—Madison Hemings
“Life Among the Lowly, No. 1”
Pike County (Ohio) Republican
March 13, 1873
It is August 16, 1801. Sally Hemings is twenty-eight, and the air this day is so heavy and hot that the sun seems tarnished and the heaps of cumulus, even at noon, are rust-tinged and indefinite through a haze of steam. It is hard to breathe. Evelina, the servant Thomas Jefferson has provided her, has taken three-and-a-half-year-old Beverly down the hill to spend the afternoon with his grandmother, as he has almost every day for the last year. Holding her three-month-old daughter against her shoulder, Sally Hemings crouches on her front porch and, with one hand, lifts the wooden cover off a bucket of greasy water and drops in the baby’s soiled clout.
A scrape of a shoe over gritty dust.
Then a voice: “At least this time it’s a white one!”
As she reels around, the bucket cover thumps to the porch floor and rolls into the yellow grass. “Jimmy! Oh, my word! Jimmy!”
“Hey there, Cider Jug!”
Jimmy stands in the middle of the road, grinning as if he’s just pulled off a very successful practical joke.
“Oh, my word!” Sally Hemings repeats as he steps up onto the porch. “Oh, Jimmy!” She flings her free arm around him. “Oh, Jimmy! Oh, Jimmy!” She hugs him as hard as she can with her one arm, but he remains inert in her grasp and has the acrid funk of someone who has gone weeks without changing clothes or washing.
She lets him go.
“When did you get here?” she says.
“Just this minute. You’re the first person I’ve seen. Been walking from Charlottesville since before sunrise.”
Despite the heat he is wearing a frock coat and a linen shirt, buttoned to the neck. His shirt is sweat-darkened and his velvet collar marked by multiple lines of salt sediment. He seems to have shrunk since the last time she saw him—coming on two years ago now (just before Thenia was born, she suddenly remembers). He’s gone gaunt, his cheeks look sucked tight against his teeth and there is a deep vertical line on the right side of his mouth. He’s only thirty-six, but he looks fifty, or older.
“Come inside,” she says. “You must want something to eat.”
“No, no, no!” he says. “Nothing for me!”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jimmy! You look like a scarecrow.”
“I’m not hungry. I never eat in the morning.”
“But it’s nearly time for dinner.”
An irritated perplexity comes onto Jimmy’s face, and he is silent a moment before nodding at the infant on Sally Hemings’s shoulder. “At least this one’s white.”
Now it is Sally Hemings whose expression is perplexed and worried. She lowers her daughter and holds her with both hands so that Jimmy can see her. “Here you go, Little Bug,” she says. “Time to meet your Uncle Jimmy!”
The little girl, having been disturbed from sleep, goes red in the face, and grimaces as if she is about to cry. But then, with a gurgly peep, she settles back into slumber.
Sally Hemings laughs happily.
“Beautiful,” says Jimmy, though not with any feeling. “A boy or a girl?”
“A girl. Her name is Harriet.”
“Harriet!” Jimmy’s eyes widen, and the corners of his mouth turn down. “Don’t you think that’s bad luck?”
“No!” Sally Hemings cries. “I love that name. And I like to feel that the spirit of her sister lives on in her. Mr. Jefferson feels the same way.”
Jimmy shrugs. “Well, at least she’s white.”
Sally Hemings pulls the baby back up to her shoulder. “Stop saying that, Jimmy! Why are you saying that?”
“It’s better to be white.” Jimmy shrugs again. “That’s all I’m saying. Better for the baby and better for you. I heard about the other one.” He smiles at his sister as if they are complicit in some evil.
Sally Hemings is so angry her knees are trembling. The other one! He never even saw Thenia. How dare he talk about her that way! He’d promised to write, but he never wrote a single letter—not even to say he was sorry she had lost her baby. All this time she’d been thinking he didn’t know. But he did know—somehow—and he’d never even bothered to write.
“What are you doing here, Jimmy?” she says at last.
“I’m back!” He smiles and holds out both hands, as if he has just materialized before her eyes. “Mr. Jefferson just can’t live without me. He’s been trying to get me to come back ever since I left. But I just kept telling him, ‘No. Too busy!’ I was running my own very successful business venture in Baltimore. A restaurant, à la française. In the very best part of town. All of my customers were white—and rich. And they just loved me, even though I spat in every plate as it went out of my kitchen. I really did that. None of them ever knew, of course. I’d stir it up. I did that just so I could always remember that I was better than the whole bunch of them. I really did. They loved me, and I didn’t give a damn about them. That’s the truth. God’s own truth. But then I started to get sick of the whole thing. Didn’t know why I was doing it. And that’s when Mr. Jefferson got in touch with me again. Wrote me this letter saying, ‘Please come cook for me in Washington. Peter can’t cook worth a damn. Please come cook for me again, and I’ll give you ten dollars a month.’ I said, ‘You give me twenty dollars a month and that’s a deal.’ And he said yes, so here I am!”
Sally Hemings’s anger has turned to something much more like fear. She doesn’t believe a single word Jimmy has said—especially about being rehired. Thomas Jefferson is due back any day now, and then Jimmy’s lie will be exposed and he will be utterly humiliated. And what will that do to him? Is he still drinking so hard? He looks like a man who drinks and does nothing else. But maybe it’s good that he is back with his family. Maybe that’s the real reason he came home.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some food?” she says. “I’ve got some fresh corn bread inside. Or some water? Would you like some water? You must be thirsty.”
“No, no,” he says, holding up both flat palms as if to keep her at bay. “I’m fine. Maybe I’ll have something to eat when I go see Mammy.”
And with that he backs off the porch and sets off down the road, without saying another word.
“I heard that he had lost his job at a restaurant in Philadelphia,” Thomas Jefferson explains. “So I thought—”
“Why was he dismissed?” says Sally Hemings.
“I don’t know.” Thomas Jefferson tilts his head and gives a weary shrug. “But I suppose we can both imagine. . . .”
“Yes.” She looks down into her glass.
He puts his hand on her shoulder and gives her a reassuring stroke, then pats her lightly twice and pulls his hand away. They are sitting on the porch just outside his chambers, drinking cold cider. The sun set on the far side of the house a few minutes ago, but there are small, rose-colored clouds straight overhead in an indigo sky and faint smears of green along the southern horizon.
“In any event, since I will only be making short visits home as long as I am in Washington and since Peter sometimes has to begin preparing for larger gatherings weeks in advance, it made little sense for him to come with me, so I thought that if Jimmy needed the work, it would be good to enjoy his cooking when I am home. I wrote to him a couple of times and got no response, so I decided he wasn’t interested. But then six months went by and he finally wrote to me.”
“Six months?” says Sally Hemings. “What was he doing in all that time?”
“He didn’t say.”
She sighs heavily. Thomas Jefferson holds out his hand in the accumulating dimness, and when she puts her hand in his, he gives her a squeeze and doesn’t let go.
“How does he seem?” says Thomas Jefferson.
“I don’t know.” She heaves another deep sigh. “He seems . . . I don’t know how he seem
s.”
He gives her hand another squeeze. “I think it is good that he is home.”
“I hope so.”
For the first few days, Jimmy manages so well in the kitchen that Thomas Jefferson declares he doesn’t know how he survived two years without Jimmy’s cooking. But then one night he helps himself so liberally from the wine cellar that he forgets to take a pot of succotash off the fire and burns it to the point that it can only be used for pig feed. The next day he will not leave his pallet in John Hemings’s cabin, claiming that he is beset with the same “ailment of the head” as Thomas Jefferson. But Pricilla, John’s wife, says that it is only corn liquor that keeps Jimmy in bed, half the time unconscious, the other half drinking. The next day he manages to produce a passable pork dinner, but the following day he burns the trout so badly that its skin is ash and its flesh like wood splinters. The day after that, his “sauce” for the peas is only melted lard—the smell alone so sickening that Maria, who is only weeks from giving birth to her first child, must rush from the table, out into the open air, to keep from vomiting.
The next day Jimmy is once again afflicted by an “ailment of the head,” but Thomas Jefferson sends Sally Hemings for him. When brother and sister arrive in his office, Thomas Jefferson folds his hands at the center of his desk and tells Jimmy, in a voice so soft it is hard to hear, “While I had very much been looking forward to both your cuisine and your company, Jimmy, I am afraid that your susceptibility to spirits is making it impossible for you to do your job.”
Jimmy’s face is slick with sweat, his eyes are red and he is visibly unsteady on his feet. “I’m fine,” he says.
Thomas Jefferson continues to speak quietly. “I am only thinking of your own good. And for that reason, I think it best that until you have regained your self-control, Edy Fossett will be the mistress of the kitchen, and you will be her sous-chef.”
“Edy!” Jimmy practically spits the name. “That ignorant bitch!”
“Jimmy!” says Sally Hemings.
“I’m just speaking the truth,” he says, his voice loud and flat. “She doesn’t know anything about cooking! She’s never even heard of vichyssoise! She couldn’t make a wine sauce if she practiced for a month!”
“Jimmy, please!” Sally Hemings tries to calm her brother by putting both hands on the shoulder nearest her, but he only shrugs her off.
“I think you should taste one of her meals before you insult her like that,” says Thomas Jefferson.
Now Jimmy is shouting. “How dare you insult me like that! I am a master chef! I’ve cooked for royalty! How dare you tell me that I should be the sous-chef to that ignorant black bitch!”
“Jimmy, please.” Thomas Jefferson’s hands, no longer folded, grip the front edge of his desk as if he is about to stand. “I am only trying to find a way that you can continue to receive your salary while you—”
“I don’t want your money!” Jimmy puts both fists on Thomas Jefferson’s desk, leans forward and shouts. “Do you think I have no dignity! Do you think I was only put on this earth to serve your pleasure! I am a free man, Mr. Jefferson. I worked hard for my freedom, and no one is going to tell me what to do.”
“Jimmy—” Thomas Jefferson’s voice is trembling with anger.
“I don’t want to talk to you!”
Jimmy turns toward the door. Sally Hemings grabs the lapel of his coat, but he shoves her aside and strides out of the room.
“Jimmy!” she calls after him, her half-closed hands hanging in the air in front of her, as if she were still clinging to his lapel. She turns to Thomas Jefferson, her gaze distraught and afraid.
“Let him go,” says Thomas Jefferson.
“I have to talk to him!” She is out the door in two steps. Her running feet resound down the corridor and across the great hall.
Jimmy is gone for two days after fleeing Thomas Jefferson’s study. When he returns to Monticello, he serves as Edy Fossett’s sous-chef for much of a week, but always sullenly and with the slurred speech and slow-motion lunging of a drunk. One night he cuts his finger so badly that he bleeds all over a bowl of onions, and Edy tells him to leave her kitchen and not come back until he is sober. As Sally Hemings is getting into bed that night, she hears his voice drifting up the hill from where the field laborers live. First he is singing, and then he is shouting in anger.
Sometime during that very silent and black hour that just precedes the first light of dawn, she awakes with a start and realizes that someone has touched her shoulder. She hears panting in the darkness, right beside her bed, and smells the sweet rankness of corn liquor.
Jimmy is speaking, much too loud for so silent and lonely an hour. “You are loved, Sally. I just want you to know that.”
“Jimmy, quiet!” she whispers. “The children.”
“You are loved,” he says as loudly as before. “People love you. That is very important.”
“Jimmy, please.” She hears Beverly stirring in his bed across the room. Evelina cries out in her sleep, “No!”
“It’s because you are good,” says Jimmy.
She hears shoe scrapes, thumps and the stretching of cloth. Jimmy is sitting on the floor and resting his hand on her belly. She can’t see him at all.
“People despise me,” he says. “I can’t be good in this world. Because I can’t be myself.”
“What are you talking about?” Sally Hemings wants to sit up, but she is still too sleepy. She rolls onto her side, and Jimmy’s hand slides from her belly to her hip. He squeezes her there as he speaks.
“I can be a black nigger. I can be an African god. I can be a slave. But I can’t be loved for who I am. Do you know what I’m saying? Do you understand?”
She feels the weight of his head against her belly and his hand across her buttocks pulling her close. His voice is thick now. He is crying.
“But I can’t be myself,” he says. “So nobody loves me. I can’t be myself in this world.”
She reaches behind her back, takes his pressing hand in her own and brings it forward, clutching it against her ribs. “I love you, Jimmy.”
He lifts his head away from her belly. He pulls his hand out of hers. “I know you do, but it’s not enough.”
She can tell from the thumps of his shoes and knees that he has shifted to a crouch.
“I have to go,” he says.
Beverly whimpers, then cries out, “Mammy!”
Jimmy is standing. Sally Hemings sits up in bed. “No,” she says. “Wait.”
“I have to go.”
By the time Sally Hemings puts both feet on the floor, Jimmy is gone.
Sally Hemings is sitting on her porch, stitching a bonnet for baby Harriet. She hears a heavy sigh and looks up to see Goliah, the gardener, standing just before the porch step and holding his hat in his hands. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Miz Sally.” He shifts from one foot to the other and licks his lips. “But my cousin, Henry, who works over to Grand Pointe, he told me to tell you that he heard word from Baltimore about Jimmy.”
Sally Hemings drops the bonnet onto her knees but cannot bring herself to speak. It has been a month since Jimmy came to her cabin in the night and she hasn’t seen or heard from him since.
Goliah looks down at the ground. “I hate to . . . Well, I’m really sorry, but Henry said . . . that Jimmy is dead.”
The bonnet slips from her lap to the porch floor. “How?” she says.
“I don’t know. That’s all Henry told me. Jimmy’s dead. That’s all he said.”
When Goliah is gone, Sally Hemings sits for a long time thinking. Thomas Jefferson has told her never to write him a letter when he is in Washington City. His enemies are always stealing his mail in the hope of finding something they can use against him. And for that reason he writes his most important letters—chiefly those to Mr. Madison—in a code generated by a device of his own invention.
But Sally Hemings can’t think of anyone who might be better able to get the whole story of what happened to Jimmy than Thomas Jefferson. So she leaves her sewing on her porch rocker and walks across the lawn to the great house, where she sits at Thomas Jefferson’s own desk and writes, “Sir, Forgive me for writing. I have just heard that my brother J has died in Baltamor. Do you know if this is true? and if it is do you know how he came to take such a despret action? Respecfully yours, S.”
She gives the letter to Remus and asks him to go straight to Washington City and give the letter directly to Thomas Jefferson and to no one else. “Put it right into his own hand.”
Ten days later Remus returns with Thomas Jefferson’s reply: “Madam, I was deeply saddened to learn the tragical news you have had of your poor brother. I have made an inquiry of Mr. E., who lives in Baltimore and was well acquainted with your brother. I regret to inform you that the news you heard was correct. J. took his own life on the 28th of October. It seems that he had been drinking excessively for at least a week, and I am sure he had little comprehension of what he was doing. This is a very, very sad story, and I am, myself, feeling quite bereft, although I think everyone who knew J. understood that something like this might happen. I send my most sincere condolences to you, your mother and to your whole family. I am much occupied by my duties at the present, but will convey more news at my earliest convenience. My thoughts are with you.” The letter is unsigned.
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Page 44