Sally Heming (4 page)

His long legs under the full-length gray frockcoat shifted
position, itching for the feel of his horse Eagle between them. He was
seventy-two years old. His presidency was six years behind him and those six
years had been spent here at home, in retirement, surrounded by those he loved
most in the world: his women, his children, his grandchildren, his slaves, his
neighbors, his kin. Restless, he rose from his writing table to his full
height, the face ascetic and serene in the bright light. He sat down again, and
his left hand took up his pen, and as it did, the copying machine he had
invented by which a letter written manually with one pen was simultaneously
traced with another by a series of connected levers, called a polygraph,
followed the movements of his hand. This would be the last letter of the
morning.

He looked out of his study windows: it was a view in which
nothing mean or small could exist, he thought. That was why he had chosen the
site, which commanded the Blue Ridge Mountains: it was one of the boldest and
most beautiful horizons in the world. His house, which he called Monticello,
giving it the soft Italian pronunciation, stood upon a plain formed by cutting
off the top of the mountain.

The light this morning is so pure and delineating, he
thought, touched with the soft promise of spring that turns the mountains their
deepest blue.

He stared for a moment more at the west lawn, noting
several figures gamboling on it—children, he supposed. He smiled. Whoever they
were, black or white, they belonged to Monticello. And to him.

He turned his eyes away and picked up his pen. Absently, he
massaged his wrist before signing:
Thomas Jefferson.

CHAPTER 3

ALBEMARLE COUNTY,
1830

But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the
child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the
circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus
nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it
with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners
and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia,
1790

"Mama
, what did you
talk about all that time?"

"I don't know, Eston, different things, gossip
mostly."

"You mean a white gentleman traveled all the way from
Charlottesville to come up here and gossip with you? What did he want? What
kind of information? And how do you know he weren't one of those
journalists?"

This was Madison Hemings speaking. His voice had a
perpetual edge of violence and irritation.

The question sent a flush of surprise up the back of Sally
Hemings' neck. As a matter of fact, she had no idea at all if he was a
journalist or not. He didn't seem or speak like one, or at least her idea of
one, since she had never met a journalist in her entire life. Therefore, she
wasn't sure. Besides it was evident from his knowledge of local families and
his accent that he was from these parts.

"I told you, Madison, I was afraid it might have been
the sheriff and when I saw that it wasn't, well, I was just so relieved I guess
I just believed anything. He had to be one or the other, and if he was white
and wasn't the sheriff, then he had to be the census taker. He said he was the
census taker, and didn't you tell me the census man would be coming round these
days? I just assumed he was telling the truth."

"Mama, you believe everything a nice white gentleman
tells you! You had no business letting a strange man, white or black, into my
house!"

"Our house, Madison," Eston said. "And leave
Mama alone. You just scared it might have been the sheriff. I told you Martha
Jefferson Randolph is not to be trusted. She hates all of us, and always
has."

"Leave Martha out of it, Eston," Madison said.
"She had her reasons for helping us—if you can call this run-down, no-dirt
farm 'help.' She's no better off herself, living down there in Pottsville, in
that dinky house with all her children, and Thomas Mann Randolph, dead as crazy
and drunk as a loon. I'm not shedding any tears for Martha Randolph! She didn't
have to marry that bastard!"

Of all her children, she thought, Madison was the most difficult,
and because he was the one who reminded her of her brother James, she favored
him in a way. He, of all her children, was in the most danger. Eston, with his
placid nature and good looks, would always get by as a black man or as a white
one.

"Mama, admit you were wrong to let him in! He could be
a journalist pretending to be the census taker just nosing around for dirt to
print," Madison went on.

"You can surely find out if he is the real census
taker," his mother answered. "Just ask in town. He said his name was
Nathan Langdon and he was born at Broadhurst. He has six brothers and sisters,
and his father is old Samuel Langdon and his Uncle John was a friend of Thomas
Jefferson. He is fair with a dark beard and about six feet tall, light for a young
man, about twenty-seven or eight. He is going to marry a Wilks girl from
Norfolk by the name of Esmeralda, and he just came back from Boston and
Harvard, cause his pa is sick and his fiancée upset about his taking so long to
come back. Then too, his brother... killed in a duel..."

"Mama, you found all that out!"

"I was the last count to be made for the day and he
was hot and tired. I guess he just stayed on longer than he intended."

"Was he waiting for us to come home?"

"Not really. He asked about you both; and wanted to
know how he could reach you for some work his father needs done at the
plantation. I told him he could find you after curfew if he needed to."

"You mean you invited him back?"

"Well, that was the least I could do, he's—"

"White, Mama! I don't want him in the house. Any
business he has with me, he can find me at the university. Any business with
anybody can be conducted at the front door. And you were alone.... What
if—"

"Madison, for heaven sakes. Not all white men are
rapists!"

"No? Just remember Stokes's wife, stuck out there past
the Channing place.... Didn't happen less than two months ago. A free colored
man's wife, free colored man's property doesn't mean anything in this county.
They don't want free coloreds in Virginia. They've made that pretty clear. One
false step—even one—and you are in a chain gang heading for Georgia or South
Carolina, papers or no papers. Just sudden like that. Nobody ever found out
what happened to Willy Dubois. Where'd he go? In the dead of night? After curfew.
Just disappeared, leaving hearth and home, wife, mother, and five children. Now
just where did he go? I don't want any strange men in this house, Mama, black
or white. You hear me, Eston?"

"I hear you," Eston said, moving over
protectively to his mother.

Eston Hemings was a beautiful man. He was huge, over six
feet four, with bright red hair and a continent of pale freckles on a clear
milky skin that showed no trace of a beard. He had enormous hands that could
carve the most delicate designs—flowers, scrolls, fruit—in any wood that grew,
and could wrench the most beautiful notes out of his instruments—the pianoforte
and the Italian violin. His features were regular and delicate, like his
mother's, with a high wide rather long nose and a generous sensual mouth.
Already there were laugh marks around his pale-blue eyes. He was broad of
shoulder with a surprisingly long and girl-like neck.

Eston knew that when Madison was like this, something bad
had happened to him in town. Maybe he would tell them, and maybe he wouldn't.
Madison had a damned irritating way of doing everything. He was the darkest in
the family, and his cool slender grace, his animal vitality and cockiness,
seemed an affront to both races. He was always getting into trouble: rows with
shopkeepers over bills, with foremen over plans, with masons over blueprints,
with other carpenters over techniques, with the landlord, with the bank, with
the tax collector. With everybody, nigh on. Madison should leave for the
Territories, thought Eston. Now. Before he really got into some scrape he
wouldn't be able to get out of. Eston knew why Mama would never leave here. He
could take care of Mama alone. He wasn't in love. He wasn't trying to prove to
some freeborn girl how great a man he was.

Madison Hemings felt the gentle but firm pressure of his
brother's rough hand steering him toward the back door of the cabin and the
cool fragrant night air. The gentle, insistent pressure calmed and soothed him.
He clamped shut his jaw in an effort to stop tears of rage.

Why was he so upset? Why had he yelled at his mother? The
real reason, he knew, was fear.... He was scared to death that something was
going to happen to ruin their fragile existence, before they even got a chance
to live it. He didn't want to tell anyone about what had happened to him today
in town. Not even Eston. Eston could feel his brother's neck muscles tense, but
he said nothing.

Outside, they faced the dying red sun sinking below the
delicate line of the peach trees they had planted more than a year ago. Beyond
that lay the boundaries of Monticello. Normally a thick whitewashed birch fence
cut across the dark green of the pine woods, marking the end of the plantation
on the southwest side. But the fences were now mostly down, and those standing
were a dirty disinherited gray. The crossbeams lay on the nettle-packed ground
where they had fallen.

Madison stared at this unkempt frontier. It seemed to be
the line between his former life and this one. He would never understand why
his mother refused to leave this place; why she deliberately chose a rented
house so close to Monticello. Was it that she wanted to be reminded, every
minute of every day, of her former servitude, of her concubinage?

His mother had never told him anything of his origins. He
knew that slave women never told their offspring anything. So slave children
learned what they could when they could, in bits and pieces from older slaves,
mammies, white people's conversations, and the bitterness of what they learned
was all the more wounding. It intensified the shame without alleviating the
burden. He remembered the shock of learning from some old crone that he was the
son of the master. Even his grandmother hadn't told him! He was their son; yet
neither father nor mother seemed to love him for it! He had tried to
understand. He had stood for hours looking at his pale-yellow face in the
polished silver mirrors of the Big House. He would run down to this very
frontier, far from the Big House, and butt his head against the white-birch
fencing until the blood came, because he couldn't understand why his father
didn't love him. Madison stared at the fence posts now, as if he expected to
see the stains of his childish blood still on them.

Madison looked up. He and Eston watched their mother slip
under the high gray railings of the frontier of Monticello. Gathering her
skirts as she went, she was walking up the mountains toward the cemeteries.

When she was upset or angry she could usually be found
either by the grave of Thomas Jefferson or that of her mother, Elizabeth
Hemings. They divided her loyalties in death as they had in life. When her sons
saw her turn eastward, they knew she was heading toward the slave cemetery and
their grandmother.

CHAPTER 4

ALBEMARLE COUNTY,
1830

And with what execration should the statesman be loaded,
who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the
other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the
morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can
have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in
which he is born to live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the
faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual
endeavours to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable
condition on the endless generations proceeding from him.