Sally Heming (50 page)

Madison was shocked. For the past five years, only the mansion
itself and grounds surrounding it had remained: empty, deserted, decaying, but
still theirs, a link to the past. In the spring, they would have been going up
to the cemeteries to clean and weed and replant....

"Mama, you be careful going up there to the cemetery,
'cause you'll be trespassing now.... Every time you pass the boundary line,
you'll be trespassing...."

Sally Hemings stared up at her gray-eyed son. So much like
James ... the same cat eyes. He had filled out in the past year. The ranginess
and some of the violence was gone. Mary McCoy, she guessed. Madison and his
black freeborn Mary McCoy. They would marry tomorrow. She stared up at him, but
she didn't have to ask if it was true about Monticello. She knew it was. The
mansion. Houses died or were killed, just like people. She felt neither pain
nor sorrow. The last link with the world was gone. She could drift now, she
felt light. As light as snow-flakes drifting.

The weight of that house, which had been on her shoulders
since she was seventeen, slipped off.

PART VI

1812

Monticello

CHAPTER 38

SUMMER
1812

Love songs are scarce and fall into two categories—the
frivolous and light and the sad. Of deep successful love, there is ominous
silence.

w
.
e. b. du bois,
The Souls of
Black Folks,
1
953

Sally Hemings
stood in the
middle of Mulberry Row. Her hands were on her hips, her face protected from the
sun by a wide-brimmed hat. Around her, children, dogs, chickens, horses, and
slaves swarmed and threatened to capsize her not more than a hundred yards from
the Big House. She surveyed what the summer of
1
8
12
had wrought. Her body was tensed and leaned slightly
forward.

Along Mulberry Row, there continued the incessant thump of
the nailery, the weaving cottage, the blacksmiths' and the carpentry shop. From
the stables came the sound of snorting, restless animals. The stables held
stalls for thirty-six horses, and they were full, with the rest tethered on the
pasture land behind. Bacon, the overseer, had given up trying to feed the forty
carriage horses of the guests. He had begun to cut down on the feed, but the
master had reprimanded him severely for it. Edmund Bacon had just arrived in
the kitchens with a wagonload of his wife's mattresses to supplement the
depleted resources of Monticello. Every bed was full and in the upper rooms and
attic, mattresses were strewn everywhere; servants slept on the floor on straw
pallets in the hallways and corridors, which were so narrow Sally Hemings had
to step over sleeping bodies every morning to get to her smokehouses and
larder.

Larder, she thought. Edmund Bacon had killed a whole beef
day before yesterday and it was completely gone! Like hordes of boll weevils,
the summer company had gone through their supplies like a field of cotton,
leaving nothing in its wake. They had come from everywhere: Richmond,
Charlottesville, Louisville, Alexandria, and a dozen other places farther away.

About the middle of June, the travel would commence from
the lower part of the state to the Springs, and there would begin a perfect
throng of visitors. Whole families came with carriages, riding horses, and
servants, sometimes like now, three or four gangs at the same time. Their
carriages and buckboards lined the mile-long road to the house, and they stayed
and stayed, from overnight to all summer: not only family but friends,
neighbors, sightseers, and even total strangers. A dog yelped around her skirts
and she gave him a hard kick. The table would be set for forty tonight, and the
children, white and black, would eat in the kitchens.

She saw three housemaids coming from the washhouse farther
down the road, their arms full of snowy, newly washed and ironed linen. A
footman was following with two mattresses on his head.

Sally Hemings yelled at him. How many times had she told
him not to carry mattresses on his nappy head! To tie it with a clean rag! He
turned, stuck his tongue out, and continued on his way. Two other housemaids
came by her carrying slop jars, a small child, who was crying, trailing one of
them. Around her wafted the cooking odors of the midday meal, savory and
pungent in the torpid air; farther down Roundabout Row, in one of the slave
cabins, somebody was cooking chitterlings from the freshly killed hogs.

After Thomas Jefferson's return from Washington City, she
had stood under the shade trees on the east lawn and watched Martha Randolph,
with her wagon train of household goods, and all her children, make her way up
the mountain for good. She had finally come to stay, she with her brood of
children and her mad husband. Not that her family had had any place else to go.
They had become penniless, with debts so overwhelming they could barely pay the
interest on them. Thomas Mann had excelled his father-in-law in spending money
and raising debts. She wondered if Martha were pregnant again. Thomas Jefferson
had pleaded with her. What was he to do? Let them starve? Leave Martha, his
only living child, at the mercy of her husband? His only living white child?
And since then there had been no mistake about who was now mistress of
Monticello. Thomas Jefferson had broken his vow. He had brought a white
mistress back to Monticello: his own daughter.

"But you promised me!"

"Martha isn't a 'white mistress,' for heaven sakes,
she's my daughter ... your niece, our family!"

"And who runs Monticello?"

"Martha does."

He had said it. And he would not be moved on this; she knew
him too well. There was an air of indifference about him now, a calm produced
by the gratification of every wish. Beneath the suave manners, the glacial
serenity, the almost deferential politeness, remained that special Virginian
brutality that came from the habit of despotism and privilege, of never being
crossed, of handling blooded horses, controlling ambitious men, ruling your own
small kingdom, and contemplating your own place in history. He had forgiven
himself everything, and he didn't care if she forgave him or not. He was
letting the Almighty do His own work. But she had kept the keys.

"Sally Hemings, what on earth are you doing standing
out there in the hot sun with your hat on when you know I need you right this
minute, you hear me?"

I hear you, Martha. I barely hear you over all this racket;
this noise and heat and running back and forth and hammering and yelling and
screaming and crying and playing children, and horses and cows and chickens;
but I hear you, thought Sally Hemings, and I'm coming. Just don't rush me, not
today.

It was the anniversary of her mother's death five years
before. She would never forget her. An image seared her and then dissolved. What
was a black woman's life? What was a woman's life? Sally Hemings decided to
ignore Martha's summons for the moment. She let the waves of noise and smells
ride roughshod over her, hardly caring, because in a few days she and her
master would escape from the crowds to their unfinished hideaway, Poplar
Forest, leaving Martha to cope with feeding, housing, and entertaining almost
fifty people.

When, she thought, were people going to stop persecuting
Thomas Jefferson with their "most felicitous and cordial and heartfelt
thanks for your hospitality"?

They were officeseekers, relations, friends, artists,
biographers, young Daniel Webster, Madison, Monroe, foreigners, natives, the
famous, the near great, nonentities, and total strangers. They pretended to
come out of respect and regard for him, but she thought that the fact they
saved a tavern bill had a good deal to do with it. She was tired of seeing them
come and she was tired of waiting on them, and, most of all, Monticello just
couldn't stand the drain much longer!

There were several ladies, parasols in hand, strolling
along the edge of the west lawn not fifty yards from her, and on it, a dozen
children, mostly Randolphs and Hemingses, were playing blindman's bluff. She
looked up. At night the very floorboards of the house seemed to sag under the
weight of humanity housed within. Maids and footmen and butlers, many of them
promoted only for the summer crowd, broke the dishes, scorched the linen,
mislaid the supplies, dropped the platters, and were slow as molasses to obey.
This summer had seemed worse than any other. Her master seemed more withdrawn
than ever, Martha more present.

Let Martha lead the table at Monticello and preside over
this madhouse, she thought. They would go to their hermitage for half the summer
and all the fall, in their new octagonal brick house, and laugh and talk and
tell old tales. She smiled.

"You know how many names they got for Papa's chamber
pot?"

"Beverly!"

"Well, Mama, it's true. I heard Mammy Ursula talking
to Fanny the other day 'cause little Ned had an accident, 'cause he fell
asleep."

"What?"

"Papa's
State of the
Union
came out and spilled all over Ned's head!"

Beverly had begun to laugh. He had a laugh like his
father's, she thought, short and abrupt, and likely to bring tears to his eyes
if prolonged. Sally Hemings had laughed as well. Her lover had built an inside
toilet, which was the object of much mirth among the household slaves. He had
invented a way to move his chamber pot by a system of ropes and pulleys and
wheels along a tunnel leading from the house to an opening in the ground about
twenty-five feet away. It had been christened "The Underground
Railway," over which traveled his "runaways." She and the other
household slaves had elaborated on the theme until now there were
"inaugural addresses" pronounced "in-all-urine-ass-dresses,"

"states of the union,"

"cabinet meeting,"

"Federal Reserves,"

"Treasury bonds,"

"ultimatums,"

"levees," and "Indian Treaties."

"Aunt Bett found a new name," Beverly had
continued. "She said they were his "manumission papers." But in
that case, he ain't
shat
in a long time!"

"Beverly!"

"I named it his
Declaration of
Indepen—"

"
Beverly!"

"Now, Beverly, you want a good switching," she
had said to his grinning face. But she had been laughing too hard for him to
believe her. Blasphemy! She had tried to explain to her sisters how the mansion
on the Champs-Elysees had been of the most modern construction, and had had as
well as bathrooms,
lieux anglais,
or indoor water closets.

"That may be very well and good in Paris, France,
honey, but trouble is, sister," Bett Hemings had said, "once this
thing gets out there, there is still got to be a slave standing there ready to
catch it, and empty it! Typical that Thomas Jefferson can't invent nothing that
don't have a slave on the receiving end of it...."

She saw him now in the distance saddling up one of the bays
he loved so much. First thing he had done when he came back from Washington
City was to build a new carriage. John had built the body, Joe Fosset had done
all the ironwork, and Burwell had painted every bit of it. Only the plating had
been done in Richmond, and a finer carriage there was not in Albemarle. That
carriage, with its four bays, Diomede, Brimmer, Tecumseh, and Dromedary, each
pair guided by a slave, with Burwell outriding on Eagle, was some pretty sight,
almost outshining in splendor his cousin John Randolph's, with his blooded
horses and his slaves following with perhaps a dozen more.