Sally Heming (49 page)

Critta had paused. Sally Hemings stared at the trickle of
saliva that had formed at the corner of her sister's mouth. Wasn't it James's
dream that Critta was telling her? James's dream that she'd known in her bones
for twenty-four years. Was she mad, her sister?

"And then people wailed into the night, and of course,
according to them superstitious slaves, they done stirred up nature itself
because an earthquake, they call it the New Madrid, an earthquake now rocked
the Mississippi and it flowed backward, turned red, and overrun the banks, and
all the ground shook and trembled, and windstorms came, and lightning, and all
sorts of strange occurrences came on that night; and Lilburn's wife went mad
with the knowledge of what he done, and fled to her brother's, and her ravings
brought Lilburn and Isham to their ruin.... The slaves buried what was left of
George, and Lilburn locked up his raving wife in the house. But the sheriff of
the county came around asking questions, and when Lilburn's hound dog dug up a
jawbone, and the sheriff seen it was a human jawbone, he got the Lewis slaves
and made them tell where they had buried George, then he made them dig up the
rest of George's charred bones. Lilburn and Isham were arrested for murder and
taken to Salem and indicted."

There had been a small sigh of exhaustion, and Critta had
stared out the window for a long time saying nothing. Winter still lay on the
land. The Blue Mountains were shrouded.

"The sheriff released them two brothers," Critta
had continued, "on bail of five thousand dollars to await their trial, but
Lilburn made a suicide pact with his brother to shoot each other over the grave
of their mother. Isham fired and Lilburn he fell dead. Isham fled, but he was
captured after a few days. He was tried for his brother's murder and sentenced
to be hanged. But before they could hang him, he escaped and is still not
found."

"And this is true, Critta?"

"As true as death, sister."

"And how ... how do you know?"

"How could I not know?" Critta said in disgust.
"White people knows. So it follows that anything they know, we know."

"But how?"

"Lilburn and Isham's father was in Virginia at the
time. The Lewis slaves, they all knew. Then it come in from the West on the
slave intelligence, the trial in the newspapers. Only reason you ain't read it
is that Masta Thomas hid the newspapers. White people don't know how many
slaves can read. White people going around tiptoeing and whispering and
slamming doors in their servants' faces and locking them, and shutting their
mouths in front of the servants. As if we wouldn't know of it! They sat around
here with blank faces with you and Masta Jefferson gone. He high-tailed it out
there to Poplar Forest with you, like he could get away from it. Silence when
you entered a room. Looks. They really think we don't know what's going
on."

She had stared at Critta. Her master had said nothing to
her all those days. Had Burwell known? Fanny? Had he really thought she would
not find out? Or had he simply decided to let someone else tell her? He had not
had the courage to tell me, Sally Hemings thought. But then she had never had
the courage to tell him of James's nightmare either.

"For weeks," Critta had continued, "when any
of the house servants entered a room, the conversation stopped. I swear I will
never understand white people. Do they really think their lies fool the people
who serve them? They go around whispering 'Not in front of the servants,' yet
they done butchered a poor boy in front of the servants! They commit their
crimes in front of the servants. They commit murder in front of the
servants!"

Sally Hemings stood up, trembling, blocking the light,
drawing in the room with her breath. She stood against the window as she had
stood in the doorway of her cabin the day the census taker had come up her
road. Except that now the violet was outside. The deep shadows of a sunless
afternoon. The clock ticked over another moment of silence.

"You! You don't know
nothing
about slavehood," her sister
had said. "You brush your silk skirts against it, that's all. Petted and
pampered and hidden and lied to.... Buried alive by your lover! You ain't never
puked from the smell of whiteness ... begged God to take this cup from
you...."

"Critta," she had said, "you are crying...."

"Aw God, have mercy on us! Lord Jesus Christ in
Heaven, have mercy!"

"Critta...."

Sally Hemings' face was seamed with rivulets of tears. They
fanned out like delicate transparent lace on ivory satin.

Critta had accused her of not knowing anything about
slavery. But she had known everything there was to know. Critta had been
ill-used. She had been raped and scorned. But Critta was she and she was
Critta. They were and always had been one and the same, and they in turn had
been one with every black field hand bent over the tobacco and cotton that had
kept their white family in
servants.
Yet what had they known about their
servants?
She knew everything there was to
know.

The
servants
surprised the master at stool and fornication, childbirth and menses,
in every secret intimacy. They knew if he was clean or filthy. Everything that
was spotted, soiled, unwashed, creased, rumpled, worn and discarded, they
picked up, and washed, folded and mended, and laid out anew for him. They knew
if their master slept alone or not, and with whom. They recognized his waste
and his possessions. They knew the true color of his hair and the true age of
his sorrows. They saw him in fear and pain, jealousy and anger, lust and
happiness. They knew his bastards, because most times they were their own
children. Their master's footsteps were as familiar as their own, his voice
recognized in the midst of company.

They saw him fight vice or honor it, swallow truth or
pronounce it, flatter for power, gossip for amusement, wife-beat for amusement,
flog out of viciousness.

They knew if he destroyed out of envy or built out of
pride. They knew his station in life and how he came to it. They knew if he
hoarded his money or spent it, honored his debts, believed in his God. They
smiled at his follies, laughed at his jokes, defended his reputation, nursed
his children, despised or respected him as they pleased, obeyed him if they
were compelled, ignored him when they had a mind to. They brought his children
into the world, laid out his dead, buried his forgotten, hid his sins from the
world, even from God—if they could. But not even they could always do that. And
still the master thought he could speak the truth only out of their earshot,
never in front of the servants....

Sally Hemings drew in her breath just as the hour struck.
The jerking shadows of the firelight etched into the shadows of her face. The
horror of the murder had lost the allure of memory and stood exposed before her
there on the cabin floor—the dreadful amputated stump of slavery itself.

She and Critta had stood that day, servant to servant,
concubine to concubine, and had been one with their mother and their mother's
mother and
her
mother. One long
line: The African and the beast hunter Hemings, the housekeeper and the slave
master Wayles, the slave mistress and the American Jefferson....

He had not told her. His hands had been bloodied with his
kin's crime, and not only had he pretended not to know it, he had pretended
that she would not know it. Those hands that had drawn her and had known her in
all the secret places had not revealed his white secrets. And hers? Had her
hands revealed her black secrets? James's nightmare? Her hands that had soothed
and caressed, had they been any less bloody? Didn't she have James's blood on
her hands? On those immaculate hands she had kept so soft for him. And Critta,
had her hands been free of blood? Had they not served the same murderers? And
the slave boy George, hadn't he lain down on the meat block for his masters;
and his fellow slaves, hadn't they tied him up and looked on and kept silent?

How many had they been to witness murder? How many of them
had been grown men? How many of those grown men would it have taken to
overwhelm two white men and their guns? How many had thought only about their
own flesh, their own sons; their precious flesh opening under a steel ax, their
blood spraying like mist onto the heated air; their heart carved out on the
butcher's table.

They were all bloodied, thought Sally Hemings. The whole
race was bloodied. Not only with the real blood of suffering, the real blood of
chains and whips and hatchets, but the blood of race, polluted, displaced, and
disappearing in rape and miscegenation, and cross-ties of kin—that fine lace of
bastardy that stretched across the two races like the web of a spider filled with
love and hate—claiming cousins and nephews, daughters and sons, half sisters
and half brothers.... The whole race was bloodied, the whole race had served
with bloodied hands and had wiped them on their masters.

They had washed and scrubbed and polished and glazed, but
how could they, bloodied as they were, have cleaned anything? How? Sally
Hemings' mouth formed the word, but there was only silence, and a lonely woman
in a cabin on the boundary of Monticello.

She had never revealed to Thomas Jefferson that she had
known about Lilburn and Isham. But she had turned away from his hands that day.
From his touch. From his "darling." And if she had told him, what
would he have said?
That it had had
nothing to do with them.
He would have
spoken about "the insanity of mankind." He had always taken things
out of the specific, out of reality and made an abstraction of them. But men
were real. Blood was red. George and Lilburn and Isham and James and Meriwether
were not merely "mankind." They had been his blood. If he hadn't been
responsible for his own blood, for his own issue, for his own race, then who
had been responsible? So she had left it unsaid. She had forgiven him for so
many things. Why not one more?

And the years had passed like seeping water from a drying
well. Silence between them. A whole kingdom of silence.

The peeling gray mansion of Monticello stood bleak and
deserted on its mountaintop while the wind howled and snow swirled around it.

Sally Hemings sat until she could no longer see her hand
before her face, and then she rose and went out into the snowstorm, hugging her
shawl, her skirts dragging in the white satin layer of crystals beneath her
feet.

She went to her henhouse to gather some eggs, and on her
way back she saw him again ahead of her, breaking pane after pane of silvery
light, and then she knew that the circle was closed. It had been twenty-four
years since Thomas Jefferson Hemings had strolled away, thirtyone since James
had died, and forty-four since she had last seen Marly. Should she hurry to
catch up with him, she thought, stay twenty paces behind, or return to the
mansion?

In the white mist, breathing softly, Sally Hemings listened
to the coursing of her blood. She pressed her hands against her womb, and
whispered, more to herself than to the dark figure, who, after all these years,
still strode his Elysian fields:

"Tell me it is not true, love, that I was never
happy...." But she knew then, she had made her pact with the infernals.
The number of kisses it might take to redeem her now was beyond even the power
of Thomas Jefferson.

"Martha gone and sold Monticello, Mama." Mama?

"Mama, Monticello's sold! To tradespeople in
Charlottesville!"

Madison Hemings was desperately trying to pull his mother
back from her reveries. She was standing in the December evening. It was six
o'clock. She was chilled yet she would not move. He tugged at her, shaking the
delicate snowflakes that had settled on both of them.

He had helped pull a drowned man out of the Ravina once. He
remembered the incredible weight of that waterlogged body—it seemed a hundred
times the weight of a normal man. He remembered the pull of his muscles, the
strain, the ache to drag the broken body up on the bank, and how he had stood
there breathless, staring at the bloated shape, heavier than lead and no longer
human.

"Mama?"

Sally Hemings felt herself being wrenched upward by an
incessant humming in her ear, like a dying fly at the onset of winter. It was
her son Madison.

"What did you say, Madison, honey?"

"Mama! I said Martha done sold Monticello to the
druggist named Barkley in Charlottesville for his business and two thousand
five hundred dollars. The price of three slaves! Ain't the Randolphs' no more.
Ain't Papa's no more!"