Sally Hemings

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1790

  MR. FRANCIS C. GRAY

  March 4,1815 Monticello

  Sir,

  You asked me in conversation, what constituted a mulatto by our law. And I believe I told you four crossings with the whites. I looked afterwards into our law, and found it to be in these words: “Every person, other than a Negro of whose grandfathers or grandmothers anyone shall have been a Negro, shall be deemed a mulatto, and so every such person who shall have one-fourth part or more of Negro blood, shall like manner be deemed a mulatto”; L. Virga 1792, December 17: the case put in the first member of this paragraph of the law is exempli gratia. The latter contains the true canon, which is that one-fourth of Negro blood, mixed with any portion of white, constitutes the mulatto. As the issue has one-half of the blood of each parent, and the blood of each of these may be made up of a variety of fractional mixtures, the estimate of their compound in some cases may be intricate, it becomes a mathematical problem of the same class with those of the mixtures of different liquors or different metals; as in these, therefore, the algebraical notation is the most convenient and intelligible. Let us express the pure blood of the white in capital letters of the printed alphabet, the pure blood of the negro in the small letters of the printed alphabet, and any given mixture of either, by way of abridgment in MS. letters.

  Let the first crossing be of a, pure negro, with A, pure white. The unit of blood of the issue being composed of the half of that of each parent, will be . Call it, for abbreviation, h (half blood).

  Let the second crossing be of h and B, the blood of the issue will be , or substituting for its equivalent, it will be , call it q (quarteroon) being negro blood.

  Let the third crossing be of q and C, their offspring will be , call this e (eighth), who having less than of a, or of pure negro blood, to wit only, is no longer a mulatto, so that a third cross clears the blood.

  From these elements let us examine their compounds. For example, let h and q cohabit, their issue will be , wherein we find of a, or negro blood.

  Let h and e cohabit, their issue will be , wherein a, makes still a mulatto.

  Let q and e cohabit, the half of the blood of each will be wherein , of a is no longer a mulatto, and thus may every compound be noted and summed, the sum of the fractions composing the blood of the issue being always equal to unit. It is understood in natural history that a fourth cross of one race of animals with another gives an issue equivalent for all sensible purposes to the original blood. Thus a Merino ram being crossed, first with a country ewe, second with his daughter, third with his granddaughter, and fourth with the great-granddaughter, the last issue is deemed pure Merino, having in fact but of the country blood. Our canon considers two crosses with the pure white and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of the negro blood. But observe, that this does not re-establish freedom, which depends on the condition of the mother, the principle of the civil law, partus sequitur ventrem, being adopted here.

  But if e emancipated, he becomes a free white man, and a citizen of the United States to all intents and purposes. So much for this trifle by way of correction.

  His long legs under the full-length gray frockcoat shifted position, itching for the feel of his horse Eagle between them. He was seventy-two years old. His presidency was six years behind him and those six years had been spent here at home, in retirement, surrounded by those he loved most in the world: his women, his children, his grandchildren, his slaves, his neighbors, his kin. Restless, he rose from his writing table to his full height, the face ascetic and serene in the bright light. He sat down again, and his left hand took up his pen, and as it did, the copying machine he had invented by which a letter written manually with one pen was simultaneously traced with another by a series of connected levers, called a polygraph, followed the movements of his hand. This would be the last letter of the morning.

  He looked out of his study windows: it was a view in which nothing mean or small could exist, he thought. That was why he had chosen the site, which commanded the Blue Ridge Mountains: it was one of the boldest and most beautiful horizons in the world. His house, which he called Monticello, giving it the soft Italian pronunciation, stood upon a plain formed by cutting off the top of the mountain.

  The light this morning is so pure and delineating, he thought, touched with the soft promise of spring that turns the mountains their deepest blue.

  He stared for a moment more at the west lawn, noting several figures gamboling on it—children, he supposed. He smiled. Whoever they were, black or white, they belonged to Monticello. And to him.

  He turned his eyes away and picked up his pen. Absently, he massaged his wrist before signing: Thomas Jefferson.

  CHAPTER 3

  ALBEMARLE COUNTY, 1830

  But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

  THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1790

  “MAMA, what did you talk about all that time?”

  “I don’t know, Eston, different things, gossip mostly.”

  “You mean a white gentleman traveled all the way from Charlottesville to come up here and gossip with you? What did he want? What kind of information? And how do you know he weren’t one of those journalists?”

  This was Madison Hemings speaking. His voice had a perpetual edge of violence and irritation.

  The question sent a flush of surprise up the back of Sally Hemings’ neck. As a matter of fact, she had no idea at all if he was a journalist or not. He didn’t seem or speak like one, or at least her idea of one, since she had never met a journalist in her entire life. Therefore, she wasn’t sure. Besides it was evident from his knowledge of local families and his accent that he was from these parts.

  “I told you, Madison, I was afraid it might have been the sheriff and when I saw that it wasn’t, well, I was just so relieved I guess I just believed anything. He had to be one or the other, and if he was white and wasn’t the sheriff, then he had to be the census taker. He said he was the census taker, and didn’t you tell me the census man would be coming round these days? I just assumed he was telling the truth.”

  “Mama, you believe everything a nice white gentleman tells you! You had no business letting a strange man, white or black, into my house!”

  “Our house, Madison,” Eston said. “And leave Mama alone. You just scared it might have been the sheriff. I told you Martha Jefferson Randolph is not to be trusted. She hates all of us, and always has.”

  “Leave Martha out of it, Eston,” Madison said. “She had her reasons for helping us—if you can call this run-down, no-dirt farm ‘help.’ She’s no better off herself, living down there in Pottsville, in that dinky house with all her children, and Thomas Mann Randolph, dead as crazy and drunk as a loon. I’m not shedding any tears for Martha Randolph! She didn’t have to marry that bastard!”

  Of all her children, she thought, Madison was the most difficult, and because he was the one who reminded her of her brother James, she favored him in a way. He, of all her children, was in the most danger. Eston, with his placid nature and good looks, would always get by as a black man or as a white one.

  “Mama, admit you were wrong to let him in! He could be a journalist pretending to be the census taker just nosing around for dirt to print,” Madison went on.

  “You can surely find out if he is the real census taker,” his mother answered. “Just ask in town. He said his name was Nathan Langdon and he was born at Broadhurst. He has six brothers and sisters, and his father is old Samuel Langdon and his Uncle John was a friend of Thomas Jefferson. He is fair with a dark beard and about six f
eet tall, light for a young man, about twenty-seven or eight. He is going to marry a Wilks girl from Norfolk by the name of Esmeralda, and he just came back from Boston and Harvard, cause his pa is sick and his fiancee upset about his taking so long to come back. Then too, his brother … killed in a duel …”

  “Mama, you found all that out!”

  “I was the last count to be made for the day and he was hot and tired. I guess he just stayed on longer than he intended.”

  “Was he waiting for us to come home?”

  “Not really. He asked about you both; and wanted to know how he could reach you for some work his father needs done at the plantation. I told him he could find you after curfew if he needed to.”

  “You mean you invited him back?”

  “Well, that was the least I could do, he’s—”

  “White, Mama! I don’t want him in the house. Any business he has with me, he can find me at the university. Any business with anybody can be conducted at the front door. And you were alone. . . . What if—”

  “Madison, for heaven sakes. Not all white men are rapists!”

  “No? Just remember Stokes’s wife, stuck out there past the Channing place. . . . Didn’t happen less than two months ago. A free colored man’s wife, free colored man’s property doesn’t mean anything in this county. They don’t want free coloreds in Virginia. They’ve made that pretty clear. One false step—even one—and you are in a chain gang heading for Georgia or South Carolina, papers or no papers. Just sudden like that. Nobody ever found out what happened to Willy Dubois. Where’d he go? In the dead of night? After curfew. Just disappeared, leaving hearth and home, wife, mother, and five children. Now just where did he go? I don’t want any strange men in this house, Mama, black or white. You hear me, Eston?”

  “I hear you,” Eston said, moving over protectively to his mother.

  Eston Hemings was a beautiful man. He was huge, over six feet four, with bright red hair and a continent of pale freckles on a clear milky skin that showed no trace of a beard. He had enormous hands that could carve the most delicate designs—flowers, scrolls, fruit—in any wood that grew, and could wrench the most beautiful notes out of his instruments—the pianoforte and the Italian violin. His features were regular and delicate, like his mother’s, with a high wide rather long nose and a generous sensual mouth. Already there were laugh marks around his pale-blue eyes. He was broad of shoulder with a surprisingly long and girl-like neck.

  Eston knew that when Madison was like this, something bad had happened to him in town. Maybe he would tell them, and maybe he wouldn’t. Madison had a damned irritating way of doing everything. He was the darkest in the family, and his cool slender grace, his animal vitality and cockiness, seemed an affront to both races. He was always getting into trouble: rows with shopkeepers over bills, with foremen over plans, with masons over blueprints, with other carpenters over techniques, with the landlord, with the bank, with the tax collector. With everybody, nigh on. Madison should leave for the Territories, thought Eston. Now. Before he really got into some scrape he wouldn’t be able to get out of. Eston knew why Mama would never leave here. He could take care of Mama alone. He wasn’t in love. He wasn’t trying to prove to some freeborn girl how great a man he was.

  Madison Hemings felt the gentle but firm pressure of his brother’s rough hand steering him toward the back door of the cabin and the cool fragrant night air. The gentle, insistent pressure calmed and soothed him. He clamped shut his jaw in an effort to stop tears of rage.

  Why was he so upset? Why had he yelled at his mother? The real reason, he knew, was fear. . . . He was scared to death that something was going to happen to ruin their fragile existence, before they even got a chance to live it. He didn’t want to tell anyone about what had happened to him today in town. Not even Eston. Eston could feel his brother’s neck muscles tense, but he said nothing.

  Outside, they faced the dying red sun sinking below the delicate line of the peach trees they had planted more than a year ago. Beyond that lay the boundaries of Monticello. Normally a thick whitewashed birch fence cut across the dark green of the pine woods, marking the end of the plantation on the southwest side. But the fences were now mostly down, and those standing were a dirty disinherited gray. The crossbeams lay on the nettle-packed ground where they had fallen.

  Madison stared at this unkempt frontier. It seemed to be the line between his former life and this one. He would never understand why his mother refused to leave this place; why she deliberately chose a rented house so close to Monticello. Was it that she wanted to be reminded, every minute of every day, of her former servitude, of her concubinage?

  His mother had never told him anything of his origins. He knew that slave women never told their offspring anything. So slave children learned what they could when they could, in bits and pieces from older slaves, mammies, white people’s conversations, and the bitterness of what they learned was all the more wounding. It intensified the shame without alleviating the burden. He remembered the shock of learning from some old crone that he was the son of the master. Even his grandmother hadn’t told him! He was their son; yet neither father nor mother seemed to love him for it! He had tried to understand. He had stood for hours looking at his pale-yellow face in the polished silver mirrors of the Big House. He would run down to this very frontier, far from the Big House, and butt his head against the white-birch fencing until the blood came, because he couldn’t understand why his father didn’t love him. Madison stared at the fence posts now, as if he expected to see the stains of his childish blood still on them.

  Madison looked up. He and Eston watched their mother slip under the high gray railings of the frontier of Monticello. Gathering her skirts as she went, she was walking up the mountains toward the cemeteries.

  When she was upset or angry she could usually be found either by the grave of Thomas Jefferson or that of her mother, Elizabeth Hemings. They divided her loyalties in death as they had in life. When her sons saw her turn eastward, they knew she was heading toward the slave cemetery and their grandmother.

  CHAPTER 4

  ALBEMARLE COUNTY, 1830

  And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavours to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him.

  THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1790

  SALLY HEMINGS closed her eyes and sank down at the foot of the neat rectangle marked off by smooth stones and planted with primroses. Fresh grass was growing within its boundaries. A wooden cross that had been lovingly carved by Eston Hemings had replaced the original tombstone. It didn’t seem possible that twenty-three years had passed since one of the two pillars of her life had crumbled. Elizabeth Hemings had died on August 22, 1807, at the age of seventy-two. She had outlived her daughter’s father, John Wayles, by over fifty years. It had not been an easy death. It had taken the whole, humid fever-infested month of August to kill her. Two months before she had died, she had stopped eating and had taken to her bed. But even starvation had been slow to weaken the fabulous constitution that had survived almost three-quarters of a century of slavery and the birth of fourteen children. Resistant to all the infections that killed childbearing women in their forties; immune to all the malarial fevers, the typhoid and yellow fevers that struck eighteenth-century Virginians in their swampy, unhealthy climate; untouched by the periodic outbreaks of cholera; without physical blemish or congenital weakness, she had survived everything, including her own biography.

  Against her closed eyelids Sally H
emings could still see the oppressive, insect-filled interior of that slave cabin where she and Martha Randolph had watched her mother strain toward death with the same prodigious will that had sustained her in life. In the sweltering heat of that room she and Martha had sat in a strange and southern circle of complicity: the concubine, daughter, the mistress and the slave; the aunt and the niece. All three women were reflecting, each in her separate way, on the intricacies of their blood ties and relationships. There had been love, servitude, hate, womanhood. It was all flowing together that day when Elizabeth Hemings, struggling, frantically seeking an exit from the life she had endured, had whispered, “Put your hand on my chest and push down; my heart won’t stop beating.”

  Monticello, August 22, 1807

  “I never knew of but one white man who bore the name of Hemings. He was an Englishman and my father. My mother was a full-blooded African and a native of that country. My father was a Captain of an English sailing vessel. Captain Hemings, my mama told me, was a hunter of beasts like her father, except that he hunted in the sea and his prey was the whale.

  “He sailed between England and Williamsburg, then a great port. When the Captain heard of my birth, he determined to buy me and my mother, who belonged to John Wayles. He approached Master Wayles with an extraordinary high offer for us, but amalgamation was just beginning and Master Wayles wanted to see how I would turn out. He refused my father’s offer. Captain Hemings begged, pleaded, threatened, and finally they had words. All to no avail; my master refused to sell. My father, thwarted in the purchase but determined to own his own flesh and blood, then resolved to take us by stealth. His ship was sailing; everything was in readiness. But we were betrayed by fellow slaves, and John Wayles took us up to the Big House and locked us in. Captain Hemings’ ship sailed without us.