Sally Heming (19 page)

Martha Jefferson shook the bare shoulders of her maid
gently and affectionately, tossing the mane of bright hair behind her. Sally
Hemings nodded to Martha and let her petticoats drop. At any rate, she could
walk like a queen, if nothing else.

She fell back into the arms of Martha, pretending to slip,
and as she did she let out a whoop: "Her majesty has just glided onto her
royal
derriere....
" They all
collapsed into new gales of laughter. This brought Madame Dupre to the door of
her boarder.

"Girls, ladies, you would think I had a regiment of
hussars in my house!"

Madame Dupre was the proprietor of a small rooming house on
the rue de Seine. She had been instructed to board the maid of the American
minister's daughters while he was away on a trip to Amsterdam and the
Rhineland. She had agreed to do this for the sum of twenty-one francs a week
plus laundry and dressmaking. The gentle, lovely girl, who had arrived at her
door two weeks ago accompanied by the minister himself, had pleased her. As she
had not been instructed otherwise, Madame Dupre treated Sally Hemings as she
would have treated any maid of an aristocrat: that is, a young girl of a poor
family with no dowry who enters the service of a great family as a lady's maid
and companion to the daughters of such a family in return for room, board, and
protection. Obviously the minister thought enough of her not to leave her alone
in the company of his servants when he went abroad....

Madame Dupre had no way of knowing that Sally Hemings was a
slave. She had no way of knowing either that a "maid" in Virginia was
a polite way of indicating someone who was black. Sally Hemings' complexion
told Madame Dupre nothing, except that she was dark. She would even have said
swarthy, but a little strange; the particular tint of the young girl's skin was
not the same as she had noted in the Italian or Spanish complexion. It was
rather an extraordinary shade of buff, without the profusion of down that
usually accompanied the ladies of that hue. She was a bit surprised at the meanness
of her wardrobe. Certainly if one was poor, one had to know how to sew in order
to dress oneself, but then she was to remedy these shortcomings by instructing
her in dressmaking and making sure that she had the minimum uniforms of a
lady's maid. Certainly her manners and gentleness and soft, charmingly accented
French bespoke a certain breeding, and with a little grooming, thought Madame
Dupre, she would surely attract a gentleman of property and improve her station
in life in the time-honored manner of becoming the mistress or (why not?) the
wife of a modest member of the gentry. She, of course, had had no instructions
along these lines, but as she liked the child, Madame Dupre decided she would
do all she could to improve her while she was in her charge. Besides, through
her mistresses, Sally Hemings had access to the Abbaye de Panthemont, where
only the finest ladies and young girls retired or were educated. She had only
to imitate her betters, she concluded.

When Madame Dupre saw what the girls had been doing, she
joined the laughter. The queen's extraordinary walk was renowned throughout the
kingdom, and when little
Sallie
showed her version of it, she had to admit it was both seductive and
accurate.

"My, that is quite good. Now do me a curtsy, all of you—
comme il faut.
I have come to
serve you tea, but you had better put your clothes back on before the servant
sees you in the state of nature."

The three girls stood up and Madame Dupre looked at the
virginal young bodies pressed close to her. The eldest Mademoiselle Jefferson
was so tall she towered over everyone. Some American ladies were immense, and
this one certainly took after her father. She had a fine complexion: milk and
roses at the same time, except that it was marred by the same freckles that dotted
the countenance of the minister. She remarked on Martha's lovely hair. It was
hanging down in a mass of thick auburn waves to her waist. Her eyes were
without color or lashes and too close together, and her chin, she felt, was
impossible: long and jutting, with the promise of unyielding stubbornness so
disagreeable to men. Yet the luxurious curls managed to soften the lines of her
face and long nose, and her mouth was delicate, firm, and good humored,
bespeaking justice if not generosity, and the body was slim, well made, and
bursting with good health.

As for the young Mademoiselle Jefferson, she and her maid
resembled each other uncannily. Madame Dupre continued her inventory. They were
both remarkably beautiful, both dark with hazel eyes, the maid's being a
peculiar but fascinating shade of yellow. They both had deep dimples, prized by
French ladies, and soft wide mouths with that touch of sullenness found in
ardent characters. The maid reflected the promise in body of the mistress, who
was still a child; perfect mat skin, long thick dark hair, and fragile yet
compact body with a deep bosom and full hips.

Yes, thought Madame Dupre, with a little luck,
Sallie
will make her fortune in Paris ...
if she has the luck to attract a gentleman.

The first time James Hemings came to visit his sister at
Madame Dupre's, she fell into his arms with a cry of relief. She had not seen
him since she had left the hotel that March day almost three weeks ago. James
Hemings was still reeling from the shock of his sister's seduction, but he
determined to show nothing but tenderness and solicitude. He had three or four
weeks at the most to convince her that her master had compromised all claims to
her love and loyalty by his forcing of her, and that now was the time to claim
her rights as a free woman on French soil. Once the demigod was back, his
powerful compelling presence would again dominate their lives, and their only
chance would be lost, perhaps forever.

He had brought her a letter that had arrived for her from
her master.

She had taken the letter from him with trembling hands but
had not read it, hiding it in her petticoat pocket. They had then gone out for
a walk, as they had so many times before in Paris. Free of uniforms and even
the semblance of servanthood, they had roamed the streets and the grand
boulevards crammed with new buildings. American Revolutionary ideas were
everywhere, and they met them in a form hitherto never encountered by either of
them: the newspaper and the broadside.

There were regular newspapers printed every day which, even
under the king's Censure Bureau, were wildly critical and full of republican
ideas. Anyone with the money to buy or rent or who owned a printing press was
free to print and distribute what he liked. These were called broadsides.
Anyone doing this was liable, of course, afterward to be arrested by the king's
censors for
lese-majeste,
but no one prevented the broadside from being printed and distributed,
even if the author was in the Bastille. It was around the Palais Royal that
most of the newspaper vendors congregated and it was usually here, in the
magnificent gardens of the palace with its famous meridian cannon fired by the
rays of the sun at noon, that brother and sister spent part of their promenade.

The public gardens of the Palais Royal teemed with every
manner of man, woman, and beast—from veiled noblewomen on their way to
assignations to street prostitutes painted in the gaudy red rouge and white
powder in fashion. There were priests and hawkers, lemonade and food vendors,
cavaliers and officers of the king's regiment, beggars and pickpockets, raving
orators, and all manner of dubious-looking characters. In the center of the
gardens was the Duc d'Orleans's new glass-domed circus, the latest wonder of
Paris. It was here, amid the pamphlets, engravings, newspapers, broadsides,
rumors, and posters, that brother and sister discovered the shadow of things to
come.

Each week a letter had come, hand-delivered by James, and
each week Sally Hemings had silently hidden it in her petticoats and gone
walking in Paris with James. Each week James sought to steal the mind and body
of his sister from her master, while she half-listened to his pleas and
warnings about her life, too stunned to think of anything except the letter
that had arrived.

They were the first letters that anyone had ever addressed
to her in all her fifteen years. They had taken on a magic, these letters
addressed to "Mademoiselle Sally Hemings." She was unable to explain
to James her fascination with the power of these words. Her name had stood
independent of herself or her will on the thick white paper. Again and again,
she had touched the black letters on the white paper imagining this person
"Sally Hemings" to whom they were addressed.

Even not being able to answer these summons, because he was
not long enough in each city, seemed right: the magic hold was never broken by
the effort it would have taken to answer and thus claim the title by which she
was addressed. Instead she had only to wait, to receive, to acquiesce.

The letters themselves, when tremblingly she opened them
after James's departure and read the dozen or so lines, were as ordinary as
those her master wrote to his daughters, which she also read when they came to
visit her. If she expected billets-doux, she got none. Instead, there was a
steady stream of fatherly advice, kindly, distant, a little cold, which took on
the air of a monologue, since no response was possible. Yet the young girl read
and reread her letters. She kept them in a silk envelope she had sewn
especially for them. Without knowing why, she showed them to no one, nor did
she speak of their existence.

Sally Hemings smiled at her latest geography lessons
interspaced with "be a good girl."

"Study ... depend on yourself... visit with Patsy and
Polly ... love me...." These fatherly letters disappointed her. How
strange these terse letters that arrived from mysterious German cities so
remote from her imagination, she thought.

Then, one day, a new letter arrived. It was dutifully
brought to her by James to her rooms and dutifully hidden in her petticoats
until she returned from their walk to read it alone, and dutifully opened and
held toward the light in order to decipher the minuscule, almost illegible
writing. When she finished reading it, she sat down weakly, her legs no longer
able to support her, and steadied the letter trembling in her hands on her lap.
Again she strained over the tiny cramped writing, as if her life had depended
on it, and finally she clutched it to her bosom with a cry.

The message was clear. And because it was written, it had
for Sally Hemings the binding power of a holy writ.

CHAPTER 15

PARIS, APRIL
1788

Thomas Jefferson
woke with the
alarm of someone who does not know where he is. The alarm was physical as well
as metaphysical. He hadn't remembered for a moment not only where he was but
who he was. He had traveled so many miles.... He sighed. He was staring at
Jean-Simon Berthelemy's painting of "Night" on his own sculptured
ceiling over his own bed, in his own room in his own Hotel de Langeac, and not
in some Prussian inn lying in his white-linen envelope among strangers. He
raised himself on one elbow and stared at the sleeping girl beside him. He had
gone to fetch his slave from her rooms as soon as he had arrived in Paris. She
was on her side, turned away from him, her long dark hair fanning out from her
body. The white sheets darkened her skin, like a pale sky darkens clouds. He
lifted the covers from her and slowly pulled them away from her body. Then he
bent his bright head and ran his tongue along the delicate backbone. The taste
of honey and pine hit the back of his throat.

"Mon
Dieu
..." he murmured, and sank back into his satin pillows.
Possessively he drew the girl closer to him and arranged her head on his naked
chest. She slept. Without waking her, he caressed the tangled hair. There was a
small crescent-shaped scar in the silky down of the beginning of her hairline.
A dim recollection made it seem that this scar had something to do with him,
but he couldn't remember what. He tenderly rubbed the slightly raised whiteness
of it with the tips of his fingers.

Landscape after landscape rushed before him as if he were
riding in the jostling coaches and carriages of his Rhine journey.

He had described to the girl again and again the long,
lonely voyage through the Low Countries to the north and finally Prussia and
the Rhine Valley. His description of the vast, magical Black Forest had
transported the young girl into a world of dragons, princesses, and fairy tales.
His imaginary carriage slowed now, so that innumerable scenes of rustic beauty
floated before his eyes in stately sequence. On the second of April he had
arrived at Dusseldorf and had gone straight to the painting gallery. It was
there that he had seen the Van der Werff painting that had so moved him: the
Biblical story of Sarah giving the slave Hagar to Abraham. That same afternoon
he had written to Sally in Paris. Had it really been a sign, he wondered?