“Do you think he’ll marry again?”
My mother jumped to her feet. “Lord Almighty! You wishing for a white mistress? Your father didn’t marry again, did he? I ain’t never wished for no white mistress, and thank God I never had one. When there were white mistresses at Poplar Hill, I was in the fields. When I came into the Big House, they were all dead. And you wishing for one? Martha Randolph ain’t enough trouble for you? Let me tell you, daughter, white Southern ladies don’t seem to mind who sleeps with they husbands, but they mighty touchy ‘bout who sleeps with they fathers! I remember my own trials with them Wayleses daughters. Lord! You think a white mistress wouldn’t sell you so quick your head would turn? You and your children? Or kill you? Or maim you? Or ruin that beautiful face? You think it’s never happened before? You think they don’t know what they men doing with their female slaves? You think they believe their slaves gettin’ whiter by contamination? You think because we’re black, they don’t feel jealousy? They love the same way. They birth the same way, and they lusts the same way. Why you think they dress themselves up in all those fine, low-cut gowns? They love their men, and they hate us. Don’t forget that, daughter. There ain’t that much difference between a white and a black female. And,” she added, “in case you wonderin’, ain’t no difference a’tall between white mens and black mens. They all think what they got twixt they legs is Heaven, and what we got twixt ourn is Hell.”
My prison was vast and golden. There were his vegetable gardens, his thousands of fruit trees, his forests full of Virginia pine, birch, oak, and linden.
Monticello was five thousand acres in length and width, and across the river were scattered six thousand more divided between his plantations of Tuffton, Lego, Shadwell, Broadhurst, Pantops, Beaver Creek, and at Martha’s Edgehill. The mountain was enveloped in deep forest, all the way to the clearing at the top, on which the mansion stood, with its lawns and gardens and shade trees. From that point, like the spokes of a wheel, radiated his fields and valleys, his streams and rivers, his tobacco, his cotton, his wheat, his cattle, and his slaves. The forest was threaded as if with silk cords with the forty miles of bridle paths over which my master rode without fail every afternoon. I could see bent backs scattered among the white and green of his lands. He had raced up the mountain to me and now he raced over the hills of Monticello each day always singing. His hands, capable of the most delicate drawings, the most exquisite caresses, now gripped the reins of his thoroughbred horse. He was strong. He was home. He enjoyed his life at Monticello. He read and wrote in the morning, he rode and tended his plantations in the afternoons. His lust for politics had slackened; even his appetite for the newpapers and local gossip had waned.
The great six-foot body had remained the same in leanness and strength through the years. So had his high color. I could now see the beginning of gray in his thick red hair and the lines around his mouth were a little deeper. The heavy-lidded eyes were the same intense sapphire blue I had always known. I wanted to cut off his queue, but he still wore his hair long and tied with a blue ribbon. It fell to his shoulders in loose curls over the fine white cravat I wound every morning around his neck. The only impatience I ever saw him manifest was with his horses. He would subdue them with a whip at the slightest sign of restlessness. He chose his bays for speed and spirit but he mistreated them, making them dangerous animals. I was often frightened. I never really knew if he would come back to me whole or broken to pieces. Apart from that, my master seemed peaceful and content with his life here.
There were twenty-five house slaves on the mountain, not including the blacksmiths, grooms, carpenters, nailery boys, weavers, and shepherds. First there was my mother, Elizabeth Hemings, housekeeper. Of her “dark” Hemingses, there were Martin the butler, and Bett, Nance, and Mary, who were housemaids. Four more of her dark Hemingses had been inherited by my half sister Tabitha Wayles Skipwell. And then there were her “light” Hemingses, whose father had been John Wayles: Robert, James, Peter, Critta, and myself. Of the white Hemingses, Thenia and her children fathered by Samuel Carr, my master’s nephew, were missing, sold to James Monroe. And last year, Robert Hemings had bought his freedom in order to live with his wife in Richmond. Finally there was John Hemings, my mother’s last son and my half brother, whose father was a white carpenter called Nelson. Some of us had children so that there were third-generation Hemings on the mountain as well: Critta’s son Jamey Hemings, whose father was Samuel Carr’s brother, Peter.
And in the hierarchy of slavehood I stood at the pinnacle, even before Elizabeth Hemings, for I was the “favorite,” the untouchable. I was far above the station of the other slaves. Accountable to no one except the master.
“I cornered the bastard!”
I smiled at the recollection of James returning triumphantly from Philadelphia and reading to me the written promise: “That if the said James shall go with me to Monticello in the course of the ensuing winter when I shall go to reside there myself and shall there continue until he shall have taught such person as I shall place under him for the purpose to be a good cook, this previous condition being performed, he shall thereupon be made free and I will thereupon execute all proper instruments to make him free. . . .”
Why was he so childishly proud of that piece of paper? Why hadn’t he simply stolen himself?
“He would have freed you anyway, James,” I said.
“No, he wouldn’t. I’m the best cook in these United States. Even now, he would keep me if he could. He’s kicking himself already over this piece of paper!”
“What will you do, James?”
“The first thing I’ve got to do is cook my last meal at Monticello and get out of here!”
“Who have you chosen?”
“Peter, of course.”
“Good,” I said. “A position as powerful as that shouldn’t go out of the family.”
He looked at me. “You are your mother’s daughter, all right,” he said.
“The master will miss you.”
“I’ve already given him six extra years of my life.
“The master,” he said. “You always call him that even with me. With that French accent of yours. I call the bastard Jefferson or TJ when we are alone or with other slaves, and half the time I call him that to his face if no strangers are present. But I have never heard you refer to him as anything else except ‘the master,’ except that you make it sound like an endearment. . . . No wonder he loves you. If you can take the most ruthless word in the English language and turn it into an expression of love …”
I turned away. It hadn’t been so long ago that he too had called him “master.” Did he really believe that that piece of paper erased a word he had mouthed since he was a child? I knew my brother so well. He was so vulnerable. Let him call my lover bastard if it made him feel better. We were all bastards after all, weren’t we? We stared at each other.
“He is not God, you know.”
“Isn’t he, James?”
“Only God deserves to be loved.”
“That may be so, but once you have loved a man, it is difficult to love God.”
I caught his hand and studied him tenderly.
He was twenty-nine years old now. His beauty had matured. The soft curly hair was denser and thicker. I could no longer remember it with powder. The high-bridged Wayles nose and the perpetual sneer of his perfect mouth gave him a foreign look. His face fascinated women, both black and white, and it was just as well he was leaving this place, I thought. In the years since our return to Monticello, he had made no connection, of this I was sure, although I knew that many overtures had been made to him by women. I wondered, as I already had in Paris, if he had ever loved a woman.
“Je t’aime, Sally,” he said suddenly.
“Ah, darling James. Moi aussi.”
He gave me a kiss, but I felt we were miles apart, countries apart. He will never understand, I thought.
“Help me,” he said.
“Yes,” I answer
ed.
“I need you.”
“I know. If only he didn’t need me more …”
“Are you sure he does?” he asked.
“I think so,” I whispered.
“God help you if you are wrong,” he said.
“And God be with you if you are right, James.”
We saw little of each other after that.
In my mind, he had already gone from this place.
Adrien Petit came back. He had been persuaded by my master to leave his beloved Champagne country and his mother and make the dangerous journey to America. He brought to Monticello a thread that connected Marly and Virginia, a link to past happiness and a promise that more would come. We slipped back into our old relationship, Petit and I. He was kind to me. Though unshockable, he was nonetheless shocked by Virginia. He could not reconcile himself with slavery and slaves.
Thomas Jefferson began to make drawings for a new house which would rise on the foundations of the old mansion, and we were alive with plans and planting. That year Thomas Jefferson even seeded, plowed, and laid out ten thousand cuttings of weeping willow.
He continued to spend a great deal of time on his horse. He even measured his fields for planting on horseback.
Moses worked in the nailery with Bedford John and Bedford Davy, as did the two brothers James, Phill Hubbard, Bartlet, and Lewis. All were young boys between the ages of ten and twelve. The nailery was on Mulberry Row, not more than sixty feet east of the Southern Breezeway and within shouting distance of the mansion; near there was an avenue of stables, slave dwellings, workshops, forges, and storage houses.
The Hemingses who did not stay in the Big House all lived and worked there, along with the white workmen who now thronged the grounds in preparation for the renovations. Naked children mingled among the blacksmiths and the horses. The clanging forges and the nailery were working all day long next to the steady thump of the weavers’ looms where the young girls worked.
In June we began to cut wheat at Shadwell and in early July we cut wheat on this side of the river.
Our reapers were Frank, Martin, Phill, and Tim. Ned, Toby, James, Val, Bagwell, Caesar, and Lewis. The younger boys were George, Peter, and the two Isaacs.
Our gatherers were Isabel, Ned’s Jenny, Lewis, Jenny, Doll, Rachel, Mary, Nancy, O, Betty, Molly, and Lucina and her sisters.
Our stakers were great George, Judy, Hix, Jamy, Barnaby, Davy, and Ben, Iris, Thamer, and Lucinda.
Our cradlers were John, Kit, Patty, the two Lucys, Essex, Tom, Squire, and Goliah.
We treaded at Monticello with seven horses, their flanks turning silver with sweat. The spicy, inexpressible fragrance of bruised and trampled chaff rose on the heavy air, impregnating hair and skin. The hoarse cries of the reapers fluttered over the ocean of not yet harvested grain like the mobs of crows which circled in formation as the stocks rose like sentinels in the half-reaped fields. The earth seemed to roll over and sigh with each slash of the scythe, its voice too, woven into the din of the reapers. All seemed to be of one plan and one motion: the burning sun, the earth turning, the wheat slumping under its own weight. Great George constantly mended the cradles and grinded the scythes that were never still. Their steel glint was visible for miles; flecks of silver paper against the high-noon gold. Each day, Nance, Mary, and I distributed the supplies. For every family unit, we gave out four gallons of whiskey, two quarts of molasses, one smoked and one fresh meat with peas.
We worked. My kin, my fellow slaves and I. We worked from sunup to sundown. We worked so that all, according to my master, would move in exact equilibrium. No part of the force could be lessened without it having an effect on the whole, he said. No hand could be stilled without retarding the scheme of things. And nothing could jeopardize his main design or delay it. This was his law: the vast rolling motion of this human machine moved according to the blueprint he had laid down for it. And if a bent back had straightened and a head shaken sweat like a wet dog, and an eye had stared into the sun, and a mind or a heart wondered if this was the way God meant things to be; my master would have said yes. For wasn’t he God at Monticello? And if one loved the man, one could still hate the God.
We stood there on the mountain, silently savoring our last month of solitude before the August company arrived and Martha and Maria came home. The deep clay gave gently underfoot, tender and softened by the constant spring rain. It would be a wet summer, with twice as many wet days as in other years. A burst of fragrance, from a flowering bush, enveloped us with its sweetness.
My lover came around and stood near me.
“Sally,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders, “however far you can see, it is all Monticello. I solemnly promise you there will never be a white mistress here.”
I pressed myself into the broad chest behind me. My master might own Monticello and my mother might run it, but Monticello was mine. There had been only one white mistress of Monticello, the first Martha, and she was buried at the foot of the mountain under a pale white stone etched in Latin.
There will never be a white mistress here.
The echo of his voice followed me through the gardens, along Mulberry Row, into the workshops of my brothers. I kept hearing that magic promise over and over in my mind through the noise of construction.
There would be no white mistress at Monticello. He had promised.
CHAPTER 25
JULY 1795
Going out into the open air, in the temperate, and in the warm months of the year, we often meet with bodies of warm air, which, passing by us in two or three seconds, do not afford time to the most sensible thermometer to seize their temperature. Judging from my feelings only, I think they approach the ordinary heat of the human body. Some of them perhaps go a little beyond it … but whence taken, where found, or how generated? … They are most frequent about sunset; rare in the middle parts of the day; and I do not recollect having ever met with them in the morning.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1790
… blind obedience is ever sought for by power: tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavor to keep women in the dark, because the former want only slaves and the latter a plaything. The sensualist, indeed, has been the most dangerous of tyrants, and women have been duped by their lovers, as princes by their ministers…
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792
“WHAT DO YOU THINK you’re doing?”
I had not expected him back from his ride for hours. He found me sitting in his room. The only private place in the mansion. I had taken some of my letters out of my secret place and was reading them.
In two strides Thomas Jefferson was upon me.
“I thought I told you to burn my letters.” He was furious. The two familiar lines of rage etched themselves between his eyes. “I don’t want any letters of mine lying around, do you hear me?”
They were not his letters, they were mine. It said so right there in black and white. “Sally Hemings.” My letters were the only thing that existed outside him or myself. Sometimes I didn’t even bother to read them as I knew them by heart. I simply stared at my name.
“I always kept your letters in Paris. In a little silk envelo—”
“Sally, this is Virginia, not Paris! It’s dangerous keeping letters. I told you to burn them. I’ll never write you another letter if you don’t destroy them.”
“I would have to forget you to burn them. I won’t do it.”
“If you won’t, I will.”
He picked up a handful of my letters and strode toward the fireplace.
“You burn those letters, Thomas Jefferson, and you’ll sleep alone.”
He hesitated a moment and then he threw the letters onto the smoldering coals. In a flash I was beside him. I shoved him out of the way. The letters were already going up in flames. I pulled them out with my bare hands.
“Sally! Darling! You’ll burn yourself!”
He lifted me up from my
knees and his heavy boot came down on the flames, until he had stomped out the fire. He then bent and with his own hands pulled the charred letters from the ashes.
“Here are your letters.”
I took them with my good hand.
“At least promise me you’ll burn them when I’m dead,” he pleaded.
“Or when it is over,” I said.
“It will never be over until I’m dead.”
I put the letters in my petticoat pocket.
“You’ve hurt yourself.”
“It’s nothing. I’ll have some blisters tomorrow.”
But a sharp pain shot through my right hand and made me feel faint. Before I fell, he picked me up in his arms and carried me to the bed, where he stared at me for a long time, then slowly his head came down toward me. I reached up with my left hand and untied the ribbon which held his thick hair. The eyes above me were dark. I recognized the pinch of suppressed fury, and in them, as always, the inner turmoil.
I felt myself being lifted and borne toward him. He tugged at my knot and it fell undone in his hands. He gathered my hair like a bouquet into a cushion under my head and locked his hands into it. His lips came down on the white scar at my temple.
The letters. They were all of the fragile self I had so painstakingly built in Paris. And he wanted to burn them. He strove as if he wanted to undo the small part of myself I had managed to build these past years. He didn’t have to remind me that this was Virginia. Virginia. Virginia. And it would be Virginia forever. Virginia. That’s why I clung to my letters. But now we no longer remembered if it was Paris or Virginia.
“What shall we do about your hand?” he asked gently.
“Ask Mama,” I said. When he returned, he had a poultice from Elizabeth Hemings. It smelled of mint and honey. He dressed my hand and let me go to sleep.
Virginia. I knew that what had happened to us could never, never have happened in Virginia.
August brought the girls back. Martha was with child. I was to accompany Maria to her first ball. I looked forward to that evening. As I had not left the confines of Monticello for more than four years, I wanted to see the new fashionable dresses, the carriages, the decorations. I wanted to hear the music, see the latest dance called the mazurka; I had been out of touch with even the small world of Tidewater, Virginia, for too long. I sat with the other servants and watched Maria dance.
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