Lies My Blogger Told Me- one that went missing, part 3
Selective memory brought me back to this one. Two and a half years ago, I finished reading The Hemingses of Monticello. Sally Hemings is a monumentally important historical figure in the collective conscience of the United States, representing those whose contributions are overlooked and even denied, whose lives were treated as commodities, and whose languages, religions, personal identities, and family units were each treated as- and feared as- potential centers of resistance.From January 26, 2016...
The Hemingses- A Book Report
Annette Gordon-Reed’s 2008 book “The Hemingses of Monticello” is simply the best non-fiction book I have ever read. Its jacket in paperback advertises it as a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award winner, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, but I was only vaguely aware of its existence until a couple months ago-- that an African-American historian had written a notable book, first, on the vastly underexplored social and sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and the much younger slave woman, Sarah “Sally” Hemings, that he owned as property and that was also the half-sister of his wife, and second, that the historian had followed up that tome with this more expansive biography of several generations of the Hemings family residing in Colonial Virginia.
What separates this book from other history texts is the extraordinary care and detail taken by Gordon-Reed to acknowledge what we have never been told, and to reconstruct historical records that are incomplete and often unreliable. Her book is endlessly thorough in exploring what it is about the relationships between the author of the Declaration of Independence and members of the Hemings family we can fairly assume to be true, and what we are left to speculate about. The central historical figure of the story is Sally, whose thoughts and actions have only been referred to peripherally until modern times, and indeed, whose humanity was not even acknowledged during her lifetime, having lived the totality of her life before the Emancipation Proclamation.
The author writes from the heretofore-ignored perspective of the utterly powerless. She’s forced to ferret out the actual details from historical documents that were written from the vantage point of persons that supported a doctrine of white supremacy. In the case of this family, the immediate perpetrator of their oppression, and many others they came into contact with, are considered giants in the nation’s history, treated by many still in fact to be akin to deities, growing in myth with the passing of time. The exploration of the lives of the Hemingses becomes essential because the men and women they slaved for lived such a well-documented life, and that allows us to search for truths in the margins.
Take for example, the details of Sally Hemings’ arrival in Paris at the age of 14 in 1787. The purpose of her sea voyage, as set by Jefferson, was to provide accompaniment for his daughter, Polly. The letters back and forth between Jefferson and his Virginia plantation, Monticello, address, not surprisingly, only the topic of Polly, but Gordon-Reed is concerned with the trip from Sally’s perspective. What would expectations have been for her? How would social propriety have been different for Sally than for Polly? The author examines how Sally is perceived by others, notably Abigail Adams, wife of John, who is living in London at the time, and receives the two girls as they are en route to France.
Abigail Adams would write to Jefferson: “The old nurse whom you expected to have attended her [Polly], was sick and unable to come. She has a Girl of about 15 or 16 with her, the Sister of the Servant you have with you [Sally’s brother, James]… The Girl who is with her is quite a child, and Captain Ramsey is of opinion will be of so little Service that he had better carry her back with him. But of this you will be a judge. She seems fond of the child and appears good naturd… The Girl she has with her, wants more care than the child, and is wholly incapable of looking properly after her, without some superiour to direct her. As both Miss Jefferson and the maid had cloaths only proper for the sea, I have purchased and made up for them, such things as I should have done had they been my own…”
Gordon-Reed impressively explores this letter from every possible angle, the account, as it is, from a privileged adult white woman about an African-American slave girl. She sections that Adams is, firstly, wrong about Sally’s age, thinking the girl to be two years older than she actually is, and therefore, believing her to be less emotionally or socially mature. The institution of slavery was also one defined in part by a hyper-paternalism so we must read also through that lens. Conflicting passages from Adams would suggest that Polly Jefferson was the one that was deeply immature, but the reverse is true in this letter to her father. Gordon-Reed explores other evidence known about Adams’ views on race, reminding modern readers that the Adams family’s well-known anti-slavery position did not mean they were not racists. She publishes text of revealing thoughts Abigail put down on paper later in life critiquing Shakespeare’s Othello-- "Who can sympathize with the love of Desdemona? The great moral lesson of the tragedy... is that black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the law of Nature."
Adams never refers to Sally by name in the letter to Jefferson. Remember that, in the United States, Sally was legally a non-person. Also, and this may have caught your eye in the text, as it did Gordon-Reed’s, what is “Captain Ramsey’s” motivation in proposing immediate return transportation for Sally? If this proposition is being accurately conveyed, why is the sailor suggesting to a third-party his opinion that Hemings will be of “so little Service” to the Jeffersons that she should be returned right away to the United States, and under his protection? The author doesn’t say so in so many words, but I will-- the implication of the offer is pretty gross. For Sally, the voyage would have been the hardest part. Once the girls have arrived in Paris, she could easily perform the same domestic duties she’s been performing in Virginia.
All of the historical records regarding Sally Hemings, early to late in her life, convey that she was observed-- by white, black, or biracial acquaintances universally-- to be physically attractive. Gordon-Reed is interested not only in that revealing comment by a peripheral character, but in Adams’ relaying of it. Needless to say, it would be totally unacceptable, in that time, for a ship captain to suggest to a Southern gentleman planter that a white girl from his household be returned to a separate continent in his custody-- and a lady at the very top of the social hierarchy, as Adams was, would never conceive of endorsing such a plan. There was a reason, after all, that everybody agreed at the outset that Polly should have a travel mate.
While Ramsey’s designs, if true, were certainly shaded by Hemings’ physical attractiveness, Adams was likely just as affected by Sally’s appearance in her motivation. She certainly knew also of the widower Jefferson’s reputation with the ladies, and the fact that there was a full staff of servants at Jefferson’s hotel residence in Paris, and Hemings would not even be asked to be the primary caregiver for Polly. Abigail Adams, therefore, comes off quite passive-aggressive in her correspondence. As Gordon-Reed points out, it would actually be insensitive to Polly to remove her from the presence of a girl almost exactly her age, whom she has known all of her life (who indeed is also her aunt), in a foreign country with a predominately foreign tongue, that comes from the same mountain community in Virginia and now shares the same life experience of cultural re-location. With both of Jefferson’s Paris-residing daughters bound for boarding school, is Adams’ actually concerned about the propriety of Hemings living in a small hotel apartment with Jefferson? And if so, is she genuinely concerned with Hemings’ well-being, or with Jefferson’s reputation in Europe and at home in the infant republic, or both? For sure, we should no better than to simply take Adams' written words at face value, yet that's exactly the type of thing historians did for decades.
Writing a history about largely-undocumented people, and from an unexplored perspective cannot be easy. This is not copy and paste stuff. But laying open hidden bits of enlightenment from ancient evidence must be very gratifying for a writer, and the dissection of such is a blast to read. What Gordon-Reed is doing is truly re-writing the American historical record, and doing so in the best sense of that phrase. She’s providing a correction to a story that is monumentally significant in the narrative of the United States. It's the type of achievement for which the Pulitzer Prize should be given.
Even though there are countless texts from Jefferson describing his personal life, and countless more by others regarding Jefferson, it seems that the early American statesman made it the highest priority of his life to hide from his political enemies and the world the fact that he was basically living as a married man with a Negro woman after the death of his wife. Though we’d very much like to, sexual relationships between slave and master cannot be boiled down to just a story of rape. At the macro level, we can do it-- Sally could not give her sexual consent to Thomas Jefferson because, as reinforced by the law of the time, he didn’t need it. She was chattel. (For that matter, he also couldn't marry her, for the state would not recognize it.) His exasperating failure during his life-- and then upon his death-- to free all of his slaves and to put the principles of the Declaration of Independence at work in his own life make our story endlessly more fascinating.
It does an injustice to history to say that all of these slave/slaveholder sexual relationships were the same. Sally’s individualism cannot be sacrificed for the purpose of having her serve as representative of all other relationships, some of which, I promise, were vastly more stomach-turning than this one. Within none of the historical accounts does Jefferson come off as a man that felt he could rape black women with impunity (though, again, legally he could as long as they were his possession) and he did not exercise his power the way others did. By the same account, it cannot be demanded of Sally by historians that she attempt to violently resist or kill her master, as other black women did, to prove to latter-day observers that she had not given her consent.
What Gordon-Reed arrives at on this subject is that, where man meets woman, black meets white, and slave meets master, some significant parsing needs to be done to get to the most precise truths of these people. And even within that construct, a Thomas Jefferson, a Sally Hemings, an Annette Gordon-Reed, or a Chris Moeller is not the same person today that he or she was yesterday, will be tomorrow. In the author’s lively turn of phrase, “Not all of anyone ever always does anything.”
Where does that leave us? These people lived in a time that was almost unfathomably different than the time we live in today. Not only is it difficult to comprehend the concept of humans as property, but we’re thankfully far out of step with their ideas on the inequality of the sexes and the age-appropriateness of sexual relationships. I most definitely do not write that to excuse the behavior of Thomas Jefferson. Abolitionists were alive and active, even in Virginia, at that time (and they were densely-populated in the locales of Paris, where Jefferson served as ambassador, and Philadelphia, where he served as President). Examples of Jefferson's writing reveal that he was aware of his own moral deficiencies on the subject, even if he had a hard time confronting them with honesty. Contrasting Jefferson with the Adamses is an interesting exercise as Jefferson was a slaveholder, yet had biracial people as his closest confidantes-- not only Sally but her brothers, and men that he freed as slaves later that he referred to for years as "friends." The Adamses were opposed to slavery, yet clearly held more socially-acceptable beliefs at the time (and less socially-acceptable today) about the importance of keeping the white race pure.
Gordon-Reed writes of the probability that Sally enjoyed a certain measure of contentedness in her relationship with Jefferson. The evidence suggests that he tried hard in his attempts to woo her, and was too accommodating a personality to have been comfortable bedding her against her will. He shopped extravagantly for her in Paris. (One recorded spree translates to a thousand dollars in today's money.) She was already pregnant with his child when they left Paris (she would bear six of his children), and according to one of their sons years later, Jefferson had to agree to free their future children as each reached the age of 21 in order to convince her to return to Virginia when she could have lived in France as a free person. (Hemings had some leverage at this one and only juncture of her life as Jefferson never registered his slaves in Paris, and stood to lose them if discovered by the authorities.) Writes the author, “The world sent (Sally) a very definite and hard message about enslavement at the same time as it conveyed another powerful message about what was to be her role in life as a woman-- partner to a man and a mother. Those roles were tenuous because the law did not protect her in either of them. They were not, however, meaningless to her."
Sally could have been treated well by Jefferson in private, even lived in love with him, but he could not acknowledge her in public. He could have set his slaves free even during the course of his life, but his obsession with his historical legacy and the financial situation of his white family claimed higher priorities. The Hemingses lived in the shadow of an extraordinarily important-- and extraordinarily flawed-- man. They were members of a population that was incalculably oppressed and dispossessed, collectively tortured, and almost entirely unrealized each as individuals. A close relationship with the third President of the United States did not shield any of them from that. Our story spins almost out of comprehension when we consider that Thomas Jefferson had this large family that consisted of in-laws, cousins, children, and a life partner (of some definition) that were also his property, and even as I continue to write this report I feel the onerous weight of the topic upon a modern consciousness, and the very real danger of being misunderstood, or writing in an incomplete fashion. The topic is safe instead in the hands of Annette Gordon-Reed. You can borrow the book, but I encourage you to buy your own.
posted by CM @ 8:50 PM
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