Sally Hemings

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  She liked Martha and wished her well, but her departure from Monticello had been a great relief. It left Sally Hemings mistress and, through her, she, Elizabeth Hemings, continued to rule. Elizabeth Hemings bumped into Big George.

  “How’s ol’Jimmy holdin’ up?” He smiled at her. “You’d think this here’s a daughter’s weddin’ the way Masta Jefferson a carryin’ on.”

  “It ain’t every day that the masta goes around freeing people, Big George. He ain’t been none too generous with this here freedom you might say.” Elizabeth Hemings smiled wickedly. Her son Robert was the only other slave she knew of that Thomas Jefferson had ever freed, and he had bought his freedom with borrowed money.

  “Bett and Queenie out there, Big George,” she called after him. “You get them to help you get out all that heavy silver, you hear? Get it all out. Sally tends to dress a table tonight you ain’t never seen the likes of!”

  When Elizabeth Hemings entered the hall of the west portico, she found her daughter on her hands and knees, arranging the velvet drapery and the presents at the foot of the Christmas tree. With characteristic quickness of movement, Sally Hemings spun on her heels and was on her feet by the time her mother reached her side. She was now twenty-two years old, and twice a mother.

  “Everything is ready for tomorrow, Maman.”

  Elizabeth Hemings nodded at her beautiful daughter and winced at her “Maman.” She had affected it ever since her return from France, and Elizabeth Hemings didn’t like it. She had never dared tell her daughter this, however, so she continued to sprinkle her conversation with French expressions. Elizabeth looked up at the immense tree.

  It was the tallest Virginia pine they could find on the slopes of Monticello, and it almost toppled over with the weight of the decorations, many of which her master had brought back from France. The French had taken up the Anglo-Saxon habit of decorating Christmas trees with a fervor and imagination that had outshone the often modest homemade decorations that were traditional in the United States. The French decorations gleamed like jewels and were the special joy of her daughter, who had taken it upon herself every year to trim the tree. The delicate silk balls with their silver pom-poms, the crystal snowdrops and lace snowflakes and the spun sugar James had spent a whole day creating, mingled with the cloved oranges and the pine cones. The top of the tree touched the ceiling of the entrance hall where tomorrow the white family and all the house servants would gather around after dinner for the distribution of presents.

  “Tomorrow is going to be one happy day, daughter.”

  “Oh, Maman, James will be free at last! If it hadn’t been for me, he would have been free years ago. I … I was so sure that things were going to turn out differently.”

  And what about you? Elizabeth Hemings wanted to say, but she held her tongue.

  “How’s little Harriet?”

  “She’s fine, Maman. I just left Suzy’s cabin. She had finished nursing.” Her daughter’s dimples flashed in a quick smile of excuse. Elizabeth Hemings was silent. She loathed the fact that her daughter would not nurse Harriet. Her daughter knew this. She had given her to a newly delivered young slave who worked in the cotton mill to wet-nurse while she bound up her breasts in the French fashion to get rid of the milk.

  “Bring her into the house, daughter. She can sleep with me. I’ll get John to bring in her cradle. Suzy can come in to nurse hers and yours together.”

  “But I enjoy …” Sally Hemings began.

  “Now, daughter, it’s decided.” Elizabeth Hemings had spoken.

  Sally Hemings dropped to her knees to straighten a fold of velvet drapery at the foot of the tree. She had no intentions of giving up Suzy’s nursing.

  “Let Big George do that, Sally,” Thomas Jefferson’s musical voice rang out behind them as he strode into the hall from his study.

  “I much prefer to do it myself, Master. The crystal snowflakes from Paris are so delicate, and we can’t get any more. I found some we didn’t use last year. Martha will be so surprised. . . .”

  “And how is Harriet?”

  “Harriet is fine, Master. I’ve just come from her.”

  Elizabeth Hemings turned away. The look she caught between the two people embarrassed her. She didn’t understand it. She never would.

  Christmas Day that year of 1795 was warm and sunny. It was almost four o’clock when Big George and Martin slipped away from the dining room, where the white people were lingering over the last meal James would cook at Monticello. He had helped me light the hundred Christmas tree candles. James, Ursula, Peter, and my mother were in the kitchens laboring over and admiring this last triumph of James: the rich turtle soup. James had made one of his specialties: a roast pork, fragrant with fresh herbs, garnished with its own deep-fried chitterlings, walnuts, and mushrooms. The meal continued with pigeons and pheasant baked in a pastry. An endless succession of vegetable platters followed. James had outdone himself. All kinds of pies ended the feast, along with profiteroles and the fashionable new French dessert: ice cream. Toasts of fine Burgundy and clarets, more groans, cries for the “Chef,” and the meal ended.

  There had been eighteen white people at the table with as many servants, one behind each chair for this special dinner. When the banquet was over, the company filed in from the dining room, flushed and happy. Big George gathered all the servants and the increasingly homesick Petit for the celebrations that were to follow. The children of the house, both black and white, were holding on to their mothers or their nurses. Although part of the house was already being torn down, the central hallway was still intact; its pale-blue damask gleamed in the reflected candles we had just finished lighting. The late-afternoon sun and the glow of the Christmas-tree candles imparted a golden haze to the entire company. The sculptured busts of Voltaire, Lafayette, and Washington seemed to be staring down from their pedestals.

  I stood to the left of the master, with the other slaves in a semicircle. Martha stood to the right of her father, the white people curving in an arc to her right completing the circle.

  Outside the sun was setting. The plantation slaves were gathering two hundred strong. Their good-natured conversations wafted through the glass doors of the vestibule toward the circle around the pile of packages. The black half of the circle faced the other half, the white half that was in turn closed by Martin and the ten-year-old Michael Brown, son of George Wythe and his freed mulatto mistress, Lydia Broadnax, His father had acknowledged him publicly as his freed slave, son of his housekeeper. All of Albemarle County, however, knew the truth, for he did nothing to hide either his pride or his love for his only son. Michael had been brought so that he could enjoy the celebrations and stuff himself with Christmas dinner with the other slave children in the kitchens.

  As I stood, the two-month-old Harriet in my arms, the five-year-old Thomas Hemings clutching my skirts, I became only one in the web of blood ties that weaved itself in and across and around the two parts of the circle, binding one half to the other in arabesques as twisted and complicated as the hanging strands of silver cord on the tree above us. My mother had gathered nine of her fourteen children; facing her were two of Master Wayles’s daughters. Elizabeth Hemings was either mother, stepmother, grandmother, aunt, or great-aunt to practically everyone present. To those she was not actually related to by blood, she was related to by bonds of property. This kingdom was hers, and she ruled as queen mother, a force of life to be revered and reckoned with by both black and white. She had loved, reared, nursed, birthed, served each person in this room.

  There were no secrets for her here, neither heart nor body that she did not hold the key to—just as her iron ring held the key to every room and closet in Monticello. In her arms was one of Martha Jefferson’s children.

  My eyes went now to the white side of the circle and my two half sisters, Tabitha Wayles Skipwell and Elizabeth Wayles Eppes. It was Elizabeth who had sent me to Paris with Polly Jefferson so long ago. I caught the eye of Martha, standing next to her
husband, Thomas Mann, whom she had loved for such a short time and who was now sinking into the melancholy which would lead him to insanity. Had she rushed into marriage, two months after we arrived from Paris, in order to escape me and her father’s connection with me? I wondered. If so, she had been mistaken in her father’s hold upon her, for though she lived at Edgehill, forty miles away, she clung to Monticello. Pity rose in me as I surveyed Thomas Mann Randolph. His bulk was growing with each year, along with his violent temper that had become legend in Virginia. His drinking sometimes sent his desperate wife and children scurrying to safety at Monticello. He was now looking at his wife with that same baffled, expectant expression with which my brother had sometimes looked at me. They both knew no other man would ever supplant Thomas Jefferson in either her heart or mine. And it was driving Martha’s husband crazy.

  Next to Thomas Mann stood James Madison, small, round, birdlike, timid, and insignificant—a schoolteacher dressed for a funeral, Elizabeth Hemings once said. He gazed in silent adoration at his unexpected prize, his bride the widow Dolley Todd. It was said that Madison—to his great surprise—had captured his new bride from the attentions of Aaron Burr. She stood beside him, resplendent in rose satin trimmed in silver, a gray chiffon scarf was tucked into the low-cut bodice that revealed a splendid bosom, and her eyes roamed restlessly over the assembly, not liking very much what she saw.

  James Madison, I thought, was a real politician. He would succeed where my master—fastidious, uncompromising, stubborn, proud—never would. Politicians, I had long decided, should not be very bright, or at least should not think very much. And, I thought, if I were free … I gazed at the glorious Dolley Madison. She reminded me of certain French ladies I had observed. There was the same cynicism hidden under the soft feminine manner, the same ability to manipulate, even this rustic company, to shine, and put herself in the best light. There was a sharp mind behind her pretty appearance. She had, I sensed, the ambition to succeed. Dolley Madison would succeed because she had no competition. And envy, mingled with the constant ache of my own deprivation, invaded me.

  My dress. It was four years old, the last of the dresses from Madame Dupré. I gazed at the emeralds glistening in the earlobes of James Madison’s wife and at the matching bracelet on her plump arm. A wife, I thought. A real wife. Recognition. Nothing delineated me from the other servants except my position of honor next to the master, the tiny ruby earrings fastened in my ears, and the heavy silver locket around my neck. I lifted my chin.

  George Wythe looked proudly at his mulatto son, who had the same round face, the same soft intelligent eyes as his father. Michael Brown was splendidly dressed, in the Quaker fashion, his shorts in buff with white stockings. His long brown uncut curls reached his shoulders and hung loose, giving him an angelic, princely look. My mother adored him and envied his education. He excelled in Latin and Greek, mathematics and astronomy taught him by George Wythe, who was determined to prove him brilliant not only beyond his color and station but beyond his age as well, and there was the wanness of overwork about his face.

  Next to Master Wythe stood Polly, and next to her our cousin Jack Eppes. From the frightened child I had escorted to Paris and the uncertain adolescent that had returned with me, Maria had become the serious and remote beauty who stood timidly beside the man she deeply loved, and had been afraid to tell her father she wished to marry.

  All last year, after her return from Philadelphia, I had nursed her through illness after illness. She had inherited the health of her mother, and her delicacy. Her mother had loved and accepted my mother and her children as part of her inheritance. For Maria, too, the Hemingses had always been a part of her life, and she had long ago acknowledged that still another Hemings, the one she loved best, held a permanent place in the affections of her father.

  It was Petit who now joined the circle between Martin and George Wythe, unwittingly attaching the white half of the circle with the black. Our eyes met. Affection? Pity? Horror at this Monticellian “family”? He shrugged and with a wry smile looked at Martin, his black equivalent.

  Thomas Hemings tugged at my skirt and his father’s hand came down on his head in a caress.

  My brother moved next to me. I shifted two-month-old Harriet, whom I held in my arms and reached down for his hand. It was cold. He was trembling violently. I increased the pressure of my hand in his, hoping to quiet him while the distribution of the presents went on. Then I registered the movement the other side of me. My master began to speak. He began to announce what I couldn’t, yet must, believe: the emancipation of my brother. James had won. He was being given at last what he had vowed never to steal. But the speech was ringing with phrases which under the circumstances were self-righteous and pompous. I felt humiliation for James and embarrassment for my master.

  James’s mouth twitched downward as he whispered to me, “I should have blackmailed him years ago … I notice he doesn’t mention anything about back pay.” James’s salary had stopped the moment he set foot in Virginia. “This morning he gave me thirty dollars and a horse.”

  “ … with a flare of genius for the culinary arts and the temperament—or I should say the temper—that goes with it...” Thomas Jefferson was finishing his speech, “he has served me faithfully, devotedly, and unselfishly in his craft and art, and I am loath to part with him. He shall ever have in my heart and my affections a special place, just as his brother Robert does for all of us here, and I am sure there is not a person present that does not wish him every happiness in his new and justly deserved … freedom!”

  I looked up at my brother, who was almost as tall as my master. This ceremony, I had been shaken to find, not only released him from his long bondage as a slave but from the bonds of a vow which had kept him in chastity all these years. It had been last summer when I had finally gotten the courage to ask him about a wife. He had laughed in my face. “Since when do slaves marry?”

  “A wife is a wife whether she is married or not.”

  “You think I would spill my seed as a slave! To father other slaves! You think I would enrich some white master by breeding more slaves for him. If I spill it, it will be as a free man who can father free children. This I vowed long ago. In Paris. I vowed I would never touch a woman as a slave. My life has been celibate, sister,” he had said. “I have never known a woman.”

  I looked now into those clear eyes. They looked over my head to hold those of his ex-master, in a gaze of such love and hatred that Martha and I, the only persons present whose eyes had not strayed from James Hemings, lowered our heads over our respective babes in arms.

  Thomas Jefferson was thoroughly moved by his own speech. He blinked back his tears and turned away from James. Petit, to Thomas Jefferson’s surprise, was crying. He felt a small hand on his sleeve.

  “They are waiting for you, Master,” a voice said softly just as the excited drone from outside swelled into a babble of cries: “Presents! Presents! Master. Master …” He gave the signal for the company to pass through the glass doors of the hall onto the west portico and stand facing the multitude gathering in front, as a cry—half-cheer, half-plea—went out from the throng of slaves, now jumping up and down in anticipation and cold.

  Sally Hemings and Martha started to distribute the Christmas bundles. Martha handed out the clothes. His slave wife handed out the presents, the sweets, the cider, and whisky.

  The lines seemed never ending, yet Thomas Jefferson knew that his Farm Book was mightily depleted of the names of many of his slaves. Secretly, he had had to sell more than a hundred slaves to cover outstanding debts that went back twenty years, and still the end was not in sight. He had been forced to sell Elk Hill—the estate he had wanted to give to Maria as a wedding present—for ready cash. The debts he had undertaken had mounted, with accumulated interest, to an unbearable load. In desperation, he had sold slave upon slave to meet the claims upon him. His son-in-law had attended to the details, so that nowhere did his name appear on the sale of hi
s property. Yet the results had been disappointing. He had averaged only about forty pounds a slave; there had been a time when a good Negro had brought upward of two hundred. He had even been compelled to break up one family, something he hated to do, simply because the male was too valuable and essential. He had asked his brother Randolph to buy the wife and children or, failing that, to sell them to some good master in the vicinity, so that they might remain near their husband and father. No others, he had instructed, were to be sold under any circumstances, in the immediate neighborhood.

  Thomas Jefferson looked out with emotion over the heads of his slaves. There would soon be a mortgage on all of them in order to finance the rebuilding of Monticello.

  I always had a fancy for a closet with a window I could more peculiarly call my own.

  ABIGAIL ADAMS, 1776

  CHAPTER 27

  SPRING 1796

  I BENT OVER the fine-lined drawings on the blue-squared French architectural paper of my master’s new plans for Monticello. I leaned over his shoulder as he explained to me how he was to change my house. Now was my chance to ask for what I wanted. The demolition had already begun, with his workmen prying loose three to four thousand bricks a day; the noise, the confusion, and even the danger at times resulted in achieving what war and revolution had never been able to produce in my mother. She would cry every day. Most of the household was camping out. Only his bedroom and study had any semblance of order, and it was here, before his drawing table, that he was seated while I stood behind him, my arms about his neck on a fine spring day. He had made great plans for his house. He had in mind to remove the second-story attic and spread all the rooms on a single floor. In place of the attic, he wanted an octagonal dome, like the one on the Hôtel de Salem in Paris that we had visited so many times. Around the interior of this dome would be a mezzanine balcony, thus providing privacy for the bedrooms intended for his white family. In his own apartments on the ground floor, he envisioned a double-height ceiling with a skylight and a bed alcove between the bedchamber and the study accessible to both, and with a passage between them. To do this, he must demolish the fireplaces that stood where his bed would stand.