There were only nine months between us, and Patsy and I were preoccupied with the changes taking place within ourselves. I was almost fifteen, she sixteen. Polly was still a child, but she had all the beauty and grace denied her sister. Martha had long resigned herself to not being beautiful but she was still unhappy about being in a country, and a society, that placed such importance on it. Because she was plain, several beautiful ladies befriended Martha, as she was no threat to them. She was the image of her father, and almost as tall as he. She towered over most of the men who were introduced to her. She had bright-red hair like her father, and freckles, which were her despair. Still she had a kind of touching grace, and she was an excellent horsewoman. She had her admirers, but she rarely went out in company. Sometimes she returned home for a special party or dinner, but during my first months in Paris, Master Jefferson was occupied with the mysterious Maria Cosway and rarely saw his daughters, except for Sunday dinner and an occasional tea at the Comtesse de Noailles. So, I would often visit Martha and Maria at the convent and bring the latest gossip, of which I got an earful from James and the other servants. Martha was annoyed by her father’s infatuation with Maria Cosway and repeatedly told me so. Her jealousy was bitter, and I was later to feel its cruelty. I was just as envious of Maria Cosway—her exquisite manners, her magnificent gowns, and haughty condescending and languishing airs. She came to see Master Jefferson with a proprietary attitude that made James mimic her behind her back, and the servants raise their eyebrows. Only Petit knew the real story, and he was as close-mouthed about it as old Martin back at Monticello.
“I wish she would go back to her husband!” This seemed to explode from Martha’s very soul, and I realized that Paris gossip didn’t stop at the convent gates.
“She is very beautiful.”
“But so old! She must be at least twenty-five!”
We sat in silence charged with malice. How could men be so anxious to pursue such decrepit creatures? I thought. They seemed to be made out of some soft, pudding-like material that had nothing to do with muscles and bones. What would they do if they had to run?
I remembered the joy I felt when, picking up my skirts, I would race as fast as I could down the Champs-Elysées, across the fields, toward the bridge of Neuilly, looking behind to make sure no one was watching. I would run until I had a stitch in my side and then pause, listening to the pumping of my heart, the pounding of my breath. . . .
We did not know that at that very moment Maria Cosway, the object of all our jealous envy, was already on her way back to her husband, having quit Paris that very day for good.
Martha then turned to me and whispered, “There was a gentleman a few days ago … you know, who killed himself because he thought his wife didn’t love him. They had been married ten years. . . . I believe that if every husband in Paris was to do as much, there would be nothing but widows left.” And then suddenly, with an emotion I didn’t understand at the time, she said, “I wish with all my soul the poor Negroes were all freed. It grieves my heart!” And she reached over and embraced me.
CHAPTER 13
PARIS, MARCH 1788
PERHAPS I had always known that he would claim me. Had not the same happened to my mother and my sisters?
I watched him secretly to see if he knew, but I realized he would know only when the moment had arrived. I could hasten or delay that moment, but I felt powerless to prevent it.
Once I went with Martha and her father to Notre Dame Cathedral to hear a mass by Cardinal Beaugrave. Both Martha and I were so overwhelmed by the beauty of the cathedral and the mass that we burst into tears. When I accompanied James on his excursions to the city, he would speak of what our life would be together, once we had our freedom. He would speak wildly and with arrogance, as if what he dreamed could be had at the wave of a hand. Perhaps so, but I knew as sure as death that I belonged to Thomas Jefferson.
I hardly strayed from the mansion on the Champs-Elysées. My first nine months in Paris had been happy ones, and now I tried to prolong that happiness, plunging into my studies, grateful and hardly believing my good fortune, honing the knowledge I had acquired and forgetting the sword that hung over my head.
Everyone was homesick for Virginia as one gray, damp Parisian day followed the other in monotonous succession. Even the famous Paris rats had disappeared, frozen into the sewers under the Seine on which the nobility and bourgeois skated. There was fire after fire on the outskirts of the city as entire shanty towns went up in smoke. The men were bored, and an oppressiveness hung over the days as we roamed the mansion, each in our little orbit. I remember the silence of those short days when candles burned at noon.
In January, an unheard-of freeze took hold of the city and confined us to the mansion. We knew that the poor people of Paris had begun to die of the cold and of starvation.
Haughty French officers came and went; Trumbull sketched them for his painting of the Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. James became more and more mysterious, speaking of “freedom” and “revolution” and “liberty.” Each time he would speak in this way, I remained silent. A sense of fatality took hold of me. I was the center of a drama; yet no one else seemed to know it. Only the painter Trumbull, with his great black eyes, seemed to have a sense of what was happening.
“Do you like it?”
“Oh yes, Master. It is very fine.”
I had come to serve his tea. He was finishing his study of my master for his painting of the Declaration of Independence. I gazed at the portrait. It showed a man of high countenance, young with a long and serious face, a high brow with soft curling red hair covering it and a wide unsmiling mouth that made him appear rather stern. It was a good resemblance.
I often sought John Trumbull’s company. He was a gentle man. Sometimes I would be impatiently waved away. When, later, he had finished his work in Paris and was folding his easel in preparation for his departure, I felt more alone than ever. I could not confide my fears to James. I thought of Petit, who liked me, but he was devoted to his master, unlikely to thwart him in anything he desired. As for the other women in the house, I was afraid of them and realized they would have no sympathy with a so common and sought-after situation. Above all, I was separated from Polly and Patsy by their innocence. I was alone, in a strange world, as I waited for a sign.
Spring came.
The ice on the Seine cracked, and its black water seeped between the glistening white. The days became longer and the candles went out. The rats came back and the brilliant stones of Paris shone again in the pale sunlight, which had timidly reappeared.
I was fifteen years old.
“I’m going away, Sally. To Amsterdam with Mr. Adams and then to the Rhineland. I’ll be gone for six weeks. I want you to study hard while I’m away.”
“Yes, Master.”
Away. I hadn’t counted on that. More waiting.
“Don’t look so sad, my Sally. It is only for a little while.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Your friend John Trumbull recommends the journey highly.”
The tall somber image of Master Trumbull distracted my thoughts for a moment.
“When I leave, you will stay with Madame Dupré, near the convent on rue de Seine. You can visit Polly and Patsy, and I have arranged that you may spend Sundays at the convent. Mr. Perrault will come to give you your lessons during the week.”
“Yes, Master.”
“I’m giving all the staff a holiday. It is not proper that you stay here … alone.”
“Yes, Master.”
“I shall miss you, Sally.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Sally, is that all you have to say?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Sally, I shall miss you. I promise…”
“Promise me!”
The words burst out of me, more a sob than an exclamation. I could bear the waiting no longer. I drew my head up and looked long into his eyes. Deep in the centers was a dark pinprick. My own ref
lection.
Yes, I thought, the time has come.
A thousand times a day fear would overwhelm me. Blood would rush to my head, and often I would clutch a velvet hanging or the back of a silk-covered fauteuil. I stopped seeing Polly and Patsy. I dared not leave the house lest he send for me. At night I fell asleep sitting upright on the side of my bed. My body would be turned away from the door, but my head and shoulders would be turned toward it. There was no lock, and I would not have dared turn the key had there been one. I would not face the door lest I invite its opening, yet I could not turn completely away. Thus I sat watch through the night.
Lord keep me from sinking down.
Lord keep me from sinking down.
Lord keep me from sinking down. I would repeat to myself. In the early hours of the morning, exhausted, I would sleep. The night before his departure, he sent for me, but he did not appear. I fell asleep in his room, and when I awoke an immense shadow blocked my vision.
I had no idea how long he had been standing there. Now that he had come, I felt no fear, only an overwhelming tenderness. His presence for me was command enough; I took control of him. I bent forward and pressed a kiss on the trembling hands that encompassed mine, and the contact of my lips with his flesh was so violent that I lost all memory of what came afterward. I felt around me an exploding flower, not just of passion, but of long deprivation, a hunger for things forbidden, for darkness and unreason, the passion of rage against the death of the other I so resembled. For in this moment I became one with her, and it was not my name that sprang from him but that of my half sister.
At once he left me, surveying me from above with the eyes of a man afraid of heights scanning a valley from a tower. Then his body tensed and rushed toward me as if he had found a way to break his fall.
Thus did Thomas Jefferson give himself into my keeping.
When I awoke the bed was empty beside me. I slipped from the abandoned bed and stared at the gray rectangles of light from the tall windows barred by the shadows of the balconies. In the strange, majestic room, I gathered my clothes from the four corners where they had been flung in the violence of the night. I stared at the sheet and then quickly, without thinking, covered the bed with its counterpane. The feeble groping for James’s dream had been erased by the force of a man’s body and a man’s will.
I washed and dressed, and quickly left the house by the front door. The morning was cool, but the day would be fair. Frost was still on the trees and bushes of the garden, but tiny sparks of green had begun to appear.
I started to walk slowly toward the Pont de Neuilly. I had taken my brother’s heavy cloak, yet I trembled uncontrollably either from shock or cold, I don’t remember. To my surprise, I recognized ahead of me his solitary figure breaking pane after pane of silvery light. Even at this dawn hour, and for every dawn to come, Thomas Jefferson had risen before me and had chosen the cold bitter morning to walk abroad.
I was filled with confusion. Should I turn back? Hurry to greet him? Stay as I was now, fifty paces behind him? Call out to him? I followed for a long moment, dreading that he would, for some reason, turn around and see me, but he kept his eyes ahead. I fell farther and farther behind as his long legs strode through the Elysian fields spread out before him. The bottom of James’s cloak, wet with dew, dragged behind me. I was seized with a terrible yearning. I thought of my mother and her mother before her. Nothing would ever be the same again. Nothing would ever free me of him. Nothing would erase those strange words of love which I had to believe in my weakness.
“Je t’aime,” he had said.
In his terror, he had used that most potent of weapons, the ruler of the mighty as well as the helpless. And I had answered, without any other words passing between us.
“Merci, monsieur.”
CHAPTER 14
SPRING 1788
JAMES DISCOVERED the concubinage of his sister that morning when he turned back the counterpane of his master’s bed. He had waited, first outside the door of the bedroom and then in the gray shadows of the arc made by the curved marble stairway of the Hôtel de Langeac in the early dawn. He had seen Thomas Jefferson descend the grand staircase and carefully unlatch the front door and step out into the courtyard of the mansion. For one moment, the rosy light loomed against the blackness of the arch. Then the door had slammed shut. James had waited for a length of time he could not measure when Sally Hemings came down the same stairs. She had turned, almost facing him and wearing his heavy black cloak and had gone out the front door.
Sally Hemings’ brother now stood in his master’s empty room under the painted ceiling of “Night.” He was twenty-three years old. Of those twenty-three years, fourteen had been spent serving, loving, and tending Thomas Jefferson. Like some demigod who descended from the heavens to mingle with mortals, he would ascend, leaving that which had to be cleaned up to his servants. His master had left Paris.
He was in throes of some powerful emotion, yet he couldn’t sort out which emotion it was. James Hemings was a virgin. His master and his sister had gone beyond the pale of his existence. He gathered the stained sheets in his arms. The complexity of his new feelings paralyzed him. Violence, like an ague, shook him. What should he do? How should he conduct himself as a free man? Kill?
“Help me,” whispered James. “God, help me.”
He didn’t—would never—have the courage to kill Thomas Jefferson.
From that day on, James dreamed of those spots of blood. The whole bed would turn red as he touched it, staining his own hands as if he had plunged them into the entrails of a living creature. He would struggle to take the sheets off the bed, but they would heave and swirl, and sickening sounds would come from them. Terrified, he would back away, but the sheets would pursue him, leaping at his throat like a wild animal, enveloping him in a slimy embrace. In the ensuing struggle, he would be hurled into the fire burning in the room’s hearth. His hands and feet, still swaddled in the sticky sheets, would begin to burn. Then his arms and legs. Then his private parts. Finally, only his torso would remain with a blackened and charred head, the mouth opened in a horrible but soundless scream. The head would begin to spin itself in agony until it literally spun itself off the burning body and lay in the ashes which filled its mouth and eyes and nostrils, strangling and suffocating him.
That same dream would come back time and again, and would remain with him until the day he died. The first time he had awakened to find himself being shaken by a pale Petit, terrified by his screams.
“Jim-mi. There is nothing to be afraid of. Réveille-toi, mon garçon. It’s only a nightmare. Wake up, son.”
“No, not like that! Glide. GLIDE! You’re not supposed to lift your feet from the floor!”
“I’m not lifting my feet from the floor!”
“You are too. You walk like a duck! Look at Sally. She does it perfectly; better than either of us.”
“That’s because I’ve watched the frotteur do it every day for a year now! Just think of waxing floors with your feet like he does and you’ll have it.”
“Waxing floors! Will you just imagine the queen of France waxing floors!”
“I’d never thought of it! Marie-Antoinette, ‘La Frotteuse.’”
The three girls dressed in their undergarments and perspiring, collapsed into loud laughter, falling onto the deep featherbed in Sally Hemings’ room at Madame Dupré’s boardinghouse.
Martha and Maria had doffed their crimson convent uniforms, which lay in a heap on the polished floors. Sally Hemings had been in her chemise, being fitted for a new dress, when the girls arrived. Martha and Maria had begun to visit their maid regularly in her comfortable and cozy rooms. There was absolutely no privacy for the girls in the convent, the fifty pensioners slept in two immense rooms without curtains, the other rooms being reserved for drawing rooms and classrooms. Sally Hemings was overjoyed and welcomed the company of her two playmates. Released from the oppressive Hotel de Langeac, from the smoldering power of Jefferson’
s sensuality, and the bitterness of her brother James, she had found relief, joy, and affection in the adolescent company of Marie and Martha. Her initiation into womanhood forgotten, she basked in her temporary return to childhood.
Often she would leave her rooming house and walk the several blocks to the Abbaye de Panthémont, entering through the chapel on the rue de Grenelle and stepping into the courtyard filled with crimson-uniformed ladies of the gentry. As this was not only a school for girls, but a retreat for spinsters, abandoned wives, and ladies of the court in temporary seclusion, the ways and gossip of Versailles and the court found their way here with rapidity, and girls were playing a game now popular at the school: attempting to imitate the famous walk of the queen, Marie-Antoinette, the “most beautiful walk in France.”
With the voluminous hoop skirts in fashion called robes à paniers, which completely hid the bottom half of a lady’s body, the desired effect of moving oneself from one place to the other was that of floating disembodied along the galleries and antechambers of palaces like ships on water, rather than humans on legs and feet. The effect was obtained by never lifting the feet from the floor, but by gliding them forward and slightly outward along the surface of the floor in a skating movement, and keeping the tightly corseted upper part of the body erect and rigidly immobile. The walk was practiced by both the ladies and gentlemen at the court of Versailles, but no one in the kingdom achieved the desired effect with greater success than the stately, full-bosomed queen herself.
“One of the ladies at Panthémont said that she had never seen such a sight as the queen sailing along the gallery of mirrors. One could see nothing in the throng of courtiers but a forest of waving plumes a foot and a half taller than her ladies’ heads,” Martha said. She turned to Sally Hemings.
“Can you imagine such a thing, Sally? Oh, how I would love to see it just once, the court of Versailles. Papa has promised to take me to the public galleries when he returns. Anyone may enter, you know, and the gardens as well are public, and you may come across the queen herself walking with her ladies. Of course, we shall have an entrée in the person of the Comtesse de Tessé, who is a lady in waiting to the queen. I will find her gliding like a swan among the pools and fountains of Versailles, and I will drop my best curtsy, and Papa will kiss her hand and … Can you imagine!”
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