Sally Heming (44 page)

"Why have you not married some woman of your own
complexion?" The Virginia Gazette.

He ground his teeth. Why? "Tell me who die," he
thought, "who marry, who hang themselves because they cannot
marry...." He prayed that Sally had not seen most of what had been written
about them. He came home feeling defeated. Everything reminded him of his two
families and the problems they faced. The presence of Maria and Martha in
Washington last winter had dampened all but the most infamous gossipmongers.
They had not deserted him. He had had his explanation with them and now he must
arrange a meeting with his injured friend and avoid a duel at all cost. He had
already talked his son-in-law Thomas Mann out of a duel with his cousin John
Randolph for the sake of Martha; now Madison must do the same for him. He could
not leave either his white family or his slave family unprotected by his death.

Thomas Jefferson looked up at his slave wife as she entered
his rooms. She appeared terribly small to him and fragile.

She wouldn't know the worst!

The following day James Madison arrived at Monticello. He
was bringing good news. He had interceded in Thomas Jefferson's favor, and
there would be no duel.

"I can't tell you how relieved I am, Mr. Madison, with
the outcome of this unfortunate affair ... and how I thank you."

"Mr. President, I don't think Mr. John Walker was any
more anxious for a duel than you."

"My dear Mr. Madison, I've never even held a pistol in
my hand. The very idea of one man murdering another in the name of injury is
insanity. We already have enough ways of men killing men without inventing an
etiquette for it."

"The law of Virginia 'honor' is a rather crude one,
sir."

"Mostly the law of vanity, dear sir. I am a simple
man. I accept with relief your intervention in this senseless affair and am
quite satisfied that Mr. Walker has accepted my apology."

James Madison noted a slight hesitation. Thomas Jefferson
was anything except a "modest" man and "insanity" or not,
he was a Virginian brought up in its codes and mores. The Walker affair had
distressed him much more than he was willing to admit. And his vanity had
indeed been touched. There was yet one more thing.

"As for the other calumny ..." began James
Madison, "I believe Mr. Monroe would be happy to take her."

Madison couldn't bring himself to say Sally Hemings.

"Take her?"

Thomas Jefferson swayed slightly and the blood rushed from
his face. "Temporarily, of course," added James Madison, alarmed at
the sudden pallor of the man standing before him. "Take her where?"

"Why doesn't she ... I believe ... she has a sister
Thenia at Mr. Monroe's. She could ... retire there with her children until the
time when—"

James Madison raised his eyes from the silver buttons on
Thomas Jefferson's waistcoat and looked directly into his eyes. How could
Thomas Jefferson not know in what political danger he was? He, James Madison,
simply had the duty to warn him that Virginia would not tolerate, even from
Thomas Jefferson, certain unpardonable things. He had to understand.

James Madison involuntarily stepped back. The cold blue
eyes had now turned a deep aquamarine.

"The Hemingses are mine," said Jefferson.
"All of them. I will deal with them personally."

"I didn't mean to presume ..." began Madison. He
concentrated on controlling the tremor in his voice. He brought his
handkerchief out of his waistcoat and mopped his brow. He had gone too far. Too
far for his own good. Relieved, he realized that Thomas Jefferson had already
dismissed the subject. His face had taken on the serene expression Madison knew
so well: his public face. The flash of his inner turmoil had been suppressed.
Thomas Jefferson seemed even taller to Madison as, towering over his small
person, he took him by the shoulder and flashed one of his rare smiles. The
sudden intimacy made Madison blush.

"We have come this far, Mr. Madison. But we still have
a long road to travel... full of the most dangerous ruts for the carriage of
State." Thomas Jefferson's smile disappeared. "You know, Mr. Madison,
how I feel about your rightful place in the political scheme of things….I'm an
old man. Compromise comes hard to me, but you have a brilliant talent for
negotiation. A nation isn't shaped in a featherbed...."

Madison started. It was a strange choice of words, but
Thomas Jefferson didn't seem to notice.

"Shall we get back to the important issues of the day?
Put this demeaning and ridiculous affair behind us. You have a long way to
travel, my dear Madison. After all, we can't disappoint Mrs. Madison, can we?
She's dead set on redecorating the President's House. And God knows, it needs
it!"

Both men laughed.

The night before he left the safety of Monticello for
Washington City, Thomas Jefferson sat alone in his study and brooded on what he
had written in his account book in August
1800.
He knew now that there would be no duel, thanks to the
sturdy and tenacious Madison. Callender could be silenced—the others were mere
copiers. He could end the outcry in the Republican press; if only his friends
could end the clamor in the Federalist press.

He must bring his families through the crisis of Callender
but he must navigate the United States through the bloody aftermath of Napoleon
and the specter of his troops arriving at the Mississippi; he must control an
undeclared war on Tripoli; cope with the Indian boundaries which were
constantly violated as the nation pushed them farther and farther West; he must
reduce the public debt, distribute the surplus in the Treasury—at least, at
last, the slave trade was outlawed; and he must bring to a successful end the
secret negotiations with France for the purchase of Louisiana and mount his
expedition to the Pacific. He had already chosen his secretary, Meriwether Lewis,
as head of the expedition, and he would take back to Washington City his new
secretary, Lewis Harvie, who was loyal enough to have threatened to kill James
Callender.

Callender. His Judas. Sally Hemings was only a pretext.
Before he had left for Washington, he would put down his for all to see. He had
also made a census of his family.

He lit his candle in the darkening study, opened his
account book and wrote:

Shortly after Thomas Jefferson had returned to Washington I
looked at his account book and found the pages open to the census he had
written in it of his family.

I stared at it for a long time, and then softly closed it.
My master had counted Thomas, Beverly, and Harriet as free and white.

Our love had been denounced and we had been betrayed in
Virginia. Even now, the hate, the epithets made me shiver. Did he think I
hadn't heard them all?
Slave, whore,
slut, concubine, Black Sal, Dusky Sally, paramour, blackamoor, wench, a slave
paramour with fifteen or thirty gallants of all colors, including Thomas Paine,
black wench and her mulatto litter, mahogany-colored charmer, Monticellian
Sally, Sooty Sal, black Aspasia ...
nothing was too
horrible for me: my heart cut out, my tongue pulled out by its roots, my body
burned, my throat slit from ear to ear, my soul sent to everlasting Hell.
Perhaps they would at least triumph in sending my soul to Hell, but for the
rest it was too late. My master and I were both anchored to a past and a
passion nothing could disavow. I had prayed for proof and he had given it to
me.

He had paid the worst of all possible prices: public
humiliation. To have been scourged at the public whipping post for slaves would
have been easier for him than that price: the loss of his public image, the facade
he cherished almost as much as he cherished the facade of Monticello.

He had paid. There was something he could do: remain
silent. And this silence would be payment. Payment for my servitude, which he
would not change. Payment for our children, whom he did not recognize. He had
paid with a kind of helpless, bewildered pride, for I was Monticello.

CHAPTER 34

MONTICELLO,
1803-1805

"Familia" did not (originally) signify the
composite ideal of sentimentality and domestic strife in the present day
philistine mind. Among the Romans, it did not even apply in the beginning to
the leading couple and its children, but to the slaves alone. Famulus means
domestic slave and familia is the aggregate number of slaves belonging to one
man.... The expression (familia) was invented by the Romans in order to
designate a new social organism that head of which had a wife, children and a
number of slaves under his paternal authority and according to Roman law, the
right of life and death over all of them.

friedrich engels,
The Origin of the
Family, Private Property, and the State,
1884

God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and
an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with
their wives and concubines: the mulattos one sees in every family partly
resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of
all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems
to think, drop from the sky.

mary boykin chestnut,
A Diary from Dixie,
1840-76

Oh, how can you think of slaves and motherhood! Look into
my eyes, Marianne, and think of love.

kate
C
hopin
, "The Maid of Saint Phillippe,"
1891-92

The news
of the Louisiana
Purchase came like a bolt of thunder at the beginning of the summer. The guns
were fired in Richmond, the bells rang, and there was great rejoicing. The news
of Master Monroe's success in Paris caused a sensation all over the nation and
made him the hero that would someday make him president. My master had doubled
the territory of the United States, purchasing the whole expanse of Louisiana
and the Floridas for fifteen million dollars.

"Typical of Thomas Jefferson," Elizabeth Hemings
declared, not without pride, from the vastness of her kitchens. "He sets
out to buy four acres and a mule, and ends up with a plantation and a herd of
cattle!"

"No, Mama. He set out to buy New Orleans and he has
ended up buying an empire."

Now that we had weathered the worst of Callender and the
Federalist newspapers, it seemed we had reason enough to celebrate. On the
sixteenth of July, the cabinet agreed to the purchase of Louisiana, and on the
seventeenth, Meriwether Jones danced a jig on the west lawn of Monticello. It
was not to celebrate the Louisiana Purchase but to celebrate the death of James
T. Callender. He had been found, dead that morning, in the James River, drowned
in three feet of water.

A year passed. A year free of scandal, although
Monticellian Sally
still rose now
and again in the press.

My master won his re-election by a landslide, losing only
four electoral votes out of one hundred and seventy-six, and not one for Aaron
Burr. It was his moment of greatest triumph, for he knew, if he ever was to
know, that the whole nation loved him. I felt keenly the pleasure of his
triumph. Gone were his protests of disdain, his abhorrence of public office,
his flight from using power. Truly, this outpouring of love and gratitude was
enough to turn the head of a man who, more than anything else, loved to be
loved.