Sally Heming (21 page)

Once, in the privacy of her attic room, she had pulled down
her bodice and stared at the smooth skin, expecting somehow to see the branded
scar "C" for concubine on her flesh just as the famous La Motte had
recently been branded with a "V" for
voleuse
on her shoulder, and her grandmother
with the "R" for runaway on her breast. But there had been nothing
but smooth skin.

When would he free her? she wondered. What if she asked him
now ... here? ... She couldn't, she was ashamed. The pallor, the soft eyes, the
ribbon undone, the mouth softened by their kisses ... He was smiling lazily at
her. Even now after their moment of passion, there was a violence and a constraint
about him that made her tremble. It was then she realized that he liked owning
her. She looked back at him. The face that just a short while ago had been hers
was now closed. It belonged to the world.

My anxious lover would sometimes touch me or smooth my hair
as if I were a touchstone, a relic of Monticello, a living symbol of all the
love and happiness that he had invested in his patrimony. Late at night, when
the house was silent and Paris slept, he would tell me of his new plans for
Monticello, of changes in the Big House, of redesigned gardens and vineyards
with German and French grapes, and olive trees not native to Virginia. For him,
the Blue Ridge Mountain region was Eden, and even Paris, the most beautiful of
all cities, could not replace it.

This I understood even as he spoke of his retirement, of
his leave of absence, and our return to Paris. When he spoke of these things,
he never made it clear if I was to stay in Paris to wait for him, return to
Virginia and be re-enslaved, or be freed at once by his hand. I did not yet ask
which of these alternatives he contemplated, but when I brought up my own
plans, laid with James and based on freedom in France, he would become silent
and morose, or suddenly leave the room.

Just as he willed the revolution that was growing to be a
peaceful one, so did he will that my conversion from slave to lover be also
without violence. He saw the Revolution through the eyes of a man who had found
unexpected happiness and who was determined to avoid unexpected grief at any
cost.

"Have you told him I want to speak to him?"

"Yes," I lied. I had begun to lie to James.

"He knows that we are aware that under French law, he
cannot hold us against our will?"

We were speaking French. James had an abrupt and excitable
manner of speaking in which every other word came out as if underlined.

"Yes." I lied, I didn't know if he knew or not.
"Did
you
tell
him about the
proposition
of the Prince de
Conti's
maitre d'hotel?"

"
Yes."

"Well,
what did
he
say?"

"He said he would speak to the prince at the first
occasion."

"Has he told you, sister, that he has written to ask
the Congress for a leave of absence to return to Virginia, and is waiting for
an answer?" James had lapsed back into English.

"Yes," I lied. I was shocked; he had not told me
anything.

"Don't you
think
it is
time
to claim our
liberty?"
He had reverted to French.

"You mean to ask to be freed? Shouldn't we wait until
the date is set for our return?"

"So that
he
can
pack
us up with
his
other
possessions?"

"You have said that we are not owned. We have gotten
wages since last January. He has recognized that this is not Virginia...."

"You
can
say
that
this
is not
Virginia? Mon Dieu!"

I blushed, but I kept my head high. "He's given me his
word."

"In writing?"

"He's promised."

"And you
will
leave?"

"I'm ready when you are."

James turned his hard gray eyes on me. "And you've
told him
you will
leave
him?"

"Yes," I lied.

"He will
never
forgive you. He will
accuse
you of
betraying
him."

"I know." This time I didn't lie. The specter of
my master's cold fury, his outraged injury, which I had witnessed once or
twice, struck terror in my breast.

"He...
wouldn't
do
you
harm?"

I thought a moment of my impulsive lover. Yes, I thought,
he was capable of hurting me.

"Of course not," I said. "He is the kindest
and most gentle of men."

"Why,
why
could he
not
have
taken
a... white mistress, if he
must
have
one,
like all
his
friends?"

"I don't know."

Jealousy struck me, unexpected and hot. James and I had
never spoken of my concubinage.

"How should I know why he does or doesn't! Do you
think he tells me what goes on in his mind? Do you think his secrets concern
me?" I stopped short.

I felt sick with this new emotion. The pain of it
overwhelmed me, almost carrying me to my knees. He was mine! Mine. So this was
jealousy. This is what I would live with from now on.

"Time is running out," James said to me in
English. He seemed to be sorry for what he had said.

"You believe that there will be an insurrection ... a
revolution? Our master says not."

"There will be an insurrection. But this was not what
I meant," he said gently.

"I'm careful," I whispered.

"Ask Marie-Louise downstairs to help you. She knows
what to do and she likes you.... There are ways."

I looked at my brother. There was no more boy left in him.
He was lean and hard. It was a violent hardness of body. His eyes beneath their
long black lashes were disillusioned and bitter. He had been seventeen when he
left Virginia. Had it been in Paris that he had known his first woman? And who
had she been? A countess whose eye he had caught? A prostitute? Whoever it had
been, I was convinced, she had been white.

I lowered my head. I had never thought of such things
before. We knew so little of each other—men knew so little of women and women
so little of men. I had no idea where he spent his money and free time. Who his
friends were. We had barely spoken to each other since I had returned to the
ministry, and we had never, until now, spoken of the one important event of my
life.

Whoever this man my brother was, he was a man. And no
matter what happened to him, he would never be caught like me in the throes of
a love which now held me against my will. But, no matter what, I would break
that will, I believed. I would reclaim my body, my heart, and I would be careful....
I would not be deprived of my one chance in life. I would not fail my brother,
I vowed. When the time came, I would run.

CHAPTER 17

PARIS, APRIL
1789

James Hemings
untied the
roasted golden-brown suckling pig and stepped back to avoid the rich dark
juices that spluttered out onto the chopping block of his kitchens at the Hotel
de Langeac. He had filled the suckling pig with a mixed stuffing of herbs,
walnuts, mushrooms, and ground meat. Around the roast pig, he placed the
candied fruits and flowers glazed with sugar. Julien, the French chef, nodded
curtly. His apprentice was now a master cook. James stood staring at his dish.

A year had passed since Thomas Jefferson had taken his
sister as concubine. Only he saw the dark side of her station: she was still a
slave. The master had taken up his political and social life as if nothing had
happened, he had simply added Sally Hemings to his bed.

He, James, had become a master cook and his sister had
become a master whore, he thought with bitterness. Not that anyone cared, he
reminded himself. Her existence, and her romance did not seem to carry any
weight in the network of gossip exchanged between the servants, the lackeys,
the hairdressers, and coachmen of the great Parisian hotels in this spring of
1789.
This spring there was only news of the political situation.
Riots, court intrigues, manifestos that flew from the courtyards to the
kitchens and the backstairs of one hotel to another with the efficiency of the
Tidewater slave network. An aristocrat's liaison with a lady's maid was after
all so common, he thought, so lacking in interest, that it was beneath the
notice of even the lowliest scullery maid. For this forlorn silence, James was
grateful.

Of course, the servants in the house all knew that the beautiful
young girl, supposedly the maid of one of his daughters, was in fact
Jefferson's mistress. But as far as James could discern, this fact had escaped
the intelligence of the white Americans connected with the household: Mr.
Short, Mr. Humphreys, Jefferson's two daughters. The master was more than ever
a loving father, a sweet-tempered lord, a kind and compassionate aristocrat, a
gallant appreciator of beautiful women. His many migraines stopped, his
melancholy abated, and he seemed to be unconscious of the undertow of civil
discontent which racked France. "The Revolution is completed," he was
fond of saying over and over.

As for most of the visitors who wandered in and out of the
ministry, they had never set eyes on his sister, nor even known of her existence.
If any of the elegant French ladies had remarked her, they certainly would have
dismissed their famous friend's
divertissement
with an amused shrug. His hope that his master's interest in his sister
would be transitory and "in the French fashion" had turned out to be
in vain. He might play at being French, James thought, but his nature was
Virginian, passionate, proud, possessive, tenacious; violent feelings ran under
that polite and remote surface. If anything, he had noted that his master's obsession
with Sally Hemings had grown rather than waned in the past year. His master,
thought James, showed no lessening of the tyrannical possessiveness and
watchful interest in her dependence on him. She seemed to be a prisoner in this
house. And his sister was reveling in it; she had blossomed under this jealous
power. The last childish contours of her body had dropped away, leving the
low-burning smolder of a woman's maturity far beyond her sixteen years. The
final shape of her face with its high, flat cheekbones and wide-spaced eyes had
hardened and lost some of its innocence. A small, exquisite, heavy-breasted,
slim-waisted body had emerged from the coltish and countrified adolescent of a
year ago. She had honed her natural grace and inborn elegance on the examples
of the most fashionable ladies of Panthemont and Paris on whom she spied
incessantly and indecently, and had developed a lust for clothes and a taste
for finery that went with such examples.

She had lessons in French, in music, in dressmaking. In her
seclusion, Sally was better read than most ladies. Yet she had resisted all his
pleadings to use her power over the senses of their master to achieve her
freedom and his. She assumed that all would be taken care of in time. That love
would make her free.

James knew better. Men didn't free what they loved. He had
surprised Thomas Jefferson more than once looking at Sally Hemings as he had
often seen him contemplating some of his rare objects, those he meant to keep.
It was the look of a man who both coveted and had the means to possess what he
coveted. How many times had he seen this look as the steady stream of precious
objects flowed from the workshops and auction houses of Paris and were set
before his master in unending abundance. A look of tender greed would flash
cross his face like a bright star, and then his hand would reach out and touch
the object presented to him, bringing it under his domination.