Martha Jefferson shook the bare shoulders of her maid gently and affectionately, tossing the mane of bright hair behind her. Sally Hemings nodded to Martha and let her petticoats drop. At any rate, she could walk like a queen, if nothing else.
She fell back into the arms of Martha, pretending to slip, and as she did she let out a whoop: “Her majesty has just glided onto her royal derrière. . . .” They all collapsed into new gales of laughter. This brought Madame Dupré to the door of her boarder.
“Girls, ladies, you would think I had a regiment of hussars in my house!”
Madame Dupré was the proprietor of a small rooming house on the rue de Seine. She had been instructed to board the maid of the American minister’s daughters while he was away on a trip to Amsterdam and the Rhineland. She had agreed to do this for the sum of twenty-one francs a week plus laundry and dressmaking. The gentle, lovely girl, who had arrived at her door two weeks ago accompanied by the minister himself, had pleased her. As she had not been instructed otherwise, Madame Dupré treated Sally Hemings as she would have treated any maid of an aristocrat: that is, a young girl of a poor family with no dowry who enters the service of a great family as a lady’s maid and companion to the daughters of such a family in return for room, board, and protection. Obviously the minister thought enough of her not to leave her alone in the company of his servants when he went abroad. . . .
Madame Dupré had no way of knowing that Sally Hemings was a slave. She had no way of knowing either that a “maid” in Virginia was a polite way of indicating someone who was black. Sally Hemings’ complexion told Madame Dupré nothing, except that she was dark. She would even have said swarthy, but a little strange; the particular tint of the young girl’s skin was not the same as she had noted in the Italian or Spanish complexion. It was rather an extraordinary shade of buff, without the profusion of down that usually accompanied the ladies of that hue. She was a bit surprised at the meanness of her wardrobe. Certainly if one was poor, one had to know how to sew in order to dress oneself, but then she was to remedy these shortcomings by instructing her in dressmaking and making sure that she had the minimum uniforms of a lady’s maid. Certainly her manners and gentleness and soft, charmingly accented French bespoke a certain breeding, and with a little grooming, thought Madame Dupré, she would surely attract a gentleman of property and improve her station in life in the timehonored manner of becoming the mistress or (why not?) the wife of a modest member of the gentry. She, of course, had had no instructions along these lines, but as she liked the child, Madame Dupré decided she would do all she could to improve her while she was in her charge. Besides, through her mistresses, Sally Hemings had access to the Abbaye de Panthémont, where only the finest ladies and young girls retired or were educated. She had only to imitate her betters, she concluded.
When Madame Dupré saw what the girls had been doing, she joined the laughter. The queen’s extraordinary walk was renowned throughout the kingdom, and when little Sallie showed her version of it, she had to admit it was both seductive and accurate.
“My, that is quite good. Now do me a curtsy, all of you—comme il faut. I have come to serve you tea, but you had better put your clothes back on before the servant sees you in the state of nature.”
The three girls stood up and Madame Dupré looked at the virginal young bodies pressed close to her. The eldest Mademoiselle Jefferson was so tall she towered over everyone. Some American ladies were immense, and this one certainly took after her father. She had a fine complexion: milk and roses at the same time, except that it was marred by the same freckles that dotted the countenance of the minister. She remarked on Martha’s lovely hair. It was hanging down in a mass of thick auburn waves to her waist. Her eyes were without color or lashes and too close together, and her chin, she felt, was impossible: long and jutting, with the promise of unyielding stubbornness so disagreeable to men. Yet the luxurious curls managed to soften the lines of her face and long nose, and her mouth was delicate, firm, and good humored, bespeaking justice if not generosity, and the body was slim, well made, and bursting with good health.
As for the young Mademoiselle Jefferson, she and her maid resembled each other uncannily. Madame Dupré continued her inventory. They were both remarkably beautiful, both dark with hazel eyes, the maid’s being a peculiar but fascinating shade of yellow. They both had deep dimples, prized by French ladies, and soft wide mouths with that touch of sullenness found in ardent characters. The maid reflected the promise in body of the mistress, who was still a child; perfect mat skin, long thick dark hair, and fragile yet compact body with a deep bosom and full hips.
Yes, thought Madame Dupré, with a little luck, Sallie will make her fortune in Paris … if she has the luck to attract a gentleman.
The first time James Hemings came to visit his sister at Madame Dupré’s, she fell into his arms with a cry of relief. She had not seen him since she had left the hôtel that March day almost three weeks ago. James Hemings was still reeling from the shock of his sister’s seduction, but he determined to show nothing but tenderness and solicitude. He had three or four weeks at the most to convince her that her master had compromised all claims to her love and loyalty by his forcing of her, and that now was the time to claim her rights as a free woman on French soil. Once the demigod was back, his powerful compelling presence would again dominate their lives, and their only chance would be lost, perhaps forever.
He had brought her a letter that had arrived for her from her master.
She had taken the letter from him with trembling hands but had not read it, hiding it in her petticoat pocket. They had then gone out for a walk, as they had so many times before in Paris. Free of uniforms and even the semblance of servanthood, they had roamed the streets and the grand boulevards crammed with new buildings. American Revolutionary ideas were everywhere, and they met them in a form hitherto never encountered by either of them: the newspaper and the broadside.
There were regular newspapers printed every day which, even under the king’s Censure Bureau, were wildly critical and full of republican ideas. Anyone with the money to buy or rent or who owned a printing press was free to print and distribute what he liked. These were called broadsides. Anyone doing this was liable, of course, afterward to be arrested by the king’s censors for lèse-majesté, but no one prevented the broadside from being printed and distributed, even if the author was in the Bastille. It was around the Palais Royal that most of the newspaper vendors congregated and it was usually here, in the magnificent gardens of the palace with its famous meridian cannon fired by the rays of the sun at noon, that brother and sister spent part of their promenade.
The public gardens of the Palais Royal teemed with every manner of man, woman, and beast—from veiled noblewomen on their way to assignations to street prostitutes painted in the gaudy red rouge and white powder in fashion. There were priests and hawkers, lemonade and food vendors, cavaliers and officers of the king’s regiment, beggars and pickpockets, raving orators, and all manner of dubious-looking characters. In the center of the gardens was the Due d’Orleans’s new glass-domed circus, the latest wonder of Paris. It was here, amid the pamphlets, engravings, newspapers, broadsides, rumors, and posters, that brother and sister discovered the shadow of things to come.
Each week a letter had come, hand-delivered by James, and each week Sally Hemings had silently hidden it in her petticoats and gone walking in Paris with James. Each week James sought to steal the mind and body of his sister from her master, while she half-listened to his pleas and warnings about her life, too stunned to think of anything except the letter that had arrived.
They were the first letters that anyone had ever addressed to her in all her fifteen years. They had taken on a magic, these letters addressed to “Mademoiselle Sally Hemings.” She was unable to explain to James her fascination with the power of these words. Her name had stood independent of herself or her will on the thick white paper. Again and again, she had touched the black letters on th
e white paper imagining this person “Sally Hemings” to whom they were addressed.
Even not being able to answer these summons, because he was not long enough in each city, seemed right: the magic hold was never broken by the effort it would have taken to answer and thus claim the title by which she was addressed. Instead she had only to wait, to receive, to acquiesce.
The letters themselves, when tremblingly she opened them after James’s departure and read the dozen or so lines, were as ordinary as those her master wrote to his daughters, which she also read when they came to visit her. If she expected billets-doux, she got none. Instead, there was a steady stream of fatherly advice, kindly, distant, a little cold, which took on the air of a monologue, since no response was possible. Yet the young girl read and reread her letters. She kept them in a silk envelope she had sewn especially for them. Without knowing why, she showed them to no one, nor did she speak of their existence.
Sally Hemings smiled at her latest geography lessons interspaced with “be a good girl.” “Study … depend on yourself … visit with Patsy and Polly … love me. ...” These fatherly letters disappointed her. How strange these terse letters that arrived from mysterious German cities so remote from her imagination, she thought.
Then, one day, a new letter arrived. It was dutifully brought to her by James to her rooms and dutifully hidden in her petticoats until she returned from their walk to read it alone, and dutifully opened and held toward the light in order to decipher the minuscule, almost illegible writing. When she finished reading it, she sat down weakly, her legs no longer able to support her, and steadied the letter trembling in her hands on her lap. Again she strained over the tiny cramped writing, as if her life had depended on it, and finally she clutched it to her bosom with a cry.
The message was clear. And because it was written, it had for Sally Hemings the binding power of a holy writ.
CHAPTER 15
PARIS, APRIL 1788
THOMAS JEFFERSON woke with the alarm of someone who does not know where he is. The alarm was physical as well as metaphysical. He hadn’t remembered for a moment not only where he was but who he was. He had traveled so many miles. . . . He sighed. He was staring at Jean-Simon Berthélemy’s painting of “Night” on his own sculptured ceiling over his own bed, in his own room in his own Hôtel de Langeac, and not in some Prussian inn lying in his white-linen envelope among strangers. He raised himself on one elbow and stared at the sleeping girl beside him. He had gone to fetch his slave from her rooms as soon as he had arrived in Paris. She was on her side, turned away from him, her long dark hair fanning out from her body. The white sheets darkened her skin, like a pale sky darkens clouds. He lifted the covers from her and slowly pulled them away from her body. Then he bent his bright head and ran his tongue along the delicate backbone. The taste of honey and pine hit the back of his throat.
“Mon Dieu …” he murmured, and sank back into his satin pillows. Possessively he drew the girl closer to him and arranged her head on his naked chest. She slept. Without waking her, he caressed the tangled hair. There was a small crescent-shaped scar in the silky down of the beginning of her hairline. A dim recollection made it seem that this scar had something to do with him, but he couldn’t remember what. He tenderly rubbed the slightly raised whiteness of it with the tips of his fingers.
Landscape after landscape rushed before him as if he were riding in the jostling coaches and carriages of his Rhine journey.
He had described to the girl again and again the long, lonely voyage through the Low Countries to the north and finally Prussia and the Rhine Valley. His description of the vast, magical Black Forest had transported the young girl into a world of dragons, princesses, and fairy tales. His imaginary carriage slowed now, so that innumerable scenes of rustic beauty floated before his eyes in stately sequence. On the second of April he had arrived at Düsseldorf and had gone straight to the painting gallery. It was there that he had seen the Van der Werff painting that had so moved him: the Biblical story of Sarah giving the slave Hagar to Abraham. That same afternoon he had written to Sally in Paris. Had it really been a sign, he wondered?
He straightened a lock of her hair. He was a rational man. It was unreasonable, he thought, loving for once what he saw and felt without wanting or trying to give a reason, and not caring much if there was one. Sometimes her face took him back to his happiest days. His eyes rested again on the sleeping slave. Her youth, the deepness and serenity of her sleep, stirred him. To be that young … Love is never a surprise to the young; but to him! He almost laughed, then remembered she slept. He shifted position carefully and drew her closer to him. After Düsseldorf, he had thought of her often with a growing sense of fatality. Was it not incredible that she was here at all, in Paris, in his arms? Was it not strange and unaccountable the circumstances of her arrival here, of her very birth? That fateful Wayles legacy so intertwined with the past, and now with the future? Future? What possible future except hate and guilt could they possibly have, he reminded himself.
He closed his eyes and drifted back to the Rhine Valley, sailing down the wide flat ribbon of it from Cologne to Hanau and Heidelberg. His return had had a dreamlike and hurried aspect about it after Düsseldorf. By the middle of April he had been in Strasbourg, where he had recrossed the Rhine into France. He had hurried then, remembering for the first time the bitter toil and poverty of the German peasants. Why had he suddenly been so touched by the women—disheveled, worn beyond their years?
His slave stirred and opened her eyes. The low morning sun caught their golden color and flecked green and brown into them. His heart pounded as she reached for him.
His face still held such terror for her. She pulled back from the lips that had brushed hers and looked into the hooded and melancholy eyes with their fair brows, and then at the wide mouth with its slightly upturned corners. Her master’s thick, wavy hair fell around his shoulders. There was a mat of reddish hair on his chest. Sally Hemings’ eyes took in the mysterious stubble of red beard and the fine age-lines around the eyes and the stern mouth. There were marks of age at his throat, a slight indentation of flesh, and suddenly she felt a piercing flash of pity for him.
CHAPTER 16
SUMMER, 1788
LENT WAS OVER and the promenade of the Champs-Elysées bristled with multicolored flower borders. Tulips and dahlias, lilies of the valley and crocuses, spread like Oriental carpets escorting the golden carriages and prancing horses of the Paris gentry come forth to show themselves and salute spring.
From the upper window of the Hôtel de Langeac I could see the place Louis XV at the end of the Champs-Elysées and, beyond the place, the gardens of the Tuileries filled with tiny moving figures. They reminded me of butterflies swarming among the stone facades and the flower borders.
The gilt carriages moved down the famous chestnut-tree-shaded promenade. I trembled at the change in my own small world. From his daughters’ maid I had become the pampered and adored mistress of Thomas Jefferson. I was one insignificant secret amongst the many buried under the surface of this spring procession.
It was the summer of my fifteenth year that I saw Marly for the first time, and like my master who had been transformed by a painting in Düsseldorf, I was transformed by Marly. I too saw what I wanted to see. Nothing would ever be the same for me again. Marly had been the favorite palace of the Sun King, Louis XIV, his retreat and hermitage from the glories of Versailles. It seemed to float above the earth, in its own nature, its own sky, its own water, its own sun. More than any of the other palaces of the kings of France, this was the most magical one. Imagine a young woman come with her love to Marly, standing beside him, and looking at all this beauty for the first time.
Marly stood planted in the wild blue forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The gardens, canals, terraces, and labyrinths stretched for miles. On each side of the magnificent palace were six summer pavilions connected by walkways embowered with jasmine and honeysuckle. Water fell in cascades from the top
of a hill behind the castle, forming a reservoir where swans floated. One fountain sprouted so high, the spray was lost from sight. In the main canal, glistening marble horses mounted by bronze men cavorted; and here and there one could see tiny gems which were ladies moving along the paths and gardens.
The only sound was wind and water; all human sound had been reduced by the vast scale to silence or whispered murmurings. From the top of the hill where the reservoir of Marly’s waterworks stood, the day had furnished a rainbow. As the great mechanical wheels raised the water of the river, a pale arc of color hung above it and faded into the colors surrounding us—the silver white of the fountains, the multicolored flowerbeds, the cream-and-blue shadow of the stone facades, the pearl-gray of the gravel underfoot—pastel colors; pink and lemon, delicate greens and blues, so unlike the harsh, hard colors of Virginia.
That day convinced me that there was no Virginia. No slavehood. There was no destiny, it seemed, that did not include this place, this hour, this Marly.
I looked at the tall figure standing beside me. No. Not tall. Immense. Like some glorious eagle overlooking Marly. I studied the familiar profile. My fifteen-year-old heart burst with pride. I could pale that face with longing. I could part that beautiful mouth with desire. I could fill those eyes with agony or joy.
I thought of Martha and her peers tittering and giggling in their fine watered silks and gauzes, the greedy restlessness and ignorance of them! Prancing by in their convent red; gossiping, silly girls who knew nothing of men. Their feverish fantasies and sickening pride revolted me. I neither despised them nor was jealous of them. I merely pitied them. What did they know about being a woman?
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