Sally Heming (9 page)

"Oh, Nathan, I've kept you again."

"No," he said sharply. "I wanted to come. I
hadn't seen you in more than a week. But I haven't had any time since this new
lawsuit started."

"How is it progressing?"

"Badly. I'm up against one of the slickest, most
outrageous liars I've ever had the misfortune to represent. He changes his
story every day. At least I can say that the adversary is consistent—consistently
lying...."

"Nathan, how are you supposed to defend someone who
lies?"

"It can be done. Liars can be defended brilliantly and
honest men can be destroyed. You should know that—you've seen many an honest
man lose ... especially in politics."

"Promise me." Sally Hemings suddenly reached out
and touched Nathan's sleeve. A flicker of memory, like a grain of sand, made
her blink.

"Yes?" he said, his voice low.

"Promise me you'll bring the latest ending to the
Randolph saga of the 'look-alike chickens coming home to roost'!"

The young man burst into laughter. Then he said softly,
"I promise."

"No excuses...."

"Please, Ma'am, am I the kind of gentleman who would
bring excuses when I could bring mayhem and scandal? By the way, the latest
Andrew Jackson joke is that when he puts on his reading spectacles, he turns
out all the lights!"

With that he was already out the door. She watched him
descend the steep pathway to where his horse waited, waited until she could see
him no more.

CHAPTER 7

ALBEMARLE COUNTY, AUGUST
1831

The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us
in such a contest.—But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this
subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history
natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into
every one's mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the
present revolution.

thomas jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia,
1790

The summer
was passing and
Sally Hemings' thoughts were enclosed in a soft, weary happiness. Slowly, out
of an almost invisible but very deep wound, in an unceasing stream, thoughts
and feelings welled up and spilled out. She felt herself floating, felt an odd
excitement in answering Nathan Langdon's questions, and even while speaking was
divided between pleasure and torment. She had lived a life; she was startled to
perceive that life. As if it had been kept in a long underground passage which
ascended now and again into the midst of tremendous events called History.
History, which had left her alone in a vast, unfamiliar, unwanted wasteland.

Furtively, she looked across at Nathan Langdon. He really
was quite an ordinary man, yet it was only with him that she felt this new
sense of her existence. Had he given her that, or had she taken it herself? It
was so hard to know.

"What are you thinking?" he said from the
shadows.

"My own thoughts," she answered.

Nathan sensed a resistance, even an irritation. He knew the
mood. Since summer he had treaded softly with Sally Hemings. He remained silent
and let the moment pass. There would be other moments, a long series of moments
in which to unravel the mystery of Sally Hemings. He would bide his time.

Nathan Langdon sighed in the stillness. It was an afternoon
like many he had spent with this ex-slave. He felt himself sliding deeper and
deeper into compromise with his race and his class and less and less inclined
to shake himself out of a numbing lethargy, an insidious guilt that kept him
peering into the faces of his slaves, his servants, his mother, his brothers,
his fiancée. For what? He didn't know. He really didn't know anymore why he had
returned to Charlottesville. He had certainly begun to question his earthly
destiny. When Esmeralda and his mother had begged him to come, it had been with
relief that he had returned South to take up the responsibilities of his
family. He had made little headway in Boston. The possibility of success in the
North for a Southerner, without means or influential friends, was dubious. He
also knew that he was wanting in the bitter, energetic ambitions of most of his
Northern schoolmates, but he had blamed this on his "Southernness."
Yet his luck had been no better here in Charlottesville, where he could hardly
call himself a stranger. He found it difficult to slip back into
"Virginian" ways. He had acquired sharper edges in the North. At
least he liked to think so. The coying slickness of Southern manners now stuck
in his gullet. The only thing he had accomplished in the past year had been his
job as census taker. That had ended now, he thought, and he hadn't succeeded in
extending his connections or his business. He had tried to form a partnership
which had not worked out well. His clerkship with Judge Miner was over and he
had not been invited to stay on. He had always had a desire for public life; to
shape national conduct seemed to him the highest form of achievement, he mused,
but he had no money and what influence there was had to be shared with his two
brothers, who also had political ambitions. There was little that was public in
his solitary room, or his solitary office, or his solitary visits to Sally
Hemings. He didn't think consciously of his unhappiness, or of what Sally
Hemings might have to do with it. If he had, he might have prevented what
happened that peaceful August afternoon.

It was several days after the much-awaited eclipse of the
sun.

It was the same August
31,
1831,
that the slave Nat Turner, property of Putnam Moore and
born the property of Benjamin Turner, and his aide-de-camp, the slave Will
Francis, born the property of Nathaniel Francis, were, with a small army of
sixty or seventy men and one woman, all born slaves, sweeping through the
County of Southampton, Virginia, and in two days and one night, murdering every
white man, woman, and child that had crossed their path, systematically burning
everything as they killed. Fifty-five men, women, and children would perish
this day because of the one favor of God they held highest and in common: being
white. Turner's goal was the arsenal in Richmond where, he, hoping to have
gathered around him an army of hundreds of runaway slaves, had planned to
organize an uprising of all the slaves of Virginia, in the name of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Ghost. He would fail.

"If your brother doesn't want it, why don't you take
on the case, Nathan?"

Langdon shifted nervously in his chair. He hadn't come to
see Sally Hemings today to be challenged. Confronted with a difficult decision.
One that basically went against his grain. The Hemingses were one thing.
Mulattoes were another.

"He didn't say he didn't want it. He said it couldn't
be won in a Virginia court of law."

"I know the atmosphere, with all these new laws, is
tense, Nathan, but perhaps you..."

Who did she think he was, thought Langdon, Thomas
Jefferson?

"The case, as I said, is un-winnable. It will be one
of those trials that is decided even before it begins."

"As are all trials concerning mulattoes in
Virginia," said Sally Hemings. She had almost forgotten. If Virginia
courts condoned murder, they wouldn't blink an eye at fraud.

"Yes, most."

"And you can't help him?"

"I would, if I could."

"Jefferson once tried to defend a mulatto when he was
young...."

"And he lost." Nathan Langdon said this not
without pleasure.

"He lost, to be sure, but he tried." Sally
Hemings was trembling. She rarely asked for anything. She hadn't realized how
difficult it was. "It took courage at the time," she said, and looked
intently at Langdon. It had been the wrong thing to say.

"Courage or foolhardiness? You must know that with the
situation as it is now, any mulatto who sets foot in a court is going to lose
just for having the temerity to do so."

Sally Hemings was still looking at Nathan Langdon. There
was something in her gaze that profoundly irritated Langdon. Something childish
and stubborn. Or was it only his anger and terror at being compared with the
great Jefferson, the constant references to him as if he were a touchstone, a
holy relic?...

"But this case is different, Nathan. This man was
never a slave. He was freeborn to begin with. You see, Master ... Jefferson's
case was one of a slave who sued for freedom on the grounds that his mother was
white, and a child by Virginia law inherits the condition of his mother. But
this man was born free because his mother was freed before he was born and left
the state. His father recognized him in court in Philadelphia, and he should
have the same rights as any citizen of the United States, being born outside
Virginia, to inherit property. In this instance, his property is his own slave
kin! Brothers and sisters and uncles!"

"He is still legally a mulatto, therefore he cannot
testify against his white cousins in the case. It is no longer a question of
slavery but that of a black man testifying against a white man."

Sally Hemings was silent. Nathan Langdon felt the gall rise
in his throat. Women. She still wanted a hero. The heroic age was over. Didn't
she know that? Ended with James Madison. This was the age of mediocrity,
small-mindedness, caution, calculation, money-grubbing. The age of the common
man. An age that deserved what it got: Jackson, not Jefferson. Then he heard
her say:

"Think if it were Madison or Eston."

"It could never be Madison or Eston."

"Why not?"

"Madison and Eston," Langdon said very
deliberately, "are white. I made them white. Legally. They can testify
against anybody on earth."

"White?"

"In the census. I listed them and you as white."

There was a stunned silence. Outside, only the sounds
summer makes. "It takes more than a census taker to turn black into
white." Her voice had an ominous quality to it: a sudden chill that should
have warned him.

"After all, by Thomas Jefferson's definition, you are
white."

"By Thomas Jefferson's life, I'm a slave."

"Think how much easier it is for you now, staying in
Virginia with all that's going on ... not to have that sword of expulsion
hanging over your head! I... decided."

"You
decided." He
couldn't tell whether she was going to laugh or scream.
"You
decided! For fifty-four years I've
been Thomas Jefferson's creature, and now... now
you
decide it's time for me to be yours.
Yours!
" She began
to laugh. "It's Judgment Day! Instead of being black and a slave, I'm now
free and
white."

Her eyes showed something of that lurid yellow that had
frightened him on his first visit.

If he had been a good lawyer, or even a competent one,
Langdon would at this point before it was too late have laughed and tried to
turn the whole thing into a joke. Or he would have lied by saying she had
completely misunderstood. But Nathan Langdon was not a good lawyer. He
blundered on, insisting, explaining. Perspiration was forming on his high
forehead. There were undertones, nuances, secrets he hadn't calculated and that
he had no way of gauging.

Her laughter had shattered what composure he had left.
Instead of reading her face, in which was reflected shock, disbelief, horror,
as well as a plea for rectification, he went on pleading his already lost
cause, repeating himself with a kind of childish despair. Surely she knew he
had meant well. That he had done it for her!

The shrillness of her laughter had given it a loud,
raucous, almost drunken quality. Then suddenly it stopped.

"Why did you have to tell me? Why couldn't you have
kept quiet? What did you think you were doing—playing God?"

"I did it for you and your sons."

"Don't be a fool, Nathan. You didn't do it for me. You
didn't even know me. You did it for him. To make him not guilty. To shield him
... so that he wouldn't have a slave wife!"