Sally Hemings

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  James led his stunned sister through the elegant, beautiful rooms. On the second floor were the master apartments, with their spacious sunfilled bedrooms, each the size of the drawing room at Monticello, and each with its dressing room and bathroom attached with a hammered-copper and porcelain bathing tub. Then, with great excitement, James showed his sister the “lieux anglais,” or water closets, the latest invention and most modern installation imaginable. The young girl marveled at the painted ceilings and walls covered with silk. She looked out of the tall rectangular windows. And to think Virginians had the nerve to call what they lived in “mansions”! Monticello. She burst into laughter at what she had until now called with awe the “Big House.”

  CHAPTER 12

  PARIS, DECEMBER 1787

  “SLAVERY is outlawed in France. We are on French soil. That means we are emancipated. Free.”

  “I don’t believe you,” whispered Sally Hemings, as if they were being overheard in the empty pantry under the kitchens.

  “It is true!”

  “You make so many jokes, James, tell so many far-fetched stories. . . .”

  “Why don’t you ask your master, if you won’t take your brother’s word? Ask a white man.”

  “Have you ever asked him?”

  “I don’t have to ask what I know to be true. There are white men in Paris and London and Boston who are working for the freedom of Negro slaves everywhere, but Thomas Jefferson isn’t one of them.”

  “It seems so unbelievable.”

  “It’s not, not if you have the courage to claim what is yours by right.”

  “It would hurt him to know we were talking like this. He is all we have.”

  “All we have!” James Hemings slapped his sister’s face. It was an instinctive gesture, directed more against his own rage than at her disbelief. The effect on her was immediate. Her eyes welled tears and she stopped listening. The enormity of what her brother had said struck her with the same force as had his hand. She had never contemplated freedom. Freedom, to Sally Hemings, was a vague, glimmering place no one ever returned from to prove it really existed. Before she realized it, she spoke her thought aloud. “What do ‘free’ people do?”

  “They work for themselves and their families,” James answered. “They get paid for their labor. They go where they want and do what they want according to the nature and demand of their trade. They vote. They hold property. No one can imprison them, brand them, beat them, kill them with impunity, and no one can sell them.” James Hemings tried to control his anger and tried to explain as he would to a child, for he remembered that his sister was still a child.

  “Free people marry and have children, who belong to them and for whom they are responsible and who in turn take care of them in old age. Free people do what they want without asking permission of any man. Many are like us, mulatto, métis, or quadroon, but there are black freedmen as well. In the French Indies, one can buy one’s freedom by accumulating enough money to buy oneself back. A few slaves have even done it in America.” James took a deep breath and continued. “Freedmen protect their home and hearth and children and wife. They congregate with their friends when and where they wish. They choose their holidays and travel without permission from anyone. They have rights and are protected before the law. Free people have family names that they pass from father to son. They have property, and they can learn to read and write.”

  “But we already know how to read and write, and we have a family name!” said Sally Hemings. She clung to the one thing she understood.

  “Not our family name—a white man’s family name, and what good does it do us to read and write? To read and write is to be able to rise in the world, not to amuse one’s master or mistress by reciting like a trained monkey, or reading to them when they are too lazy to do it for themselves. We must refuse to go back to Virginia and prepare ourselves for the day we are commanded to do so.”

  “Stay in France?”

  “Or Europe. There are other countries besides France.”

  “What would I do?”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  “They have children that really belong to them? They cannot be sold? Explain it to me again. From the beginning.”

  “In the beginning …”James smiled. He smiled and lifted her up in his arms. “Little sister, you are going to learn; learn to walk, then learn to run! Then you will learn some other things as well. Your French is not bad. . . . And that voice!”

  Sally Hemings smiled uncertainly. She found it difficult to follow James’s changes in mood. His ideas, which would spill out of him in a torrent of words, admonishments, curses, lessons, and silences, always frightened her. The catlike eyes would gleam with malice one minute and brim with adoration the next. Sometimes he would let loose such a cyclone of abuse that the air itself seemed to shrivel. He had done this at home as well, provoking gales of laughter from the gathered entourage. Her mother had been glad to see him leave with Master Jefferson; at least it was less likely he would end up swinging on the end of a rope in Paris than in Albemarle County. Her half brother Robert called James’s swearing raunchy, pole-cat, ornery, low-life, filthy swearing, and the whole family would burst out laughing, since Robert would find himself swearing at swearing. Then someone would break down and plead for one of his imitations, for no one at Monticello possessed the art of mimicry better than James. He had the ability to make people laugh and make their blood run cold at the same time. He would choose his words carefully and would work himself up into a malicious frenzy. This was what he was doing now. He was taking her carefully through an insurrectionist garden, having her smell first this flower, then another, leading her gently toward the strong scents, the bolder colors, the mandrake, and the poison. Little by little, he led her where he wanted her to go, stopping to explain an idea. All these ideas were new to her, and James had to explain them to her over and over.

  He made her study seriously, she read anything she could get hold of. They were already planning what to tell their master when the time came.

  Sally Hemings acquiesced to everything. She was borne along on the tide of her brother’s vision and excitement. After a long lesson, she would make her way to her room, lie on her narrow bed, and stare at the ceiling.

  James Hemings knew that it was lonely for his sister in the ministry. There was no one her age, and she had no official duties besides that of bathing her master’s injured wrist. Except for an occasional errand, or a visit to the convent, she spent most of her time strolling in the gardens, or reading.

  She applied herself to learning everything she could, the rudiments of dressmaking, hairdressing, and clothes-cleaning. In a few months the backwater-country slave had learned to speak the language well. Brother and sister were now speaking French together. They would also at times combine their Virginia-slave English with French, inventing ther own secret language. But with Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings spoke only her soft Virginia-accented English. Thomas Jefferson sought his slave’s company more and more. They seemed drawn to each other, master and slave, by mysterious threads that Sally Hemings did not completely understand. Thomas Jefferson indulged her as a child rather than as a servant, laughing when Petit remarked that it didn’t matter if she was useless around the ministry; she was such a joy to be with and to look at. And often he would gaze at her, staring without realizing it, or without realizing that he was being watched.

  Both James Hemings and Adrien Petit saw this affection develop. Petit, observing with the cynicism of his race and his caste, and James like a blind man; he had been away from Virginia and slavery too long.

  “James?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you remember our father at all?”

  “Master Wayles? Sure I remember him, I was nearly ten when he died.”

  “What was he like? Was he kind to Mama?”

  “I suppose you could call him kind. He never mistreated her and she had the run of the house, nay, the whole plantation. He was
never there.”

  “What happened to her husband?”

  “He died. At least I think he died. I never knew Mama to say anything about him.”

  “And her other children—those who didn’t come with us to Monticello?”

  “There were two who became the property of our half sister Tibby Wayles.”

  “And Mama’s mother, our grandmother?”

  “Knew her too at Bermuda Hundred. An Afric she was. The most beautiful woman on the plantation, and she was old when I saw her. She had run away many times. She had an ‘R’ for runaway branded on her chest—it should have marked her cheek, but at the last moment our father didn’t have the heart to do it.”

  “Mama never speaks of her.”

  “I know.”

  “And on the other side, our father’s mother?”

  “He was an old man, our father. He died a few months after you were born. I never saw anybody who looked like his mother.”

  “So strange to have blood in your veins and not know where it comes from.”

  “Yes. Not like the Bible, where you can say he was the son of … who was the son of … who was the son of … That’s what you mean?”

  “Yes,” she said, “yes, that’s what I mean. If I could know that the son of the son of my son would have some knowledge of me, would have something … a portrait of me or a mother or grandmother who remembered me … if something of mine, some object or some memory could touch him years and years and years from now … That he would know who I am. Who I was. That it wouldn’t all be silence.”

  There was so much fervor in Sally Hemings’ voice that it stopped James from making a derogatory remark about ancestors. She was right in a way. Blood was magic. To be able to trace it back was the most precious thing they had lost. He thought about the plantation and the old people with their fetishes. They knew blood was magic, a link to the past, a curse or a blessing on its inheritors, a fearful potent magic. Even their mother, Elizabeth Hemings, was not completely free of ancestor worship. She knew a few spells herself. He smiled bitterly. If only she had used them at the right moment.

  It was enough for white people to know that they were “sons of God” straight down from heaven. No intervening generations to cloud their divinity; their blood was “pure,” yet they deigned to mix it with the blood of Africa, a blood laden with the responsibility of a million years.

  The two young people looked at each other, their eyes meeting in frail comprehension.

  “Yes,” James said, “it is as if part of you is recovered if you claim ancestors and expect descendants.”

  “But if we don’t know them—can’t find them or their graves or anything?”

  “Then it is very bad voodoo. Very bad spirits. The gods are angry and turn away from us.”

  “And if our gods are angry, can we go to their God?”

  “It seems we started off wrong ‘cause of somebody called Ham. And so we are damned to be waterbearers and woodchoppers and servants because, all of a sudden, we are back with blood curses. We arrive here in trouble. Everybody else starts out with a new soul, only we come here with the curse of Ham around our necks. No purity for us. Christ didn’t get around to it.”

  “And the Afric gods say this, too?”

  “Of course not. They haven’t even heard of Jesus. He hasn’t been around long enough to even make the acquaintance of those gods. Frankly, if people get the gods they deserve, then white people sure got theirs because He’s the meanest God I ever heard of. And the more He loves you, the harder it’s on you. So He must really love us!”

  James threw back his head and let out a roar of laughter.

  James Hemings had the narcissistic energy of a forest animal. Almost as tall as his master, he was lean and muscled. His body gave him a European rather than an American look: the coal-black wavy hair, the thin flared nose, even the dark-ivory color seemed less exotic here against the rich brocades and silks of French interiors than in the simpler trappings of Monticello. His face was a harder replica of his sister’s. The shadow of his heavy beard and eyebrows shaded his face with a kind of violence entirely absent from hers. The generous mouth was almost always engaged in complaining and turned down in perpetual discontent. Yet, instead of giving his face a somber, even disagreeable aspect, his bad nature took on a melancholy and romantic tinge. Both black and white had always indulged him in this, and everyone said that he had a handsome, even noble face, despite its latent anger, which could be dispersed with one delicious smile. This had saved him from many a reprimand and several beatings.

  His arrogance and adventurous nature stood him in good stead as a cook, and his long, beautiful hands had begun to shape masterly cakes and pastries. He was now in the midst of his third apprenticeship. The first had been with a traiteur named Combeaux. He was calm and patient in the kitchen. Meticulous and infinitely careful. Never did he lose his temper while cooking—the mark of a true chef. Adrien Petit recognized this, and although he was hazy on the dictates and protocol of American slavery, he had already indicated to “Jim-mi” that he would be welcomed in several French households when, as James put it, “the time came.”

  One day, six months after her arrival in Paris, Sally Hemings passed the gilded mirror in the entrance of the Hôtel de Langeac and caught a glimpse of herself. She was pleased with what she saw. She had completely recovered from her mild case of smallpox, an experience that had terrified her and through which James and Petit and Master Jefferson had nursed and indulged her. She had had only a few eruptions on her face, but those had caused her untold misery. The doctor had been kind, and her ordeal had left her without a mark on face or body.

  Her provincial air and homemade country clothes had disappeared with the fever and her new skills in dressmaking. The clear liquid gold of her eyes gazed serenely at her image in the polished silver. She was satisfied.

  Her lips turned up in a smile and two dimples flashed for an instant on either side of her mouth. Abigail Adams had been right. It was more criminal to be out of fashion in Paris than to be seen naked. To which the Parisians were not averse, as Mistress Adams had noted …

  The French ladies, she thought, as she looked at herself in the mirror, displayed such an art with powder, rouge, wigs, perfumes, and elaborate clothes that you couldn’t be sure they weren’t the famous dolls of Mademoiselle Bertin, dressmaker to the queen, that traveled from court to court all over Europe, dressed in the latest fashion.

  The French ladies spent a great deal of time making themselves beautiful, she mused. The French ladies also possessed a most voluptuous room installed only for bathing, called a salle de bain. She repeated the expression out loud. The French ladies would even sometimes receive visitors there! They would empty a pint of milk into the water to cloud it, and called it a bain de lait. The French ladies...

  The young girl repeated the new French expressions she was learning, savoring them each time anew. She laughed outright. She was happier than she had ever been in her life.

  She was learning new and independent ways of thinking and behaving. Her eyes no longer slid off the glances of whites. She was able to look white people in the eye, even to address them in French or English without hesitation.

  Humming to herself, she smoothed the folds of her new dress, pulled the hood of the soft woolen cloak she wore over her head, and stepped out into the crisp December air.

  In December a young painter from Massachusetts named John Trumbull arrived at the mansion. I liked him from the beginning. He was to spend some time with us, sketching the French officers who had fought in our Revolution and doing a portrait of my master for the painting commemorating the Declaration of Independence. He was tall and thin, with dark round eyes that seemed to see everything and consume what they saw. Things, he told me, were lines and planes to him, light and shadow. I asked him if he saw me this way and he replied by making several sketches. He showed them to me.

  “This cannot be me,” I said to him.

  “B
ut it is. You have only to look in the mirror.”

  I tried to please everybody: my master, my brother, and the girls; but it was not always easy. James had always been demanding and quick of temper, and now he had taken on all the airs of the French servants. He took me in charge and rationed my contacts with the other servants. Polly had wanted me to accompany her to the convent, where the young ladies were allowed to keep their maids, but Master Jefferson was against it. He, too, was making more and more demands on my time and guarded me jealously from the outside world.

  As consolation for my disappointment at not being allowed to stay at the convent—it was a calm, beautiful place, which I had liked at first sight—he had allowed me to study with Monsieur Perrault, James’s tutor in French.

  “You have a lovely voice, Sally. Married to the French language properly spoken, it will be extraordinary. Extraordinary.” It was the first compliment I had ever received outside of my slave family and I had blushed. But Monsieur Perrault went on, without apparently noticing.

  “It is not so much in the tone as in the timbre. Like a musical instrument. A pity you have had no musical training. I am sure you should sing. And you, ‘Jim-mi,’ at least you’ve learned how to swear in French to perfection. A notable necessity for a chef.”

  Monsieur Perrault had looked from me to James. I knew he was really very fond of “Jim-mi” despite his “sottises” and “mauvais traitements.” James was horrible to his tutor, but diligent in his studies, preparing himself for his “future.” He never said exactly what this future consisted of. It was a “secret,” only to be revealed at the “right” moment.