I remembered a scene I had witnessed with Martha at the abbey less than a year before, the mysterious and strangely seductive ceremony of ordination for novices. I watched those girls, most of them my age, their faces and bodies pressed into the cold, humid, unyielding stone: their wedding day, the soft fine wool of their habits spread around them like spilled milk. They married God as one married a man. And if one loved a man as one loved God, was it so different? Did it really matter if it was God or man, as long as it was not both?
I put my hands on my face and pressed my eyes red-gold, as if the image blinded me. I opened them again. Marly was still there. And so was he. Smiling down at me from the vast distance between us.
On the thirteenth of July, 1788, there fell, on the very edge of harvest, the most frightful and abnormal hailstorm ever remembered, completely destroying the crops of the year which had already been much damaged by a long drought. For sixty leagues around Paris, it was said, the ruin was total. The legendary Estates General, that had not met in one hundred and sixty years, would meet again the following May. The king had surrendered. Paris was exultant. Martha and Polly came home from the convent, and an ominous calm fell over the city.
I had had no female companion at the Hôtel de Langeac. And so, although I did not feel that I could confide in her, Martha, when she came home from her convent, became for me a refuge from the masculine world of the ministry, and from my powerful lover. His impulsiveness, his vagueness, interspersed with melancholy silences, his inexplicable bursts of passion overwhelmed and often confused me. Later, I would conquer his moods; but at that time I turned to Martha. She was my link with home, with my mother, perhaps with other women. She returned my affection that summer with a warmth we were never to recapture again. I would accompany Martha on her calls to her school friends before they left for their summer estates. We would stroll along the busy and crowded rue Saint-Honore, dodging the hackney coaches, or along the chestnut-shaded cobblestones of the quai Pont Neuf, looking. We would walk side by side, arm in arm. A lady and her maid, a slave and her mistress, an aunt and her niece, the virgin and the concubine.
Then, one day, the first shadow of what was to pass fell between us. As in all aristocratic households of the day, hair was dressed daily by professional hairdressers who came to the house. There were more than three thousand of them in Paris alone. The one appointed to the Hôtel de Langeac, after dressing my master’s hair, would go to the convent to do Polly and Martha’s coiffure. There was a second hairdresser whose duty it was to dress the hair of the servants. There was not a fine household in Paris that did not avail itself of the services of two or three hairdressers every day.
As if in silent recognition, my master’s hairdresser began to dress my hair. Martha had no knowledge of this until one day it was whispered to her by a friend that her hairdresser was also her maid’s hairdresser, an unheard of breach of etiquette.
“Is it true that Antoine does your hair?” We were out walking. Her clear eyes were puzzled, not angry. I returned her gaze. It was one of the last times’we looked into each other’s eyes.
“Pierre complained that he had too many heads to do with the increase in staff, and Antoine said he didn’t mind doing my hair, since he could not come directly to you anyway.” If Martha had thought about it, this would be unthinkable. Hairdressers placed more importance on rank and etiquette than the queen herself.
“I don’t think it’s fitting,” Martha answered.
“Well, it’s convenient, Mistress.”
“I shall ask Father about it.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mistress. He is so annoyed at Antoine anyway that he will surely fire him, and where to get another as good?”
“I won’t do anything if Antoine stops doing your hair.”
“What harm is there, Mistress? Besides, he does James’s too,” I lied. I wanted to keep my hairdresser.
“He does?”
“Yes.”
“Oh … In that case … I guess it’s all right. I’m surprised Antoine would … If Father says so …”
“Master says so,” I continued to lie.
It was the first of many lies I would tell to the white women in my life. From that day on, I would lie to her and to others. Poor Antoine became a milestone between me and Martha.
“My dear … you mustn’t worry if I seem … strange sometimes.” Thomas Jefferson’s voice had the familiar hesitancy of his public speaking. “This is so unexpected and for me, so unbidden. And you are … so young and yet so sure. . . . You seem as old as Eve to me, my wise one.”
It was part game and part true, he thought. There really didn’t seem to be any differences in their ages. Sometimes he wondered who was the child. He felt so young. His naked back was to the silken draperies of his rooms on the street side of the apartments. His huge body was framed in the rectangles of barred, balconied windows.
He reached and cupped the head of his mistress in his giant hands and stared across at her, pressing her tiny skull between them. Her smallness always stirred him. He gave a short harsh laugh.
“I don’t know what to do with you!”
“Don’t do anything, Master,” she replied, “and it will be done.”
“Thy will?”
“Thine.”
Thomas Jefferson fondled the delicate skin at the back of his slave’s neck under the coiled hair. She was indeed his creature. Both in body and in spirit. He had formed and shaped her himself, this wild flower, into something that bordered on the aristocratic—or at least the unique, an exotic hybrid of exquisite beauty and fascination. Her training and tutoring was beginning to show, her musical education as well. Her voice was low, true, with a lilting sweetness that was unforgettable. Her appreciation of beautiful things gratified him. She had even begun to speak her native tongue differently, and her French was perfect. He possessed something he had created from beginning to end, without interference or objections or corrections. In a way, he had birthed her. As much as he had his daughter. He had created her in his own image of womanly perfection, this speck of dust, this handful of clay from Monticello.
“I love you,” he said.
“I have always loved you,” said his mistress, but he was no longer listening. He had already gone from her, not physically but mentally, as he often did.
Sally Hemings watched secretly the proud, haughty face in a hundred moods for a trace of herself, yet never once had the face she knew as hers—this passionate, hungry, wounded face that had just been so close—ever betrayed him in public. That other face, the public one, was the face of her enemy, her master. But one she owned. . . .
Once, in the privacy of her attic room, she had pulled down her bodice and stared at the smooth skin, expecting somehow to see the branded scar “C” for concubine on her flesh just as the famous La Motte had recently been branded with a “V” for voleuse on her shoulder, and her grandmother with the “R” for runaway on her breast. But there had been nothing but smooth skin.
When would he free her? she wondered. What if she asked him now … here? … She couldn’t, she was ashamed. The pallor, the soft eyes, the ribbon undone, the mouth softened by their kisses … He was smiling lazily at her. Even now after their moment of passion, there was a violence and a constraint about him that made her tremble. It was then she realized that he liked owning her. She looked back at him. The face that just a short while ago had been hers was now closed. It belonged to the world.
My anxious lover would sometimes touch me or smooth my hair as if I were a touchstone, a relic of Monticello, a living symbol of all the love and happiness that he had invested in his patrimony. Late at night, when the house was silent and Paris slept, he would tell me of his new plans for Monticello, of changes in the Big House, of redesigned gardens and vineyards with German and French grapes, and olive trees not native to Virginia. For him, the Blue Ridge Mountain region was Eden, and even Paris, the most beautiful of all cities, could not replace it.
This I understood even as he spoke of his retirement, of his leave of absence, and our return to Paris. When he spoke of these things, he never made it clear if I was to stay in Paris to wait for him, return to Virginia and be re-enslaved, or be freed at once by his hand. I did not yet ask which of these alternatives he contemplated, but when I brought up my own plans, laid with James and based on freedom in France, he would become silent and morose, or suddenly leave the room.
Just as he willed the revolution that was growing to be a peaceful one, so did he will that my conversion from slave to lover be also without violence. He saw the Revolution through the eyes of a man who had found unexpected happiness and who was determined to avoid unexpected grief at any cost.
“Have you told him I want to speak to him?”
“Yes,” I lied. I had begun to lie to James.
“He knows that we are aware that under French law, he cannot hold us against our will?”
We were speaking French. James had an abrupt and excitable manner of speaking in which every other word came out as if underlined.
“Yes.” I lied, I didn’t know if he knew or not.
”Did you tell him about the proposition of the Prince de Conti’s maître d’hôtel?”
”Yes.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“He said he would speak to the prince at the first occasion.”
“Has he told you, sister, that he has written to ask the Congress for a leave of absence to return to Virginia, and is waiting for an answer?” James had lapsed back into English.
“Yes,” I lied. I was shocked; he had not told me anything.
“Don’t you think it is time to claim our liberty?” He had reverted to French.
“You mean to ask to be freed? Shouldn’t we wait until the date is set for our return?”
“So that he can pack us up with his other possessions?”
“You have said that we are not owned. We have gotten wages since last January. He has recognized that this is not Virginia. . . .”
“You can say that this is not Virginia? Mon Dieu!”
I blushed, but I kept my head high. “He’s given me his word.”
“In writing?”
“He’s promised.”
“And you will leave?”
“I’m ready when you are.”
James turned his hard gray eyes on me. “And you’ve told him you will leave him?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“He will never forgive you. He will accuse you of betraying him.”
“I know.” This time I didn’t lie. The specter of my master’s cold fury, his outraged injury, which I had witnessed once or twice, struck terror in my breast.
“He … wouldn’t do you harm?”
I thought a moment of my impulsive lover. Yes, I thought, he was capable of hurting me.
“Of course not,” I said. “He is the kindest and most gentle of men.”
“Why, why could he not have taken a … white mistress, if he must have one, like all his friends?”
“I don’t know.”
Jealousy struck me, unexpected and hot. James and I had never spoken of my concubinage.
“How should I know why he does or doesn’t! Do you think he tells me what goes on in his mind? Do you think his secrets concern me?” I stopped short.
I felt sick with this new emotion. The pain of it overwhelmed me, almost carrying me to my knees. He was mine! Mine. So this was jealousy. This is what I would live with from now on.
“Time is running out,” James said to me in English. He seemed to be sorry for what he had said.
“You believe that there will be an insurrection … a revolution? Our master says not.”
“There will be an insurrection. But this was not what I meant,” he said gently.
“I’m careful,” I whispered.
“Ask Marie-Louise downstairs to help you. She knows what to do and she likes you. . . . There are ways.”
I looked at my brother. There was no more boy left in him. He was lean and hard. It was a violent hardness of body. His eyes beneath their long black lashes were disillusioned and bitter. He had been seventeen when he left Virginia. Had it been in Paris that he had known his first woman? And who had she been? A countess whose eye he had caught? A prostitute? Whoever it had been, I was convinced, she had been white.
I lowered my head. I had never thought of such things before. We knew so little of each other—men knew so little of women and women so little of men. I had no idea where he spent his money and free time. Who his friends were. We had barely spoken to each other since I had returned to the ministry, and we had never, until now, spoken of the one important event of my life.
Whoever this man my brother was, he was a man. And no matter what happened to him, he would never be caught like me in the throes of a love which now held me against my will. But, no matter what, I would break that will, I believed. I would reclaim my body, my heart, and I would be careful. . . . I would not be deprived of my one chance in life. I would not fail my brother, I vowed. When the time came, I would run.
CHAPTER 17
PARIS, APRIL 1789
JAMES HEMINGS untied the roasted golden-brown suckling pig and stepped back to avoid the rich dark juices that spluttered out onto the chopping block of his kitchens at the Hôtel de Langeac. He had filled the suckling pig with a mixed stuffing of herbs, walnuts, mushrooms, and ground meat. Around the roast pig, he placed the candied fruits and flowers glazed with sugar. Julien, the French chef, nodded curtly. His apprentice was now a master cook. James stood staring at his dish.
A year had passed since Thomas Jefferson had taken his sister as concubine. Only he saw the dark side of her station: she was still a slave. The master had taken up his political and social life as if nothing had happened, he had simply added Sally Hemings to his bed.
He, James, had become a master cook and his sister had become a master whore, he thought with bitterness. Not that anyone cared, he reminded himself. Her existence, and her romance did not seem to carry any weight in the network of gossip exchanged between the servants, the lackeys, the hairdressers, and coachmen of the great Parisian hôtels in this spring of 1789. This spring there was only news of the political situation. Riots, court intrigues, manifestos that flew from the courtyards to the kitchens and the backstairs of one hotel to another with the efficiency of the Tidewater slave network. An aristocrat’s liaison with a lady’s maid was after all so common, he thought, so lacking in interest, that it was beneath the notice of even the lowliest scullery maid. For this forlorn silence, James was grateful.
Of course, the servants in the house all knew that the beautiful young girl, supposedly the maid of one of his daughters, was in fact Jefferson’s mistress. But as far as James could discern, this fact had escaped the intelligence of the white Americans connected with the household: Mr. Short, Mr. Humphreys, Jefferson’s two daughters. The master was more than ever a loving father, a sweet-tempered lord, a kind and compassionate aristocrat, a gallant appreciator of beautiful women. His many migraines stopped, his melancholy abated, and he seemed to be unconscious of the undertow of civil discontent which racked France. “The Revolution is completed,” he was fond of saying over and over.
As for most of the visitors who wandered in and out of the ministry, they had never set eyes on his sister, nor even known of her existence. If any of the elegant French ladies had remarked her, they certainly would have dismissed their famous friend’s divertissement with an amused shrug. His hope that his master’s interest in his sister would be transitory and “in the French fashion” had turned out to be in vain. He might play at being French, James thought, but his nature was Virginian, passionate, proud, possessive, tenacious; violent feelings ran under that polite and remote surface. If anything, he had noted that his master’s obsession with Sally Hemings had grown rather than waned in the past year. His master, thought James, showed no lessening of the tyrannical possessiveness and watchful interest in her
dependence on him. She seemed to be a prisoner in this house. And his sister was reveling in it; she had blossomed under this jealous power. The last childish contours of her body had dropped away, leving the low-burning smolder of a woman’s maturity far beyond her sixteen years. The final shape of her face with its high, flat cheekbones and wide-spaced eyes had hardened and lost some of its innocence. A small, exquisite, heavy-breasted, slim-waisted body had emerged from the coltish and countrified adolescent of a year ago. She had honed her natural grace and inborn elegance on the examples of the most fashionable ladies of Panthémont and Paris on whom she spied incessantly and indecently, and had developed a lust for clothes and a taste for finery that went with such examples.
She had lessons in French, in music, in dressmaking. In her seclusion, Sally was better read than most ladies. Yet she had resisted all his pleadings to use her power over the senses of their master to achieve her freedom and his. She assumed that all would be taken care of in time. That love would make her free.
James knew better. Men didn’t free what they loved. He had surprised Thomas Jefferson more than once looking at Sally Hemings as he had often seen him contemplating some of his rare objects, those he meant to keep. It was the look of a man who both coveted and had the means to possess what he coveted. How many times had he seen this look as the steady stream of precious objects flowed from the workshops and auction houses of Paris and were set before his master in unending abundance. A look of tender greed would flash cross his face like a bright star, and then his hand would reach out and touch the object presented to him, bringing it under his domination.
He pitied his sister in her enraptured beauty and delusion. She was nubile and Jefferson was virile. It was only a matter of time before her fate as a woman caught up with her.
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