Sally Heming (55 page)

He straightened instinctively under the command of those
eyes, then bowed and helped her into his carriage. His last service to Thomas
Jefferson.

Darkness was descending as they drove down the mountain.

Adrien Petit and Harriet Hemings rode away and never knew
that within hours of their departure, Thomas Jefferson slipped on a decayed
step of one of his terraces at Monticello, breaking his forearm and dislocating
the bones of his right wrist for the second time.

Harriet would not have known its significance, and even
Sally Hemings, rushing to the aid of her injured master, could not have savored
the special irony of this fall. Only Petit, opposite a violently trembling, but
dry-eyed young orphan, would have remembered his master's original fall from
grace, in the Paris of Maria Cosway, the year of Our Lord,
1787.

CHAPTER 42

OCTOBER
1825

"Sally!"

It was Martha's voice, sharp with anxiety. I didn't know
why I had come down the east stairs from my room as if I had been summoned, but
I was in the hallway when she called. I saw her leading her father from the
dining room, where he had—as usual—been entertaining a group of young students
from the University of Virginia.

The door had been left ajar, and I could see the assembled
young men, several of whom I didn't recognize.

As was his custom, Thomas Jefferson's place had been set
separately, at a small table which was now empty, the chair pushed back. The
young men were all on their feet, and several were peering anxiously through
the opening of the doorway.

"Sally, he's been taken with a malaise," Martha
said.

"No, Martha, I'm perfectly all right now."

"Here, let me help you."

He leaned heavily on me. I felt the tremor of his hand on
my shoulder. How fragile and weak it was. Those hands that had had so much
strength, that had guided, shaped, designed, and caressed. Now they rested,
palsied and without weight, on my shoulder. I turned my back to open the door,
and slowly we made for his room across the hall.

"Get Burwell," he murmured.

Burwell's gone to Charlottesville, I thought in panic as I
looked over my shoulders beyond the open door into the glare of the candle-lit
dining room. Then I thought without surprise, He is dying.

From Harriet's departure on, misfortune had plagued us. No
sooner had my master recovered from his fall from the terrace than he had
ridden and had been thrown again by Brimmer. Stubbornly, he had ridden once
again, and this time it had been Eagle that had slipped while fording a river
and my master, entangled in the reins with his crippled wrists, had almost
drowned. Next had come a fever that had confined him to his bed for three
weeks. Then a flash flood had swept away the dam he had been building for over
a year. He began to sink under the weight of his debts, which seemed to have no
end. He had had to borrow from his son-in-law Jack Eppes and had pledged
Varina, Martha's estate. Then his eldest and favorite granddaughter, the lovely
and gentle Anne, whom we called Nancy, died, believed by everyone to have been
killed by the brutality of her husband. Charles Bankhead, a young, handsome
aristocrat, had turned out to be a drunkard, a bully, a coward, and a
wife-beater. Many a time one of the overseers, or Burwell himself, had saved
her from a beating by her husband.

Six years earlier, Jefferson Randolph had accosted Bankhead
on the courthouse steps in Charlottesville and accused him of abusing his
sister. Bankhead had responded by stabbing Jeff several times with a long
knife. When Thomas Jefferson had heard the news, at nightfall, he had mounted
his horse and galloped down the mountain the several miles to Charlottesville.
Then, before I could stop Beverly, he, too, had saddled up and ridden out to
find his father. "He'll kill himself in this weather," he had said.
Fear in his face, he had taken Brimmer and sped. When Beverly arrived at the
store where Jeff had been taken, he saw his father kneeling by the head of his
wounded grandson, weeping. Jefferson Randolph had been conscious and when he
saw his grandfather crying, he too had started to cry. Burwell and Beverly had
watched in silence. Jeff, unlike his sister, had survived.

It was Eston who rode out after Thomas Jefferson now,
fearful that he would come to some harm. He would ride down to his university
that Eston and Madison had seen the inside of only as carpenters....

In one way or another, all my master's "sons" had
forsaken him. Thomas Mann in insanity, Bankhead in brutality, Jack Eppes in premature
death, Madison and Monroe in ingratitude, Meriwether Lewis in suicide, Thomas
Hemings in flight, Beverly in whiteness. There was only Eston who remained a
son. And in his hurt and melancholy and loneliness, he had shown more affection
and tenderness to Eston than to any of our other children. He had given Eston
Maria's pianoforte, encouraged his music, paid for his lessons; given him and
Madison a plot of land of their own to earn money. Madison had become a fine
fiddler, but even this tired and tardy recognition left me unmoved. I was like
a piece of ground too long soaked with water which remains damp and cold even
when the sun appears.

In the end, it was the master who sought his sons and their
love, their attention, who wanted more from them than was his due; for if he
had loved them, had he trained them as sons, a fierce and loyal love would have
been his. His white grandchildren would never be able to give him the special
kind of desperate love his yellow children would have laid at his feet. His
grandsons were, after all, one generation removed from his flesh. Madison,
Thomas, Eston, and Beverly were the sons of his passion.

At the end of
1824,
one man who could remind him of our beginnings arrived at Monticello.

Resplendent, Lafayette returned again in February to
Monticello, at the end of his triumphal tour of America, where he was laden
with honors and voted by Congress two hundred thousand dollars and a township
of land in appreciation for his services to the country during the Revolution.
For my master, it must have been a bitter mockery of our own desperate
situation.

General Lafayette's first visit to Monticello had had the
aura of an official visit. There had been more than three hundred people
present to witness the two old men shuffle into each other's arms, tears
flowing.

The crowds had gathered outside on the west lawn that day
to see with their own eyes the meeting of the two heroes of the Revolution. The
fastidious and luxury-loving Lafayette had not changed his tastes, nor his mode
of living, I saw, French Revolution or no French Revolution. As the elegant
carriage rolled onto the flattened clay and sand, a dapper, finely dressed Lafayette
had descended amidst cheers.

The last visit was quiet and more intimate, the true
closing of a circle begun so long ago, the rendering of accounts, toting up of
long-lost memories.

It was during this second visit that I made the
acquaintance of Lafayette's companion, the mysterious Frances Wright. She
sought me out, eager to speak. Frances Wright, a rich, well-born orphan of
Scottish descent, was rumored to be General Lafayette's mistress and had been
his constant companion for several years.

She was twenty-nine-years old and Lafayette sixty-seven.
The thirty-two years difference between her and her general was three years
more than the difference between me and my president. She too had to fight
Lafayette's daughters for a part of his affection, and if she had begged him
either to marry her or adopt her, as was rumored, it was in the same futile
hope of legitimate protection for her love as I had dreamed of for mine, and
with the same despair.

Frances Wright was as tall as Martha Jefferson. Her hair
was magnificent, but she was not especially pretty. Her fortune, her education,
her unmarried state had given her a freedom and an independence unheard of for
a woman. There was about her carriage, something of the radiance of a young man
unafraid of whatever fate had in store, and confident that she would overcome
whatever it was.

She did not seem in the least affected or aware of my
position, or my color. I sat and listened as she outlined her ideas on
emancipation, not only of slaves but of women. She was the first abolitionist I
had ever met. I longed to speak to her of Thomas, of Beverly, of Harriet, but
they were no longer Thomas, Beverly, or Harriet. They no longer existed in my
world. They existed in the white world now, and I had no right to speak of that
world to anyone, white or black.

One day, Frances took my hand and spoke to me passionately.

"Merely freeing and enfranchising the Negroes is not
enough for them to participate in a free society. Only after they have been
given some education and trained to support themselves can their freedom be
meaningful."

She spoke with fervor of the communities set up by two men
in Pennsylvania, Robert Owens and George Rapp. She spoke of helping slaves and
whites alike live on a basis of equality, somewhere in the West or South,
paying with her own fortune, where the slaves would be not only freed but
educated. Blacks and whites would go to school together, people would be free
to love and marry whom they chose. She also spoke to me about a woman called
Mary Wollstonecraft, an Englishwoman, who had written a book on the
emancipation of women called the
Vindication of
the Rights of Women.

"More than ever, it must be proved that black and
white can and must live together," she lectured. "Since the Missouri
Compromise, we have a country that is divided between slave and free societies.
It cannot and will not endure thus...."

It was the first real courage I had ever encountered in a
woman. Frances Wright evoked a vision of life I did not recognize, and it
seemed just as well that my life's illusion was near its end.

"Oh, Sally Hemings, let's understand what knowledge is
... let's clearly perceive that accurate knowledge regards all equally. Truth
is the same for all humankind; there are not truths for the rich and truths for
the poor, truths for men and truths for women, truths for blacks and truths for
whites, there are simply TRUTHS....At least this much I have learned. While you
are bound can any American woman say she's free? Can any American woman say she
has
nothing to do with slavery?
And can you, Sally Hemings, say you have nothing to do with us? With
me? We are all you and you are we... and THAT'S the truth.

"Nowhere outside my investigations of the rights of
slaves could I have acquired a better understanding of my own rights ...
womanhood's own rights. The anti-slavery cause is the high school of morals in
this land. The school in which human rights are more fully investigated and
better understood and taught than in any other. Is this country a
Republic
when but one drop of colored blood
shall stamp a fellow creature for a slave? ... Is this a
Republic
while one half of the whole
population is left in civil bondage ... sentenced to mental imbecility?"

I smiled. Oh, if only Harriet could hear her, I thought.

"You don't count the bonds of love and passion as one
more bondage? You, a modern woman?"

Frances Wright smiled back at me. It made her face
beautiful.

"Love and civics unfortunately don't necessarily go
together," she sighed.

Later that year, she purchased two thousand acres of land
for her new settlement of Nashoba, fourteen miles from Memphis, Tennessee, and
there she put her ideas on women and Negroes and education into practice. When
her experiment failed, her name would become, as mine had once been for the
public, equal to every vice, and she would be denounced as "The Great Red
Harlot of Infidelity," just as I had been denounced as "Black
Sal." Her name, as mine had been, would be coupled with the unspeakable
crime of miscegenation.

At the same time that Lafayette left America and Frances
Wright left Virginia, Jeff Randolph tried to organize a lottery of our estates
to satisfy my master's creditors. Timidly, he had showed me his letter to the
Virginia Legislature for permission for the lottery, carefully enumerating his
services to the nation.

Thomas Jefferson begging! I wept. "Why not ask John
Adams?" I asked. But he shook his head slowly. The nation and Virginia had
forgotten him. He was too proud to ask Adams. His son, John Quincy, was now
president of the United States, and who knew how John Quincy Adams felt about
Thomas Jefferson?