processing the meaning of the good and bad gestures they sent one’s way—was no less so.
Jefferson’s construction of his relationship with Sally Hemings naturally had a very different meaning for her brothers. Patriarchy involves more than just males dominating females; it is also about competition between males, a struggle in which some win and some lose, creating a hierarchy based on relative degrees of power. Like those of other enslaved men, the Hemings brothers’ statuses signaled to white men that they had lost that struggle and were to be placed on the lowest end of the scale—stuck in perpetual boyhood or animalized as “bucks.” Jefferson’s acting the role of benevolent patriarch at the Hôtel de Langeac did not speak to James Hemings’s masculinity in the way it spoke to his sister’s femininity. Instead, Jefferson’s actions toward him emphasized Hemings’s diminished status within the male hierarchy. Even a legal father who supported his son long after the son reached adulthood would be seen as diminishing his offspring’s manhood.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 36