“Good.” Jefferson drew her to him, the faint shift of muscle and rib comforting through the thin layers of muslin that divided flesh from flesh. “The will to liberty must be armed, Sally, and it must show itself willing to shed blood. After all these centuries of oppression, the French people are waking up. They’re remembering that they are men. It’s a frightening time. But the King is a man of good heart, and stronger than the creatures who surround him. He’s shown himself willing to step beyond the old ideas, and to work with the Assembly. Only barbarians fear the clear light of freedom.”
For a moment the glow of the single candle shone in his eyes, as if he looked beyond that small brightness to some greater glory. Then he smiled at her, as if in her silence he read her fear.
“And this house has very stout gates. I’m known to everyone in Paris as a friend of freedom, as a regular guest, if not a participant, in the Assembly. And I’m known to the King as the Minister of his sworn ally. We have nothing to fear from either side, Sally.”
He cupped her face in both hands, brushed her lips with his. “It is a glorious time to be alive.” Then he slipped the nightgown down from her shoulders, and they spoke no more of the King.
A short lifetime spent at Jefferson’s elbow, watching him tinker with inventions that seldom worked out in practice, had taught Sally already that Tom was an incurable optimist who tended to believe whatever he wished were true. Still, when she was with him, whether at his side in the secret stillness of his bedroom or on the opposite side of the dining-room among the other servants, it was impossible to contradict him. Impossible to pull her heart away from the power of his words and his thought.
Lying beside him in the aftermath of loving, she felt safe. Able to look, as he did, beyond the walls of the Hôtel Langeac and the veils of time, to see this beautiful fairy-tale land that had been for so long bound in the chains of the King’s power and the King’s friends and the all-dominating Church. To hear its people saying, at last, There is another way to live.
The bells of the old abbey on Montmartre Hill chimed distantly. In her attic bedroom, Sally heard the striking-clock in the hallway answer with three clear notes. In another half-hour the cocks in all the kitchen-gardens up and down the Champs-Elysées would begin to crow. Jacques the kitchen-boy would be awake soon after that, as first light stained the sky.
Then it would be too late to flee.
Sally slipped from beneath the sheets of her narrow bed. As she shed her nightgown, found the stays and dress and chemise she’d put out last night knowing she’d have to dress in the dark, she tried not to think about what she was doing. She laced up her shoes, braided her hair by touch alone, and put on a cap. Leaving Tom’s room last night, with the candle sputtering out, she had forced herself not to look back. Not to think, That was the last time. But as she slipped away, she did pause in the doorway of the girls’ room to make out, very dimly, the blur of white that was Polly’s sheets, the dark smear of the little girl’s hair.
Almost as much as Tom, she would miss Polly.
She would even miss Patsy, who for nearly a year had made her life a wretched guessing-game of frozen silences, petty frustrations, uncertainty, and spite.
And she would never see her family again.
The front gates would be locked, but Sally drifted like a shadow down to the kitchen, past the cubbyhole shared by Jimmy and the kitchen-boy Jacques. There were times in the past two years that Sally had hated her brother. First, because he had slyly maneuvered to push her and their master together, then later because he had come to her to borrow—or steal, if she wouldn’t lend—the money that Tom would give her, for small pleasures like gloves and shoes and fans. After Patsy came home from the convent and started keeping the household books, Tom began leaving money for Sally in a drawer of his desk, rather than buy her things as he had before.
Sometimes, she was almost certain, Jimmy got to the drawer before she did.
She moved the iron bolts of the kitchen door, slipped it open barely the eight inches that would admit her body, then closed it softly again. She paused long enough to slip her feet into the pattens that protected her shoes from the black, acid Paris mud, then tucked her small bundle of belongings more firmly under her arm. At this hour, she should be fairly safe. Even rioters had to sleep sometime.
Still she felt breathless as she walked in the hushed stillness beneath the chestnut trees. The kitchen-boy had told her yesterday that while the rioting was going on in the Étoile, the lawyers and merchants who’d elected the representatives to the National Assembly had declared themselves a Governing Committee, and had called for forty-eight thousand militiamen to keep order and deal with the royal troops camped in the Bois de Boulogne and the vegetable-farms around Montmartre and Rambouillet, should they attack.
A glorious time to be alive.
Everything will be all right.
Desperately, Sally hoped so. Whatever was happening in Paris, it was going to be her home henceforth.
When Mr. Jefferson had said last November that he had asked to return to the United States for a short visit, to take Patsy and Polly home, Jimmy had announced that he would not return with them. As slavery did not exist in France, he declared, he was a free man, free to go or to stay. And he chose to stay.
Jefferson had answered, with cool reasonableness, that as Jimmy was a free man he must accept a free man’s responsibilities, among them not robbing the man who had brought him to France and was paying for him to be taught the skills of French cookery by which he intended to make his living. Jimmy owed it to his former master—Tom’s voice had gritted over the word—to return to Virginia for as long as it would take him to train a replacement there. Then he would be free to go wherever he wished.
Sally had seen that for all the calm rationality of his answer, Tom was furious.
He’s a white Virginia gentleman. Sally quickened her step between the chestnut trees, the half-seen pale blocks of great houses set back from the road in their parklike grounds. Whatever he might write, or think, or say about the Rights of Man and the injustice of slavery, what he feels is what he feels.
It was this dichotomy, this yawning gulf between his ideals and the demands of his flesh, that had made him turn away from her, all those months.
Wanting her in spite of every inner vow he had made to himself, the promise not to be the kind of master who would force a slave-girl.
Even at fifteen, turning from girl to woman, she had seen that in his eyes.
Within a week of her arrival with Sally in Paris, Polly had gone into a convent-school. She and Patsy would come home on Sundays, to spend the afternoon and the night in their father’s house and return to the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont in the morning, and on those nights Sally would sleep in a cubicle just off the girls’ bedroom. Mr. Jefferson was strict with Sally, forbidding her to go about the streets by herself. In Williamsburg, and in Richmond, she knew instinctively the kinds of places it was safe for a young girl to go, and in Williamsburg she knew, too, that any black woman, and most black men, would be her friend in a difficult situation.
Mr. Jefferson had assigned M’sieu Petit the task of teaching Sally the finer skills of service, how to clean and mend and care for fine clothing, how to pack it loosely in paper and straw to be stored in trunks in the attic til it was wanted. How to starch and iron ruffles, and how to dress hair. Miss Patty herself had taught Sally the art of fancy sewing; the little Frenchman clicked his tongue approvingly, and put her to study with Mme. Dupré, the household seamstress and laundrywoman, the only female in the masculine establishment.
But these things didn’t take up all Sally’s days. When Polly went off to the convent, Sally asked, a little timidly, if she might read in the library while Mr. Jefferson was out. “Mr. Adams would let me, sir. You can write and ask him, if I ever tore or damaged anything, or didn’t put it back.”
To her surprise Mr. Jefferson replied, “Of course you may, Sally. Even when you were quite a little
girl I remember you were always careful with books.”
She hadn’t thought he’d noticed.
It was his library that brought them together—his library, and Sally’s unquenchable curiosity about everything and anything. She picked up kitchen-French quickly, and the slurry argot of the cab-men, street-singers, and vendors of ratbane and brooms. But Mr. Jefferson hired a French tutor for both her and Jimmy. And often in the evenings, if he wasn’t invited out to dine, Mr. Jefferson would take an hour to help her read the French of good books. More than once, having left her in the library deep in Mr. Pope’s Iliad or some article in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, he would return late to find her still there, reading by candlelight while the rest of the house slept.
Much of the time he’d be with Mr. Short, his secretary from Virginia who also had a room in the attic of the Hôtel Langeac, or Mr. Humphreys, another semipermanent Virginian guest. But Mr. Humphreys had his own friends among the Americans in Paris, and Mr. Short was having an affair with a society lady. On many nights Mr. Jefferson would return, a little bemused, alone. Then if Sally was still in the library he’d bring a chair over next to hers, and they’d talk about the marvels described in the Encyclopédie, or he’d tell her the gossip that everyone traded in the Paris salons. Sometimes he’d play his violin for her, though his broken wrist was slow to heal, and the music that gave him such joy was also now a source of pain. Sally guessed that without his daughters during the week he was lonely. For a man as gregarious as he was, there was a part of him that needed his family; that needed faces familiar to him from home.
And in a sense, she and Jimmy were family. She had known Mr. Jefferson since the age of two, and thought no more of being alone with him at midnight, while all the household slept, than she would have thought of staying up late talking to one of her old uncles on the cabin step of the quarters along Mulberry Row.
Jimmy, who’d started out teasing her about getting wrinkles from too much reading, sometimes looked at her with that calculating glance and said, “No, you stay up however late you want, Sal. You learn lots of things, reading.”
She hadn’t known what he was getting at, at first. In that first year in Paris, so enchanted had she been with that whole glittering city that she’d barely been aware of the changes in her body.
She was used to people telling her she was pretty, and used to men—both black and white—trying to steal kisses. From the age of twelve Sally had been adept at defending herself with nails and knees from would-be swains in the quarters. And like any female slave from that age up, she had learned the risky maneuvers involved in saying No to white men without being punished for insolence.
She was aware that she was getting taller. She knew her hips had widened, and her breasts filled out, because just before her first Christmas in France, soon after her fifteenth birthday, she’d overheard Mr. Short remark to Jefferson, “By gad, Jefferson, that girl of yours is growing into a beauty.” Not long after that Jimmy had taken her aside and said, “Now, you don’t let those good-for-nothing footmen down in the kitchen go sweet-talkin’ you into lettin’ ’em kiss you, girl,” and Sally had only stared at him in disbelief.
“I ain’t that fond of garlic,” she’d retorted, and Jimmy laughed.
But he’d sobered quickly, and said, “You be gettin’ more’n a tongue full of garlic, if you let ’em catch you alone. You remember, girl, you in France now. You and me, we’re free here. There’s no law here that says a black girl can’t scratch a white man’s face if he puts his hand up her skirt.”
“And how many times you had your face scratched, brother?”
“Enough to know.”
Jefferson apparently shared Jimmy’s concerns. The following March—1788—when he went to Amsterdam to meet Mr. Adams and sign a treaty with the Dutch, he arranged for Sally to board with the seamstress Mme. Dupré and her husband rather than stay in the Hôtel Langeac with the other servants. Sally had romped with Mme. Dupré’s grandchildren and helped Madame and her daughter in the kitchen. At the market one morning there she had encountered Sophie Sparling, who had helped nurse poor Miss Patty in her final months. Twenty-two now, Sophie was a paid companion to a Mrs. Luckton, an English widow who lived in the nearby rue des Lesdiguères.
Things were indeed different in Paris. Here, one wasn’t immersed in a world of slaves and slaveholders. She had seen in the way Mr. Jefferson spoke to her, that with her fair complexion and long, silky hair, he sometimes almost forgot that her grandmother had been African. Maybe because she knew herself to be legally free, she found herself shedding the barriers of caution that existed between slaves and masters. Here, he could no longer give her away, or send her where she didn’t wish to go.
Somehow, in Paris, it didn’t matter that Sophie Sparling was the white granddaughter of a tobacco-planter, and Sally Hemings the not-quite-white granddaughter of an African woman who’d been enslaved and raped. It was good to speak English to another woman who remembered Virginia’s green hills. A little to Sally’s surprise, Sophie seemed to think so, too.
Looking back now on those weeks at Mme. Dupré’s, Sally felt a desperate longing for the simplicity she’d known then.
That’s how I want to live, she thought, as she hurried down the thinning gray gloom of the Champs-Elysées. In a little house like that, just a couple of rooms that’ll be my own.
And she shivered, though the dawning day was already scorching hot.
Around her, the city seemed eerily still. The big houses set along the fashionable avenue were dark, shutters closed tight. But as she approached the open expanse of the Place Louis XV, she could see men clustered in the wine-shops under the colonnade, muttering and waving their arms.
Saturday—the day before yesterday—men and women had poured into the huge square to protest the King’s dismissal of his Finance Minister M’sieu Necker, who—everyone in the kitchen said—was the only man capable of ending the famine and financial mess that had held the country in the grip of death for a year. Cheap pamphlets—commissioned by Necker’s salonnière wife—praised his skills, and vomited scatalogical invective on the men the King had selected to replace him.
The demonstrators had been met by a regiment of hired German soldiers, under the command of a cousin of the Queen’s.
Dried blood still smeared the cobblestones, dark under a blanket of dust and drawing whirling clouds of flies.
Sally lowered her head and cut through a corner of the square, with barely a glance at the equestrian statue of a former King, now smeared with dung and garbage. Another day she would have walked through the Tuileries gardens rather than along the quais at the riverside, for the river stank like a sewer. But she felt uneasy about going into those aisles of hedges and trees. Men roved the streets and alleyways of Paris these days, men out of work and hungry—angry, too. With the shortages of bread, the tangled national finances that were driving more and more men out of employment, there were fewer who could pay for servants, barbers, new clothes, new shoes, food.
As she hurried along the dark quais, Sally could glimpse them: long dirty hair, baggy trousers, bare legs, the wooden shoes of peasants. Some moved about the garden, others slept beneath its trees.
Everything will be all right.
She felt sick with fright.
Those days at Mme. Dupré’s, those days of walking about the city with Sophie, seemed to her now like the last time that her life had been normal: that she had been herself, her real self. When Sophie could get away from her employer, which was seldom—Mrs. Luckton was worse than any plantation mistress—they would rove together through the gardens of the Luxembourg and the Tuileries, or wander among the exceedingly expensive shops of the Palais Royale. They’d pretended to shop for silks of the most newly fashionable hues—“flea’s thigh” and “goose-turd green”—and admired the jeweled rings and watches—or whole coffee-sets or sewing-kits or travelers’ writing desks of enamel and gold—at Le Petit Dunkerque.
At the cafés benea
th Palais Royale’s arcades, street-corner orators had denounced the King, the Austrian Queen, and the horrifying thing called The Deficit which France owed to everyone. In the evenings at Mme. Dupré’s, Sally would read, sometimes the books she’d buy at the booksellers along the narrow streets, sometimes the newspapers and pamphlets that Mme. Dupré always had about the house—political, filthily scurrilous, and occasionally fascinating. On other evenings, she’d read and reread the letters Mr. Jefferson would send her, from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Strasbourg.
Brief notes, but full of canal-locks, churches, what was being said, and worn. He knew she was eager to hear such things, of a world even wider than the one she now knew.
On the evening of the twenty-third of April he returned, and Sally walked back with Mme. Dupré on the morning of the twenty-fourth. She ran up to her attic room with her little satchel of clothes, her long hair loose upon her shoulders as it was the fashion to wear it in Paris, and had just emerged from the back stairs on her way down to the kitchen to see Jimmy, when she came face-to-face with Mr. Jefferson in the hall.
He was in his shirtsleeves, stepping from the door of his own room, and stopped as she cannoned into him. She backed away laughing, and dropped him a curtsey. He said, “Sally,” as if for just a moment he was making sure that it was Sally, and not someone else who looked like her. A little hesitantly, he added, “It’s good to see you again. I missed you.”
“And I you, sir.” Though he might still own her mother and her brothers and sisters as if they were so many stallions and mares, she understood, from her friendship with Sophie, what kind of life the daughters of a planter would have to look forward to, if their father were to simply free his slaves.
Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers Page 18