Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (18 page)

“It was probably a little log house with a chimney base,” Neiman said. “Actually, we found a pole for a chimney prop. There's a little artifact scatter in here—the remains of her dinner plates, et cetera.” He thought the house probably took no more than about a week to build, with the workmen using scrap bricks salvaged from other work sites to build part of the hearth. She had a large garden, and the Monticello records show that even in her last years she was raising vegetables and poultry for sale to the mansion.
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Betty Hemings was the mother of Sally and, if one accepts the contention that Sally had children with her master, the grandmother of some of Thomas Jefferson's children. Thinking about her grandchildren made me realize why I found the site so touching. Some time earlier I had read the memoir that Betty's grandson Madison Hemings set down when he was sixty-eight, one of the prime sources in the Hemings-Jefferson controversy. Reading it closely for “evidence,” I was brought up short by an aside about his childhood. Madison said that his earliest memory, from when he was about three years old, was of his grandmother: “She was sick and upon her death bed. I was eating a piece of bread and asked if she would have some. She replied: ‘No, granny don't want bread any more.' She shortly afterwards breathed her last.” It had no evidentiary value; it was simply a small touching fragment of humanity.

Neiman believed that Jefferson built the house for Hemings around 1795. Before that, she had been sent to an outlying farm called Tufton, “for reasons we don't understand,” Neiman said. “She was a house servant. So why she's at an outlying quarter farm is not clear.” But her return to Monticello in 1796 coincided with the birth of Sally Hemings's daughter Harriet. “So you think about the grandmother hypothesis,” Neiman said. “She moved back here to be around as the children are born.” If they were Jefferson's children, it would make sense that he would want a trusted nurse for them. She lived close enough to the mansion and Mulberry Row to be available for child care, but far enough away so that when measles broke out on the mountaintop in 1802, Jefferson thought her house would make a good quarantine for the black children who had the disease.

Jefferson built the house thirty feet from the Third Roundabout. Any passing rider could have waved to Betty Hemings and probably did. Among the artifacts the archaeologists found here were some small bits of clear glass, so the house had a glazed window. When Neiman compared Betty Hemings's porcelain with shards from the house of a white workman, he found that she had rather fancy dinnerware and a cheap tea set. He surmised that teatime was a more important social event for the white man and his family than it was for Betty Hemings, but she liked to set an attractive table for dinner.
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We left the house site and zigzagged down through the forest to pick up a new trail. We had walked for a few minutes when I began to hear voices and see moving shapes through the trees ahead. It was an odd sensation in the silent woods, where one could genuinely feel lost in time, and odder still when we walked a little farther and I saw we had landed at Monticello's Visitor Center, back in the present day. Hundreds of tourists were arriving and boarding vans that glided up the steep mountain road to the mansion at the top. Neiman led the way downhill through a series of parking lots to a large patch of grass and trees surrounded by pavement but set off by a split-log fence.

“This was long rumored to be a slave cemetery,” Neiman said, and that's what the archaeologists believe it to be. The memory of the graveyard's existence seems to have flickered on and off at Monticello. When the parking lots were laid out and paved in the 1970s, preliminary maps marked this spot as “old graveyard,” so someone knew there were graves here, and it wasn't paved over. The information that something was here may have been passed to the staff by a groundskeeper, Randolph Crawford, who lived in a small house nearby. He had noticed that stones on this site were arranged in a way that suggested they might be markers, though there were no names on them. More intriguing to him was a mysterious circle of fieldstones. Suspecting that the site had a link to Monticello's former slaves, he spoke to an African-American housekeeper who worked at the mansion. She told him that it was indeed a burial ground and that “her people used to build a circle of stone” to use at funerals: the mourners would make a fire within the circle, seat themselves around it, and tell stories about the deceased.

Though the graveyard was spared, the memory of it faded at Monticello. “They knew the cemetery was there when they built the parking lot,” Neiman said. “As people left the staff, it was forgotten about, except vaguely.” After seeing the imposing Jefferson-Randolph family graveyard near the summit, where Jefferson lies buried beneath a monumental obelisk, visitors would often ask, “Where were the slaves buried?” and the answer was “We don't know.”
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The African-American cemetery asserted its presence subtly. Whenever the mountain got a light dusting of snow (heavy snowfalls are a rarity in these parts), faint depressions revealed themselves in outline, vanishing with the melting snow. In good weather, when sunlight fell across the parking lot at a certain slant, rows of shadows appeared in the ground. For archaeologists, graves are hard to locate and just as hard to verify.

One of Neiman's predecessors, Barbara Heath, took note of the clues in 1990 and decided to investigate. The most direct approach—digging down until she struck actual burials—was immediately ruled out as a desecration. Heath began with the least intrusive method, remote sensing by magnetometry, which identifies magnetic anomalies created by the presence of human remains. The machines yielded “maddeningly ambiguous” results. The archaeologists called in a consultant, who took one look at the site and pointed to the small boulders of greenstone scattered about. Greenstone, the parent material of Monticello Mountain, is loaded with iron that deranges magnetic testing—“one of those boulders has more iron in it than a Winnebago,” said the consultant. When technology failed them, Heath and her crew went back to old-fashioned methods, painstakingly mapping every tree, rock, and dip in the ground, identifying twenty-four depressions that they believed held graves.

Ten years later Neiman returned to the site with new magnetometers, but when the ambiguities persisted, he too decided to revert to old-fashioned methods, excavating in shallow squares, just deep enough to reveal the presence of grave shafts but not deep enough to disturb any burials. One of the most interesting finds was something they did not find: there was no evidence of plowing. Much of Monticello had been plowed over in Jefferson's time and later, but not this patch of ground. Neiman's crew found an old plow blade at the very edge of the cemetery, so the plowmen had gone that far but no farther. He identified twenty burial shafts, eight of which were believed, because of their small size, to hold the graves of children. Five graves had stones, but with no markings.

Because this soil is so highly acidic, it was very unlikely that any human remains, or other artifacts except coffin nails, could still exist in the shafts, but Monticello's archaeologists let a potentially valuable opportunity pass when they decided, out of respect, not to dig to the bottom. Other burials of slaves in the South have been excavated with startling results. A dig at Stratford Hall plantation, where Robert E. Lee was born, turned up thirteen African-American burials from the eighteenth century. Three black men were buried there with African-style clothing. Excavations in the Chesapeake region have discovered burials with beads and seeds, another African custom. Archaeologists in Georgia unearthed a slave's grave with remnants of a plate above the head, which fit with the custom “to place the last plate, the last glass and the last spoon used before death on the grave.” Other excavations have yielded bits of crockery, upturned bottles, seashells, and particular plants with significance in African cultures. The historian Philip Morgan has explained: “All these practices were ways of propitiating the dead, of easing their journey into the spirit world, and of ensuring that they did not return to haunt the living.”
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When the archaeologists looked at Jefferson's papers, they found that this was the very spot where Jefferson had first intended to put his burying ground—“one half to the use of my own family; the other of strangers, servants.” The white Jeffersons and Randolphs ended up atop the mountain, and the slaves here.

As we were leaving the graveyard, the last stop on our trek across the mountain, I turned and saw a bouquet of flowers lying on the ground. That day, someone unknown had come and placed that remembrance here; perhaps somewhere off the mountain lived a descendant who had neither forgotten nor abandoned this place.

I asked Neiman if he thought Betty Hemings and her family might be buried here, and his answer was that the Hemingses were more likely to have been buried closer to the summit. A sign of this appeared in the 1950s in the most startling manner. Monticello's then director, James Bear, was walking in the area of the Ancient Field when, amazingly, he came upon a headstone from the 1830s wedged
in the crook of a tree
. How it got there nobody knows. One surmise is that an employee found it on the ground, put it in the tree for safekeeping, and never said a word about it. A marked headstone for a slave is very rare. Slave cemeteries are also rarely found. Indeed, given the size of the population of enslaved people—in Jefferson's time 40 percent of Virginians were slaves—so few of their cemeteries have been found that one would think that slaves never died.

 

The holes on the mountainside suggested an improvement in family life; the large root cellar suggested food in abundance. It has long been known that slaves raised their own crops for sale, but only recently have we begun to get an idea of the scale of this enterprise and what it means. In 1994 a Jefferson expert at the Library of Congress, Gerard W. Gawalt, published a transcription of four years of crop accounts.
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From 1805 to 1808, Jefferson's granddaughter Anne Cary Randolph met with slaves each Sunday during the summer months and bought a wide variety of goods from them. Anne was just fourteen years old when she started the record. Conducting business transactions with slaves formed part of a young white woman's “apprenticeship” as a plantation mistress, according to Gawalt. Anne kept her records in a disused notebook of her grandfather's, his account book from his days as a Williamsburg lawyer in the late 1760s. Anne's grandmother Martha, Jefferson's wife, had used the same notebook for the same purpose. Gawalt wrote that the records reveal the “vitality” of the “entrepreneurial spirit of the slaves.”

It required a farmer to find a deeper meaning in these farm records. In 2006, Monticello hired Leni Sorensen as its African-American research historian, someone with a Ph.D. in history who had also farmed in South Dakota. When she examined these crop accounts, she was struck by the “prolific” productivity of enslaved people who were obviously very skilled gardeners. Focusing on one month of late-summer records from August and September 1805, Sorensen noted an “impressive” sale of vegetables to the big house, including watermelons, cabbages, potatoes, cucumbers, and squashes, but an even more remarkable output of 47 dozen eggs and 117 chickens. With the eye of an experienced farmer, Sorensen knew that so many eggs and chickens do not simply wander onto the property: “In order to ensure a steady supply, the chicken-raisers among the slave community had to build and maintain nest boxes, food and water containers, brooding cages, and fenced chicken yards.” Someone had to guard the chickens against snakes, opossums, raccoons, stray dogs, and cats. This was a very large enterprise, and it would have involved virtually everyone in Monticello's African-American community: “More than half the black adults at Monticello sold produce to the Jefferson household, and all but three adults among them also sold chickens. In fact, it is likely that all adult slaves at Monticello kept personal gardens, but that only those individuals who sold produce had occasion to appear in the records.”

At first glance this presents a heartening picture of go-getting and thrift, but other numbers tell us that if the slaves had not raised their own food, they would have starved. Jefferson's rations were meager, and Sorensen calculated that the daily calorie payoff fell catastrophically short of what a working adult needed to survive. Bagwell and Minerva Granger, for example, with their five children, received a ration of sixteen dried herring and two pounds of beef—for a
month
. A modern American family of seven would consume that in three days, if the children could be persuaded to eat the herring. Pregnant and nursing women, who had to work in the fields despite their conditions and the demands on them, had special dietary needs that the Jeffersonian ration did not meet. Jefferson issued a white overseer six hundred pounds of pork a year, which is more than eleven pounds a week.
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For the slaves, it was plant or die, with the gardening and chicken-raising work done in the scant free time available to them in their dawn-to-dusk daily routine. Small children and the elderly had to do a lot of the work, when Jefferson did not call up the children and the “senile corps” to work for him. For the elderly, indeed, gardens were utterly essential: when slaves became too feeble to work all the time, Jefferson cut their rations in half. From time to time, one hears the rumor that planters turned old people out to the woods to die. Cutting an elderly person's rations in half comes close to that.

Obscure and long-forgotten, Anne Randolph's farm accounts utterly demolish one of the pillars of her grandfather's racial ideology—that African-Americans were incapable of planning beyond sunset. He wrote in 1814: “For men probably of any color, but of this color we know, brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast, are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves, and are extinguished promptly wherever industry is necessary for raising young.”
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