Sally Hemings

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  Standing outside the Senate House after the ceremony, Burwell and Jupiter at my side, I looked over the now dispersing assembly, trying to recognize friends of my master whom I had seen at one time or another at Monticello. Suddenly I noticed a short, handsome man. He was magnificently dressed, wearing buff, with yellow lace showing at the neck and wrists.

  His curly black hair was pulled back from an abnormally high forehead, the pallor of his skin contrasting with the jet-black hair and eyebrows that were arched in a quizzical expression over deep brown eyes. He headed directly toward us, stopping once or twice to greet people who hailed him, turning swiftly from one side to the other on the balls of his feet in a dancing motion that was most graceful. Finally, he was upon us.

  “Davey Bowles! Jupiter! The imperturbable and good Jupiter! Miss? …”

  “Masta Burr, suh. A glorious day for the Republic, suh. You looking for Masta Jefferson, suh? He went with a group of gentlemen over to the Representative House … suh.”

  Jupiter stepped protectively in front of me as he made his speech. Jupiter was the same commanding height, as well as the same age, as his master. He towered over this Master Burr, who came up to his chest.

  “Why isn’t Bob Hemings here, Jupiter? Where’s that boy?”

  “Robert Hemings, he freed, Masta Burr, suh, like James. He done bought his freedom from Masta Jefferson so’s he could join his wife and his daughter in Richmond, who’s slaves of Master Strauss there. Masta Jefferson, he signed his manumission papers on Christmas Day ’94. He regretted thoroughly leavin’ Masta Jefferson, Masta Burr, but he jus’ couldn’t prevail upon hisself to give up his wife and his daughter.”

  “Well, I wish him well, Jupiter.”

  “Yassuh.”

  Aaron Burr didn’t take his eyes off me. He waited patiently, apparently used to Jupiter’s evasions, and said nothing.

  Finally, Jupiter, after more rambling conversation that astounded me by its servility, gave in.

  “This here child, she’s a servant of Masta Jefferson, too. She’s a Hemings, and Burwell here is her nephew. She’s called Sally Hemings of Monticello,” Jupiter added unnecessarily. It was the longest speech about me that I had ever heard Jupiter make.

  “Another Hemings of Monticello! Good God, how many of you are there in this family? And how is James, by the way? I heard he went back to France. Mr. Jefferson’s dinner parties haven’t been the same since. As a matter of fact, he has spent the last year trying to steal other people’s cooks! And this girl, surely she’s not a field hand now, is she?”

  “She’s mistress of Masta Jefferson’s wardrobe, suh,” Jupiter replied grandly.

  This man called Aaron Burr turned his black and burning gaze on me as if I were standing before him naked.

  “The … mistress … of … Thomas … Jefferson’s wardrobe … Jupiter?” he uttered slowly.

  His eyebrows arched almost up to the hairline of his wide high forehead and gave him the appearance of Satan himself. His eyes raked me with such a mixture of contempt and lewdness that my blood turned cold. Never had a man looked at me thus. I was trembling. When I met his gaze he insolently held it. He threw back his head and laughed—a high, tinkling, peculiar laugh that was most unpleasant. I decided then and there that I detested Master Aaron Burr.

  “From the way he dresses, Jupiter, I didn’t think he had a wardrobe, let alone a mistress of it. Except for today,” he added, “as he is looking most elegant in French blue, possibly because he has his mistress here to dress him …”

  I felt Jupiter tense.

  “Je vous en prie, Monsieur. Je suis la femme de chambre de Mademoiselle Maria Jefferson,” I interrupted coldly in French. I don’t know why I did it. I was flushed with anger and I was glad my face was half-hidden by my hat. Master Burr was as astonished as if a dog had started to speak Latin.

  “Ah! Que je fus inspirée. . . .”

  “Quand je vous recus dans ma cour,” I replied.

  It was the first lines from an aria that Piccinni, the singing tutor to Marie-Antoinette, had written. Marie-Antoinette was rumored to have sung it in public to her lover, the Count Fersen, at one of the famous parties at Trianon. It had been made into a limerick by the Parisian populace. Everyone who had been in Paris just before the Revolution knew it by heart. I couldn’t help smiling at his astonishment, and he smiled back at me; a wide, handsome wicked grin. I blushed, sorry that I had smiled at him despite myself.

  “Vous parley très bien le français,” he said with his heavy American accent. “Vous avez bien dit, une servants de Maître Jefferson? C’est a dire, une esclave?”

  “Oui, Monsieur,” I replied.

  He looked questioningly at Jupiter, then at Burwell, neither of whom answered since they had not understood what we had said. Burwell too had put his “don’t-ask-me-I-just-a-poor-darky” expression on his smooth golden-brown face.

  “Eh bien, ton maître a tant de choses à célèbrer en plus de son poste comme vice-président...”

  “Que Dieu le protège dans sa tâche,” I replied, curtsying low and in the French manner.

  “Bien dit—well said, indeed. That God protect him. From his enemies and his friends.”

  So this was my master’s rival, I thought, the rich and famous lawyer from New York, Aaron Burr. I loathed him.

  “Burwell, take your aunt out of this mob. Jupiter … Davey, Mademoiselle Hemings of Monticello …” Again he drew out the words sarcastically.

  Outrage filled my breast. If I had been white, he would not have dared address me so, servant or no servant. Despite my rage, I curtsied low, and to my surprise, he bowed expertly. He spun on his heels in a curious dancing movement and walked jauntily away. He spoiled the effect, however, by looking over his shoulder at me, and promptly bumped into a tall handsome man who, Jupiter whispered, was Alexander Hamilton. The comic effect of the formidable Master Burr falling over himself in his attempt to get a last look at me didn’t dispel my hatred, nor the sense of dread the crowd had evoked in me. “Enemies”? I had thought that in all this great crowd there were only friends and followers of my master. Who could be an enemy of Thomas Jefferson and why? Who could wish him any harm? Certainly my master had complained at times about the envy and the malice of political life, but mortal enemies seemed impossible to conceive. Master Jefferson, the absolute ruler of Monticello, was so gentle, so serene. He was surrounded by love. Could he be surrounded here by people and forces he could not control? People that could thwart his will as easily as he could that of his servants? I thought of the newspaper articles I had read in the past few days. Yes, there were people here he could not rule, could not order, could not even fight or convince, who were as intelligent, as rich, as powerful as he. There were friends whose support he would need to seek. Mysterious enemies from whom he had to defend or protect himself. And, above all, there was the “public”: that dangerous and volatile mass that one could call neither friend nor enemy, for it could change from one day to the next. And this “public” had been given the name “The People” by their government, thereby making it one body, one will, the sole source of power that the great sought with such tenacity. “The People” now stood milling around the blood-red courtyard; “The People” brushed up against Jupiter, Burwell, and me as we stood to one side of our carriage. “The People” could destroy my master. And if my master was destroyed, what would become of me? It was then that I understood that my master’s enemies were mine as well. That, in this white world, I had nothing but enemies.

  “Jupiter, I’m going into the carriage. I feel faint.”

  As Jupiter helped me into the carriage, he said, “I expect that Thomas Jefferson don’t want you out here minglin’ with this mob, being scrutinized. I don’t think he’d like the idea of you being exposed to this riffraff. He expected you to go home after the ceremony. You can see there ain’t no ladies here.” With that he slammed the door of the carriage.

  “ … and, I told him, my inclination would never perm
it me to cross the Atlantic again.”

  I stared at him. With one willful declaration, the spoken and unspoken promises of the last eight years were broken. All my dreams of ever returning to France had vanished. Even now, with James gone without me, and with two children to raise, buried deep, I had always hoped to return to Marly. Now that subject was closed forever.

  Three days after the inauguration, my master, accompanied by Jupiter, went to a dinner given by Master Washington. Despite hopes by everybody of a reconciliation between him and the new president, Adams, it had been evident at the dinner that their relations were so cold and so singular as to foment gossip even among the servants in the kitchens. Servants industriously discussed every aspect of the political situation. They sometimes seemed to have more information than the actual participants in the feuds and intrigues that evolved. Jupiter was not surprised, therefore, when his master returned from the dinner in a rare rage that only he and I were ever permitted to witness.

  His face was flushed way beyond its usually high color, and he tore at his cravat so brutally that he practically strangled himself. His long legs paced the floor of the tiny room, shaking the floorboards, and his voice trembled with anger.

  “The first and only thing John Adams proposed to me was that I return to France!”

  He then let out a stream of imprecations against his old friend Adams; against Hamilton, Knox, Pickering, Burr, and the others. They were all against him. I memorized the names. So, I thought, these were my master’s “enemies.” In great agitation, he called for Jupiter to get a horse saddled, then changed his mind. He sat down long enough for me to pull off his boots. He stood up in his stocking feet and let loose another string of insults.

  “If John Adams and his inherited Federalist cabinet think they can shut me out of the government, they had best think again!”

  His huge fist came down on a small table beside the bed, smashing it to pieces.

  My brief excursion into white America was over.

  When we returned up the mountain, from Philadelphia, the mountain was in bloom.

  He stayed home for almost the whole year.

  At the end of the following summer, Maria Jefferson married her cousin Eppes in a small ceremony, amidst the demolition work going on over our very heads at Monticello. The couple would reside at Bermuda Hundred, more than a hundred miles away. For her wedding, her father gave Maria twenty-six slaves, seventy-eight horses, pigs, and cows, as well as eight hundred acres. Our good-byes were tender, for Polly had always treated me as a friend. We had managed to forge an unwritten truce that placed our love for her father as security against our love for each other. There were no secrets between us. When I showed her the room connected with that of her father’s, her sigh of relief was as great as mine.

  “Oh, Sally, how very nice!”

  “He changed his apartments last year to accommodate it, and Joe and John are building the staircase.”

  “It means you no longer have to cross the public hall to enter and leave.”

  We never mentioned why this new arrangement would be better for all concerned. Nor would she ever mention this new arrangement to her father or ever allude to it.

  “Remember, in Paris,” I said, “all the secret stairways and rooms in the mansion? How we would imagine romantic stories about them?”

  “We were so young in Paris,” Polly said.

  “You still are, Mistress. Seventeen is a wonderful age. . . .”

  I had a safe harbor at last. But a mother is never safe. My master had been home for almost five months, Polly was still on her honeymoon, when rumors of an epidemic spreading up from Charlottesville struck terror in the heart of every mother, black or white. Both Tom and Harriet fell ill. Martha’s daughters were sick at Edgehill, as well as half a dozen slave children. During the next weeks, we worked without sleep, nursing the children, Martha traveling back and forth between Edgehill and Monticello. Dulled by exhaustion, shedding bitter tears, Martha and I watched my little Harriet, only two summers old, slowly suffocate to death.

  I laid her next to Edy, in the slave cemetery. Four of his white children lay under their stones in the white cemetery. The dividing line did not even stop at the grave. But what did it change? They were all his children, and they were all dead.

  Harriet’s death brought me low, undermining the fragile movements of still another new life in my womb. The winter reminded me of Paris in ’88, long and cold and nothing like normal Virginia winters, with candles burning in the afternoon, keeping everyone, slave and white, indoors. My first-born, Tom, survived, and I clung to him with all the desolation I felt that winter.

  Martha, who had lost a daughter at the same time I had lost Edy, raced back to Edgehill and her children in mortal fear, leaving me alone.

  Only one living child left, except the one in my body. I kept Tom indoors the whole winter, never letting his sturdy red-headed figure out of my sight. My heart pounded at every cough, stopped at every complaint.

  At the end of March, I sent word that my time was approaching. A few days later, a sofa came made of fine mahogany with carved legs and back in the Jacobean style; a feather mattress and down coverlet of silk arrived as well. He had not forgotten me. When I wrote that I was safely delivered of a boy, the reply came back, “Name him Beverly,” and I did.

  Not long afterward, a harpsichord arrived from Philadelphia. Martha came up from Edgehill to see it almost immediately. I looked with envy on her four healthy children. I too would have had four …

  “It is for Maria, you know.”

  “Yes, so I understand.”

  Martha didn’t mention the fact that Maria no longer lived at Monticello, but away at Bermuda Hundred. I was delighted with the harpsichord.

  “It is a charming one, I think,” she said, “but certainly inferior to mine.”

  She was looking not at the harpsichord, but at the white, blond, blue-eyed slave child I held in my arms … her half brother.

  CHAPTER 29

  MONTICELLO, OCTOBER 1800

  What security for domestic purity and peace there can be where every man has had two connections, one of which must be concealed; and two families. . . .

  HARRIET MARTINEAU, Society in America, 1837

  The organ of justice, is the couple considered as a personal duality, forming by the contrast of attributes a complex being, the social embryo. . . . Nature in man and woman is not by consequence, the same. Moreover, it is through him that the conscience of both of them opens onto justice, each one becomes for the other at the same time witness, judge and a second self. Being in two personages, this couple is the real human subject.

  PROUDHON, Pornocracy or Women in Modern Time [published in 1875]

  The Richmond Jail, Sept. 13, 1800

  SIR,

  Nothing is talked of here but the recent conspiracy of the Negroes. One Nicholas Prosser, a young man who had fallen heir, sometime ago, to a plantation within six miles of the city, had behaved with great barbarity to his slaves. One of them, named Gabriel, a fellow of courage and intellect above his rank in life, laid a plan of revenge. Immense numbers immediately entered into it, and it has been kept with incredible secrecy for several months. A number of swords were made in a clumsy enough manner out of rough iron; others by breaking the blade of a scythe in the middle, which thus made two swords of a most formidable kind. They were well fastened in proper handles, and would have cut off a man’s limb at a single blow. The conspirators were to have met in a wood near Prosser’s house, upon Saturday before last, after it was dark. Upon that day, or some very short time before it, notice was received by a fellow, who being invited, somewhat unguardedly, to go to the rendezvous, refused, and immediately informed his master’s overseer. No ostensible preparations were, however, made until the afternoon preceding the night of the rendezvous, and as the militia are in a state of the most contemptible disorganization, as the blacks are numerous, robust, and desperate, there must have been bloody work. But upon tha
t very evening, just about sunset, there came on the most terrible thunderstorm, accompanied with an enormous rain, that I ever witnessed in this state. Between Prosser’s and Richmond, there is a place called Brook Swamp, which runs across the high road and over which there was a bridge. By this the Africans were of need to pass, and the rain had made the passage impracticable. Besides they were deprived of the junction and assistance of their good friends in the city, who could not go out to join them. They were to have attacked the Capital and the penitentiary. They could hardly have failed of success, for after all, we only could muster four or five hundred men of whom not more than thirty had muskets. This was our state of preparation while several thousand stands of arms were piled up in the Capital and penitentiary. I do not pretend to blame the executive council, for I really am not sufficiently master of the circumstances to form an opinion. Five fellows were hung this day and many more will share the same fate. This plan was to massacre all the whites, of all ages and sexes, and all the blacks who would not join them; and then march off to the mountains with the plunder of the city. Those wives who should refuse to accompany their husbands were to have been butchered along with the rest, an idea truly worthy of any African heart. It convicts with my knowledge that many of the wretches, who were, or would have been, partners in the plot, have been treated with the utmost tenderness by their owners and more like children than slaves. …

  I read through the rest of the letter, which dealt with general political opinions, and to the name of the sender: Thomas T. Callender. I fixed the name in my mind, then handed the letter my master had asked me to read back to him.

  “I suppose you already know all about it,” the familiar voice added with something like sadness.

  Indeed, the slave intelligence had brought the news long before now, and the story of Gabriel Prosser was already legend.