The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (53 page)

Enslaved men who lived on the same plantation with their sisters, wives, and daughters who were raped had little choice but to continue in the company of the men who raped them. They weighed responding to one horrific event against the likelihood of provoking other, more extensive horrific events that could destroy their families even more thoroughly. That was one of the deepest and harshest realities of slave life. James Hemings could be excused if he visited Monticello to see the rest of his family and deemed it better for their well-being to swallow any pride and stop by and visit with his former master who had raped, and was continuing to rape, his sister. After the Philadelphia visits, Hemings did return to Monticello to work for Jefferson as a paid employee, for a time, and was thinking about taking Jefferson’s offer to be the White House chef just before his death.
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But no other Hemingses were in Philadelphia when he visited Jefferson after his emancipation. Going to see Jefferson was merely going to see Jefferson. There is no indication that the Hemings family would have suffered reprisals if Hemings had simply never bothered to call on him.

I
T IS, IN
part, the uncertainly about the precise origins of the Hemings and Jefferson relationship that makes it hard to accept the idea that they were emotionally attracted to one another. Even if working our way back to the Hôtel de Langeac brings us to a beginning that was not presumptively pristine, as we view his origins with his wife, we find enough signs from both Hemings and Jefferson (him far more particularly) that these two people were emotionally attached to one another, and there is no reason to suppose that they were not from the very beginning. Saying that works no fundamental change in the nature of American slavery, even if many choose to treat Hemings and Jefferson as symbols of the institution—the violation of an entire people by the system of slavery, the violation of countless black women—reenacted in the lives of these two human beings, who because of their fame are easy to use as stand-ins for those larger phenomena.

Whatever the notion that Hemings and Jefferson may have loved each other makes us think of them as individuals, the idea of their love has no power to change the basic reality of slavery’s essential inhumanity. For any who fear the effects of romanticizing the pair, the romance is not in saying that they may have loved one another. The romance is in thinking that it makes any difference if they did. Rhys Isaac, writing of Hemings and Jefferson (although the idea applies to Jefferson and Martha Wayles, too), has wisely cautioned, “We have to recognize that gender relations in past times and other cultures make ‘love,’ as we are inclined to idealize it, extremely problematic.”
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And how do we tend to “idealize it”? By demanding a great deal of the emotion, separating it out, and enshrining it above all others that move and direct the course of human affairs, viewing it as cure-all, able to end war, famine, disease—even beliefs in white supremacy. It is common to think of love as an always positive transformative force and, from our inevitably personal perspectives, transformative in just the ways we think are significant.

Love has been many things throughout history: the simple comfort of the familiar, having a person to know and being known by that person in return; a connection born of shared experiences, an irrational joy in another’s presence; a particular calming influence that one member of the couple may exert on the other, or that they both provide to one another. A combination of all these and myriad other things can go into making one person wish to stay tied to another. Anyone who is not in the couple—that is, everyone else in the world—will not understand precisely how or why it works for two people.

The most intimate of situations, the one least likely to be observed by others—sexual compatibility—can also be a form of love. But in our Western culture (and some others, to be fair) sex is considered, if not exactly dirty or shameful, a somewhat guilty pleasure that must always be separated from more exalted love. This is especially true when a couple, like Hemings and Jefferson, for reasons of race, status, or gender are not supposed to be together, as if partners who do not have the imprimatur of law, society, and custom could never feel the emotion of love for one another. The invariable charge against such pairs is that they are inauthentic per se, because they are bound together purely for sex, rather than love.

We may turn once again to “Old Man Eloquent,” John Quincy Adams, on
Othello
to make the point emphatically. After his earlier essay on the subject, mentioned in chapter 9, Adams confronted the issue of Desdemona’s character again in a review essay written in 1836 in which he explained more fully the source of his objections to her.

After noting that Shakespeare could not have intended to present Desdemona as an example of feminine virtue, because he has her “eloping in the dead of night to marry a thick-lipped wool-headed Moor,” Adams wrote further of the black and white pair,

In the end, the couple’s individual personal qualities, which Adams concedes are excellent (aside from Desdemona’s flaw in being able to become attracted to a person of another race), are totally irrelevant to the plausibility of their feelings for one another. The two could never connect on the basis of their mutually attractive innate human attributes. There was a barrier that could never be breached, and Adams makes clear what that barrier is when he intones, “I have said the moral of the tragedy is, that the intermarriage of black and white blood is a violation of the law of nature.”
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Even across the years, in other passages dripping with disgust, Adams’s turmoil and conviction fairly leap off the pages of his essay. He well knew that intermarriage between the races was not
actually
against the law of nature, because if “nature” had cared whether blacks and whites mixed their blood, “nature” would have fixed it so they could not: black and white people would not be able to have children together. They could and did, of course, so the locus of nature’s prohibition had to shift. Blacks and whites can have sex and produce children (a basic, biological function), but they can never experience together higher-order emotional responses; they can never love each other in a romantic way. Only a lower-order (animalistic) response—lust—can explain the lives of men and women who connect across the boundaries of race. Nature’s loophole that allowed for black and white procreation was to be closed by refusing to credit (and certainly not to dignify) interracial couples’ feelings for one another. Indeed, they and their feelings were to be subjected to extreme ridicule to discourage others from following their example. The statement about the inability of men and women of different races to love one another was (is) at its heart an expression of anxiety-driven aspiration rather than a description of reality.

Adams very openly grounded his belief in the impossibility of real love between Othello and Desdemona in his superstitions about race and the rules of human nature in a way that might make at least some modern readers uncomfortable. The fact is his views are not so different in practical effect from grounding the notion of the impossibility of love in inter-status and interracial contexts in superstitions about the power of law and social customs: that they operate (like Adams’s human nature) as irresistible forces that inevitably control individual sensibilities. When they do not, it is the result of deep perversion: something is morally (in Adams’s time) or psychologically (in our time) wrong with the people who transgress.

Neither view takes account of the almost infinite permutations of human personality and circumstances that make every person unique. Nor do they account for human beings’ great ability to rationalize behavior until it fits, at least in the privacy of their own minds, the rules of whatever social game is being played. “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man!” indeed.
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Both approaches to the question of authentic love—faith in a version of human nature, faith in the plenary power of law and social custom—are troubling because they are deterministic and, like all deterministic formulations about the ways of men and women in society and history, diminish the human spirit and virtually require ignoring contrary evidence and the role of contingency and subjectivity in the lives of people and societies. They are even more problematic because one suspects that they are invoked to achieve a particular end: control. The idea of authentic love, and wielding the power to say when that can legitimately exist for some people and not others, emerges as a tool (with a romance all its own) used to ratify some aspect of an existing social order, or to make sense of one that is perhaps too difficult to comprehend or merely deeply disturbing. What one cannot understand, or put into a suitable category, simply does not exist.

It is an empirical, not just an intuitive or romantic, fact that law and social mores have never been able to stamp out constitutive elements of the human personality. The American slave society in which Hemings and Jefferson lived, with its tremendous grant of power to one group over another, grossly distorted the distribution of human emotions. One encounters vastly more instances of the negative ones that helped the institution along—some from Jefferson’s own hand—than benign or positive ones that contradicted its basic tenets. Yet we would never expect law and even extreme social opprobrium to remove from a population jealousy, hatred, greed, sympathy, mirth, possessiveness—the entire palette of human emotions. If the shapers of law and social customs had that kind of power, social orders would stand forever. Cultures would never change. Very often the seeds of change are planted in the privacy of individual minds, homes, and bedrooms—any place where people retreat to escape from the demands of society’s rules and to take on personae that are more suited to their own needs than those the external community would have them adopt.

In the Marriage Act of 1753 in England, parts of which Jefferson tried without success to bring to Virginia as one of his proposals for legislative reforms, parents were given the right to void the marriages of their minor children. Jefferson had his own reasons for supporting the law, but the original drafters’ primary concern was that children might make matches that threatened the status of great families in the society. What if, one supporter asked, “‘a young Girl of fifteen, for instance, one of the Daughters of a gentleman, happening to fall in Love with her Father’s Butler’ would marry him rather than ‘her equal’; or that ‘a boy of sixteen, heir apparent to an Estate, whose Fancy is captivated with his Mother’s maid,’ would marry her in order to ‘gratify an impetuous passion.’”
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As this supporter of the law recognized, being in vastly different social classes did not mean that males and females could never fall in love with their social “inferiors” or “superiors,” for there was a deep and knowing understanding, no doubt born of familiarity with life and crises within English manor houses, about the ways of human beings when they were put in certain circumstances. Note the hypothetical’s pairing of the daughter of a gentleman with his butler, and son of the lady of the house with her maid, instead of imagining a cross-class liaison between people who would not have encountered one another in a household on a daily basis.

This commentator knew that for males and females, it was a simple matter of proximity and opportunity, and positive law had to step in sometimes to protect society (those at the top of the hierarchy, actually) from the all too predictable course of human nature. Societies can effectively shape how, when, and whether people express and act on certain emotions in public. They cannot decree that individuals not have them, nor can they control what individuals do behind closed doors. A gentleman’s daughter and his butler, or a lady’s son and her maid, might feel as deeply for one another as they wanted, but they should not be allowed to translate their feelings into publicly supported actions that might disrupt the social order. Benjamin Rush, Jefferson’s great friend and noted Philadelphia doctor, patriot, and signer of the Declaration of the Independence, understood the problem very well, and fretted about its operation in the United States. Anxious to maintain what he thought were the necessary “class divisions” in the emerging Republic, he pronounced it dangerous for men (the upper-class males with whom he was most concerned) to live alone; for these unmarried men, Rush said, were at great risk for crossing socially constructed barriers to form liaisons with women of lower classes. Sex, Dr. Rush believed, was a basic and natural part of life, but only legally established relationships could preserve it in its most wholesome form. He wrote, “While men live by themselves…they do not view washerwomen or oyster-wenches as washerwomen or oyster wenches, but simply as women.”
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Given this at once astute and banal observation, one would love to know what Rush truly thought upon hearing that his dear friend Jefferson, a longtime widower, had succumbed to the tendency that he outlined so plainly.