Sally Heming (48 page)

He had needed someone he could trust for the expedition,
someone who could combine daring, prudence, woodsmanship, surveying,
familiarity of the Indian character, with a good knowledge of botany, natural
history, mineralogy, and astronomy. What better choice than his brilliant
secretary Meriwether?

My son Thomas had dreamed day and night of that expedition,
had begged his father to let him go, although he was much too young. Meriwether
Lewis had chosen William Clark and his slave York to go with him. For two years
and four months, they had toiled and marched the uncharted wilderness. Of this
my master was proud. But even this happiness, we were to discover, was
mortgaged.

It was at the end of summer, the September golds and
oranges already turning into October's reds and browns. As if in a dream,
repeating itself, I heard the heavy tread of Davey Bowles in the hall, the
strangled anguished cry, only this time it was a male cry. I had time only to
turn to see Thomas Jefferson burst into his study, his face contorted with
grief and incomprehension.

Meriwether Lewis had committed suicide in Tennessee. He was
dead at exactly the same age as James. The cold terror of that self-murder ran
through me as I stared in fearful apprehension at his wild grief.

James gone. And Maria. Jamey. And Michael. And Mama. And
now Meriwether. Death lay around our feet, like the neat piles of raked leaves
Wormley had left scattered on our lawn. Thomas Jefferson had turned away from
me.

I knew how much my master had liked Meriwether Lewis. He
had taught him surveying, as my master's father had taught him. He had taken
him on as private secretary, and it had been Meriwether who had assuaged the
loneliness of the sinister President's House in Washington City. He had
introduced Meriwether into the circles of power, and when he had needed a
leader of the expedition to the Pacific, who had he chosen out of his
"family" but Meriwether? He had thought of the danger, I knew, but
had refused to shield a "son" from becoming the first to explore it
simply because of his own fears for safety. And Meriwether had done him proud.
He had become a hero and my master had covered him with honors, made him
governor of Louisiana. And now Meriwether Lewis was dead by his own hand:
Accused by James Madison, another "son," of mismanaging Louisiana. As
dead as James, and for reasons perhaps as unknown.

"All my hopes were in Meriwether. He was the last. Why
must I always lose what I love? Why can I never hold what I cherish? Why have I
no sons of my own?"

His words stunned me. What about the census of his family?
I had seen it with my own eyes.

I said quietly, "But you have four sons."

Could not Thomas or Beverly be instructed in botany, in
astronomy, in surveying; could not Madison or Eston learn natural history,
mineralogy, Indian affairs? I wanted to scream.

He took a long time to answer me. "I don't have four
sons. You have four sons."

Silence.

I had burned for him and I had birthed for him. Seven times
I had descended into that valley from which neither his wife nor one of his
daughters had returned. And my sons stood as testament and hostage to a body I
could never call my own. I felt an explosion of insulted motherhood, all red
and brown, like the leaves scattered on the lawn outside the window.

His back was turned to me. My eyes sought the iron poker
lying within my reach near the chimney. I wanted to strike that broad
blue-sheathed back. I wanted to strike and strike again, with all my strength,
to smash him. Oh God, I wanted to kill him, for now, after all these years, I
understood what he had understood from the beginning, but had not had the
courage to tell me. He had renounced his sons from the day of their birth!

The red and brown were swimming now in patches of
blackness, like a flickering candle. Snatches of darkness overtook the colors.
I reached for Joe Fosset's iron poker. The master had no sons, the slave had
sons. The white man had no sons, the black woman had sons. It was she who had
lusted, not he. She who had seduced, not he. No, Beverly or Thomas or Madison
or Eston could not be instructed in mineralogy or botany, in Greek or Latin, in
music, in architecture, in natural history, in astronomy. They would never
count as real sons.

Never.

Then why had he clung to us all these years. Why had he bound
us soul and flesh to him? Why had he not relinquished and freed us? And why,
why had I stayed?

Love me and remain a slave.

Now the colors had darkened.

The iron poker appeared dull and lethal. His back was still
turned to me. In my mind's eye I struck and struck and struck. I wanted to see
the look of surprise as he turned to defend himself. I wanted to see terror and
disbelief in those innocent eyes. Then I wanted the poker to smash that
high-arched nose, to see that expression of mild benevolence disappear under
blood. I wanted him dead. Dead as Meriwether. Finally, all the colors became
that almighty color: black.

I felt horror for us all. Master. Concubine. Bastards. I no
longer had the strength to lift Joe Fosset's poker over my head.

I didn't—would never—have the courage to kill Thomas
Jefferson.

But I would free his sons.

I swung around, my back against the deep, many-hued valleys
with its army of black pines, and faced the impeccable whiteness of Monticello.

I put my mind to it methodically, as if making up a
household inventory. When would Thomas Jefferson Hemings "stroll"
away? How much money did he need? How much did I have? Could I sell my sapphire
bracelet secretly in Richmond through Burwell? Would he or would he not say
good-bye to his father? Where would he go? Who could I trust to help him? Did
it really matter that he was nineteen and not the "promised"
twenty-one? He was white enough to pass for white, as his father had said of
Jamey. Would he leave Monticello a white man? Could he do it to save himself?

No, Thomas Hemings would not say good-bye to his father, to
be charmed or willed or loved out of going away. Yes, he would leave Monticello
a white man. At the top of my stairs, I stared into the mirror, just as I had
one day twenty years before in Paris. The long Calvary of the renouncement of
one child after another was beginning.

But the departure of my eldest son did not go as I had
planned. I had not planned that he would meet his father unexpectedly on his
stolen horse, with all the money I had in the world on the Fourth of July.

The father and son met on the wide front lawn of the west
facade of the mansion, under my window, each on horseback. Thomas Jefferson was
hatless as usual, his fine sandy-gray hair lifted in the breeze, wet from the
summer dawn; my son's deep auburn hair as wild and thick as his father's. They
seemed almost a double image, the same long, pale faces, stubborn chins, and
pale hooded eyes.

They faced each other for a long moment, their horses
stock-still under their expert hands. So still that they resembled two
equestrian statues in the pink morning; sculpture erected to commemorate some
long-ago and forgotten heroic deed. A slight movement of the horses, nervous
and ready to run, shattered the illusion. They rose in their saddles as one and
drew together in an embrace that lasted a long time. It was Thomas who broke
the hold of his father, who then spun his horse and sped away at a reckless
gallop on sloping terrain, taking a nearby hedge in a jump that would have
unseated anyone except him.

My son reined in his horse, frightened by the sudden
movement, and sat a long time looking after the vanishing horseman.

I gazed at my own reflection distorted in the thick glass.
I placed my hands in front of me, between myself and the windowpane. They were
soft, strong, and steady. On my left hand, I wore a wide yellow band of gold.
Wife. My hand came down upon the window hard, but it would not shatter.

Thomas Jefferson Hemings turned and looked back at the
columned facade. In something like a salute, he raised his arm as he turned and
rode away down the mountain.

PART V

1834

Albemarle County

CHAPTER 37

DECEMBER
1834

The female slave, however fair she may have become by
various comminglings of her progenitors, or whatever her mental and moral
acquirements may be, knows that she is a slave, and, as such powerless.... She
has parents, brothers, sisters, a lover, perhaps, who all suffer through her
and with her.

M
argaret
D
ouglass
(from prison),
1853

Though the effects of black be painful originally, we must
not think they always continue so. Custom reconciles us to everything. After we
have been used to the sight of black objects, the terror abates, and the
smoothness and glossiness, or some agreeable accident of bodies so coloured,
softens in some measure the horror and sternness of their original nature; yet
the nature of their original impression still continues. Black will always have
something melancholy in it....

edmund burke
, "On the
Sublime and Beautiful,"
1756

Sally Hemings
closed her eyes
and remembered. The smooth eyelids slid over the dark openings set like caves
in a clay mountain, leaving the pale oval countenance flattened and glowing
like a polished bone in the dark of an unearthed grave. In the cabin, the fine
French clock of onyx and bronze struck the hour, then ticked over a new minute
of silence. In her mind she saw her son ride away.

She rose from where she was sitting and went over to the
light. Carefully, she untied the black velvet ribbon she wore around her neck,
and opened her locket. She took out the lock of red-auburn hair and brushed it
with her lips. Then she stared at the painted image in the locket for a long
time. Tomorrow was another son's wedding day.

Scrupulously, with the edge of her muslin scarf, she wiped
the tears that had fallen onto the portrait. Then she replaced the bright lock
within and closed the case, the fine mechanism of the lock giving her a
moment's satisfaction.

She stared out of the window, remembering another December
more than twenty years before. Another kind of "black death." The
December of the murder at Rocky Hill, in
1811.

"T.J.'s dead sister, Lucy's boys, Lilburn and
Isham," her sister Critta began, "been condemned for killing, and
dismemberin' Lilburn's body servant, George, out there in west Kentucky. The
news is just reachin' Virginia."

Critta had sat in the darkness of her secret room at the
top of the staircase and told her the bad news from Kentucky. That was the
reason why her master had snatched her up, along with Fanny and Burwell, and
fled to their newly finished house at Poplar Forest. Away from the mansion.

"Last December, on the night of the fifteenth, Lilburn
decided to chastise his slave George and ordered a bonfire built in the meat
house of the plantation, and ordered all his slaves present. There, Lilburn and
his brother Isham had two slaves tie up that poor boy, not two years older than
Beverly, and then laid him on the meat block. First people thought Lilburn was
only going to whip George. 'Hand me that ax,' Lilburn told his brother. Then
the people thought Lilburn only going to chop offa finger or an ear, or maybe a
whole hand or foot. But Lilburn first cut off the boy's two hands and flung
them into the fire and then cut off his feet. Then the people knew Lilburn's
goin' to kill his slave. Lilburn started chopping and the people started
groaning. Lilburn continued on with the slaughter and the people fell silent.
Some say Lilburn chopped the head from the body, others say he threw George
into the fire and burned what was left of his slave alive. All this because
George broke a favorite milk pitcher of his dead mother. All this because Lucy
Jefferson Lewis's linen kept gettin' ripped and her aprons kept disappearin',
and her dishes broken."