In the snowy January of 1781, when Sally was eight, the family had been in Richmond, where Mr. Jefferson was Governor of the state. He had come back from the Congress, Sally’s mother had said, because Miss Patty had begged him to, because she could not live with him gone all the time. Sally guessed her mistress feared that if the British took the Congress prisoner, Mr. Jefferson would be hanged. So he’d come back to Virginia, first to Williamsburg and then to Richmond, and the British invaded the state anyway. They’d seized Richmond, and the family barely got away; Sally remembered clinging to her mother’s skirt as the servants huddled around the wagons, and hearing baby Lucie Elizabeth, who’d only been born the previous November, wailing thinly in the cold.
Three days later the British riddled the house with bullets at point-blank range, then rounded up the servants who’d remained there, and sold them off for cash. Both Miss Patty and baby Lucie Elizabeth came down sick as a result of the flight through the freezing countryside. In April, Lucie Elizabeth died.
Eighteen months later, just after Mr. Jefferson’s term as Governor was ended and he returned to Monticello, a militia captain came tearing up the mountain one June morning at dawn, shouting that the British were but three hours behind him and had already taken Charlottesville. Mr. Jefferson woke his wife and daughters and got them into the carriage, carrying Polly down the stairs wrapped in a blanket. Aunt Carr, Mr. Jefferson’s sister who had lived with him since the death of her husband, wailed prophecies of doom as her older boys Peter and Sam struggled to keep the younger ones calm, and Miss Patty’s parrot Shadwell shrieked and swore.
Sally and her older sister Critta, and their sixteen-year-old brother Jimmy, helped load the farm wagon with food, blankets, clothing. Mr. Jefferson lifted her and Critta into the wagon, but their mother went in the carriage with Miss Patty, to quiet their mistress’s terror as the vehicles went jolting down the breakneck, rutted road. Sally later heard from her oldest brother—Martin, the butler—that Mr. Jefferson had tried to pack up some of his papers and had gotten away from the house only minutes before the first red-coated dragoons emerged from the woods.
After the first flight from Richmond, Miss Patty had never been well. By the time they’d escaped from Monticello, the bones of her cheeks stood out through the sunken skin and her hands were like dead leaves.
Yet when Mr. Jefferson was there, Miss Patty would laugh and twine ribbons in her beautiful dark red hair, and insist she was much better; that there was really nothing wrong. Even as a child, Sally had sensed how desperately they both needed to believe this was true. By the fall of 1782 Miss Patty was with child again, her seventh, according to Sally’s mother, counting the little boy she had borne to her first husband. She’d put on weight for the baby’s birth—the second little Lucie Elizabeth—but even Sally could see it was unhealthy bloat, not the smoothness of returning health.
Those last four months, between Lucie’s birth in May and September, when Miss Patty died, had a nightmare quality in Sally’s memory. What they must have been for Mr. Jefferson she could not imagine. There was no more playing school with Patsy, or reading in the library, or learning fine stitching or the art of dressing hair. Sally had been put in charge of Polly—then four—sleeping on a pallet on the floor of the girls’ room and helping Aunty Isabel in the nursery with baby Lucie.
Even little Polly sensed something was amiss, though Patsy whispered through gritted teeth that no one was to tell her sister how desperately ill their mother was. At night, when Polly couldn’t sleep, Patsy would tell her stories, enlisting Sally’s aid when her own limited invention flagged. Afterwards, when the younger girl drifted off to sleep and Sally returned to her pallet, Sally could hear the heartbreaking liquid sweetness of Mr. Jefferson’s violin from downstairs, as he played for his wife in the darkness.
“Did Mama have freckles?” Polly sat up suddenly, her small, oval face puckered with sudden fright at the recurring concern. “Papa said he wouldn’t love me, if I let myself get freckled.”
“Your papa only said that because he’d heard that pirates on the high seas look especially for freckled ladies, to haul away into captivity,” Sally informed her gravely. “He just didn’t want to scare you by saying so.” And when Polly gave her a suspicious look, she laughed and said, “Sugarbaby, when your papa sees you, he’ll be so glad he won’t care if you’re covered all over with spots like a bird’s egg.”
For three weeks after Miss Patty’s death, Mr. Jefferson kept to his room. Passing the door, Sally had heard him weeping, or pacing incessantly, like an injured animal trying to outwalk pain. It was whispered in the slave-quarters that he would follow his beloved into her grave, from the sheer shock of his grief. Often Patsy would be with her father in his room nearly all night, as she was most of the day. Then it would fall to Sally to tell Polly stories, and hold her in bed until the little girl slept.
One afternoon he went through the whole of the house, gathering every letter, every list, every scrap of his wife’s handwriting, and burned them all in the kitchen fire; cut to pieces the single small likeness of her that had been painted the year before. Sally remembered waking one fog-wrapped dawn, hearing a door close softly somewhere in the house, and Patsy’s voice downstairs call hesitantly, “Papa?” Long familiar strides, first in the hall, then grinding on the gravel outside, heading toward the stables at the far end of Mulberry Row. Sally slipped out of her blanket and ran to the window in time to see Mr. Jefferson plunge down the drive on his fast bay stallion Caratacus. Tall and thin and stiff in her rumpled dress, Patsy stood by the back door with her rufous hair hanging down her shoulders. The pink of her shawl in the gray fog had been like the last flower of a summer gone.
Not long after that Mr. Jefferson had taken the family to his friend Mr. Cary’s home near Richmond, for the girls and the Carr children to be inoculated against the smallpox. Baby Lucie had been left with Aunt Eppes. Sally, Critta, Jimmy, and Thenia, their youngest sister, were inoculated as well. Mr. Jefferson and Polly’s nurse Aunty Isabel acted as sick-nurses to the whole group, the first time Sally had seen her master begin to emerge from the desperate isolation of his grief.
It was there that Mr. Jefferson got the letter from the Congress that his friend, the fragile Mr. Madison who Sally always thought looked like a wizened old man, had put her master’s name forward to be one of the ministers to France. With Miss Patty dead, there was no reason why he shouldn’t accept.
He’d gone to Philadelphia with Patsy. Sally had hoped to be taken along as Patsy’s maid, or at least as a sewing-girl to the household. Instead, when he came back, she heard in the kitchen that she was going to be sent with Polly and Lucie, not back to Monticello, where she had friends and family, but to Eppington.
“Is it true?” she demanded of her mother, when she’d raced in a flurry out to the sunny room across the yard from the kitchen, where the Cary slaves and those of their guests gathered to do the mending and ironing and stitching of clothing for the household. The Cary slaves had regarded her in mingled pity and surprise, that at age nine she still seemed to think it would cross any white person’s mind to even ask if she wanted to leave her family or not.
“It’s true,” her mother had answered. And then, when Sally turned to run from the room, “Where you goin’, girl?” She’d caught Sally by the arm, led her outside into the yard behind the big Cary house at Ampthill, the air cold after the frowsty sewing-room’s warmth. “You thinkin’ of runnin’ in to Mr. Jefferson, to ask him not to send you to Eppington? Are you?”
When Sally didn’t reply, Betty Hemings shook her, not roughly but urgently, pulling her eyes back to her own. “Don’t you even think about it, girl. Don’t you even think that because he teaches you your letters, and talks kindly to you, and answers all your fool questions, that he really cares even that much—” She measured the width of a lemon-pip between forefinger and thumb, “—where you want to go, or what you’d rather do than what he tells you to. Not him, not any white, m
an, woman, or child. They got a word for niggers that think they can ask not to do things they don’t want to do and that word is spoiled. And once they start thinkin’ you’re a spoiled nigger, then they start lookin’ around for ways to un-spoil you. To teach you real hard not to talk to ’em as if you wasn’t black. You understand?”
Sally, trembling with defiance, looked up at her mother’s face and saw there fear as well as anger: a terrible, piercing fear. She thought, What does she think he’ll do? Sell me?
And the thought succeeded it as instantly as the following heartbeat, He could.
It was indeed what her mother feared.
“It’s like that Decoration of Independence Martin was tellin’ us about,” her mother went on, her voice low and tense. “Mr. Jefferson wrote, All men is created equal, but what he meant was, All white Americans is created equal to all white Englishmen. Can you give me the name of any one of his slaves that he’s turned loose since he wrote that?”
Sally whispered, “No, ma’am.”
“You’re damn lucky you’re just goin’ with Polly, and not bein’ sold to Mrs. Eppes.” Betty’s voice was low, and she glanced at the back door of the Cary house, where young Peter Carr, just shooting up from boy to young man, could be seen flirting with one of the light-complected housemaids. “If Mr. Jefferson was to die tomorrow, every one of us would be sold off to pay his debts. You better get used to it, girl, and thank God it’s no worse yet.”
Sally had returned quietly with her mother to the sewing-room, and had taken up work on a shirt for Sam Carr, as a way to quiet her mind and her hands. But later that evening, when the men had finished their port and were going in to join Mrs. Cary and the older girls in the parlor, seeing Mr. Jefferson walking behind the others Sally slipped from the shadows and tugged his sleeve, whispered, “Mr. Jefferson, sir—must I go to Eppington?”
He paused in his steps and looked down at her. His tall loose-jointed form seemed to loom against the candle-glow and gloom of the early-falling winter darkness. She was at the age when the slave-children began to be given real jobs, and had graduated from short calico shifts to a real dress of printed muslin, her hair—which was like a white woman’s, silky and long—braided tidily up under a linen cap. In the half-dark she was aware that, being taller than the other girls her age (except for Patsy, who at ten was as tall as little Mr. Madison), she seemed already one of the adult servants, and not a child who can ask for things because she doesn’t know any better.
Mr. Jefferson’s voice was gentle and kind. “Now, Sally, Polly asked specially that you go with her to her aunt Eppes. She knows you, and loves you. I’m sending you with her so that she won’t be lonely there.”
He didn’t sound in the least as if he even comprehended that she, too, might be lonely there. Shock, anger, disappointment pierced her heart like a thorn, but looking up into his eyes she saw there was no arguing. She’d seen that side of him as he’d dealt with other people, but never before had he turned that kindly implacability on her.
He simply didn’t want to hear there was a problem. His hands rested briefly, warmly, on her shoulders. “You’re a good girl, Sally, and I’m trusting you to take care of my daughter. And it won’t be for very long.”
It was to be four years.
And for those four years, Sally had hated Thomas Jefferson.
The carriage emerged from the woods. Sunlight dyed the dust egg-yolk gold. They passed through a village: white stucco houses, brown tile roofs patched with green moss, a thick smell of pissy gutters, smoke, and pigs. A few of the people wore town-folks’ clothes, like the people Sally had seen in Williamsburg and in the fascinating bedlam of London, but they looked patched and threadbare. Most wore smocks and breeches, ragged and baggy and without stockings, like the field-hands.
But if they were field-hands, Sally reflected uneasily, somebody was short-feeding ’em and selling off the rations. One man spat after the carriage as it clattered by.
Looking back, Sally had to admit that painful as it had been, her sojourn at Eppington had been for the best. If she hadn’t been there when Mr. Jefferson’s letters had come, insisting that Polly be sent to join him in France—if Aunty Isabel hadn’t been with child and unable to make the voyage—she wouldn’t be sitting here now. She wouldn’t be about to see Jimmy again, her favorite brother. Lazy, handsome, prankish, troublemaking Jimmy: She almost laughed out loud at the thought of him. Her mother had sent her word that Mr. Jefferson was having him taught French cooking, which was supposed to be the best in the world, though Sally couldn’t imagine better cooking than what her Aunty Lita could produce in a single pot over the fire.
She wondered if he’d learned to speak French like the lofty M’sieu Petit. (Enough to cheat at cards and find every alehouse for five miles around, anyway!)
She wondered if he’d changed.
A stone bridge, and the deep glitter of water; a speckled flotilla of ducks. Then woods again, like the wooded mountaintop of Monticello, crisscrossed with paths and dotted with lawn and flowers. A park, like the great parks in London, Hyde Park and Grosvenor Square where Mr. and Mrs. Adams would go walking with Polly, during the ten days they’d stayed in that wonder-filled metropolis.
Mrs. Eppes, and Aunty Isabel, had given Sally strict instructions about staying at Polly’s side and staying in the house when Polly was out with the white folks—by the time it was known Sally would accompany her charge to France, Mrs. Eppes was as familiar as Aunty Isabel was with Sally’s boundless curiosity, her omnivorous craving to find out about anything she didn’t know. Neither the white aunt nor the black nurse had ever been to a city bigger than Williamsburg, but they’d guessed what temptations would flaunt themselves across Sally’s path.
“The girl’s never to be found when you want her,” the delicate, formidable Mrs. Adams had complained, on their second day beneath her roof. “A fine nursemaid for a child Polly’s age!”
But London—!
Even the birds were different in London: cocky little brown sparrows, instead of the silvery doves Sally knew in Virginia. The summer night-noise, too, was different, watchmen and carts and vendors all yelling, instead of the incessant clamor of night-crying insects. Her heart hurt for the songs of the mockingbirds, but in Grosvenor Square, walking in the twilight (when she should have been back at Mrs. Adams’s house!) she’d heard the indescribable sweet voice of the nightingale, that all the fairy-tales talked about.
All those crowded houses had their stables along separate alleyways that begged to be investigated. The Square and every street around it was alive with vendors who brought not only milk and eggs and vegetables from the markets but also hot pies, scarves, slippers, quills for making pens. The markets were jaw-dropping carnivals of activity, produce, servants, housewives, whores—Sally had never seen a whore, and had to quietly confirm with Mrs. Adams’s maid Esther that yes, those women with bright clothes and hair that startling color made their living by coupling with men.
Sally loved Virginia with the whole of her heart—loved its stillness, the sweetness of the woods, and the soft peaceful twilights. But the world was a marvel-filled place. Even Mrs. Adams had unbent, when Sally had asked, a little fearfully, if she might be permitted to read some of the books in Mr. Adams’s library: Coming back to books after four years without them was like sitting down at table starving. Like Mr. Jefferson, fat, grumpy Mr. Adams loved books, and like Mr. Jefferson both he and his beautiful wife were born schoolteachers.
There would be books in Mr. Jefferson’s house.
Had Mr. Jefferson changed?
Though her resentment at him had burned bitter in her for four years, she had never been able to eradicate from her heart the memory of his violin echoing in the darkness for his dying wife. The tireless months Mr. Jefferson had spent in Miss Patty’s room watching her fade from life returned to Sally’s mind, confusing the simplicity of her anger at all he had done. And not only to her: Even as a child of eight, Sally knew it took two to ma
ke a baby. It was impossible that Mr. Jefferson, a grown man who had read books and talked to doctors, wouldn’t know it, too.
“She was afraid, if she put him out of her bed, that he’d start lyin’ with Iris or Jenny,” Sally’s mother had said, naming the light-skinned housemaid, and the young wife of the plantation cobbler. Both had shown Mr. Jefferson—and a number of his guests at one time or another—their willingness. Being the master’s woman was a good way to get extra food and gifts, and to pass along to any offspring the inestimable gift of preference in an unfair world.
“Why you think she always smiled, and made herself pretty the way she did?” her mother asked. “It’s not just so he wouldn’t fret. It was to draw him back to her, to bind him. To keep him from going away. She’d rather risk death than lose him.”
Sally still thought Mr. Jefferson should have known better. And maybe, she reflected, recalling not only despair but horror in his eyes as fevers, weakness, infections ravaged the beautiful woman he had loved—maybe he had guessed at last what he had so frantically told himself wasn’t true.
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