After noting the discrepancy between Hughes’s account and Randolph’s on how the carriage got up the mountain, Randall, in a fascinating and utterly instructive reversal of normal policy, flatly and happily declared the black man’s account more trustworthy than that of the upper-class white woman’s. “We consider old Wormley’s authority the best on this point!” he wrote, clearly relishing Hughes’s particular details about the “African ovation,” as Randall termed what happened when Jefferson arrived at his mountain.7 During the antebellum period in which Randall’s book appeared, in 1858, it may have been good for sales, at least in the South, to highlight such an excessive display by slaves of their affection for their master—voluntarily turning themselves into beasts of burden over their master’s protests—to reassure white southerners and to rebuke the implacable northern abolitionists who had named slavery a cruel and barbarous system. The blacks were eager to be slaves, and the benevolent whites only reluctantly took up the burden of being their masters. If the conditions existing in this “organic” relationship had really been cruel and barbarous, slaves would never have been so happy to see their oppressor.
Whether they actually pushed or pulled the carriage up the mountain or merely walked or ran alongside it, there is no reason to doubt that most of the enslaved people who gathered to greet Jefferson were truly happy to see him return. But, as with all stories, context is everything. It is just as likely that for the vast majority of them, who could not have known him in any real sense, Jefferson was more of an idea than a real person. Unlike the Hemingses, whose sons, brothers, daughters, and sisters lived and traveled with him, slaves down the mountain, particularly in the era before his retirement, would not have had the occasion for enough contact with Jefferson to have loved him in any meaningful sense—even had they had an inclination actually to do that. “Loving” from afar is the very definition of loving the idea of a person rather than the actual thing. He had been effectively gone from Monticello for almost eight years, nearly all of Hughes’s lifetime on the date this memory was made. Moreover, Hughes was telling his story long after he had spent years taking care of Jefferson’s horses and acting as the principal gardener at Monticello, and thus overseeing two of Jefferson’s great passions—long after Jefferson had spent years fathering several of Hughes’s first cousins, long after the days when Jefferson would put in a few token moments puttering in the garden some evenings with Hughes, and long after Hughes had dug Jefferson’s grave.8
The filter through which Hughes’s memories were reanimated and transmitted was idiosyncratic and deeply personal. He had associations and memories of Jefferson shared by no other members of the enslaved community on the road to Monticello that day. This does not make what he said untrue, although Randall tended to embellish stories, and it is entirely possible that he took what was Hughes’s true story of a basic expression of respectful joy and turned it into an Albemarle County proslavery pageant play. The other enslaved people who greeted Jefferson, many older and far more knowledgeable about life than the young boy taking in that scene, had important reasons to be happy to see him besides irrational feelings of affection for one whom they knew largely by sight and reputation. The idea of Jefferson, what he represented, more likely fueled their enthusiasm.
Enslaved people’s closest human associations and familiar surroundings often brought a form of stability and comfort. That was virtually all they had. Because they were treated as property, however, they understood the tenuous nature of their connections to persons and places. In fact, many of those present with Hughes that day were in that place because their original owner, John Wayles, had died and left them as the property of another man. They, or people of whom they knew, had been required to pull up stakes and move to accommodate their master’s changed family situation. Even Jefferson’s time in France, well short of an actual death, caused significant dislocations in the lives of the enslaved community. Many were leased out and thus separated from their families and homes with no idea when or if they would be reunited with loved ones in what had become their settled place in the world. To make matters more frightening still, that place—the farms that made up Monticello—had deteriorated significantly while Jefferson was away. The land was wasted and even the house itself, the very symbol of him, neglected and run down. None of this was hidden.9
Enslaved people were well familiar with the basic contours of agricultural life, as they formed the core ingredient to it and suffered under it. Farmers borrowed money and paid it back with the crop itself or the proceeds from the sale of the crop. Even the only minimally observant among the enslaved community understood that a failing farm lessened the owner’s ability to pay creditors—those ever-present specters in the lives of Virginia planters. Unhappy and unfulfilled creditors led to voluntary sales of assets (very often, the slaves themselves) or foreclosures and auctions carried out under terms designed to suit creditors. In that most dire situation, the will of even a “benevolent” owner who wanted to keep a family together could be thwarted. Slaves regularly lost their mothers, fathers, children, and other relatives to this process.
Against that backdrop, the idea of Jefferson—healthy and returned—was a reason to cheer far beyond what he meant to them as a flesh-and-blood man, representing as he did that day their best chance for a degree of stability and a return to normality. Now that he was back, perhaps everyone else could come home, too. Those greeting Jefferson that day held many different images in their heads and hearts as they moved across land that the law (with the physical force to back it up) tied them to, whether they wanted to be there or not. They were cheering out of hope for themselves and the lives of their families within the very limited framework allotted to them, not necessarily, as Randall would have it, for their unlimited love for the man who owned them.
THE ALMOST FIFTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD Elizabeth Hemings welcomed home her son and daughter who had been away in a distant place for years. Few Afro-Virginian women in her position ever experienced such a thing: to be able to listen to her children describe a world across an ocean that they had come to know intimately, perhaps bringing gifts and certainly bringing knowledge of a different language and culture from that faraway place. She, and no one else in her time, had the same expectations about maintaining easy contact with absent relatives that exist in the modern world. For all his wealth and power, Jefferson himself could not make a ship carrying a letter travel faster across the ocean than any other man could. Near the end of his stay in France, he sent the only letter he ever wrote to his younger brother, Randolph, while he was abroad, in which he makes clear that he did not even know how many children his brother had.10 He communicated more with his sister and in-laws, with whom he was close, but those contacts, too, were invariably far apart in time. Even within those structural limits on communication, Jefferson at least was part of a social world in which all the immediate members of his family were literate, if some only marginally so. Words on a page connected them to people far beyond the sound of voices, conveying information and providing physical evidence that, within the time of sending and receiving, the correspondent was still present on earth.
Though Elizabeth Hemings lived in a world where oral communication was primarily the order of the day, her sons Robert and James Hemings could easily have written to one another while James and Sally were overseas.11 If brother and sister did send any letters or packages to Monticello from France, no traces of them remain. Their communications, however, would not have been a part of Jefferson’s record of his incoming and outgoing correspondence, so one cannot look to his papers to decide the matter. Those items would have gone the way of the vast majority of the documents and personal property of families who do not feel compelled to preserve their family history for posterity, or who try to do that but are thwarted by fires, floods, carelessness, and other mishaps. Jefferson’s records do show that throughout the 1790s, Robert Hemings, when he was away from Monticello and after his emancipation, wrote at least five letter
s to Jefferson, and Jefferson wrote at least one letter to him. Given the fate of other letters that had a high probability of a mention of Sally Hemings—one would expect a brother to ask the man who was living with his sister how she and other family members were faring—it is not surprising that all of those letters are missing from the collection of Jefferson’s correspondence.12
Even though the Hemings brothers knew how to read and write, Jefferson preferred to communicate with them, and other members of their family, by sending word through others. It would have been just as easy for the person who was supposed to deliver an oral message face-to-face to have given the Hemingses a letter from Jefferson containing the same information, if he had wanted to write to them. The circumstances of Robert and James Hemings suggest that Jefferson’s preferences about this give a misleading view of his slaves’ capacities. One might be tempted to say that he simply did not want to correspond with black people, or to be seen corresponding with his slaves, through the same means he used to send letters to whites. His messages to the Hemings brothers were usually sent at times when he did not know where they were, and an intermediary had to both find them and deliver the message. There is a good chance that Jefferson’s white intermediaries might have felt demeaned by being asked to deliver letters to a black person. Relaying a verbal order from a master better maintained Virginia’s social and racial hierarchy than carrying a letter intended for an enslaved person. He did write to other blacks, most famously to the almanac author and mathematician Benjamin Banneker. But the acclaimed Banneker was a special case, and the two men had no expectation of a continuing relationship. In later years Jefferson did correspond with Robert and James’s younger brother John, who was literate, about work that he wanted to have done.13
As noted earlier, before he handed his duties as a chef off to his brother Peter, James Hemings compiled a very detailed list of the kitchen utensils at Monticello in clear and confident handwriting and spelling that showed a high degree of literacy, perhaps even above normal for that time. No one knows for whom the list was generated, but given that Peter would have been the one using the utensils and been responsible for keeping track of them, he probably knew how to read the list as well.14
While we know that Robert and James were literate and that Peter likely was too, we do not know about their other Wayles siblings, including their sister Sally. Her son Madison remembered asking his father’s grandchildren to teach him his letters, which may lead to an entirely reasonable inference that his mother did not know them.15 For if she had known, surely she would have taught her son. One could, of course, draw a similar inference about Robert and James Hemings in relationship to their sister and other siblings. It seems improbable that Sally Hemings’s two oldest “full” brothers, who lived in the same place as their siblings, would have known how to read and write and not conveyed any information about literacy to their younger siblings—not even to tell them how to recognize letters in the alphabet. Although it is clear that whites placed a greater emphasis on the education of boys than of girls, there is no evidence that African Americans had the same attitude about this matter. In fact, literacy seems to have been for everyone who could obtain it.
Sally Hemings was much younger than Robert and James, and they were away with Jefferson for periods of her childhood. But she and James lived closely together under extraordinary circumstances in France. They were under no apparent prohibition from Jefferson on reading and writing, and were not overly burdened with work or minute supervision, as James Hemings’s adventures with his French tutor, and Sally Hemings’s relatively open work schedule during large stretches of her time in Paris, reveal. If only to improve the quality of their personal association and chances of survival in the country where they thought of staying, James Hemings would have had a great incentive to teach his sister the alphabet, and at least enough of the rudiments of reading and writing to be able to read lists and follow written instructions. They would have needed to pool their every available talent or ability in order to work together to survive.
This is a very delicate business to consider from our vantage point for a number of reasons. We live in a time when parents in industrialized countries and striving Third World societies understand that sooner is always better than later when it comes to education, that there really is no time to waste in preparing children for literacy. The notion has become so ingrained as to be thought almost primal. Education is the central preoccupation of our lives because it is that dividing line, not the line between being a free person and a chattel, that determines whether one’s children will have good prospects in life rather than relatively poorer ones.
Without knowing Sally Hemings’s expectations about literacy, when and how it was to be obtained, and her degree of familiarity with it or sense of urgency about it in her children’s early lives, we can hardly say that her son’s comment proves that she could neither read nor write at any level—especially since Hemings did not say how young he was when he asked to be taught his letters, or describe the circumstances surrounding his approach to Jefferson’s grandchildren. He could easily have been a little boy anxious to identify with his white nieces and nephews, who were his age and going to a school that he knew he could never attend, but wanted to. Did he act on his curiosity before his mother, who undoubtedly had other critical things to teach him about the world that he was born into, thought to address this issue? Did her brothers, she, or other members of their family learn to read when they were six or seven or as teenagers? Great care must be taken with this because Hemings’s comment raises questions about more than just the state of his mother’s literacy and his relationship with his father. It goes to the very heart of the nature of the relations among the Hemings family and their understanding about their position in a slave society. There is every indication that they grasped the baleful position they had been born into, and knew that forces were actively working to keep them down. African Americans felt deeply about the denial of education to them. Literacy was a highly prized skill to be passed on, even if surreptitiously and even to people who were not in one’s family. The Hemings family was very close. Siblings named their children after one another. They bought their relatives’ freedom and supported one another in many ways. Yet a narrow reading of Madison Hemings’s statement suggests that there was no Hemings family tradition of sharing educational achievements with one another, as there was in many other enslaved families; for if there had been, he would not have had to ask members of his father’s white family instead of members of his mother’s African American family to teach him his letters.
One must analyze Hemings’s statement in light of what is known of enslaved people’s general attitude about obtaining literacy and, more specifically, important details in his own personal life. There were a number of potential vectors of literacy within the Hemings family. Beside Robert and James, John Hemings, to whom Madison was apprenticed at age twelve, and was certainly in his life on a daily basis before then, knew how to read and write, as did his wife, Priscilla. If the Jefferson family had not saved John Hemings’s letters, and all we had to consider was Madison Hemings’s recollections, we would assume that John Hemings did not know how to read and write, because if he had known, surely he would have taught his nephew/apprentice a skill that he needed to ply the trade that he was supposed to be teaching him. That, of course, would be a totally wrong assumption. Mary Hemings could read and write; she signed legal documents, and she and her children by Thomas Bell, Robert and Sally, in nearby Charlottesville kept in close contact with their family at Monticello. James Hemings was dead by the time Madison was born, but Robert did not die until 1819. He lived in Richmond, but he, too, kept in contact with his family on the mountain.
A more detailed discussion of the Hemings children’s relationship to the white Jeffersons will be left to a later chapter, but it is enough to say now that Madison Hemings’s placement of the responsibility for his literacy solely in the hands of the Jeffersons when t
here were multiple other members of the Hemings family (and other enslaved people on the plantation) who could have taught him his letters seems more an attempt to wrestle with his complicated relationship with his father than a precise statement about who around him was available to teach him to read. Judging by his preface to Hemings’s recollections, the man to whom he was speaking, S. F. Wetmore, was specifically interested in whether Jefferson had or had not contributed to Hemings’s education, and was deeply critical because he felt the statesman should have done more.16 It may never have occurred to him to consider that Hemings’s black relatives had either the ability or the responsibility for teaching the young Hemings to read. Given his mother’s family circumstances, and her personal history, it is more probable that Sally Hemings was literate at some basic level, understood her limitations, and felt it better to leave her children’s tuition to Jefferson’s grandchildren. There were distinct advantages to doing this. Not only were his grandchildren receiving rigorous formal training that could benefit her children, but encouraging her offspring’s association with the Randolph children might further cement a connection to them that could be helpful in the long run. Madison Hemings did not say who among his father’s grandchildren taught him, but he did name one of his children, Ellen Wayles, the same name as Jefferson’s eldest granddaughter.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 49