Sarah Hemings

Imagined portrait of Sarah Hemings

As a 14-year-old girl, Sarah Hemings was sent with Thomas Jefferson’s younger daughter Maria to France. Sarah was the enslaved half-sister of Jefferson's wife Martha who had recently died. In Paris, Sarah learned to speak French and Jefferson bought her dresses so that she could accompany his daughters to parties. He also paid for her to be quarantined and inoculated against smallpox. Sarah enjoyed the lavish life she lived in the Jefferson household at the edge of the Champs Elysées and told her children stories about it.

In France, Sarah and her brother James (who was training to be a French chef de cusine) were technically free. They could have stayed and remained free. According to Madison Hemings, her son, Sarah used this knowledge to bargain with Jefferson when he was called back to the United States. In an interview conducted in 1873, Madison Hemings says, “To induce her to return with him, Jefferson promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia.” She was pregnant by Jefferson at the time.

After returning to Monticello in 1790, Sarah Hemings no longer appears in the obsessive records Jefferson kept of his accounts. In a comprehensive history of the Hemings family, The Hemingses of Monticello [2008], Annette Gordon-Reed unearths much about this unusual family, all descendants of Elizabeth Hemings, a slave woman. Sarah is seen to be Jefferson’s concubine, though no one will talk about it, least of all Jefferson.

Sarah’s first child dies at birth and her second did not live long. She remained at Monticello, surrounded by other members of her family who were treated with particular benevolence by Jefferson. Her brothers took part in Jefferson’s political life, living with him in Philadelphia, New York and finally Washington. Jefferson returned to Monticello as often as he could. Sarah’s work was to mend, sew and take care of his personal belongings, as well as care for her children, born into slavery as their status in Virginia legally followed that of their mother.

Jefferson kept Sarah part of his private life, but their relationship was exposed to the public by James Callender in a Richmond newspaper in the middle of Jefferson’s first term as president. She was called “Dusky Sally,” and other names, but none of it changed Jefferson’s relationship to her and her family, and he was elected to a second term as president, despite the innuendo. Sarah’s last child was born in 1808, just as Jefferson was about to leave the presidency and retire to his mountain.

After his death in 1826, Jefferson’s debts were too much for his daughter Martha to bear. Monticello was sold, along with most of his slaves. Before his death Jefferson did free his four children by Sarah: the first two, Beverley and Harriet, slipped away to Ohio to live as white people (they were 7/8^th white) and the last two, Madison and Eston, were noted in his will. Sarah Hemings was informally freed by Martha, Jefferson’s daughter, and she lived the rest of her life in Charlottesville with her son.

As Gordon-Reed says, “Hemings and Jefferson lived in a world obsessed with family connections. Kinship ties were enormously important to enslaved people who tried hard to defend them against the depredations of slavery. Blood and family were important to white Virginians as well, but they added the component of racism to the equation.” Gordon-Reed details the benevolent society Jefferson tried to build on his mountain, noting that no matter his kindness, and the Hemings family’s reciprocal care for him, it was still based on master and slave relations.

“The few reports of Sally Hemings give the impression of a sweet and reasonable person,” says Gordon-Reed. Her story, as told by her descendants, is of someone who worked within the confines of her situation while loving Thomas Jefferson. It was clear she lived in a monogamous relationship to him. All of her children resembled him. As an older person, she handed down a few of his possessions, a pair of spectacles, an ink bottle and a shoe buckle, as well as her stories of living in France as a young girl. To acknowledge the intimacy of these particular American forebears, which has only happened in the last ten years, is important. To acknowledge that many of our ancestors have lived in varying relationships to each other, is to widen and deepen our understanding of the human family.

Amy March Laurence

Samantha Mathis, Christian Bale, Little Women, 1994

The story of the four March sisters told in Little Women [1868-1869] by Louisa May Alcott is very well known in America, partly because several movies have been made of it. The book is particularly popular for its depiction of Jo, the second daughter whom Alcott modeled after herself. Upon rethinking and rereading this very lively book, I have come to appreciate Amy, the youngest, whose artfulness succeeds as well as Jo’s outspoken brashness.

The sisters are taught that, though they are poor, “we’ve got father and mother and each other,” as Beth says on the very first page. They were once well-off, but the family lost its money and the girls struggle with envy of their friends, sibling rivalry and overcoming their failings, just as any modern kid does. Alcott’s program is to show, as Jane Smiley writes, what education can do: “Getting ahead is not her purpose – attaining self-control and acting in accordance with the Christian virtues of modesty, self-reliance, charity and hopefulness are the goals she sets for all the girls.”

Jo is willful, ambitious and a tom-boy, writing stories and plays for the sisters to act out. Meg is swayed by her more affluent friends, even after she marries for love. Beth loves music, but after an illness, comes to accept the fact that she will not live long. Amy, the youngest, is also headstrong and ambitious, but she uses sweet and tasteful methods to gain what Jo tries to achieve through honesty and outspokenness.

Amy is vain, proud of her golden curls, but she is sad that her nose doesn’t come to an aristocratic point, and that she must wear her cousin’s ugly clothes to school. In fact, when she is punished by having her hand hit with a ruler, Marmee takes her out of school. The girls’ parents do not believe in corporal punishment and shaming. When the girls sit about one afternoon, building “castles in the air,” Amy’s is “to be an artist, and go to Rome, and do fine pictures, and be the best artist in the whole world.”

Growing older, Amy makes an effort to provide an outing for her drawing class of twelve as a thank you to the girls who have been nice to her. The family pitches in to help, but only one of the girls comes and Amy feels foolish. When she helps at a charity fair, she tries to be unselfish and is rewarded finally by Jo convincing Laurie, the March’s amiable and handsome neighbor, and his friends to come and patronize her table. Jo praises her, but Amy says, “You laugh at me when I say I want to be a lady, but I mean a true gentle-woman in mind and manners … I want to be above the little meannesses, and follies, and faults that spoil so many women.”

When Amy convinces Jo to come calling with her (Meg is now married and Beth in poor health), Jo embarrasses her by telling wild stories. Echoing her mother, Amy tells Jo, “Women should learn to be agreeable, particularly poor ones; for they have no other way of repaying the kindnesses they receive.” Amy is rewarded when Aunt Carrol asks her to come on a family European tour, though Jo had longed to go.

Jo cannot agree to marry Laurie, because she feels more like a sister to him. It makes Laurie very unhappy. He goes to Europe, meeting Amy there in Nice. He is moping and Amy gives him a dressing down, calling him “Lazy Laurence.” Laurie is surprised Amy is considering marrying Fred Vaughn. “One of us must marry well,” she says. “In time I shall become fond of him.” Laurie says he understands, but says, “Quite right and proper as the world goes, but it sounds odd from the lips of one of your mother’s girls.”

Amy misses Laurie very much when he leaves however, and refuses Fred. Laurie reminds her of home, and when Beth dies, he comes to Vevey to comfort her. They recognize their love for each other and agree to “always pull in the same boat.” They are married and return home. The story ends happily with an apple harvest a few years later, when Meg, Jo and Amy all have children and Jo has started a school for boys with her German professor.

The economics of our modern world certainly differ from those in 1868, since women have won for themselves places in every field, the right to vote and (nearly) equal pay. But the question of feminine power is just as alive now as it ever was. Do women achieve their aims more by Jo’s methods or Amy’s? It is still true that some women have more money, and some women are blessed with a great deal of talent, hardly ever in the proportions anyone expects.

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women from incidents in her life and that of her sisters, as well as the progressive principles of her unique parents, Bronson and Abigail Alcott. The girls learn from the mistakes which their parents freely allow them to make. The morality of the book reflects the classical belief that selfishness turns in on itself, whereas kindness to, love and respect for others is our only hope of happiness. This transcends whether a person is a man or a woman, of course. But the fact that Little Women shows us four different kinds of femininity makes it ever interesting.