The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (33 page)

None of this required great effort on the young girl’s part, and there was ample opportunity for “people watching” on a scene that changed each day. Carriage rides with Jefferson and his daughters, or even on her journey to and from the Suttons’ inoculation house outside Paris, brought a new world to her. Most important of all, none of these rich and enlightening visual experiences required having any money or special social status; enslaved and free, black and white, could look upon the products of French civilization and be impressed, disquieted, stunned, or simply moved. And while her brother had been in the city long enough to take his experience somewhat for granted, Sally Hemings probably had not. She was there just long enough to get comfortable and to remain excited about all that she was seeing and learning.

One of the things Hemings learned fairly early on was how it felt to receive pay for one’s work. In January of 1788 she received her first recorded wages—twenty-four livres, plus an additional twelve as a New Year’s tip.
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She was paid the same amount as James Hemings, in his very important role as chef de cuisine. One can only surmise that Jefferson had not thought things through, for this was a little unfair to James. There is a probable answer to the anomaly. She received no recorded pay in February, either because she did no work or because Jefferson made an adjustment for the seemingly inappropriate January payment, thus spreading the twenty-four livres over two months. He then left on a seven-week tour of northern Europe at the very beginning of March. Hemings did not receive pay again until November of the same year; when she did, the wage was half that of her brother, Jefferson having concluded that this was the appropriate rate for her. Working women of that time in France typically received half the pay of men, even when they did the same job. Twelve livres was also the amount Jefferson gave to his daughter Patsy as an allowance for most of her time in France. Despite the cut, Hemings’s salary of twelve livres per month was actually well above that of the average female live-in servant in Paris.
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It has been suggested that Sally Hemings was apprenticed during the months when she received no salary and that this accounts for the absence of payments to her during certain periods of her stay in Paris.
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There is, however, no evidence for that, and there almost certainly would have been, had this actually happened. Jefferson’s memorandum books show no record of payment for Hemings to be apprenticed to anyone for the fifteen months that she received no wages. No artisan would have trained her for that amount of time for no pay, and may not have been able to in a Paris dominated by trade guilds. And though he did from time to time fail to record purchases or expenses, Jefferson would have at some point recorded so extensive an ongoing obligation.

Having an informal status did not mean that Hemings was not expected to help out around the house. There surely were many times when she could run errands for her brother or assist him when he had to prepare meals for larger than normal dinner parties. She also had a skill—sewing—that could be put to immediate use without Jefferson’s thinking to put her on a fixed salary for doing it. He viewed sewing as one of the foundations of a woman’s domestic life and advised his daughters that resort to “the needle” would be necessary for the smooth running of their households once they became married women, providing vital services to their families even as it relieved their own ennui.
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In fact, Jefferson believed that sewing was even better for women than reading. In a circumstance where other essential jobs at the residence were already taken care of, it would be natural for him to turn to that most basic task performed by plantation women and girls, upper and lower class, white and black, alike.

Sewing and mending clothing were skills that were in perpetual use during Hemings’s time. Jefferson certainly had someone to perform those tasks before she arrived, but it would have been a simple matter to turn any extra mending that needed to be done over to Hemings without thinking to make this into a formal daily job for which she would be paid regularly. The times when Hemings had no set job in Paris fore-shadow what was to come at Monticello. When Jefferson was away for long stretches during his public life, and his daughters were married and moved away, the Hemings women had nothing to do, and that did not bother Jefferson. When he was president, he declined to purchase a female slave for Monticello because, he said, he already had too many house servants in “idleness,” but he made no move to employ them. He told his overseer not to give them anything to do, and he leased out other slaves, but not Sally Hemings and her female relatives.
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Still, Hemings’s return to regularly paid status during the latter part of 1788 is intriguing. Petit was in charge of the household servants, paying them wages with the money Jefferson gave him for that purpose. There are no indications from either him or Jefferson what her job was. As is so often true with Jefferson, in the absence of a direct statement of why he did something, information from other sources (sometimes documents he created for other reasons) clarify an opaque situation. The pay scale of French servants in this period, where Hemings’s salary fit on that scale, and her later role at Monticello provide a good answer to the question of what her job was in Paris. Jefferson paid all of his servants the going rate, actually a little above it, for their designated jobs. He evidently consulted people about what a maître d’ hôtel or a valet de chambre, for example, should receive in the way of wages. When he began to pay Sally Hemings, he paid her at the rate of the highest-level female
serviteur
within a French household, which would be a cook or a
femme de chambre
.
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Her brother was the chef, so there was no other role for her, beside
femme de chambre
, that merited so high a rate of pay—but, whose chamber?

Hemings did not get paid twelve livres per month simply to be the
femme de chambre
to Patsy and Polly when they came home on Sundays, which they had been doing ever since she and Polly had arrived in Paris and for which Hemings had not been paid. The evidence indicates that it was at the Hôtel de Langeac that Hemings began to act in what would be her roles as an adult at Monticello: chambermaid to Jefferson, a seamstress doing “light sewing”
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for the household, and helping out Patsy and Polly as they needed. Jefferson never had a designated housekeeper at the Hôtel de Langeac. One of his servants, presumably the porter, was responsible for the upkeep of the place, doing the heavy lifting and cleaning. The luxury of having Hemings arrive as an extra servant—a female servant at that—lay in her ability to efficiently manage his personal belongings. Who better to take care of his wardrobe and linens than a person who knew how to mend clothing and other items if required? The even greater efficiency was that she could, as he apparently thought she would, continue in this capacity once they returned home. Just as Jefferson intended it to be for her brother, the Hôtel de Langeac was a training ground for Sally Hemings’s life at Monticello.

Knowing Hemings’s most likely job, however, does not explain why her formal employment suddenly returned in November. Given their later lives, one immediately wonders whether the resumption of her regular employment marks the time when Jefferson became more seriously interested in her or, if not, when their relationship actually began. Did she become his permanent
femme de chambre
because she was already his mistress and this role provided an excuse for her to be in his rooms, was he merely thinking of having her as a mistress and set up circumstances that would put them in close contact, or did he become seriously interested in her only after having encountered her daily in the intimate setting of his living quarters? Liaisons between masters and chambermaids, enslaved and not, have been prevalent enough in all ages to be the stuff of cliché. In the eighteenth-century France of Hemings and Jefferson, some men refused to marry women who had been
femmes de chambre
to males, knowing what could happen when unrelated men and women come into contact with one another in the man’s private chamber.
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The woman, under the power of the master, could be sexually violated or abused, or the man and woman, interacting with each other in this very intimate and suggestive setting, could develop a mutual attraction. While an evolving relationship growing out of the cumulative effect of daily interactions would not explain what led Jefferson to give Hemings a regular job that November, it is more likely what happened. She had been paid wages once before without any reason to think that it was the result of any sexual interaction between them, and her wages ceased for eight months.

The feeling of being paid for her work, in a place where she considered herself to be a free person, could only have been empowering to Sally Hemings. For the first time in her life, she had something that belonged to her that she had worked for. Work, and payment for it, tends to foster a sense of independence and encourages thoughts about the future. Writing of Harriet Jacobs, Virginia Cope has noted that Jacobs’s “initial act of freedom consist[ed] of walking into a Philadelphia shop and making a purchase,”
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a moment of supreme importance to one who had lived as an item of property and could now confound her status by purchasing her own. The moment riveted Jacobs. Even though she had not worked for the money, which she used to buy gloves and veils to help shield her from the prying eyes of slave catchers, Jacobs’s participation in the market transformed her sense of self.

Hemings, working for a set salary, was in an even greater position than Jacobs to feel the effects of having money and the ability to transact business. There were now new things to consider about the way she lived. She could decide to save or to spend—thinking of what to spend her money on or what she might be saving for—all this in a society that offered a dizzying array of choices about how, when, and whether to become a consumer. Any money she did not save she could spend on clothing or use to go with her brother to museums, or to the many low-cost theaters that were cropping up to serve lower-class patrons—there was no Jim Crow in eighteenth-century Paris. She could give charity to those who had no money, or buy gifts for people back home. Paris, unlike Virginia, provided a world outside her own thoughts that was right at hand to strengthen her powers of imagination. The people who saw her would have had no reason to doubt that she was anything other than a free person of color, confirming the very different and expanded options open to her in this new place. With no suffocating community ethos upholding her enslavement, Sally Hemings, like Jefferson, was able to breathe the air of liberal eighteenth-century Paris with “perfect satisfaction.”

Having a thing in hand almost naturally raises expectations about getting other things. Perhaps Hemings might receive a raise, or if she did work for others, she might be paid more, and someday she might even be able to work for herself. People dream, despite whatever supposed realties may be before them, and dreamers were all around both Hemingses, their new cohort in Paris—their fellow French servants. The experience of managing their own money caused many among their number in ancien régime France to think of their jobs as a launching pad to better things. They wanted their own businesses or situations that would take them from under the immediate thumb of a master, and their aspirations ranged from the grandiose, and nearly unachievable, to mundane wishes that were actually within their grasp. For the grandiose, the West Indies held a special allure as a place to go to make fortunes. A number of servants, spurred by stories about the incredible turns of luck of a minuscule number of people, saved their money with the idea of going to the French colonies and becoming wealthy planters. Cooks with far less impressive training than James Hemings placed advertisements in newspapers offering their services to families traveling to the islands, hoping to break away at some point and buy their own plantations. That this actually happened on occasion no doubt fueled these aspirations, even though the rarity of the occasions suggested how unlikely an outcome this really was.
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At the other end of the spectrum were the more easily achievable dreams—dreams of being an innkeeper, of having a modest market stall to sell fruits and vegetables. A number of freed slaves took this route. Although the majority of them remained in service, male former slaves in Paris were in many occupations. The historian Pierre Boulle has found that they tended more than their female counterparts to work in the homes of aristocrats, becoming maîtres d’hôtel and valets de chambre. But they also worked as carpenters, hairdressers, and tailors, among other things. James Hemings with his exquisite training in France, and his years of service to Jefferson, was well positioned to take his place as a chef in an upper-class household. Young female former slaves tended to work in the clothing industry, as seamstresses, though some of them did become attached to upper-class households as
femmes de chambre
. One suspects that the brother and sister would have been quite attractive as a pair to prospective employers.
Femmes de chambre
and seamstresses, young women in Sally Hemings’s occupations, longed to become the proprietors of their own dress shops. A two-year apprenticeship in dressmaking that would prepare young women for that could be had for 200 livres, a sum that neither James nor Sally Hemings, the former being paid 288 livres per year, the latter 144, would have thought out of their reach if they worked hard enough, pooled their resources, and saved their money.
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These dreams of life out of service were not specific to any culture, race, or country. When their older brother, Robert, was emancipated in the 1790s, he left behind his life as a servant, as soon as he was able, to open his own fruit and vegetable stand and hauling business in Richmond. He struggled, but his labor was his own.
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