The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (38 page)

Because both of them were out of their places, Hemings and Jefferson had more good reason to
want
to talk to each other than they would have had in Virginia in a household with many layers of her older relatives between the two of them. When one is abroad, and past the initial thrill of burying oneself in a foreign culture, familiar faces, accents, and manners can be quite comforting, even if found in a person whom one might have virtually ignored at home. The teenage Hemings might not have had very much to say to Jefferson at Monticello. In France, however, he and her brother were her most familiar links to Virginia. Just by being together in a foreign land, all three had more to say to one another, certainly more interesting things, than if they had been at home. The quality and substance of their conversations had to have been different since they could not have centered on issues that grew out of their surrounding slave society, because they were not in one.

The accounts of many who knew him, enslaved and free, confirm that Jefferson was a veritable font of information, which he conveyed at a moment’s notice to any and all who asked for it—or did not. This impressed many. Isaac Jefferson, who portrayed him as the man to go to for answers, admired Jefferson’s “mighty head” tremendously. Not all were charmed. The supremely educated and cosmopolitan John Quincy Adams often found Jefferson’s disquisitions tiresome. There were altruistic reasons for Jefferson’s behavior. His desire to spread knowledge to others was a part of his unshakable belief in the benefits of progress; the more people knew, the better the world would eventually become. He took no proprietary interests in his ideas and thoughts, and did not believe others should either.
⁷

At the same time, there must also have been something personally gratifying (ego-enhancing) to Jefferson to be the person in the room who knew things, the one to whom others looked for answers, and whose intellect impressed people at all stations of life. His dealings with Isaac Jefferson show that he wanted to be that person, even for those who were not considered his social equals. It could not have been very hard for him to have impressed a fifteen-or sixteen-year-old girl, and there is no reason to suppose that he would not have been quite happy to do that. Sally Hemings, more like Isaac Jefferson than John Quincy Adams in her relationship to him, would have felt entirely comfortable looking to Jefferson on occasion to help sort out the new territory that she had to negotiate in Paris.

For his part, Jefferson enthusiastically welcomed contact with Americans, and his letters to family and friends and his attempt to re-create a Virginia garden at the Hôtel de Langeac betray hints of his homesickness.
⁸
In Hemings he had a late envoy from Virginia, his “country,” as he called it, who could talk to him about people and places he knew and had not seen for years. She also brought valuable information about his daughters’ lives at Eppington—both that of Polly, whom he had to get to know, and that of Lucy, whom he would never get to know. She was also another person who spoke English, a critical thing for a man who wrote and read French well, but was never at home speaking the language.

Then there is the simple matter that Jefferson very much liked attractive females, and Hemings was attractive. All of the women associated with him—his wife, Maria Cosway, and Sally Hemings—were thought exceptionally good-looking in their day, a criterion that evidently meant a lot to him. He loved beautiful things. An agreeable personality in a woman was important, but not quite enough for Jefferson. There is no portrait of her, but men of both races noted Hemings’s beauty, as well as that of her sisters and daughter.
⁹

For the world and time in which she lived, the African American Hemings had attributes associated with white standards of beauty. In addition to pronouncing her “very handsome,” a term used in those days to denote feminine beauty as well as masculine attractiveness, Isaac Jefferson described her as “mighty near white” with “straight hair down her back.”
¹⁰
Her son Madison had light gray eyes. A man well acquainted with her youngest son, Eston, who like all her children was genetically “whiter” than she, described him as “light bronze colored” with “a visible admixture of negro blood.”
¹¹
His brother Madison had a similar appearance. The Hemings brothers did not get those traits from their extremely fair-skinned, European-looking father, whose skin did not tan in the sun, but burned and peeled when he did not wear a hat. Eston Hemings’s wife, Julia, was said to have looked more like a white person than he. This suggests that Sally Hemings was a light-skinned, very obviously black woman—someone whose racial makeup could be immediately discerned upon looking at her—a “bright mulatto,” just as Isaac Jefferson described her.

In his
Notes on the State of Virginia
Jefferson pronounced white skin more aesthetically attractive than black skin because it enabled whites to blush and thus to display sincere emotions, “the expression of every passion,” which included the exchange of sentiment between males and females, as the blushing female is a staple representation in stories of courtship and love. He also offered “flowing hair” as a particularly important attribute of whites’ beauty. Jefferson knew that not every white person, and he was speaking really about females, had flowing hair and that people who were not “all” white could have it. Jefferson lived his entire life among black people, and was familiar enough with them to know that many African Americans, of varying degrees of skin color, from yellow to light bronzed, can blush. These were the effects of the racial intermixture that Jefferson said brought on the “improvement[s] in body and mind” of black people “in [their] first mixture with whites,” improvements that he said had been “observed by every one.”
¹²

Sally Hemings and her siblings were the products not of the “first mixture” of blacks and whites but of the second. This almost certainly accounted for the Jefferson family’s view that they were of “superior intellect” compared with their fellow slaves, who could have been just as intelligent or creative as the Hemingses but, lacking “white” blood, would never have been given as much credit for it. That was also why the African American Sally Hemings was light-skinned enough to blush and have long flowing hair.

There is more. In the passages in the
Notes
in which he casts doubt on blacks’ equal intellectual capacity, Jefferson expressed his greatest confidence in blacks, besides his opinion that they had better rhythm than whites, in matters of the heart stating with great certainty that nature had done them “justice” in that department. These formulations about people of African origin—skepticism of their equal intellectual capacity and certainty about the quality of their hearts—were ideas from which he apparently never wavered. According to one visitor to Monticello late in Jefferson’s life, he echoed these sentiments, saying that he had not yet found a true “genius” among blacks, but believed that they had the “best hearts of any people in the world.”
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Sally Hemings, then, combined what Jefferson regarded as the best in white people with what he regarded as the best in black people, an evidently appealing blend of the head and the heart.

The men testifying to Hemings’s attractiveness saw her when she was older. The teenager at the Hôtel de Langeac had not yet given birth to seven children, or experienced the inevitable results of gravity, and may well have been absolutely stunning to look at. Talking to her would have been more of a pleasure for Jefferson than a chore, whether there was any immediate sexual frisson or not. Males and females, even of different rank and race, engage in light banter that acknowledges the other’s gender. That is one of the ways that relationships—licit and illicit—are formed. Sometimes male-female small talk rises to the level of flirting, especially when no one else is around. Male-female banter and flirting are usually totally meaningless and innocent—empty, stylized—perhaps even biologically influenced, faux mating rituals. They can, however, take on a wholly different import when external constraints are loosened, that is, when people ignore the concept of inappropriateness.

Though Patsy and Polly were away at school, Hemings and Jefferson did not have the Hôtel de Langeac to themselves. Their household included her brother, the other servants, and the many people who enjoyed Jefferson’s hospitality there on a periodic basis. He had come to Paris very willing to share quarters with others who needed a place to stay, though of the people who had started out living with him in those early days, only William Short remained by the time Sally Hemings arrived.
¹⁴
Though Hemings and Jefferson shared space with others, the pair need not have conducted themselves in ways that drew attention, and the spacious house, with its “ingenious arrangement of passageways,” was specifically designed to protect the privacy of its residents. Jefferson’s easy and sociable personality was undoubtedly trained on everyone in the household, Hemings included. Noticing that he reacted to her in a positive way—and she to him, for that matter—would not have given immediate cause to think that they were, or were going to be, having a sexual relationship.

If anyone in the household
did
suspect something, it would not have occasioned writing down what they suspected or even what they knew. It is hard to imagine a French servant, particularly the one most closely associated with Jefferson, Adrien Petit, being shocked at the idea that a man—an unmarried man at that—had taken a mistress. Having no woman in his life might have seemed more bizarre. The adage is true: “No man is a hero to his valet.” A valet’s job, if he is doing it the right way, is
not
to be shocked. As for the rest of the servants—gardener, coachman,
garçon de cuisine
—it is unlikely that they would have regarded it as unusual or have acted as impediments. If Jefferson paid their salary on time, which he always did, making him an anomaly in that society, and was good and decent otherwise, his affair with a chambermaid would have been just one more example of the kinds of things that members of the servant class knew about their masters—an occasion for gossip, but not one for judgment or memorializing. It is also unclear how many of Jefferson’s servants were twenty-four-hour presences at his residence. While the higher-level servants almost certainly lived there, the “lower”-level ones, like the gardener and
frotteur
, probably did not.

Other people lived at the Hôtel de Langeac for varying lengths of time—for example, the American painter John Trumbull, famous for his rendition of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Based in London in the 1780s, Trumbull met Jefferson when he came to the city in 1785. Trumbull first stayed at the Hôtel de Langeac in 1786, before Sally Hemings arrived. He made a return visit in December of 1787 and remained there until February 1788. Near the end of the Hemingses’s stay in France, he came back to Paris and was able to see his friend Jefferson off on what everyone thought would be a temporary visit home. Trumbull met both James and Sally Hemings.
¹⁵

Of course, William Short had used the Hôtel de Langeac as his primary residence throughout all of Jefferson’s time there. He was well familiar with Hemings and her family even before he came to Paris. He did not, however, have a presence at the mansion that would have inhibited a liaison between Hemings and Jefferson, assuming anyone’s presence would have mattered. As was noted in chapter 12, Short effectively divided his time between Paris and Saint-Germain—a town then fifteen miles outside of Paris. Between 1785 and 1788, he made almost monthly visits there, staying for extended stretches of time with the Royers. In September 1788 he left Paris for an eight-month tour through Europe, returning to the city in the second week of May 1789. Just a week later he headed straight for Saint-Germain to visit his beloved Lilite. Throughout all the time that Sally Hemings was in Paris, there were many, quite long periods of time (months), when Short was not at the Hôtel de Langeac with her and Jefferson at all.
¹⁶

Both Trumbull and Short venerated Jefferson. If they suspected or knew about Hemings, they had no incentive to make a written record of whatever they knew. Men often keep the secrets of their male friends, especially where women are involved, hoping the favor will be returned, if needed. Short knew very well from his own experiences how valuable it was to have others be sympathetic about one’s socially unacceptable liaisons. If he knew about Hemings and Jefferson, his infatuation with Lilite Royer, taking place at the same time, left him little room to make judgments about his mentor. All the while Short was visiting the married Lilite, he wrote and spoke to his friends of his deep love for her. It is unclear what he ultimately hoped to gain by carrying on in this way, but the besotted American evidently could not help himself. What could he, doggedly acting the role of the “extra man” in Lilite’s marriage just to remain close to her, reasonably have said about Jefferson and his teenager? Even after giving up on Lilite after 1789, Short moved on to Rosalie, the young wife of the duc de La Rochefoucauld with whom he lived without marriage for a number of years. Nothing about Short’s life suggests he was a moralizer on sexual matters. Jefferson’s “protégé” was not at all put off by the unconventional.

We know of Lilite Royer only because Short
himself
could not resist writing to a few friends about her, always hiding her identity, but writing about her nevertheless. One correspondent, a Virginian, Preeson Bowdoin, who was also in France at the time, promised Short, “Every thing you have said, or may say, respecting the Belle of St. Germain, you may rest assured, shall remain a profound secret. Yes, I have been too often a Lover myself not to know the value of such a confidance.”
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Howard Rice has suggested that Jefferson knew about Short and Lilite, and it made him uneasy. Jefferson knew where and with whom Short was living. If the sensitive mentor was at all perceptive about the demeanor and attitudes of his “adoptive son,”
¹⁸
he figured out that something more than the prospect of learning and keeping up his French kept drawing the young man back to the countryside even after he had made it clear to him that he wanted him to spend more time in Paris.
¹⁹
Yet Jefferson apparently never wrote to his friends about anything that he suspected or knew about the reason for Short’s intense attraction to Saint-Germain.