Not Just in the Great House, but in the Quarters

Abstract

Most scholars would have been daunted to the point of capitulation in the face of the archive Professor Gordon-Reed has mastered so magnificently for The Hemingses of Monticello. With the meticulousness of a crack detective, Professor Gordon-Reed has made the Hemings documents sing. One of my favorite examples is her brilliant reading of a Monticello kitchen inventory that James Hemings bequeaths to his younger brother Peter, who is about to assume James's (former, pre-presidency) role as Jefferson's chef after his retirement to Monticello in 1809. Gordon-Reed understands Hemings' list of tools and equipment as a kind of professional autobiography, testifying to James's remarkable training in the art of haute cuisine during his time in Paris with Jefferson. Jefferson will fulfill his promise to manumit James in the following months but, tragically, not long after that, James will be dead by his own hand. As an avid, nearly breathless reader of Gordon-Reed's account, I only wanted more, more, more. Eight years earlier, why did James Hemings refuse to ask Jefferson in a timely fashion to take him on as chef at the White House? Gordon-Reed speculates that James wanted Jefferson to offer an official invitation; meanwhile, the frustrated president-elect, waiting for James to approach him, grew weary of this unspoken power struggle in which the desired supplication was not forthcoming and the wish to offer the position according to official conventions became impossible to express; out of patience, Jefferson ultimately decided to hire a native Frenchman instead. This episode strikes me as particularly bizarre and heartbreaking, given that Jefferson took James Hemings to France precisely to afford him the culinary training that would enable him to cook haute cuisine for his master. And why, so soon after at last having been released from the burdens of laboring unremunerated for this complex, difficult man for nearly three decades, did the finally emancipated James find his life unsustainable in freedom? Did he have no attachments, no loves, no prospect of either? Professor Gordon-Reed supplies us with a sorrowful if oblique letter from Jefferson to one of his daughters in which he acknowledges James's death, but we have nothing from the Hemings side of the equation to fill in the blanks, and particularly, nothing from James's hand to help contextualize the tragedy to come. Gordon-Reed's ability to turn archival straw into intellectual gold, so prolific across her marvelous book, here runs into the brick wall of the archive's limitations, leaving this reader saddened and baffled by the story's greatest mystery. That even she has not unraveled the enigma of James Hemings (who would be my protagonist if I were concocting a sequel) is my only, and unfair, cavil with the book. Meanwhile, I am made breathless by the way in which Professor Gordon-Reed's achievement relies as much on her magnificent imagination as it does on her enormous archive. Like a great novelist, she breathes life and power into characters who in earlier accounts had been rendered with one part filial piety, one part nationalist zeal, one part Masterpiece Theater, and one part waxworks. (There may be too many parts in this recipe, but I am a literary scholar, not a French chef.) With brilliance, she details historical context in all its thick description, particularly James and Sally Hemings's life in Paris, with the foment of the revolution percolating; she vividly paints their social milieu among servants of other ambassadors and the very French aristocrats about to lose everything; and she is particularly sparkling in her discussion of black servant peers of the Hemingses who may have discussed with them the French Admiralty Court's hearing of petitions from enslaved noirs, for whom it nearly always ruled favorably. These chapters afford a rich understanding for the background to Gordon-Reed's speculation that Hemings was able to argue for the eventual manumission of herself and any future children in Virginia if she promised to return there with Jefferson when he left Paris. …