The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (16 page)

Jefferson took the Hemings women out of the pattern that had been well established in his home territory. From the very beginning, Virginia’s slave society situated black women outside the scope of European notions of femininity. If Virginians wanted to make the most of slavery as an economic and racial institution, they could have no qualms about the treatment of African women. A notion grew up very early that black women were an “exception to the gender division of labor” and could be sent into the fields to work, while wealthy white women were seen as too delicate for that. White Virginians codified this idea in 1643 when free black women were made “tithables.” This meant that a tax could be placed on their labor, just like that of free white men and enslaved men and women. White women were not tithables, because they worked in the home. In other words, black women who were out of slavery were treated like white
men
instead of like white women. As the years passed, the connection between black women and hard physical labor became so firmly entrenched in the minds of white masters that the women “were as one with their farming tools and called, simply, ‘hoes.’”
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In truth, lower-status white women worked in the fields during the period of indentured servitude and alongside their farmer husbands thereafter. People knew that. The nature of life on an ordinary farm is such that, at some point, everyone has to pitch in and help. But the ethos of a society is often most tellingly expressed in its mythology, emphasizing what people want to believe about themselves, and what they want to tell others about who they are, rather than what one can observe about their nature by simply opening one’s eyes. Ignoring reality is a part of the game. Very often in these mythologies, people of higher rank become the standard of measurement for people in the community. The everyday reality of the lives of lower-class white women in Virginia disappeared under the weight of the need to defeminize black women. Women (some might say “ladies”) became defined by the actions, demeanor, and attitudes of high-status females.

True to his time, Jefferson saw fieldwork as unfeminine, and he criticized Native American men for sending their women into the fields and assumed that the intensity of the experience accounted for the low birthrate among the group. While discussing their example, Jefferson posited that, whenever the men in a given society are “at ease,” the first thing they do is take women out of hard labor and put them in the home. He had been brought to this observation as he noted with disdain the presence of peasant women in the fields during his time in Europe. While traveling through Holland in the spring of 1788, Jefferson made clear what he thought of women engaging in agricultural pursuits.

He could well have been describing a scene in the fields at Monticello or another of his farms. Enslaved women attended to their “little offices” just as diligently as the laboring women of Holland. They wore bracelets, ribbons, and earrings, too, and that behavior had the same object as that of their European counterparts. Having lived among them, Jefferson knew that enslaved women wanted to make themselves attractive to their male companions. Yet, when talking of this matter of women and fitness for hard labor, he resorted to the Native American example, ignoring the more logical comparison—the laboring women in his own fields. Jefferson, however, really did know that fieldwork was inappropriate for black women. He daydreamed while in France about planting fig, mulberry, and olive trees in “countries where there are slaves.” In those places, he noted, “women and children are often employed in labours disproportioned to their sex and age. By presenting to the master objects of culture, easier and equally beneficial, all temptation to misemploy them would be removed, and the lot of this tender part our species be much softened.”
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Jefferson’s characterization of enslaved women as “this tender part of our species” engaged in labor “disproportioned to their sex” demonstrates that he knew the obvious: black women did not have physical strength equal to that of black men. In addition, black women, not black men, were the ones having babies and breast-feeding them, thus interfering with their capacity to work efficiently. Everything he wrote about women suggests that for Jefferson biology was destiny. Their defined roles vis-à-vis males and children were the reasons that the home was the most suitable place for them. Where did that leave the enslaved women at Monticello who were not members of the Hemings family?

The issue, as in so many other areas of Jefferson’s views on race, was that certain truths had to be overridden (or rationalized) when they bumped up against an extreme self-interest that did not rest comfortably with the implications of those truths. Jefferson could place black women among the “tender part” of the human species, along with the peasant women in the fields of Europe and the Native American women in his own country, see them as ill equipped relative to men for fieldwork, and still send them there because it suited his needs and the needs of his society. White supremacy does not demand deep conviction. Ruthless self-interest, not sincere belief, is the signature feature of the doctrine. It finds its greatest expression, and most devastating effect, in the determination to state, live by, and act on the basis of ideas one knows are untrue when doing so will yield important benefits and privileges that one does not care to relinquish.

Jefferson’s special treatment of the Hemings women allowed him to think of himself as a “good” and “kind” master. By exempting them from labor in the fields, he set them apart from the other black women who tended and harvested his tobacco and wheat, putting them in a social and, no doubt, psychological limbo—for the women themselves and the white males around them. The great irony is that, in doing this, he also cut the women off from the traditions of their African foremothers. Wherever she was from, the chances were great that Elizabeth Hemings’s mother would have grown up to work in the fields, as would her daughters and their daughters. In the vast majority of the West African communities from which most slaves in North America were brought, agricultural work was women’s work to a substantial degree. To the African mind, there was nothing unfeminine about this.
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Not having an African mind, Jefferson defined the Hemings women, just one generation separated from Africa, along European lines. He saw them as the kind of women who were formed for the “attentions” of men, not for “hard labor.” Accordingly, he dressed them differently from other enslaved women on the plantation. When he was away from Monticello during his political life, he bought the Hemings sisters Irish linen, muslin, and calico, making sure they were not all in the same pattern to avoid monotony in their dress. He purchased fitted cotton stockings for them, taking note of the sizes. Other enslaved women at Monticello “received a uniform allotment of osnaburg, the coarse brownish linen issued to slaves all over the south…and baggy stockings of woven cloth.”
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At one point, when she was ill, Elizabeth Hemings’s daughter Critta was sent to “the Springs” to take the cure, her room and board paid for by Jefferson.
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The Hemings women were not free white women, but they were not hard-laboring black women either. They were something else. Just what that “else” was is difficult for us with our well-developed sense of racial identities and meanings to gauge precisely. That the Hemings women’s existence in this “middle category” did not lead to their immediate freedom did not make their life in that state meaningless to them. Even though enslaved, these women had inner lives that were shaped by what did and did not happen to them on a daily basis—and by what they saw happening to others.

Jefferson’s attitude toward the male Hemingses has long been commented upon and, generally, portrayed in a positive light, as an example of his innate humanity breaking through a slave owner’s persona that many find troubling today. In this view, Jefferson’s seeing male Hemingses through a different lens allowed him to connect with them almost as if a form of male bonding occurred between these men that transcended the day-to-day reality of slavery. As we will see in the coming chapters, Jefferson acknowledged their masculinity (particularly that of Robert and James Hemings) and refused to take all of it—letting them do some of the things that men of the day would be expected to do, allowing them to have a measure of control over the course of their lives. All this raises an obvious question avoided for many years: If Jefferson responded to the masculinity of certain Hemings males, how did he respond to the femininity of their sisters?

By all accounts of them, in contemporary writings and the family histories of Jeffersons and Hemingses, the Hemings women were seen as beautiful and desirable. Thomas Jefferson Randolph commented on this himself. The white males on the mountain, Jefferson family members and his employees, responded to them in that way. The duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, upon visiting Monticello, noted the prevalence of interracial relationships between the white men who worked there and “mulatto” slave women, reinforcing the idea that lower-status white males alone were responsible for the white-looking slave children. But there were other indications that the practice was not strictly divided along class lines. Practically every adult Jefferson male associated with Monticello was said, either by his own family members, the families of those enslaved, or nonfamily members (white and black), to have had sexual relations with Hemings women: Jefferson, Peter Carr, Samuel Carr, and John Wayles Eppes. In a way that seems at once astounding and unsurprising, Monticello seems to have resembled a mini version of the stereotypical view of New Orleans—a place where white males pursued and attached themselves to light-skinned black women.
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Throughout their time at Monticello, none of the Hemings women married men from “down the mountain” who worked in the fields. They were either in long-term liaisons with high-status white males or white workers at the plantation, or they married household servants from other plantations who were also mixed race or, in the case of Critta Hemings, a free black man.
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One could say that these women had no choice regarding the white men, even the men who did not own them. It is also possible, of course, that given a choice they would have preferred white mates. That might be a disturbing thought from a modern perspective, with our knowledge of slavery and views about the value of solidarity in the face of oppression. This possibility, however, must not be discounted outright, especially in light of the behavior of some of the Hemings children and grandchildren.

Tempting and romantic as it may be to construct a monolithic population of slaves who acted cohesively across color and genetic lines because of their common enslaved status, it is more realistic to accept that different individuals and families had different understandings about where they stood in relation to other slaves, within the slave system and, indeed, within America’s racial hierarchy. People’s individual experiences shaped their way of seeing the world. The Hemingses did not, any more than other human beings, always live with reference to the “big picture” of their society. They lived, instead, in the day-to-day interactions with the people around them, the values they formed in the context of their surrounding society, and their sense of the best way to make the most of their lives before they died.

We cannot simply assume that the Hemingses, living in a world that valued whiteness—whites’ culture, hair, skin color, and facial features—regarded their status as slaves as vastly more meaningful than the reality that they were also part white. To be a slave was hard, but being black was not easy either. Even emancipated blacks lived under the harsh regime of white supremacy, denied the right to full citizenship, the quality of their lives determined by the whims of the dominant white community. This world expressed open contempt for the tightly curled hair, broad noses, and full lips of African people. White society could change the Hemingses’ legal status with the stroke of a pen, or the Hemingses could change it themselves, as some of them did, by walking away from Monticello and blending in with the rest of free white society—leaving the stigmas of slavery and blackness behind. The only way to destroy their proximity to whiteness would be for the Hemingses to marry and have children with a person who was not as “bright” skinned or light bronzed as they were. That, for generations, many of the Hemingses refused to do. When one considers the harshness of life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for people of African origin, it is not surprising that some black people who could leave life under slavery and white supremacy behind might have wished to do that.

For the women in the Hemings family, being treated as a caste apart and having their femininity reinforced rather than forcefully denied—circumstances that may seem trivial to present-day observers viewing the enormity of slavery—may have had deep meaning. Elizabeth Hemings, her daughters, and granddaughters knew that their enslavement limited their horizons. But their everyday existence encouraged them to think of themselves as different from others who shared the same legal status. They could, as women of all races and classes have often done, use their femininity to seek better lives through their association with men who had some degree of status—white males, mixed-race house servants, or free black men. Jefferson would not take any Hemings woman completely out of slavery until 1822, when he freed his daughter Harriet to go live as a white woman and escape
partus sequitur ventrem
. Instead, the Hemings women served as seamstresses, maids, and, in Sally Hemings’s case, Jefferson’s “substitute for a wife.” But these events, which will be discussed more fully in later chapters, unfolded over decades. It took years to build the Hemingses’ story at Monticello.