Adapted from THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO by Annette Gordon-Reed. Copyright © 2008 by Annette Gordon-Reed. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

When Sally Hemings arrived in Paris on July 15, 1787, at least one person was there to welcome her with the enthusiasm and warmth of family: her brother. He had last seen his youngest sister when she was eleven years old, and she had probably changed greatly in appearance during that time. While he had gone from age nineteen to twenty-two, the changes in the elder Hemings were likely more psychological and emotional than physical, but nevertheless profound. Sally Hemings met in her older brother a man who had traveled throughout France, lived and worked among people from a completely different culture, and been responsible for himself in this foreign environment. He knew firsthand, as his sister would come to know, that there were different and more varied ways for them to go through the world than existed in Virginia. She also met a man who was about to come into his own as a highly skilled professional. James Hemings was nearing the end of his various apprenticeships, and in the months immediately after his sister's arrival he became the official chef de cuisine at the Hôtel de Langeac in charge of the kitchen and, thus, a supervisor in his own right.

With the new title came a larger steady monthly wage for Hemings, instead of the spending money that Jefferson had doled out to him over the years and the smaller salary he had been receiving in the months just before he took on the role of chef. Though he was used to working for wages for other employers, Hemings's new job marked an evolution in his self-image and in his relationship with Jefferson. He now had a true trade that he could ply for others, though it seems clear that Jefferson expected Hemings's services, if not for a lifetime, for the foreseeable future. Things did not work out as Jefferson expected, and they ended up working to James Hemings's advantage, but that was all to come. In that summer of 1787, Sally Hemings brought a new dimension to James's life. He now had someone to share this adventure, for the present and the future, should they decide to take their freedom in France. For the immediate moment, she could fill him in on the state of things in Virginia, while he could speak to her frankly about all that had happened to him since he had come to France and what it meant to him. And, best of all, probably to his great relief, he could do that in his native language.

What Jefferson initially thought of his daughter's young companion is unknown. He remembered Hemings as the little girl who was present at his wife's, her sister's, deathbed. These were at best bittersweet associations that called forth memories both of loss and of Virginia. Indeed, when Hemings had last seen Jefferson, he was still in the emotional fog brought on by Martha's loss. Not much time had passed between the day they had gathered together as Martha lay dying and the day he left his daughters at Eppington to begin the journey that would take him to France. What did Hemings make of Jefferson's now rejuvenated and resplendent self, hair powdered and dressed—when he could sit still for it—outfitted in the French style? However he had thought of Hemings previously, he had to think about her differently now for several reasons, not the least of which was how to fit her into his present household. There was no reason for Hemings to play the role that had brought her to France, at least not in the same way, for Polly almost immediately joined Patsy Jefferson at the abbey, where she would now have the companionship of her sister and the opportunity to make new friends at school while she pursued her studies.

Forty Days

More important for Jefferson than figuring out what role Sally Hemings would play in France was the pressing issue of her health. In addition to her youth, there was another important way that Hemings did not fit his specifications for the female attendant who was to come to France. He expressly asked that a person who had had smallpox make the journey. The Eppeses complied only partially with this request by having Isabel Hern inoculated. They did not have Hemings inoculated, and no extant letters reveal whether the issue was ever raised with Jefferson. He had arranged for Hemings's older brothers to be inoculated—Robert in Philadelphia in 1775 and Martin and James in 1778—but he knew he had no hand in inoculating their little sister. This was a quite pressing matter, and he must have asked Hemings as soon as she arrived at the Hôtel de Langeac whether she had, in fact, been inoculated. She had not. Jefferson needed to deal with this issue as quickly as possible, and his concerns about her contracting the disease militated against allowing her to move too freely in her new environs. In those very first months of her time in Paris, Hemings's life, very likely, centered on her new residence and immediate neighborhood.

As it had been since ancient times, smallpox was a periodic scourge during the eighteenth century. Seemingly out of nowhere, epidemics swooped down and carried off large numbers of people to excruciating deaths. Thirteen years before Hemings arrived in France, an epidemic at Versailles took the life of many, including King Louis XV, famous for his apocryphal last words, après moi, le déluge. Jaded French society reeled upon hearing the horrifying details of Louis's agonizing death. Up until that time, France had been slow, compared with England, to adopt the procedure of inoculation. After King Louis's ordeal the French nobility in particular enthusiastically embraced it.

There is no cure for smallpox, and throughout the ages populations across the globe have had to find ways of preventing its spread. Inoculation was practiced in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. White Americans first became aware of the procedure from African slaves who described it to them. Cotton Mather brought it to the widespread attention of the American public after an African-born slave, Onesimus, told him that he had undergone the procedure while still in his native land and was thus immune to smallpox. In the mid-1700s, after much debate, the American colonies initiated the procedure with great trepidation. The technique involved taking from an infected person a small amount of the secretions from the pustules (the inoculum) and transferring it to a healthy individual with the aim of creating a milder version of the disease and permanent immunity to it. This was done by creating an incision and placing the inoculum into it. Naturally, this very crude procedure often failed—the healthy person contracted full-blown smallpox and died or lived, but was seriously disfigured by the scarring.

When Jefferson wanted to have Sally Hemings inoculated in Paris, he had available to him, and Hemings got to meet, a member of the foremost family of inoculators in the world: the Suttons. In the mid-eighteenth century, Robert Sutton Sr., an English doctor, whose sons followed him into the practice, developed a more sophisticated method of inoculation. The mortality rate for the Suttons' inoculations was remarkably low for what was a very dangerous undertaking because the men were especially adept at carrying out their own procedures. They personally inoculated thousands of people and lost only about one percent of their patients, which meant that the chances Hemings might die were extremely low. An additional advantage for Hemings was that Sutton's method almost invariably reduced the amount of scarring down to the site of the pricking on the arm, leaving the kind of scar that would be familiar to millions of twentieth-century Americans who received smallpox vaccinations before entering kindergarten. Other inoculators were not as successful in reducing complications from the procedure, and their patients were sometimes grossly disfigured, even blinded. This, too, would have been of great importance to the vanity of a young girl in a world where the appearance of females (at all strata of society) was more important than that of males: a man with pockmarks on his face suffered fewer social consequences than a woman with even just a few.

After inoculating entire communities in England, the Suttons eventually branched out to other parts of Europe and were invited by members of the nobility and heads of states on the Continent to perform inoculations. Although they emphasized their services to the poor in England, they certainly came to the Continent to make money. The patients of the brothers who practiced there tended to be rich and aristocratic. Jefferson wrote that he paid "Dr. Sutton for inoculating Sally" about three months after she arrived in Paris, and he paid an enormous sum indeed—about forty dollars, the equivalent of roughly one thousand dollars today. Hard businessmen that they were, the Suttons insisted upon payment before services were rendered. So unless Jefferson was able to persuade Dr. Sutton otherwise, Hemings must have been inoculated on the day of or sometime just after his November 7 notation that he had made the payment.

Jefferson did not say which Sutton inoculated Hemings. Robert Sutton Sr. had died by 1787. All of the sons set up their own practices in various parts of England and on the Continent when that market opened up, with Robert Jr. having the greatest presence in France. Robert Jr., was in charge of the Suttons' inoculation house outside of Paris. In 1774 he, and perhaps at least one of his brothers, Joseph, was brought in to try to help King Louis XV. Given the patient's prominence, the Bourbons would have brought in all six Sutton brothers if that had been necessary to save him. But the efforts of whatever number of Suttons were to no avail. King Louis was beyond anyone's help.

Inoculation carried with it the great risk of touching off an epidemic because the patient was, for a time, contagious. To guard against that problem, patients were quarantined for a period of weeks. When Robert Hemings was inoculated, Jefferson noted that he had paid "Ambo for lodging & nursing Bob four weeks." When he mentioned paying to board "Martin & Jame," he did not say how long they remained in isolation, but there is no reason to suppose that their situation was drastically different from their brother's.As one might expect, things were a bit more rigorous in metropolitan France. There the quarantine was to last at least forty days after the day of inoculation, and it was illegal to inoculate anyone within the city limits of Paris. Sally Hemings was sent to an inoculation house outside of town to have the procedure performed.

But where did she go? The exorbitant fees the Suttons charged paying clients like Jefferson included the housing and feeding of the patients. Hemings's inoculation was handled the same way the Suttons handled other patients in their two-tiered system of treatment. Poor patients back in England, usually treated in mass or group inoculations for nothing or next to nothing, stayed in their villages, which were then kept strictly quarantined. The Suttons made the rounds on a schedule to take care of them. Paying clients were sent away to comfortable inoculation houses that the Suttons set up in areas far from towns, and the brothers made the rounds there to look after them. Like these patients, Sally Hemings underwent the procedure "in private, quarantined from the community at large." Indeed, by the time she arrived in Paris, the Suttons had long had their own inoculation house on the outskirts of the city.

In keeping with the brothers' insular franchise mentality, which favored their relatives, the family impresario Daniel Sutton sent his father-in-law, Dr. Worlock, to set up the Suttons' inoculation house in France. It was "an isolated house outside of Paris with fresh air near Mont Louis, called P. Lachaise." By 1804 the Sutton's inoculation house was closed, and Père-Lachaise became the site of "the most famous cemetery in Paris," which still exists today, although now within the city's limits.

While one could see Jefferson viewing Hemings's inoculation from both his personal and his scientific perspective, the matter was probably almost all personal for her. Jefferson knew the extent of the Suttons' good reputation and that he could not have put Hemings in better hands. Hemings, however, probably had little reason to know about the Suttons, and even if Jefferson chose to act as the good patriarch and explain to her just who Sutton was and the significance of his involvement in treating her (and try to allay any fears), it could not have erased all doubt. Anyone with ordinary intelligence would have understood that a required quarantine of forty days indicated that one was about to undergo a very serious medical procedure and that there was always a chance that things could go wrong. After the trip over the ocean, the sojourn in London with Abigail Adams, and the stressful introduction to city living, new food, new faces, and new surroundings, Hemings faced yet another trial.

The Suttons religiously followed a strict regime that they believed was the key to their success. After years of attempting to keep the exact nature of that method secret, Daniel Sutton published a book in 1796 revealing their protocol, complete with a handy chart of the daily routine that patients like Hemings were put through. According to Sutton's prescription, at the beginning of her confinement Hemings was to be put on a diet that restricted the amount and type of food. She was not supposed to eat any animal protein. She could not drink any alcohol, which was probably not yet a part of her routine anyway.

After the inoculation was performed, usually by making a small incision on the upper arm and placing a piece of thread that had been exposed to smallpox pustules into the wound, those attending Hemings at the inoculation house followed her condition. Her "duly restricted" diet continued. To control the symptoms of the mild case of smallpox—chief among them, a high fever and, sometimes, very intense aches and pains—Hemings was given a dose of a serum that included, controversially even at that time, a tiny amount of "calomel," a form of mercury. In earlier days, inoculators had used mercury more liberally, often weakening their patients to an alarming degree.

The Suttons had a great belief in the benefits of fresh air. They emphasized rest, to prepare the body to take and control the mild case of smallpox. At the same time, they believed that it was important for the patient to move around. Hemings was thus supposed to engage in moderate exercise, defined as walking around the grounds of the quarantine area for a set period of time each day. That is why the Suttons wanted their patients out in the country away from everyone else. A daily walk through a community might bring them into potentially fatal contact with others. Once Hemings developed a fever, it was to be "treated with cold water, warm tea and thin gruel by mouth." After her "eruption appeared," she would be directed once again to get up and walk around—and take in more fresh air. Then she would return for more rest.

Because he had a generally low opinion of doctors, Jefferson often played the role of physician in his own life—personally nursing his daughters when they were ill, as he had his wife, giving doses of medicine to slaves, watching the schedule for that, setting their bones, and stitching up wounds. With Hemings's inoculation program, there was medicine to be given and a regimen to follow that had been prepared by a celebrated physician notorious for guarding the secrets of his success. The whole business spoke to virtually every aspect of Jefferson's personality: his boundless curiosity, his addiction to routine, his interest in progressive scientific methods, and his self-fashioning as a dutiful patriarch and competent quasi-health professional. Hemings probably had to answer many questions from him about everything that had taken place while she was under Sutton's care in his very secretive world.

Just months into her stay in France, Hemings was living amid strangers, apart from her brother, and others familiar to her, on the opposite side of Paris from the Hôtel de Langeac. Her mother was an ocean away. She had come from a family of numerous siblings and spent most of her childhood living in a place where there were always lots of people her age and older around her. What she faced living on the outskirts of Paris was about as far from the life she had known as one could imagine. Being ill, even under controlled circumstances, is difficult. Being ill and alone in a strange country where people speak a language one cannot understand is on another order of magnitude of difficulty.

Dr. Sutton, of course, spoke English, and Hemings could communicate with him when he made his round of visits. The attendants at the house may have been bilingual or not, as the house was specifically designed to serve French-speaking patients. This was very likely Hemings's first really intensive experience with language immersion, when she was surrounded by people for whom English was a second language. If they talked to her in her native tongue, they would have spoken to one another in their own, sharpening her ear for French even as she wondered what they were talking about.

Hemings was at the right age to quickly achieve proficiency in French. Her son Madison recalled that, by the end of her time in Paris, she had learned to speak the language "well," which makes sense given her age at the time she came to the country and the length of her stay there. When he first arrived in France, a very impressed William Short noted how much faster the teenage children of Jefferson and John and Abigail Adams picked up the language as compared with their elders. This was not a matter of formal study or educational level. The elder Americans had studied French, Jefferson for many years, themselves. Human beings are primed to learn languages, and can do that very well without studying them formally.

What did Sutton and his attendants make of the young African American girl who had been put into their care by the American minister to France? Did they know she was a slave? It is probably impossible to recover just how many blacks were being inoculated in the city at that time. There cannot have been very many, for there were not that many blacks in the country. Their overall small numbers in Paris as compared with Hemings's Virginia, or the French colonies, for that matter, made blacks a less immediate threat to Parisian whites. She probably faced a different, less forbidding racial dynamic than the one that existed back in Virginia. The people at the Suttons' inoculation house (who would have had no reason to go around thinking of themselves as "white" and attaching daily significance to that) were most likely very different from the whites she had encountered for most of her life. Still, Hemings was undoubtedly something of a curiosity at the place. Here Abigail Adams's observation about her good nature and others' testimony that she was very pleasant to look at may have given her an advantage as a patient. From Hemings's standpoint, this may have been the first time she had ever been attended to by white people. In her life to date whites were the centers of attention—that of other whites and of blacks as well. Even at her young age, she had been raised to care for white children who were not much younger than she. "The Girl," for an extended time, was now the focus of attention, being looked after by others who were there to serve and care for her.

Hard as it must have been, perhaps because it was hard, the entirety of this experience—the isolation, the facing down of an inherently frightening situation, and the process of recovery from the ordeal—helped shape Hemings's personality just as surely as her transatlantic crossing. Those forty days alone with no tasks to perform, save relying on her own inner strength to get well, left her with no one's interests to look after but her own. Perhaps for the first time since she was a small girl, Hemings had the perfect occasion to think intensely about herself, what her life had been to date, and what she would like to have happen in the future, and to daydream a great deal about all of that.

Adapted from THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO by Annette Gordon-Reed. Copyright © 2008 by Annette Gordon-Reed. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed

Read Annette Gordon-Reed's essay about why she decided to write this book.