The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (58 page)

Even though the Hemings brothers knew how to read and write, Jefferson preferred to communicate with them, and other members of their family, by sending word through others. It would have been just as easy for the person who was supposed to deliver an oral message face-to-face to have given the Hemingses a letter from Jefferson containing the same information, if he had wanted to write to them. The circumstances of Robert and James Hemings suggest that Jefferson’s preferences about this give a misleading view of his slaves’ capacities. One might be tempted to say that he simply did not want to correspond with black people, or to be seen corresponding with his slaves, through the same means he used to send letters to whites. His messages to the Hemings brothers were usually sent at times when he did not know where they were, and an intermediary had to both find them and deliver the message. There is a good chance that Jefferson’s white intermediaries might have felt demeaned by being asked to deliver letters to a black person. Relaying a verbal order from a master better maintained Virginia’s social and racial hierarchy than carrying a letter intended for an enslaved person. He did write to other blacks, most famously to the almanac author and mathematician Benjamin Banneker. But the acclaimed Banneker was a special case, and the two men had no expectation of a continuing relationship. In later years Jefferson did correspond with Robert and James’s younger brother John, who was literate, about work that he wanted to have done.
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As noted earlier, before he handed his duties as a chef off to his brother Peter, James Hemings compiled a very detailed list of the kitchen utensils at Monticello in clear and confident handwriting and spelling that showed a high degree of literacy, perhaps even above normal for that time. No one knows for whom the list was generated, but given that Peter would have been the one using the utensils and been responsible for keeping track of them, he probably knew how to read the list as well.
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While we know that Robert and James were literate and that Peter likely was too, we do not know about their other Wayles siblings, including their sister Sally. Her son Madison remembered asking his father’s grandchildren to teach him his letters, which may lead to an entirely reasonable inference that his mother did not know them.
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For if she had known, surely she would have taught her son. One could, of course, draw a similar inference about Robert and James Hemings in relationship to their sister and other siblings. It seems improbable that Sally Hemings’s two oldest “full” brothers, who lived in the same place as their siblings, would have known how to read and write and not conveyed any information about literacy to their younger siblings—not even to tell them how to recognize letters in the alphabet. Although it is clear that whites placed a greater emphasis on the education of boys than of girls, there is no evidence that African Americans had the same attitude about this matter. In fact, literacy seems to have been for everyone who could obtain it.

Sally Hemings was much younger than Robert and James, and they were away with Jefferson for periods of her childhood. But she and James lived closely together under extraordinary circumstances in France. They were under no apparent prohibition from Jefferson on reading and writing, and were not overly burdened with work or minute supervision, as James Hemings’s adventures with his French tutor, and Sally Hemings’s relatively open work schedule during large stretches of her time in Paris, reveal. If only to improve the quality of their personal association and chances of survival in the country where they thought of staying, James Hemings would have had a great incentive to teach his sister the alphabet, and at least enough of the rudiments of reading and writing to be able to read lists and follow written instructions. They would have needed to pool their every available talent or ability in order to work together to survive.

This is a very delicate business to consider from our vantage point for a number of reasons. We live in a time when parents in industrialized countries and striving Third World societies understand that sooner is always better than later when it comes to education, that there really is no time to waste in preparing children for literacy. The notion has become so ingrained as to be thought almost primal. Education is the central preoccupation of our lives because it is that dividing line, not the line between being a free person and a chattel, that determines whether one’s children will have good prospects in life rather than relatively poorer ones.

Without knowing Sally Hemings’s expectations about literacy, when and how it was to be obtained, and her degree of familiarity with it or sense of urgency about it in her children’s early lives, we can hardly say that her son’s comment proves that she could neither read nor write at any level—especially since Hemings did not say how young he was when he asked to be taught his letters, or describe the circumstances surrounding his approach to Jefferson’s grandchildren. He could easily have been a little boy anxious to identify with his white nieces and nephews, who were his age and going to a school that he knew he could never attend, but wanted to. Did he act on his curiosity before his mother, who undoubtedly had other critical things to teach him about the world that he was born into, thought to address this issue? Did her brothers, she, or other members of their family learn to read when they were six or seven or as teenagers? Great care must be taken with this because Hemings’s comment raises questions about more than just the state of his mother’s literacy and his relationship with his father. It goes to the very heart of the nature of the relations among the Hemings family and their understanding about their position in a slave society. There is every indication that they grasped the baleful position they had been born into, and knew that forces were actively working to keep them down. African Americans felt deeply about the denial of education to them. Literacy was a highly prized skill to be passed on, even if surreptitiously and even to people who were not in one’s family. The Hemings family was very close. Siblings named their children after one another. They bought their relatives’ freedom and supported one another in many ways. Yet a narrow reading of Madison Hemings’s statement suggests that there was no Hemings family tradition of sharing educational achievements with one another, as there was in many other enslaved families; for if there had been, he would not have had to ask members of his father’s white family instead of members of his mother’s African American family to teach him his letters.

One must analyze Hemings’s statement in light of what is known of enslaved people’s general attitude about obtaining literacy and, more specifically, important details in his own personal life. There were a number of potential vectors of literacy within the Hemings family. Beside Robert and James, John Hemings, to whom Madison was apprenticed at age twelve, and was certainly in his life on a daily basis before then, knew how to read and write, as did his wife, Priscilla. If the Jefferson family had not saved John Hemings’s letters, and all we had to consider was Madison Hemings’s recollections, we would assume that John Hemings did not know how to read and write, because if he had known, surely he would have taught his nephew/apprentice a skill that he needed to ply the trade that he was supposed to be teaching him. That, of course, would be a totally wrong assumption. Mary Hemings could read and write; she signed legal documents, and she and her children by Thomas Bell, Robert and Sally, in nearby Charlottesville kept in close contact with their family at Monticello. James Hemings was dead by the time Madison was born, but Robert did not die until 1819. He lived in Richmond, but he, too, kept in contact with his family on the mountain.

A more detailed discussion of the Hemings children’s relationship to the white Jeffersons will be left to a later chapter, but it is enough to say now that Madison Hemings’s placement of the responsibility for his literacy
solely
in the hands of the Jeffersons when there were multiple other members of the Hemings family (and other enslaved people on the plantation) who could have taught him his letters seems more an attempt to wrestle with his complicated relationship with his father than a precise statement about who around him was available to teach him to read. Judging by his preface to Hemings’s recollections, the man to whom he was speaking, S. F. Wetmore, was specifically interested in whether Jefferson had or had not contributed to Hemings’s education, and was deeply critical because he felt the statesman should have done more.
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It may never have occurred to him to consider that Hemings’s black relatives had either the ability or the responsibility for teaching the young Hemings to read. Given his mother’s family circumstances, and her personal history, it is more probable that Sally Hemings was literate at some basic level, understood her limitations, and felt it better to leave her children’s tuition to Jefferson’s grandchildren. There were distinct advantages to doing this. Not only were his grandchildren receiving rigorous formal training that could benefit her children, but encouraging her offspring’s association with the Randolph children might further cement a connection to them that could be helpful in the long run. Madison Hemings did not say who among his father’s grandchildren taught him, but he did name one of his children, Ellen Wayles, the same name as Jefferson’s eldest granddaughter.

I
N THOSE FIRST
days after James and Sally Hemings returned, there was much news for their family to share regarding all that had taken place over the preceding five years. One of the first things to talk about was that there were now more of them. Mary Hemings, Betty Brown, and Thenia and Critta Hemings had all given birth while their brother and sister were away. Their oldest sister, Mary, was living with Thomas Bell, a relative newcomer to the area, having arrived in Charlottesville in 1784. Mary Hemings had been leased to him in 1787. Although the birthdates of their children are unknown, their youngest, Sarah (Sally) Bell, married in 1802.
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This suggests that Hemings and Bell met sometime before she was leased to him; indeed that may have been the impetus for the transaction. While the Hemingses and Jefferson were still at Eppington, Jefferson wrote to William Short reporting the recent news about Charlottesville, mentioning new people who had come to the area and noting that “A Colo. Bell is there also, who is said to be a very good man.” He did not say who had told him about Bell, nor did he mention the context in which his new neighbor’s name came up. But Bell had leased Jefferson’s property—Mary Hemings. His name probably surfaced in a general discussion of Jefferson’s business affairs or a general recitation of where members of the Hemings family were all living at the time. Bell was also among the notable citizens of Albemarle County who gave a public welcome to Jefferson when he returned to Charlottesville.
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Bell and Jefferson had met before that official event. Whether or not he had heard about Bell and Mary Hemings before their first meeting, he certainly knew of their relationship afterward. On Christmas Day 1789, two days after he came home, Jefferson went into town to buy “snuffers” from Bell’s store.
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It is not known whether James and Sally Hemings were along to see their eldest sister when Jefferson first visited Bell’s store, although the holiday would have been the perfect occasion for a reunion with her after their years away from home. If they did not travel into Charlottesville with Jefferson, he would, as a simple matter of courtesy, have passed on to Mary news of her little brother and sister. Slavery, of course, mixed business with the personal in a very particular way. By the time of Jefferson’s first visit, Mary Hemings had borne two children with Bell, Robert and the above-mentioned Sally. Her offspring, naturally, were of interest to her younger siblings. They were of interest to Jefferson because he knew Mary Hemings both as a person and as his property. Her children were additions to his capital.

Bell’s store was attached to his home. So Jefferson undoubtedly saw Mary Hemings that day. Whether they spoke of it explicitly or not, it did not take much deduction on his part to figure out that she and Bell were lovers. There were new babies who had not yet been born when he left for France. One might say in our time that none of this was anyone’s business but the couple’s. In their time, it was
exactly
Jefferson’s business. He had a right to know what was going on in Mary Hemings’s life—from her as an item of his property, and from the man who had leased her, who had legal duties and obligations to him that arose from the leasehold agreement.

Jefferson’s discovery of what was going on between Hemings and Bell made no difference to him. In fact, it may have been part of the basis of their instant affinity. He and Bell, involved with two enslaved African American sisters, took an immediate liking to one another and formed a deep friendship that was at once social, political, and business oriented. Given their respective situations, they had much in common and little ability (or need) to make judgments about the other’s personal life. Bell has been a much neglected figure in Jefferson biographies. He truly was one of Jefferson’s closest friends. He dined at Monticello, and Jefferson visited his home. Within two years of their first meeting, Bell was clearly like family, and Jefferson enlisted him in his very controversial effort to build support for the National Gazette, the newspaper he hoped fervently would provide effective opposition to Hamilton’s economic and political program. Bell was a perfect Jeffersonian Republican. Neither a member of the gentry nor a yeoman farmer, he was what would be called a “middling” sort—a prosperous, intelligent, educated, and civic-minded man who had enough of a stake in society to make him want to be active in his community. He cared about what was going on, in his local government and in the new federal one, following both scenes and voicing his opinions. When he wrote or spoke to Jefferson about the political issues of the day, he offered the voice of the ordinary citizen, and Jefferson respected his opinions and came to trust him greatly. He enlisted him as his agent on business transactions and to sell the nails that enslaved boys made at Monticello. They socialized together, talked of quotidian things, including, no doubt, the ways—good and bad—of the sisters with whom each was living. Their connections to Mary and Sally Hemings gave their association deeper resonance, though not in a way that could ever be shared on paper.
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