Two weeks pass, but Moak never brings the banjar. And something in his manner makes Sally Hemings feel that she shouldn’t ask him about it.
Ursula doesn’t like him—a fact she makes clear through manifold disapproving glances and, one day after Moak has left, by sitting down next to Sally Hemings and proclaiming, as she jabs the air with a rigid index finger, “I’m not gonna tell you this but one time. That Moak ain’t nothing but a sweet-talking, low-life nigger. You be too nice to him, he gonna make you pay the price, I swear as the Lord Jesus is my Savior. So you best stay away from here in the mornings, if you know what’s good for you. And that all I’m gonna say on it.”
Telling herself that Ursula is just a jealous old biddy, Sally Hemings is determined to keep coming to the kitchen for her morning tea in time to catch Moak—but not only do Ursula’s stares and brow-grumbling continue without relent, after a day or two Moak stops smiling at Sally Hemings and meeting her eye. Clearly she’s not the only one who has gotten a talking-to—though when she confronts Ursula about it, the old woman only says, “I told you I ain’t talking about that no more.”
Finally Sally Hemings decides that meeting Moak in the kitchen is just too unpleasant, so she has her tea alone in her cabin and waits to run into him where she won’t have to contend with Ursula. As it happens, she doesn’t have to wait at all. The very first day that she has her tea alone, she looks out her door and sees that Moak has taken the long way around after dropping off the wood for Ursula and is walking, sling draped over his shoulder, right along the road in front of her cabin.
In her hurry to get to the door, she spills a big dollop of tea on her dress, just above her knee, but she is careful to actually step through the doorway as if she were merely coming out to check the weather.
Moak gives her a big-toothed smile the instant he sees her. “Morning, Miz Sally!”
“Morning, Moak. Just wondering if it’s going to rain.”
They talk about the weather long enough for Sally Hemings to feel she has convinced him and—to some extent—herself that she really only did come out to look at the sky. It is definitely not going to rain, they both agree. No, no, always dry this time of year. Finally Sally Hemings asks, “So why didn’t you ever bring your banjar around to show me?”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that.” Moak shakes his head slowly and gives her a sly smile. “Because you hear the banjar, you have to dance, and the kitchen’s no place for dancing, especially not with Ursula staring all the time.”
Sally Hemings can’t bring herself to say the thing that is in her mind, but that ends up not being necessary.
“Of course,” says Moak, “I can always play it for you someplace else—somewhere we wouldn’t have to worry about Ursula staring.”
Feeling breathless and dizzy as she speaks, Sally Hemings allows as it might be possible to meet in another place, and Moak suggests that she come to the old tobacco barn near Iron Field at about sundown.
She will only be out for an hour, she tells herself. Should Thomas Jefferson turn out to have sent for her, she will simply say that she went for a walk. “My head was hurting,” she will tell him. “I thought the night air would do me good.”
Sally Hemings leaves Beverly in Aggy’s care and makes her way to the East Road via the vegetable gardens, a route that keeps her well downhill from the great house and entirely out of sight. She sees her breath in the orange glow as the sun eases down, and then a shimmer of blue mist rises over the dark fields and the scant yellow leaves in the woods turn pale gray.
By the time she catches sight of the tobacco barn, just up a short path to the left of the road, she is so cold that she is shivering, even with her cape from Paris pulled tight around her shoulders. She stops at the bottom of the path and decides that she should turn around immediately. But in the next instant she is telling herself she would be a fool to have come all this way for no reason. She stands in a state of shivering paralysis for close to a minute and then hears the nasal plink-plonk of what must be a banjar.
“Too late now,” she says aloud, and starts up the hill.
The instrument sounds to her like a cross between a harpsichord and a lute—nothing like she’s been imagining—and Moak is clearly not playing it so much as plucking at individual strings, maybe to tune it or maybe just to fill the silence.
The entrance to the tobacco barn faces the field, on the far side from the road, so she doesn’t see him until she is actually in front of the door and they are less than a yard apart.
“Good evening, Miz Sally,” he says, standing up from a bench. The barn is empty and hasn’t been used for several years, but even so, the air inside is still dense with tobacco’s acrid pungency—so dense that Sally Hemings feels something swirl inside her head as she comes to a halt in front of Moak.
She doesn’t know what to say, and for a few seconds, it seems, neither does he. Then he presents the instrument to her, holding it horizontally with both hands. “So here she is!”
The first thing Sally Hemings thinks as she takes it from him is that it is a giant version of the rattle he made for Beverly—a broad stick, flattened on one side and almost as long as her arm, stuck into a gourd slightly larger than her head. The front third of the gourd has been cut off, however, and some sort of animal hide has been stretched across the opening. Gut strings run from wooden pegs at the top of the stick across the stretched hide and are knotted at the gourd’s base.
“Go ahead,” says Moak. “Give it a strum!”
“No. You.” She tries to hand the banjar back, but he pushes it away.
“Come on!”
He is smiling so sweetly that Sally Hemings can’t resist. Holding the instrument vertically by its neck, she runs her fingernails across the strings, producing a sound much louder than she expected. She laughs and feels sweat prickling out all over her body, even though she is still cold.
“Now you do it.” She gives the instrument back. “Play me a song.”
“All right.” He puts one foot up on the bench where he had been sitting and rests the gourd on his thigh. “But you have to dance.”
She laughs again, nervously.
“You won’t be able to help yourself,” he says. He gives the strings some preliminary plucks, and tightens the pegs at the end of the neck. “That’s how it is with the banjar. You hear it playing and your feet just got to move.”
At this suggestion Sally Hemings experiences another prickling sweat and feels her feet anchor themselves to the ground. She doesn’t move when Moak starts to play, and after a while he nods encouragingly. “Come on!”
The truth is that the jangling music doesn’t make her feel like dancing at all. She had been imagining that the banjar would be much more soulful, a sort of baritone guitar or maybe something like a viola. But Moak’s tinny twanging is far more comical than soulful, and the rhythm is too fast and regular for dancing. She had been expecting something like a reel or a waltz.
“Go on,” he says, giving her another nod. “Just let yourself go! You’ll see. Your feet already know how to do it.”
Out of sheer pity, Sally Hemings takes a few steps to the left, and then to the right, but only grows more embarrassed. After a while she slows to a sort of sway, which gradually diminishes to something less than toe tapping. Moak’s disappointment in her only makes things worse. He serenades her for a few minutes, then stops abruptly.
“You want to play?” He holds out the instrument.
“Oh, no!” she cries. “How could I do that?” These words aren’t even out of her mouth before she is feeling like a coward and a fool.
“It’s easy! I’ll teach you.”
He gives her the banjar, then moves around behind her, so that he can position the fingers of her left hand on the neck. She likes the feeling of his strong, callused fingers on her own and the warmth of his body running all down her back. She realizes that
she is not cold anymore and has not, in fact, been cold for quite some time.
Once he has shown her how to hold down a single string with the middle finger of her left hand, he presses the thumb and forefinger of her right hand together and then makes her strum, up and down several times. “Now let go of the string,” he says. He helps her strum a couple of times more, then tells her, “Now press your finger down again.” After a few mistakes, she manages to do what he tells her, and then, as she lifts and lowers the middle finger of her left hand and allows him to strum a complex rhythm with her right hand, he sings a dee-deedly-dee melody that actually makes what she is doing sound like music.
She laughs again and again during all this and leans back into his warmth, becoming ever more alert to the contours of his body and to that manly muskiness she smelled in the kitchen and which is somehow potent enough to be distinct even amid the heady smell of the tobacco. Sally Hemings is just beginning to think that maybe she could dance to the banjar after all when she notices a new hardness behind her. After only a moment, he begins to press that hard part of himself against her, and all the strength goes out of her hands. He stops trying to move them, and he stops singing, too.
He presses himself against the whole length of her body and sways slightly from side to side. “I’m wondering,” he says softly, and has to lick his lips before continuing, “if you thinking the same thing I’m thinking.”
Sally Hemings also has to lick her lips before she can speak. “I don’t know.” Her breath is trembling.
“You want to go find out?”
She doesn’t move and doesn’t speak for a long time. But then she pushes the banjar aside and steps away.
“I can’t,” she says. “I’d like to, but I just can’t.”
The more Sally Hemings reads, the more she becomes aware that the difficulty she has making sense of words is not just a matter of her own ignorance but also of certain weaknesses of the alphabet. She finds it particularly illogical that two letters should combine to make a sound entirely unrelated to the sounds each letter makes on its own, with th being the worst example, but sh being almost as bad. She is also bothered that the letter c can sometimes make the same sound as s and other times as k, and she is of the opinion that c is an entirely superfluous letter that should simply be dropped from the alphabet.
Be that as it may, her skill at decoding letters and the tiny marks in between them has progressed to the point that she has little trouble reading newspapers and has become particularly adept at spotting the name Jefferson. The newspapers keep her up to date about what Thomas Jefferson does while he is away, and they portray him as leading a heroic battle against the Federalists and the Alien and Sedition Acts. While she is never sure that she fully grasps all she reads, she finds it hard to believe that John Adams is truly the villain and fool that the newspapers declare him to be. She very much liked Mr. Adams during the fortnight she lived with him and Mrs. Adams in London. One time he came into the house carrying a tiny white rose that he had just picked in the garden. “For you, my dear Miss Sally-Bump,” he said as he handed her the flower. He always called her “Sally-Bump,” though she never understood why. At the time she thought that he was referring to a pimple on her chin, but now she can’t imagine that could be true.
Despite her progress with the newspapers, Sally Hemings still finds Notes on the State of Virginia almost entirely impenetrable, not so much because it is difficult to read—although she does have trouble with words like “latitude,” “commonwealth,” “suffrage”—as because it seems to consist only of long catalogs of geographical features, plants, animals, products, laws and so on, all of which she finds entirely boring. Nevertheless, she remains determined to finish this book before moving on to others, and so every now and then she will pull it off the shelf over her bed and open it to a random page, in the hope of finding something she might actually want to read.
During one such attempt, she flips the book open to the middle and instantly spots three words that interest her very much indeed: “emancipate all slaves.” She glances over the succeeding pages to see if Thomas Jefferson is, in fact, advocating emancipation and happens upon a passage where he seems to be comparing Negroes and whites, in the midst of which she reads: “in memory they are equal to whites; in reason much inferior.” She snaps the book shut, her head pounding, a nausea whirling in her stomach and radiating up her throat.
Over the next month, she is constantly seeking out and avoiding Moak, flushing with delight in his presence or going cold with anxiety. Finally, one afternoon two days after Thomas Jefferson has gone to Philadelphia, she lets Moak raise her skirt in a locked storage closet and have his way with her. They start out with her back against the wall, but after only a few moments he lifts her into the air without pulling out of her and stretches her atop Polly’s sea chest, where he pounds into her with a speed and a force she finds so thrilling it is all she can do to keep silent.
When he finishes—far sooner than she would have liked—he bends over, wraps his arms around her and—still panting—murmurs into her ear, “I always wondered what white pussy felt like.”
For some reason this statement doesn’t bother her in the least.
“How was it?” she asks.
“Good,” he says. “Deep and tight.”
Deep and tight. She smiles. And she smiles again and again over the next few days, whenever those words come back into her head. She doesn’t know why they please her so. Maybe it’s just the notion that she can satisfy so young and good-looking a man. Maybe it’s because there was something in the way he spoke those words that made her feel like she was his possession, and somehow she welcomes being his possession—a feeling she has never remotely had in connection with Thomas Jefferson.
They meet three more times over the next week—once more in the storage room, once in a woodshed and once in the cloakroom. And every time he uses her with the same delirium-inspiring vigor but then quits just as her own orgasm approaches. On each occasion she is left in such an agony of desire that she can hardly wait to be alone in a privy or her bed, where she might satisfy herself with her fingers. But that never really satisfies her, and she only grows more desperate for the moment when she will have her orgasm with him.
Often, when she is alone in her bed, either after they have made love or late in the night when she needs to relieve herself simply so that she can sleep, she imagines saying to him, “I want you to give me a gift,” and that is the very instant when her orgasm surges from that slippery nub beneath her fingers all the way up into her throat and cheeks and head.
Sally Hemings feels people’s eyes linger on her as she moves about Monticello. But at the same time, she thinks that people are avoiding her—most obvious is Patty, Moak’s wife, whose head jerks around as if she’s been punched whenever she sees Sally Hemings approach. But even people with whom Sally Hemings would normally stop and have a quick chat avoid her gaze or walk past with only a grunted greeting or a somber nod. Ursula tells her straight out, “I’m not talking to you no more!”
She knows why, of course. And she tells herself she doesn’t care. She tells herself she wouldn’t care even if Thomas Jefferson were to find out. Sometimes she worries that he might sell her, but on the whole she thinks that possibility highly improbable. He could banish her from the great house perhaps, but most likely he would act as if she were so far beneath his notice as to be invisible.
She imagines what life would be like if she were Moak’s wife. She’d have to work harder, of course, but she wouldn’t have to feel so out of place all the time. She could just be herself. Patty is a pretty woman. She’d find herself another man. There’d be bad blood between them for a while, but in the end it would all work out.
Sally Hemings is in the storage room again, this time belly down over the sea chest, and Moak is grunting behind her. When he finishes, she grabs his thigh and says, “Don’t stop.”
He pushes her hand aside, pulls out of her and bends to grab his breeches, which are collapsed around his ankles. “Sorry, baby, that’s all I got.”
“Use your fingers, then.”
“What’s the matter?” he says, pulling up his breeches. “My willy ain’t good enough for you?”
“Please.” She turns around and grabs his hand. “I want you to give it to me.” She pulls his hand between her legs, but he yanks free.
“I thought white women was crazy for black willy,” he says.
“Only my skin is white.”
“How come you so stuck up, then?”
Moak is not so much angry as contemptuous. Sally Hemings is so shocked that she cannot speak.
“That’s what everybody say about you.” He gives her a smug, close-lipped smile. “You know that, don’t you? Everybody say you so stuck up ’cause you think you white, when really you just a black nigger, same as the rest of us.”
Sally Hemings’s period is only a couple of days late, but there is an unusual fullness in her breasts and a sensation in her belly that she thinks of as an opening-up, as if her womb were a flower within a bud and on the verge of bursting. She is sure she is pregnant. She knows there is no way she can be certain, but she is certain anyway—and filled with dread.
As soon as Thomas Jefferson has returned from Philadelphia, after being away for three months, she knocks on the door to his chambers and kisses him before he has completely closed the door behind her. She tells him how much she’s missed him. She caresses his cheek and runs her hand across his chest. Clearly he is surprised by her behavior, and equally clearly he is exhausted and is not really in the mood, so she slides her hand down his belly and, in a matter of seconds, knows that she will get what she wants.
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Page 40