The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (3 page)

It was not just the males in the family who were prime movers, as much as enslaved people could be. Mary Hemings, the eldest of the first generation of Hemings siblings, exerted a remarkable influence upon the family. She was the first to maneuver her way out of slavery on the mountain. She was able to be a source of refuge, stability, and monetary support for her relatives who remained in bondage at Monticello—up to and beyond the time of the family’s dispersal in 1827, when Jefferson’s human property was sold after his death to pay his enormous debts.

Every story has a beginning, and we will start there. One could argue strenuously that the central (and most compelling) figure in the family’s history was not Sally Hemings but her mother, Elizabeth, whose experiences in life helped project her influence down the family line. Elizabeth Hemings, known as Betty, was the matriarch of a family that over four generations numbered in the dozens. She was well suited to that role for many reasons, not the least of which is that she lived a very long time—seventy-two years, well beyond the average life span of Virginians of her day, black or white. Also, she had many children—by one count, fourteen of them, although only twelve have been positively identified as hers. Half of her children had a black father, half had a white father. Her grandchildren, some of whom were born while she was still bearing children, had black fathers and white fathers. The mixing continued into succeeding generations until some of her descendants decided to move totally away from their African origins, while others resolutely clung to it.

Behind all of this stands Elizabeth Hemings, the person of origin for the family and their story. The unnamed African woman who was her mother, John Wayles (who fathered six of her children, including Sally Hemings), Martha Wayles Jefferson (Wayles’s eldest daughter, Jefferson’s wife, and Sally’s half sister), Thomas Jefferson, and Sally Hemings—all of them lived for a time under her knowing gaze. If one person could be brought forward to help tell this story of slavery, intertwined families, pain, loss, silence, denial, and endurance, hers would be the most valuable voice.

Like all enslaved parents, Elizabeth Hemings lived with the possibility that her family would be broken up by sale or gift. In fact, two of her adult children were sold—one to be united with her enslaved husband, who lived on a nearby plantation, the other to cohabit with a white merchant in Charlottesville. Jefferson freed two of her sons during her lifetime, and they left Monticello to live on their own. Another daughter was given as a wedding present to one of Jefferson’s sisters. For the most part, however, the Hemings family remained intact, or within close proximity to one another, for their entire lives. As a result each member had, in the person of Elizabeth Hemings, a mother/grandmother to be the repository of family lore and center of family attention.

The women of the family were house servants who worked alongside one another for years. Their brothers, sons, and nephews were butlers or valets to Jefferson. The Hemings men who were not in the house were artisans who worked just outside of it on Mulberry Row, which abuts and runs parallel to the main house at Monticello. One of Hemings’s many grandchildren set the scene recalling a childhood spent running errands in and out of the big house surrounded entirely by (and this to him was extraordinary and important) members of his family. In this compact area, the Hemingses would have seen and interacted with one another every single day.

In sum, this family was at least as much “together” as many other families who lived on farms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, in the Hemingses’ confined world on the mountain, the entire enslaved community in which they lived was basically stable over the years. With few exceptions—births, deaths, temporary moves from one household to another—the rolls of Jefferson’s Monticello slaves do not change much over the decades. That the Hemingses were enslaved thus did not automatically render them incapable of knowing who they were, of knowing their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers. Slavery did not destroy their ability to observe, remember, and reason. It did not prevent them from forming enduring and meaningful attachments. It did not make them untrustworthy—certainly not when compared with the people who held them in bondage. In short, nothing about their enslaved status makes them undeserving of our considered and unprejudiced attention.

We do not have, in the Hemingses, an enslaved family with loose ties, little knowledge of family history, and no family cohesion. That Virginia law did not protect their family does not end the inquiry, for legal regimes are not omnipotent. Powerful as they may be, they never have (and never will, because they cannot) control all human feelings and arrangements. While it is certainly important to be aware of what
could have
happened to this enslaved family because its members were not ultimately in control of their destiny, that knowledge should not overshadow what can be gleaned by considering what
actually
happened to them. Under the circumstances of their lives, the Hemingses were able to achieve and maintain a coherent family identity that existed within slavery and survived it.

Central to the Hemingses’ identity was their being of mixed race. Basing American slavery on race created a world where, put simply, it was better to be white than black. Being “in between” was meaningful as well, and the Hemingses’ interracial origins helped determine the course of the family’s history. The conventional wisdom that white slave owners sometimes valued more highly those slaves who most resembled white people was very much a part of life at Monticello, and the Hemingses benefited from it. Although, as we will see, at least one other enslaved family, the Grangers, who appear to have been of completely African origin, rivaled, if not exceeded, the Hemingses in the amount of trust Jefferson reposed in them.

Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s eldest grandson, extolled the virtues of the Hemingses specifically. He said that while slaves on the plantation had their own theories for why the Hemingses were favored, the true reasons were their “superior intelligence, capacity and fidelity to trust.” There is no cause to doubt that the Hemingses were indeed intelligent, but we should also consider what role their appearance and the knowledge of their genetic makeup may have played in his assessment of them. Randolph was likely influenced by the common view among whites that intermixture with white people eugenically improved black people, making the children from these unions smarter and more attractive than those of full African heritage. Under the circumstances, Randolph, and his grandfather, would have been inclined to see, credit, and encourage the talent they saw in men and women who looked more like themselves. That is one way prejudice works.

Like architecture, which can convey meaning as eloquently through the spaces left empty as the areas built over, Randolph’s statement about the Hemingses is illuminating for what it says (he gives a view of the family’s overall talent) and intriguing for what it does not say. Just what were those other unnamed reasons the slaves gave for the Hemings family’s ascendancy? Was it just that they were fair-skinned? Or was there something else? Although Randolph chose not to elaborate on this point, it is not too hard to figure out what he had in mind. The Hemingses were not only part white; their white “parts” came from the master’s family. Naturally, the other slaves at Monticello might have assumed that this counted for something, influencing the way they and others saw the Hemingses, and the way the family saw itself. It would be hard to look at a household filled with members of the same family and not come to the conclusion that their shared blood was why they were all there.

How did others enslaved at Monticello see the Hemingses? Thomas Jefferson Randolph provided one perspective. Among “the other slaves,” he said, the Hemingses’ role at Monticello was “a source of bitter jealousy.” The enslaved people down the mountain were watching and, evidently, weighing the Hemingses. Jeff Randolph may well have been right that the source of friction between Hemingses and non-Hemingses was jealousy. But couldn’t the “other slaves” have had concerns that Randolph would not likely have perceived? What about the fact that some Hemingses clearly identified with Jefferson and his family, sometimes displaying extreme loyalty to them? Did the other slaves find that grating? The Jefferson-Randolphs, after all, were keeping all members of the enslaved community—Hemingses and non-Hemingses alike—in bondage. Their “superior intelligence, capacity, and fidelity to trusts” were not saving the overwhelming majority of them from that fate. At least some of those enslaved at Monticello might view the Hemingses’ way of accommodating to their circumstances as problematic.

Or perhaps the friction was merely the result of the much discussed tension between slaves who worked in the fields and those who worked in the master’s house? Scholars have rightly cautioned against calling house slaves “privileged,” mainly because the term does not take into account the views of the enslaved. It just assumes that they would have thought spending their days around white people a desirable thing, that being “chosen” to be in proximity to white masters was a sign of good fortune. White slave owners may have thought so, but that was only their view.

It also assumes that the relative “easiness” of housework when compared with fieldwork dramatically outweighed all other considerations. While house slaves like the Hemingses may have generally been exempted from more physically challenging fieldwork, there were some advantages to being outside the constant eye view of white masters and mistresses. Enslaved people who worked away from the master’s house had greater personal autonomy and the chance to commune with one another in the manner they chose—they could more easily say what they wanted, the way they wanted. Every moment spent away from white masters and mistresses gave them the chance to fashion and maintain their own sense of identity in matters of family, religion, and other social practices. The things most real and important about slaves’ lives were the things most hidden from the white world. In the field, even with an overseer making rounds, slaves were largely free from too intimate involvement with the whims and personalities of their oppressors. For some, this could well have been a psychological relief more precious than the extra calories burned and effort expended in tending crops.

We must remember that, in the society in which the Hemingses existed, family was all. This was as true for blacks as for whites. Importantly, during the Hemingses’ time at Monticello, family at its most elemental level was about blood ties. The Hemingses’ situation vis-à-vis other slaves in their community was especially complicated because they were slaves in a household where they were genetically related both to one another and to those who held them in bondage. Because of that connection, the master of that household chose to treat them in a way that separated them from the rest of the enslaved population—for example, letting some of its members hire themselves out and keep their wages, exempting the women of the family from any hard labor, freeing only people from that family, giving certain of its males virtual free movement, and selecting them for special training as artisans. The master then chose a woman from the Hemings family, had children with her, and arranged for the freedom of that nuclear family. Any enslaved member of that community who knew the history of Monticello would have known that the only route to freedom (one traveled only infrequently) was the possession of Wayles, Jefferson, or Hemings blood. No one else had a chance. It is doubtful that other members of the community could have avoided seeing the Hemingses as different from themselves. It is also unlikely that members of the Hemings family could have avoided seeing themselves in something of a special light, even if the harsh reality of slavery might have served to check the tendency to see themselves as completely separate from other enslaved people. These and many other issues must be considered as we examine the Hemings family’s progress through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

History is to a great degree an imaginative enterprise; when writing it or reading it, we try to see the subjects in their time and space. Imagining requires some starting point of connection. Even though we acknowledge that the connections will not be perfect—we cannot really know exactly what it meant to be a Hemings at Monticello, or a Jefferson, for that matter—we have to reference what we know of human beings as we try to reconstruct and establish a context for their lives. Historians often warn against the danger of “essentializing” when making statements about people of the past—positing an elemental human nature that can be discerned and relied upon at all times and in all places. Warnings notwithstanding, there are, in fact, some elements of the human condition that have existed forever, transcending time and place. If there were none, and if historians did not try to connect to those elements (consciously or unconsciously), historical writing would be simply incomprehensible. Think of attempting to read a foreign language in a script you had never seen before. You could stare at the pages for an eternity, but without some point of commonality between the unknown script and something you already know—a connection—no matter how long you stared, you could never crack the code.

Therefore, we should not be afraid to call upon what we know in general about mothers, fathers, families, male-female relationships, power relationships, the contours of life in small closely knit communities, as we try to see the Hemingses in the context of their own time and place. This will require thinking of the family members in a way they were not thought of during their lives and, it must be said, during most of the period that Monticello has been the object of scholarly attention—as fully formed persons with innate worth and equal humanity that links them directly to us all, no matter what our race. I asked in an earlier work, “In what universe could the humanity, family integrity, and honor of slave owners count for more than the humanity, family integrity, and honor of slaves?” My answer was that we Americans have lived in that universe since the founding of the country, and have only recently begun the process of moving beyond its boundaries. I hope this work adds to the momentum of that journey.