Sally Heming (46 page)

"Thomas, you know that Jamey's gone?"

"Yes. Who told you?"

"Mama, of course."

"There were some Mohicans in the neighborhood, and he
stole off with them, or was stolen by them!"

"Ran off with the Indians?" I asked it innocently,
but he knew as well as I that it was the route many escaping slaves took:
refuge with Indians. If they could reach an Indian nation, it was the safest
and surest route to freedom.

"They will probably take him across the Mississippi or
to another tribe who will get him to Canada. I doubt if he will stay with them.
He is white enough to pass for white, so let him stroll."

There was no rancor in his voice, but the chill of
desertion was there. Even for Jamey. Jamey had chosen freedom. My master no
longer "loved" him enough to go after him. I breathed a sigh of
relief. He would not send the patrols after him. Thomas was now seventeen. When
had he realized that the master was his father? And how long did I have before
he too would stroll?

I did not have long to ponder Jamey's flight, for hard on
his disappearance came an event that underlined the mortal danger we lived in
on our mountain: a double murder. It was a murder that struck special terror in
the gentry—poisoning, the one killer all Southern whites lived in dread of.
More than one Big House cook had been hanged in Albemarle County on suspicion,
or conviction, of poisoning her white folks.

It was my mother who brought me the news: George Wythe,
Liddy Broadnax, and their son Michael Brown had been poisoned.

"Well, like the Richmond papers say," she
announced, "it happened a little more than two weeks ago, that is the
poisonings happen then, 'cause Masta Wythe, he just died. The bells in Richmond
was a-tolling like the end of the world, but poor Michael, he died more than a
week ago after horrible suffering. They cut him open—the doctors—and they found
the inflammation in the stomach and the bowels that's caused by yellow arsenic,
like Wormley use for the moles and groundhogs."

Michael Wythe Brown, two years younger than my Thomas, was now
dead. He had been here for James's Christmas emancipation. I picked up
eighteen-month-old Madison. There were now two Madisons. Martha had named her
last son Madison to cancel out mine in the affections of his father. White
vengeance had many faces.

"And what are they saying in the Richmond kitchens,
Mama?"

"Well, Masta Wythe's nephew George Sweney been charged
with murder and the white folks is up in arms and having a fit. You know how
scared they is of poison with all us cooks.... Ain't nothing caused such a
sensation in Richmond since the British. You know old Masta Wythe considered a
saint in Virginia. You know how well loved he was, how mild and kind and how he
done served on the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of
Independence, and served on the High Court and all.... Well, he done wrote a
will giving his house to Lyddy Broadnax and his property and half his bank
stocks to his son Michael Brown. The rest of his money he left to his nephew
George Sweney, with the regulation that if Michael died before Sweney, Sweney
would get Michael's part, too. Lyddy says Sweney found out about the will the
night before Whitsunday, the twenty-fifth. Masta Sweney came as he sometimes
did when Masta Wythe was at court, and went to his room and found his keys of
his private desk. He opened the desk, and when Lyddy went in she found him
reading a paper that her masta had told her was his will. She done tied it
herself with a blue ribbon.

"Well, in the morning, when breakfast was nearly
ready, Masta Sweney came into the kitchen. Lyddy said he went to the fire and
took the coffee pot to the table while she was toasting the bread. He poured a
cupful for himself and then set the pot down. She saw him throw a little white
paper in the fire. He then drank the coffee he had poured for hisself and ate
the toast with some fresh butter. He told her good-bye and went about his
business. She didn't think there was anything wrong then. In a little while,
she heard old Masta Wythe's bell. 'Lyddy, did I leave my keys in my desk
yesterday, for I found them there last night?' he said to her. And she said, 'I
suppose so, Masta, cause I saw Masta George at the desk reading that paper you
gave me to put there. Masta George said you had sent him to read it, and to
tell you what he thought of it.' Old Masta Wythe said, 'I fear I am getting
old, Lyddy, for I am becoming more and more forgetful every day. Take these
things away, and give Michael his breakfast, and get your own, Lyddy.' She gave
poor little Michael his breakfast and as much coffee as he wanted, and then
drank a cup herself. After that, with the hot water in the kettle, she washed
the plates, emptied out the coffee grounds, and scrubbed the coffee pot bright.
By that time she was so sick with cramps she could hardly see, and Lord, she
was poisoned and her son and her master as well. And now they're both dead and
Lyddy Broadnax wish she was. Her son—her only son—dead. And they had had such
hopes for him. Wasn't no boy in Richmond educated like Michael. Masta Wythe
didn't spare nothing for his education. And freed him too, from the beginning,
and Lyddy as well. He had the finest books...."

For the first time I saw fear in my mother's eyes.

"Who did she tell all this to, Mama?"

"Well, first to the doctor, Foushee, then to the other
doctors who opened up poor Masta Wythe and found the same inflammation as in
Michael. Then she had to tell it to the Court of Examination. This was after
Michael died. Before then she was suffering something terrible and Michael was
suffering worse than either her or Masta Wythe. She was so sick that she didn't
even know when her son died. It was the Sunday after the poisoning that Masta
Wythe, dying himself, found out his son had just died. He cried out, drew a
long breath, and said pathetic-like, 'Poor boy.' Well, it seems that Masta
Wythe immediately called for his will to change it, since he knew by then he
was murdered. 'I am murdered,' he said, and he struck George Sweney from his
will. 'Let me die righteous,' were his last words."

The cords on my mother's neck stood out. Her eyes seemed to
be on some horrible object far in the distance coming toward her. Her hair was
a silvery white, her skin darkened by age, but hardly wrinkled. Rather it
seemed solidified. It was neither flesh nor stone, but a thin, fragile,
paperlike substance hardly covering her bone and muscle. Her eyesight was
intact and she had all of her teeth.

"But that George Sweney, he'll hang for it, won't
he?"

"I think not, Mama. Black people and mulattoes can't
testify against white people. Lydia Broadnax can't accuse her son's
murderer."

"No! It ain't true!"

"Thomas Jefferson made the law himself. He and George
Wythe."

"No! Lord God. Lyddy. Lyddy."

"There's no sense calling on God. He only takes white
men's testimony," I said with bitterness.

"Oh, Lord Jesus Sweet Saviour have mercy on us black
women," she moaned.

My heart burst. Mama, after seventy-three years of slavery
still believed in justice. She rose, her body quivering with age and fury; I looked
at her helplessly. I could do nothing for her. Just as I could do nothing for
myself. Thomas. Michael. Beverly. Madison. What protection did we have from
white vengeance?

"Darling," Elizabeth Hemings whispered suddenly,
her face gray with fright, "you think they'se trying to kill us all?"

The deaths of Lydia Broadnax's son and lover destroyed my
mother. Her spirit broke. She who had always been envious of Lydia's freedom
and privilege and her son's education, she who had made freedom and recognition
for herself and her children the supreme goal in her life, now saw that being
free did not lead one from the dangers of blackness.

All her life, she had urged me to get freedom for the
children; to strive for that magic circle which she thought was safety, only to
find that there was no safety for us anywhere. There was only one escape from
white will and white justice. And she decided to take it.

"Think I'm going to die now," she said simply one
day, and she folded her apron and took to her bed. She refused her food.
"They" were trying to poison her and she decided to die before she
was murdered.

Martha and I spent the days of the summer watching and
listening as she strained toward death, her life running out in rivers of
words. And, to the end, she clung to the idea that somebody was trying to
poison her. We did everything. We ate her food in front of her. Both of us.
Martha. Me. We fed the children out of her refused plate. But she opened her
mouth only to speak.

"Put your hand on my chest and push down," she
had finally whispered. "My heart won't stop beating."

By the end of August, Mama finally won her battle to die.
She was buried in the slave cemetery. I was now all alone and the second legacy
of blood and kin fell upon me: not only to love but to survive.

I did not know how my master had taken the death of his
well-loved friend and benefactor until he came home for the summer after the
murders. He had not written from Washington City of the death of his professor,
and it was only upon his arrival that I fathomed his grief and his shock.

I learned that he had been mentioned in Wythe's will. He
paced the floor as he told me:

"Such an instance of depravity as has been hitherto
known to us only in the fables of poets."

I said nothing. George Wythe had flaunted Michael's
intelligence, his education, his beauty, had freed him and, by making him his
heir, had advertised his parentage for all to know. Against the most sacred law
of the South ... he had gone against the rules and he had paid with what he had
loved most: his only son had died before his eyes.

"When I think that we all gathered at the Washington
Tavern in the capital in March, less than a year and a half ago to celebrate my
second inauguration, and John Page asked George to retire and then proposed a toast
to him, praising his wisdom and integrity as a magistrate, his zeal and
disinterestedness as a patriot!" My master shook his head. "The hall
resounded to nine cheers ... as many as were given to me—" His voice
broke. "He had left me his library, his scientific instruments, his silver
cups and walking stick—" He paused. "And he had made me a guardian of
Michael Brown...."

Oh, God, I thought, not only had the quiet, mild-mannered
George Wythe advertised his miscegenation by leaving an inheritance to his
yellow son, he had advertised the plight of Thomas Jefferson by placing a
yellow boy under his guardianship.

By the time the trial began in September, it was famous
throughout Virginia. Edmund Randolph, Martha Randolph's cousin by marriage,
defended George Sweney. The outcome was as I had predicted. For the murder of
George Wythe, signer of the Declaration of Independence, codifier of the
Virginia laws, judge in the High Court of the state, George Sweney was
acquitted for lack of evidence, despite forged checks in his uncle's name,
despite the arsenic found in his room, despite the eyewitness account of Lydia
Broadnax, who was never allowed to testify. If it took only a few minutes for
the jury to return a verdict of not guilty of the indictment of murder of
George Wythe; the indictment for the murder of Michael Brown was dismissed
without a trial. For the forged checks in his uncle's name, George Sweney was
convicted and sentenced to six months' imprisonment and one hour's exposure on
the pillory in the marketplace in Richmond, but he never served even this
sentence.

George Sweney was free. Mama, Wythe, and Michael were dead,
still freshly in their graves that September day when I stood posed to mount
the staircase to my room. I still remember his voice.

"How painful and melancholy to reflect that a man so
pure, so upright, so virtuous, and so beloved should have met an unnatural
death."

A flash of disbelief went through me. I turned and almost
stumbled. He was lying to himself! He was going to lie to himself even about
this! Oh God, when would we stop the lies.

"Unnatural death!" I screamed. "It was
murder.
Murder!
Don't you
understand? Oh, Thomas, can't you face your white race this one time?" He
looked up. There was actually surprise in his eyes.

Remember Callender! Remember, Goddamn you, Thomas
Jefferson! Remember the hate, remember the filth, remember Callender dead in
the mud of the James River! This is what you can expect from your white world.
Death and hatred and damnation for you, for me, for the children!