Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  If he becomes President, thought Sally, he will be in Philadelphia more—or in that new Federal City on the Potomac. As Mr. Adams’s Vice President, he’d spent as little time in the capital as he could, and Patsy and Randolph had lived a good part of the time on their own plantation at Varina. If he becomes President, will they be back here as they used to, ten months of the year?

  The thought, though annoying, didn’t bother her as it once had.

  She had done as she’d meant to do: had guaranteed freedom for her children, which was more than her mother had been able to accomplish.

  Surely, she thought as she turned back into the dim warm glow of her cabin, that should be enough.

  Tom left as soon as it was light enough to see the road down the mountain. He’d knelt in his riding-clothes to kiss bright-haired Annie and burly Jeff, and Sam and Peter Carr hugged their mother breathless and pretended they hadn’t had two of the younger spinning-maids up to their room last night. Patsy held baby Cornelia in her arms, and stood alone half-hidden in the dark of the scaffolding that covered the front of the house; three-year-old Ellen was sickening for a cold, and had remained indoors. Tom Randolph seemed silent and awkward as his father-in-law shook his hand.

  Then Tom swung into Silveret’s saddle—he never took the carriage when he could ride—and rode out at a frisky hand-gallop, raising his hat to his family. As he passed Sally, in the misty twilight where the road curved down the mountain, he touched the brim again, in salute.

  Then he was gone.

  Along Mulberry Row, and in the cabins that dotted the woods on the back-side of the mountain, all the cocks had commenced their second crowing. In less than an hour the carpenters would be starting their hammering, the white craftsmen Tom had hired commencing the more exacting labor of plastering the new rooms. The whole mountain smelled of the smoke of breakfast-fires. As Sally descended to her cabin she saw that the door of the joiner’s shed stood open.

  Her first thought was Mr. Dinsmore’s up early…. Which was totally uncharacteristic of the young Irishman who’d come to do the fine carpentry within the house.

  Her second, Why is there no lantern-light inside? was still half-formed in her head when a shadow appeared in the doorway, a huge hand reached out and caught her wrist. Sally’s hand was coming back to claw, her breath dragging into her lungs to scream, when she saw in the chilly dawn light that it was Lam Hawkin.

  He swept her into the joiner’s shed with a violence that pulled her off her feet, shut the door, not with a kick, but with soundless swift care.

  “I can’t stay.” His fingers were already pressed to her lips. “And I can’t be seen here—”

  “You’re a free man, Lam.” Sally pushed his hand away. “Who you runnin’ from?”

  “I don’t know. And what I tell you, you must swear to keep to yourself, for your own sake and your boys’. Or they’ll be after you, too, Sally, to keep you silent.”

  In his eyes she saw everything: the lights bobbing through the darkness to the trees, the way the carpenters had looked at her yesterday. The strange black man disappearing fast in the direction of the woods.

  Who? died on her lips and even her breath felt stilled for a moment, as if she’d been slammed against a wall.

  Then she whispered, “Is it a revolt?”

  Lam nodded.

  And she remembered: It was what the French King had asked, when someone told him about the rioters seizing the Bastille. Is it a revolt? The messenger had replied, No, sire, a revolution.

  A terrible complex shiver went through her, born of a thousand memories. She felt cold, as if, the grannies said, a goose had walked across her grave. A revolution.

  She whispered, “Sam and Peter Carr were down in Richmond two days ago, they hadn’t heard—”

  “It ain’t started yet. I don’t know when it will start. Soon, I think, before the tobacco harvest. It’s big, Sally, and it’s organized like an army, with scouts and spies and recruiters. And it’s spreadin’. They got lieutenants workin’ in secret, in Henrico County, an’ Hanover, an’ Caroline, an’ Louisa Counties. They got secret workshops makin’ bullets, hammerin’ plow-iron into pikes. They gonna take Richmond, they say, an’ make a kingdom of black men, where none are slaves to none. Just like Toussaint did in Saint-Domingue, nine years ago.”

  “An’ kill the whites?” Sally remembered the torrent of panic that had swept Virginia, just after her own return from France, at the news that in the wake of the French Revolution, the slaves in the French sugar-island of Saint-Domingue—who outnumbered the whites on the island ten to one—had risen in revolt. They had slaughtered not only the whites, but the free colored caste of artisans, slaveholders, shopkeepers there. Two French fleets had been defeated there so far. The blacks were still free.

  Lam’s eyes shifted. “Some of ’em. I hear there’s some they won’t, those they feel are on their side and will help.”

  She felt the half-truth through her skin but said nothing. No man who owned slaves, no matter what he’d written about equality and freedom, would be considered on their side. Nor would his family.

  “Sally, I took a chance comin’ here to warn you. Because I trust you. And I don’t want to see you hurt, or your boys hurt. I don’t know when it’ll happen, but when it does, I’ll come here, me an’ my girls.” Lam had married the year after Sally had returned to Tom, the cook-girl of a Charlottesville lawyer. He’d bought their two daughters as they were born, and had saved up about half the two hundred dollars it would take to free his wife, when she’d died last year. “We’ll go back into the mountains, until it all blows past, for better or for worse. But you gotta be ready to go. We may not have more’n a few minutes to spare. Food, money—all the money you can gather. We gonna need it. An’ you cannot tell, Sally. Not your family, not anyone. Swear to me that.”

  He had risked his life, to come up here and tell her. If rebellion was being planned, the community of the unfree would—and could—strike swiftly at a potential talebearer. And no white sheriff would even investigate a black man’s unexplained death.

  She whispered, “I swear.” Then: “But if you honestly think a rebellion’s going to succeed, you’re mad. You really think a—a kingdom of black men can stand here in Virginia? That any white will help ’em? The whites got militia, Lam. They got an army up north of ten thousand—”

  “That’s exactly what people said when your Mr. Jefferson an’ his friends all spit in the face of the British,” Lam said harshly. “You don’t hear anyone goin’ around these days sayin’ how stupid that was.” He was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Whose side you on, Sally?”

  She pulled her arm sharply away from his grip. “I am on my children’s side.”

  “And your children look white enough to pass for white boys. Or to be killed in mistake for ’em, if killin’ starts.”

  Sally knew he spoke the truth. But for years she’d heard Tom talk of the Saint-Domingue rebellion, as he’d talk to her about almost anything that was on his mind at bedtime, in the world-within-a-world that was his room. He talked the way he made music, to clarify his mind, and from things he had said, it was perfectly clear to Sally that the only reason the blacks in Saint-Domingue were still free was because Saint-Domingue was an island, and the French were too busy fighting everyone in Europe to spare an invasion force of sufficient strength.

  But in Saint-Domingue, the rebelling slaves had murdered white—and free colored—children along with adults.

  “I’m not sayin’ these people is smart or dumb, Sally. And I’m not sayin’ what their chances are. I’m only sayin’ they’re comin’. It could be soon. It could be damn soon.”

  Richmond is as full as it can hold, she heard Tom say, of men from all over Virginia. Prominent men, men of property and power….

  If they was smart, thought Sally dizzily, NOW would be the time to strike. An attack now would buy ’em time.

  And she felt in her heart the slow hot blaze of anger, at the
thought of the men and women she’d known in Eppington and Williamsburg, who had been sold away from their families or seen their wives, their husbands, their children sold away.

  Who had seen their daughters or their wives or their sisters raped or seduced—who lived daily with the knowledge that any white man could molest them with nothing more to fear than his neighbors saying, Tsk. Who lived hourly with the awareness of men sizing them up, as Tom Randolph and Peter Carr and Jack Eppes sized her up each time she walked past.

  Serve them right.

  For the unavoidable and unquestioned fact that one day the children Young Tom and Bev played with were all going to be sold away from their families and friends, sent to places where they knew no one; and when they were grown, they’d see their children taken away and sold in turn.

  For the sheer unthinkability that a white man would or could feel genuine love for her—unthinkable even by the white man himself.

  Serve them right, if it was a thousand times worse.

  Outside the window, she heard Young Tom whistling as he came back from the kitchen. Like his father, he was always singing, and Tom had even begun, in his casual way, to teach him to play the fiddle. She said softly, “You better go. The men’ll be up at the Big House soon and they’ll see you if you stay. I swear I’ll be ready, and I swear I’ll tell no one. Thank you, Lam,” she added, as he clapped on his hat, and opened the shed door a crack to make sure the coast was clear. “More than I can say, thank you. You’re a good man.”

  He brought the door shut again, regarded her in the gloom. “And you’re a good woman, Sally. I just wish you were as happy as you deserve to be.”

  She returned a crooked smile. “We’re all as happy as we deserve to be, Lam. God bless you. I’ll see you soon.”

  “That you will, girl.” His eyes grew hard. “That you will.”

  Bev’s fever-flush had spread over his face and body. His throat, when she carried him to the cabin’s window to look, was fiercely inflamed. Young Tom was sitting on the edge of the bed with a dish of leftovers from the Big House breakfast, his sharp face worried: “He didn’t eat anything last night, Mama, and now he won’t have anything either.”

  “There grits there, sugarbaby? Mix ’em up with a lot of milk, and pour some honey in. I bet he’ll take a little of that.”

  Between them, Young Tom and Sally got the toddler to eat a little, and to drink the bitter willow-bark tea against the fever. When Young Tom had gone back up to the Big House, Sally carried her younger boy over to her mother’s cabin, where Betsie told her that Jenny’s Mollie was worse that morning, and Minerva’s youngest two were showing symptoms as well. Despite all this, and between Sally’s own tasks at the Big House of keeping Tom’s room in order and feeding his three mockingbirds in their cages, she made the time during that day to discreetly scout hiding-places and exit-routes in the woods that could be used that night, if necessary: hiding-places that would accommodate both herself and a three-year-old boy. Young Tom, she knew, was clever enough to escape on his own and rejoin them later.

  She came back from one of these scouting expeditions to find both Jeff and Annie Randolph at Betty’s cabin, with another jug of milk pilfered from the kitchen, and some extra blankets. “We heard some of the pickaninnies were sick, ma’am,” explained Annie, glancing worriedly from Betty Hemings’s face to Sally’s, and back. Since Patsy couldn’t very well order her children to shun Sally without an explanation, the golden-haired nine-year-old and her brother had never been told to keep away from her: Like the white children of most plantations, they played with the slave-children and ran in and out of the cabins as cheerfully as if they lived there. “Will they be all right?”

  “We’re praying so, sugarbaby,” replied Sally, and smiled down at the girl: Tom’s granddaughter, even if she was Patsy’s child. Only a year older than Maria had been, when Sally and she had set sail for France. Unlike Jeff, she hadn’t yet grown bossy around the slave-children; she would hold the babies with the same grave care that a few years ago she’d devoted to her dolls, practicing to be a mama herself.

  Even Jeff seemed cowed in the presence of sickness. To Betty he murmured, “They gonna die?” and he sounded both scared and grieved. He added, stumbling a little on the words, “My baby sister got sick and died. The first Ellen, not Ellen now.” Jeff had been not quite three years old when that fragile little girl had succumbed.

  As she watched Tom’s two oldest grandchildren dart back up the slope toward the brick mansion in its tangled cocoon of scaffolding, Sally seemed to hear in her mind the distant clamor of bells ringing the tocsin, of rough voices singing Ça Ira.

  She shivered, although the afternoon was warm.

  That night Sally dreamed of fire. Dreamed that Paris was burning, that the flames leaped over the customs-barrier and kindled the faubourgs beyond it, and the woods and fields beyond that, fields of tobacco and sugar. The blaze was spreading, and would soon consume the world. Sick with panic, she crouched in the shadow of a wall on the rue St.-Antoine watching the baying mob surge closer and closer, and in the lead walked a woman she knew was her grandmother, the proud black African woman who’d been raped by a sea-captain while on her way to the New World in chains. She carried a torch in one hand, and a pike in the other, and impaled on the pike was the head of Thomas Jefferson.

  Sally woke with a gasp, lay in the darkness staring in the direction where she knew the window lay, half expecting to see the shutters limned by flame in the dark.

  But the hot, thick night was still. The only sound she heard was the drumming of the cicadas, the skreek of the crickets, and Young Tom’s deep, even breath.

  Nearly every slave conspiracy Sally had heard of had ended up betrayed by someone on the inside, some slave who’d gone running to his master with all the details. As a child Sally had sniffed with contempt at such craven treachery; and because she had loved Tom and Patsy and Polly and Miss Patty, it had never crossed her mind that one day vengeance might come knocking on their door.

  Now she understood how people could be good and well-meaning—even shocked by the evils of the society of which they were a part—and still deserve retribution for the part they had played.

  Now she understood how a man or woman could betray the freedom of all, for the sake of an oppressor who had been gentle and kind.

  It is a glorious time to be alive, Tom had said in France, his eyes shining in the candlelight, but he’d still made preparations to get his daughters out of the bloody path of the juggernaut.

  In the days that followed, Sally was careful to go about her business, and avoid any show that she was listening more carefully to half-heard conversations. She’d always kept money cached in the rafters of the cabin where Jimmy wasn’t likely to find it, money Tom gave her for little luxuries for her children, like Young Tom’s secondhand fiddle. Now she began to conceal food there as well.

  In this she was aided by the fact that nothing at Monticello was quite normal during that time.

  Bev’s sickness was soon seen to be mild: he cried and scratched, but he always seemed to know who and where he was. But in the Big House, Patsy’s daughter Ellen was very sick indeed.

  Sally found herself plotting out routes of flight—plotting out hiding places—suitable not for one woman with a three-year-old, but two women with not only toddlers but a baby. For she understood, almost without conscious decision, that if she got Tom’s grandchildren to safety, she would have to spirit Patsy away as well.

  It wasn’t just that Tom would expect nothing less of her.

  When faced with the thought of rebelling slaves overrunning Monticello—coming up from Charlottesville or across the river from Edgehill, crazy as the men and women of Paris had been crazy—she simply could not leave Patsy to her own devices.

  Any slaves who worked for Tom Randolph, Sally guessed, would be crazy with rage if a revolution sparked to life, and out for blood. Though Randolph was careful not to get a reputation in the neighborhood as a har
sh master or a cruel one, he had qualities that were almost worse. He was careless with money and in debt—Tom had on several occasions had to lend his son-in-law money—and he was unpredictable.

  Sally didn’t know a slave on Monticello who didn’t dread the day when Tom Randolph would become their owner.

  As the hot June days of haying and corn-harvest advanced, Randolph came seldom to Monticello. His son Jeff, the only child in the Big House not sick, would sometimes sit on the dismantled pillars of the front porch for hours, waiting for him, and twice had to be stopped from going over to Edgehill, to see if he was there. Sally found herself worrying at the thought of that eight-year-old, son and grandson of slave-owners, walking by himself through the woods along the river’s edge.

  It would serve them right, she told herself again.

  And maybe it would.

  She cached a length of rope at the back of the cupboard in the little girls’ nursery, knowing that if the house were to be set on fire, the narrow stairway—which Tom claimed was so modern and heat-saving and which every servant who had to carry things up and down it despised—would turn into a lethal chimney.

  If it came to flight—if it came to a rebellion—the house, with walls and windows already breached by construction, would be no refuge. They might have only minutes to escape. And as she passed the door of the nursery in the darkness of the night, Sally would look through and see Patsy sitting quietly beside Cornelia’s cradle or little Ellen’s bed. And at the sight of her, she’d feel a sick despair.

  Standing in the dark of the upstairs hall, Sally considered her old friend—her old enemy—in the soft glow of the single appleseed of light shed by the veilleuse on the nursery dressing-table. Clothed in her wrapper of rust-colored brocade, her red hair braided down her back, Patsy had never looked plainer, her long face lined with weariness and her mouth bracketed by gouges of temper and disappointment too long held in rigid check.