Sally Heming (28 page)

Let Dusky Sally henceforth bear

The name of Isabella And let the mountain, all of salt

Be christen'd Monticella

john quincy adams,
1803

CHAPTER 22

NEW YORK CITY,
1834

"The only thing
I know about
Sally Hemings is that she was for a time the most famous lady of color in the
United States."

Nathan Langdon squinted through the haze of blue smoke
surrounding the voice of Aaron Burr. Now that he was here, in the presence of
the legendary vice-president with all his messages and letters and
introductions, Nathan Langdon was not all sure he really wanted to speak of
Sally Hemings to him.

It had been more than a year since he had spoken with John
Quincy Adams about her and now he had impulsively sought out her old enemy,
Burr. Langdon, now securely ensconced in the inner sanctum of the political
machine that ran Washington, was a "Washington lawyer" who would
serve whatever politician and party paid him the best.

Aaron Burr, whom he had met several times before, had
greeted him like a long lost son: "Why, Nathan, my boy. What brings you to
New York City?"

There was something repellent about the tiny old man
propped up in his bed, surrounded by his books. Burr was embroiled, as usual,
in controversy and notoriety; this time, his own divorce at seventy-eight from
his fifty-eight-year-old bride of one year for infidelities and fraud.

"You're not related to her, are you?" Burr asked
as he pushed his spectacles down from his forehead onto his sharp nose and
peered through them.

Irritated at himself, Nathan Langdon felt a blush coming
on. Aaron Burr always did have the famous knack of smelling out a motive. Now,
he was zeroing in for the kill.

"Don't tell me you're a son of Thomas Jefferson!"

"Colonel Burr, sir!"

"How am I to guess," he replied crankily,
"when one side of the blanket inevitably resembles the other... and I
should know."

"I have met ... two of her sons, and I believe that
there is a third somewhere in New York. I would hope to find a trace of him,
for his mother's sake."

"For his mother's sake? Then you know Sally Hemings? I
had heard that she had been sold on the auction block, along with her daughter,
after Jefferson died bankrupt."

"No, she was freed in
1826
and remained in Virginia, where she still resides with two
of her sons. I... I met the family in my official capacity as census taker of
Albemarle County."

"Really? How old is she now?"

"She was fifty-six when I first met her, so that makes
her sixty now."

"Is that all?"

"Yes."

"My God! How old would Thomas Jefferson be now?"

"Ninety-three."

"The age I feel today."

"You look very well, sir."

"And you are the worst liar I've met. How do you ever
get your clients off?"

"Usually I don't, sir." Langdon laughed. Despite
himself, he was beginning to warm to the old man who had an aura, even now, of
brimstone and danger.

There was something in the way he had said Sally Hemings'
name that made Langdon hesitate to go any further into his relationship with
her. Aaron Burr was not, after all, John Quincy Adams. The quick elflike face,
the thin wasted body, the still undiminished reputation gave him an
indisputable power of intimidation.

Langdon had delivered a packet of letters from Burr's
friends in Washington yesterday, and had spent the better part of this
afternoon with him as well.

Burr had told Langdon, when the ex-census taker had guided
him onto the subject that still obsessed him, that he had only seen Sally
Hemings once in Philadelphia at Thomas Jefferson's inauguration as
vice-president. He had never been intimate enough with the president (to say
the least) to have been invited more than once or twice to Monticello, and
there she had not been in evidence.

"But with all the clutter I found upon entering the
house, I could have missed her in between the stuffed moose and the statue of
Cleopatra. Walking into his entranceway was like walking into the inside of his
head. Everything a confusion of relics, of conjecture about things he knew
nothing about, loose ends and solid marble. There were Indian relics; bad
paintings, including a crucifixion owned by a man who didn't believe Jesus was
divine; heads and horns of an elk, of a deer; a map of Missouri drawn by
Indians (before he and Meriwether Lewis stole it from them); buffalo hides,
bows and arrows, poisoned lances (better than treason trials), peace pipes,
wampum belts, several Indian dresses and cooking utensils; and a colossal bust
of himself on a truncated column which made him ten feet tall and gave me a
good mouse-eye's view. The column, I remember, had the twelve tribes of Israel
and the twelve signs of the zodiac upon it; and besides the full-size reclining
statue of Cleopatra (after she had applied the asp), there were busts of
Voltaire, Turgot, John Paul Jones, George Washington, General Lafayette, and a
model of one of the pyramids!

"In the salon, I remember, were busts of Alexander the
Great; Napoleon, whom he professed to despise; and, quite aptly, a 'Sleeping
Venus' (white, not black). This was, of course, when I was his vice-president.
But if I didn't see her at that time, I certainly witnessed several interesting
happenings! The guest next to me practically fell off his chair when the
spitting image of Thomas Jefferson came in carrying the soup! But this couldn't
have been the famous 'Tom,' for he was too old. I think I heard him called
James or Jamey. At any rate, the place was crawling with white slaves,
literally, since many of them were very young children who seemed to have the
complete run of the house. As you know, after that time, the president and I
had a slight disagreement...."

Nathan Langdon was shocked even now. To refer to charges of
treason as "a slight disagreement...."

"You look shocked, my boy." Aaron Burr loved to
shock people and then console them. "If you look at it from my point of
view, I was simply twenty years before my time. We must kick the Spanish out,
annex half of Mexico, and fight a war to make it stick. All begun by our
illustrious President Jackson, twenty years later ... after I planned it. And
not a word of credit... or thanks!"

Nathan Langdon laughed. He was irresistible, this old man!

"I wouldn't call a trial for treason a 'slight
disagreement'!"

"It was a trial, not a conviction, my boy. The jury
returned a verdict of 'not guilty because not proven guilty' the first time,
and the second trial for the misdemeanor was a straight 'not guilty.' People
seem to forget that! The government had no case, and they knew it. Even Hay
admitted he couldn't hang me. He sought further treason indictments in Ohio. At
any rate, sooner or later Jefferson, with the aid of a complacent and
well-rewarded judge, would have gotten his verdict of guilty. After all, John
Marshall couldn't follow me through the seventeen states trying me. So, fearing
Jefferson's pertinacity in my pursuit, I went into hiding and eventually made
my way back to Europe, coming home during the war to resume my law practice. I
ran into John Trumbull, the painter, and his poor wife while I was in
London."

John Trumbull, Nathan thought. The one man who had made
drawings of Sally Hemings as a young girl.

"Is he in New York now?" he asked.

"Oh, yes, you know he became quite a staunch
Federalist. He's the president of the American Academy, and he has managed to
get his paintings in every federal building in Washington." Aaron Burr
pushed his spectacles back up on his high-domed forehead. "Would you like
to meet him?"

"Yes, sir," replied Langdon, "if it's not
too much trouble."

Aaron Burr would be quite content to give the young man a
letter of introduction. The talk about Sally Hemings had brought back his
undying hatred of Thomas Jefferson, and had reminded him of the one great
mistake of his life: trusting Jefferson to keep his word as a gentleman. What
he had always hated about Jefferson was his hypocrisy. It had cost him, Aaron
Burr, the presidency, he thought. Jefferson would lie with the whore politics,
then rise from her bed, scream that he had been infected with syphilis, and
refuse to pay....

"What do you really want to know about Sally Hemings,
and why?"

"Everything. Nothing. It is something I stumbled onto,
and now—" Nathan Langdon stopped, disconcerted.

"Strange, I had a beloved sister called Sally ... who
protected me from many a beating at the hands of my guardian. When I ran away
from home the first time, I was four and she six. She threw herself between me
and the rod, a pattern which was to continue all our lives. We had only each
other, having lost both our parents and grandparents by then. But, if ever a
woman left me cold, and there are not many who did, Sally Hemings was one.
Beautiful, yes. I saw her in her prime."

Aaron Burr gazed at Langdon, who was hanging on his every
word. "She was possibly the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, black or
white, slave or free, duchess or maid, with the exception of my daughter
Theodosia. But there was a cloying self-satisfaction about her that I detested.
A hypocrisy that matched her lover's. Leave it to Thomas Jefferson to find the
only woman in the South capable of being self-righteous about
concubinage...."

"Sir, being an ascetic, Jefferson can't have relished
the role of a debauchee."

"My dear sir, scratch an ascetic and you unearth a
sensualist! He loved words and used them like an artist; he loved wine, music,
food, flowers, beautiful objects, luxurious surroundings, fine books,
tapestries, paintings, horses, land. What is eliminated from that classic list
of the sensualist? If you count his love affairs with buildings, gardens,
scientific instruments, and his own written word, I would say that he, not I,
is the profligate. I may go down in history remembered only with the smoking
dueling pistol in my hand; but, really, I am a most dispassionate individual.
Behind that cold facade he was the passionate one. His hatred for me and all
his political enemies was uncontrolled, almost feminine. You could say he was
an inconsummate politician, rather than a consummate one. And all this... this
ardor was consummated, if you like, in the most extraordinary political
document of the century: the Declaration of Independence. This, not Sally
Hemings, nor any other woman, was his great moment of passion. His pathological
hatred for the English and everything English, including the English in
himself, impregnated him with a felicity of language he never again achieved.
Reread it, Nathan. In the original version, that document grips you like a
woman. It is pure passion. That's why it sings, and that's why it moves people.
What red-blooded American could resist such a ravishing and virile image of himself?

"Pure genius, my boy. I rather unimaginatively stuck
to women. As for Sally Hemings ... she came with the plantation."

"Sir, you forget she was a slave. She had no
choice."

"Oh, come now, Nathan. This was Virginia, not
Mississippi. And this was a Virginian gentleman, not some redneck overseer.
Even token resistance would have been enough. If she was her mother's daughter,
she probably
seduced
him. Now,
there
was a woman, Elizabeth Hemings. She must have been close to fifty when
I saw her, and she looked twenty-five: superb, a Nefertiti with
real
traces of Africa on her brow, and a
carriage worthy of a queen. She made you glad you had them, though I would have
been trembling in my boots if I had had to prove it to her! No, Sally Hemings
was too snobbish, too glacial, too busy playing Joan of Arc and putting on airs
to suit me. How old was she in Paris?"

"Fifteen," answered Langdon.

"Then she definitely seduced him. What forty-year-old
man in his right mind can resist a healthy fifteen-year-old girl?" Aaron
Burr smiled to himself. The profound shock on Nathan Langdon's face told him
all he wanted to know. This young man had become involved with Sally Hemings in
an emotional way, probably having to do with Thomas Jefferson, maybe as a
father figure. He had that hangdog look of a rejected lover. Why? if she had
accepted him in the first place. Aaron Burr was intrigued. What would somebody
as proud and haughty, as jealous of her prerogatives as Sally Hemings, and as
famous, want with a pip-squeak like Nathan Langdon? He decided to try another
technique.