I was grown, now. Old enough to help set up his household. If Papa believed, as he said he did, that young girls ought to primarily be trained for domestic tasks, to prepare for a life as wives and mothers, then why did he insist on my learning music, drawing, arithmetic, geography, and Latin? But Papa would not be dissuaded in his plans for my education. Even when my enrollment in the convent was universally criticized by our American friends, who feared royal and papist influences. The abbess swore, however, that though I would be cloistered behind convent walls during the week, I’d be exempt from catechism and the sacraments.
As the day I was to attend the new school dawned, I could scarcely force myself from bed, despite the fact I’d hardly slept all the night before. Papa had to call for me twice, and I was so distraught at our inevitable separation that I didn’t even care that my delays earned his ire.
When we finally passed through the gates of the Panthemont, underneath a magnificent clock that faced the street, I clung to my father’s arm. In habits, the nuns all looked much the same, rushing about with their charges, girls wearing uniforms of crim son. We were led into a large room filled with beds and writing tables where I was to board with other girls. And though some of the girls were introduced to me as the daughters of English nobility, none would speak anything but French. I thought I was the only American, and when Papa left me for the night, I cried into my pillow hoping no one could hear.
Today, if someone were to ask where I have been happiest in my life—where I found the most companionship and joy and discovered the best in myself—I would name the convent without hesitation. But my first days at the Panthemont were a misery. I lived for the evenings when Papa came to share supper with me. Every night, I thought he’d change his mind and take me home, but he didn’t.
I kept quietly to the corners, ignoring the taunts of the older girls. They pointed and laughed at my freckles and my big bony elbows. They mocked my faltering attempts to speak French. And I learned that I wasn’t the only American girl after all—there was also Kitty Church, whose mother was from New York, but she seemed to despise me most of all. A kindly abbot encouraged me to play with the other girls in the courtyard during the afternoon, but when I cleaved to him, Kitty teased me that Catholic priests couldn’t marry—which made me blush so hotly I could scarcely bear it.
Learning embroidery one day, I was asked by one of the girls, “Is it true that your father owns African slaves?”
The question was softly put, with no hint of malice, but before I could answer, Kitty Church laughed. “Yes, of course it’s true. Don’t you know that Mr. Jefferson is our slave-holding spokesman for freedom?”
The way Kitty spoke of my father, with such mockery, stung my cheeks with shame. It was a shame deepened by the fact that Kitty’s father, like mine, was an American envoy to France. Her family hailed from the North, where slaves were fewer and the abolitionists held much sway. I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d learned this scorn for my father from hers, and if her father was a rival to mine.
“Do you own a slave, Patsy?” Kitty singsonged the question. “Do you whip her when she misbehaves?”
This boldness encouraged our classmates, many of whom expressed dismay and made a point to tell me French law freed any slave who set foot in the country. I wondered if my father—or Jimmy Hemings—knew this. And while I fumbled for a reply, mortified and defensive, one of the girls stabbed a needle into her embroidery before berating Kitty Church on my behalf, hurling curses in French.
The savage-tempered girl was raven haired and tiny, and I wondered why she took up for me.
“It isn’t how you say it is,” I finally argued as the girls outdid one another in imagining horrid abuses. I remembered the day Papa commanded our overseer to stay his hand with the lash; I’d never witnessed slaves being whipped bloody, or flayed open and left to wild animals if they disobeyed. Never had such a thing happened at Monticello!
But the more I tried to defend our plantation, our home, our way of life, the more strident the criticisms became. And the nuns said nothing, for this was a house of pity, and they must’ve thought my papa a wretched sinner.
I stared down at my crude embroidery, remembering my mother’s sewing. Her neat stitches to repair a dress in need of mending. A small embroidered flourish to ornament a bonnet or a tablecloth. In a dark mood, I was lost in that memory until I looked down to see that I’d stabbed my finger with the needle and my blood had seeped into the delicate cloth.
“Come,” said the raven-haired French girl. “We’ll bandage that.”
Before I could protest, she shook her head and pressed her fingers to her lips to hush me. She was delicate and beautiful like my little sister Polly. That’s what made me follow her back to the bedroom where she sat beside me until I could face the world again. Her name was Marie de Botidoux, but she couldn’t say my name. The closest she came was Jeffy. I liked the way it sounded on her tongue. And I was so desperate for a friend I would’ve let her call me anything at all.