Sally Hemings

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  Davey Bowles had brought the first news and told me of the uprising. Gabriel Prosser and Jack Bowler had been the leaders of the insurrections. Gabriel, a handsome, twenty-four-year-old giant of six-foot-three and his comrade Jack, three inches taller and four years older, had organized more than a thousand men in Henrico County. Brilliant and literate, he had carefully planned his rebellion. Gabriel’s wife, Nanny, had been active as well, as were his brothers Solomon and Martin. They had all been betrayed by a fellow servant called Ben Wolfolk, who had heard of the conspiracy through two loose-mouthed slaves, George Smith and Samuel Bird. The insurrection was to have taken place on the first of September; the rendezvous for the rebels had been a brook six miles from Richmond. Eleven hundred men were to have assembled there and were to have been divided into three columns. All were to have marched to Richmond under the cover of night.

  The rebels had counted heavily on the French, whom they had understood to be at war with the United States, for the money that was due them, and that a warship, which would help them, had landed at South Key. If successful in this first stage, the penitentiary in Richmond had enough arms, the powderhouse was well stocked, the capital contained the state treasury, the mills would give them bread, the control of the bridge across the James River would keep off enemies from beyond. Thus secured, they had planned to issue a proclamation summoning to their standard of red silk, with the words “Liberty or Death” printed on it, their fellow slaves and humanitarian whites. In a week, they had estimated they would have had fifty thousand rebels and could have taken other towns. In case of failure, they were to retreat into the mountains, as the rebellious slaves of Santo Domingo had done.

  There had been intimations all summer of insurrection in Richmond, and the white table talk had been ominous with it. Yet the attack itself had surprised and shaken them. Why? I wondered, when they all lived, black and white, with this threat every day of every year. The whites had been surprised and unprepared. Only treachery had prevented success—treachery and God, for the appointed day had been prey to the most furious storm ever known to Virginia’s memory. Why? I asked myself again and again. A tempest had burst upon the land instead of insurrection. The governor of Virginia, Master Monroe, had called in the United States Cavalry and the hangings had begun. I looked at the date on the letter. It was already outdated. Gabriel Prosser was already dead. Captured by treachery on a schooner in Norfolk, he had been brought back to Richmond in chains. There he had manifested the utmost composure and taking all the responsibility onto himself, had conducted himself as a hero, and had made no confession. Now, I looked at a fourth letter. Master Monroe was writing to Thomas Jefferson for advice. How to stop the hangings? More than thirty-five had gone to the gallows, and the Richmond jails were groaning with prisoners. They had suspended the trials. If they hanged everybody, they would annihilate the blacks in that part of the country.

  “I think there has been enough hanging.”

  Why, when he kept so many things from me, did he want to share this particular burden? Did I not already have enough to bear? He knew that I could never come down on his side in this.

  My lover looked at me with surprise.

  “You know about the hangings?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know how many?”

  “Rumor has it forty or fifty, with hundreds waiting to be tried.”

  “Governor Monroe doesn’t know what to do. Here, look at this.”

  I read Master Monroe’s letter.

  “All I can say is,” I said, “you can’t kill every slave in Virginia.”

  He got up from his desk and came toward me. “No,” he said slowly, “you can’t kill every one.” He took the letter from my hands and went back to his desk. “When to stay the hand of the executioner is an important question. Those who have escaped from immediate danger must have feelings which dispose them to extend the executions. . . .”

  “I still say there’s been hanging enough. You can’t kill everyone.”

  I thought of the new seed planted in my womb. A new slave.

  “You must understand,” I began, “they are not felons or common malefactors, but persons guilty of what our society obliges us to treat as a crime, and which their feelings represent in a far different shape—”

  “I know this,” he interrupted. He was turned away from me, the frightened, imploring letter of Master Monroe still in his hand.

  He turned toward me but did not approach. He was afraid of me. He could forget in private, but he could never forget in public.

  More to himself than to me, he said, “It is certain that the world at large will forever condemn us if we indulge or go one step beyond necessity.”

  At the word “necessity,” I looked into his eyes but said nothing.

  “Our situation is indeed a difficult one,” he continued, “for I doubt if those people can ever be permitted to go at large among us with safety.”

  “Then exile them! The French and British do so,” I begged. “Those people” were my people! Even as we spoke, he forgot. Banishment. Was that not James’s choice? I pressed my palms to my womb. If I could save one … just one of them.

  “I have thought of it,” he said. “Surely the legislature would pass a law for their exportation, the proper measure as you have pointed out on this, and … all similar occasions.”

  I thought again of Gabriel Prosser. He had died on the gallows with ten of his men and with hundreds in the Richmond jail waiting to be tried and hanged, but they, the slaves, didn’t believe it. Already there was a song that had started somewhere on some plantation, and was now winging from slave quarter to slave quarter. Prosser, the song went, didn’t die on the gallows, but escaped with the help of a young slave boy named Billy. He lived to rise again. We were not about to let Gabriel Prosser die. He would rise again. Another black man would rise to take his place just as he had at Santo Domingo. My master looked down into my eyes.

  “Exile them,” I whispered.

  Relief broke over his face. “Thank you,” he said, and his eyes were filled with an ineffable tenderness. He, for the first time in his life, had a glimpse of the terror of slavehood and loving me he had acknowledged this terror. On this mountain, his eyes seemed to say, we can hold everything at bay, even this.

  Shyly he reached out and touched me. He still seemed afraid of me. “Let me work now,” he said.

  I suffered his touch, but my mind was ablaze. There were so many things I wanted to say.

  I turned and left him to his letters. I climbed the miniature stairs at the foot of his bed to my room. It was not until my master had left for Philadelphia, the balloting for the presidency still in doubt, that I heard that the last of Gabriel’s condemned rebels had been reprieved and banished from Virginia by James Monroe.

  I had not pleaded in vain.

  CHAPTER 30

  OCTOBER 1800

  JAMES CAME HOME. He had arrived from France more than a year ago, and we dreamed to hold him at Monticello until the summer. He had seen his ex-master in Philadelphia.

  “Thomas Jefferson says my journeys will end up on the moon! If only it could be so, for I am tired of this earth and its inhabitants!”

  “When did you see him? How is he?”

  My brother looked at me in disgust.

  “He is fine. Embroiled in politics, as usual, and complaining about it, as usual. Burwell sends his love. Your master has no stomach to govern men. He says, ‘I leave to others the sublime delight of riding the storm, better pleased with sound sleep and a warm berth below, with the society of neighbors, friends, and fellow laborers of the earth, than of spies and sycophants. . . .’ So, I guess he misses you, sister. He can’t decide whether he wants to be vice-president or not. Certainly, according to the newspapers and the backstairs, they are giving him a hard time. He looked so worried and despondent, I proposed that he join me on my next voyage to Spain to forget his troubles.”

  “Spain!”

  Both Elizabeth H
emings and I exclaimed at the same time. We were sitting in one of the cellars next to the kitchens where it was cool. We had stuffed James with everything good we could find to eat in the pantries. He was wearing the latest French fashions and looked splendid. Men no longer wore breeches, but long pants, slender, and tight, and tucked in tall boots. The colors had changed as well—no more rose satin or pale-blue silk. Frock coats were shorter, fuller, in dark colors with high collars and white linen swathed the chest and neck up to the ears. James no longer wore his hair long; it was cropped short in a mass of curls.

  “But why Spain?” we asked.

  “And why not Spain? As I told your master, it is the only country not fighting, or getting ready to fight, with France! Don’t think that France is any party since the Revolution; we had only the beginnings of it that October of eighty-nine, and the stories we’ve heard here are nothing compared to the reality. When I arrived in France, I had hoped to find work with one of the great houses I had known when we were there. Only I learned that most of the great houses were closed, or gutted and burned, their owners and occupants either in exile or gone to the guillotine, like the poor king and his queen. And the ‘citizens,’ as they call everyone now, were looking askance at the servant class as well. Many cooks’ and valets’ heads came off along with their masters’. Petit knew what he was doing to leave when he did.

  “Once Robespierre was dead, it was thought that the bloodletting would be finished, but it goes on even now. There is civil and foreign war. Everyone is attacking France or getting ready to attack her. Because of the upheaval, there had no been no planting and therefore no harvest. There is no bread and no money. People pray only for a deliverer. The Estates General is paralyzed. Everything—everything is chaos, yet your Jefferson still hopes for victory for the Revolution. Nothing but a miracle will save France now. Never did I think the fine house of the old Comtesse de Noailles on the He Saint-Louis would be gutted and burned to the ground; as well as the Hermitage, and the Tuileries Palace. There was no trace of the Bastille, but think on this: they destroyed Marly as well. Nothing is left.”

  Marly. So it too was gone.

  “And all of Master Jefferson’s friends?” I asked.

  “How changed their fortunes are now! Lafayette is in a prison at Magdeburg. Madame de Corny is a widow and has retired to Rouen with a pittance she salvaged from her jewels. Mrs. Cosway has gone into a convent at Genoa. Monsieur de Condorcet escaped from a hanging indictment, and is a fugitive. The Due de la Rochefoucauld was torn to pieces by a mob before the eyes of his mother and wife. Those who have not been separated from their heads are either in exile or in prison. The Directory could well use the Bastille we tore down!” James licked his lips.

  The recital of murder and trials went on long into the night. We listened at first with horror and interest; then numbness set in as the litany went on and on. James took delight in the demise of one great aristocrat after another. His hard eyes glinted when he told the tales of the Terror and Jacobins and finally Robespierre’s death. Now there was the chaos and civil war of the Directory.

  “We Americans didn’t have a revolution worth talking about,” James continued. “We’re just as much slaves now as in 1776! We’re just as much slaves under a vice-president and a president as we were under a British governor. They still import as many slaves into this so-called Republic. If the French could make an insurrection with stones and pitchforks, why can’t we?”

  “James, hush your mouth!” Elizabeth Hemings cried.

  But there was no master here to overhear what we said. I was the mistress of Monticello.

  “I’m trying to say, Mama, that there are thirty thousand slaves in the state of Virginia alone. In South Carolina, we outnumber the whites. . . . Thirty thousand Virginia slaves … that’s an army. You realize that? An army!”

  My mother rose as if to block the very words out of James’s mouth. But who was listening?

  We moved outside and I watched the mountains turn gold, red and silver as the sun dipped. James’s eyes glowed, feverish as ever. The low-hanging smoke from the slave fires dimmed the pink of the sky, and the buzz of night creatures mingled with the droning of James’s familiar voice.

  What did I really feel? Horror, vengeance, delight, sorrow, indifference … yes, indifference was the closest to this tight stony feeling that pushed itself up into my heart.

  “Lord, you know that sounds like some slave revolt!”

  “That’s what I mean, Mama, if you could see what the Revolution—theirs, not ours—brought down as we saw it, then you would know that anything is possible!”

  “But them aristocrats,” my mother said slowly, “was weak.”

  “And our masters are strong? Those white people were just like us; militia and passes, and lynchings … Just like us, Mama! Can you understand a little of what I’m trying to say to you?”

  “I understand more than you think, James Hemings. I understand when you talk about revolution and how many slaves there is in Virginia and how our masters with all they privileges ain’t no stronger than that King Louis. I understand you just like anybody got two cents’ worth of brains understands you. But I know what we ain’t got, and what we ain’t got is a leader to lead us. A Moses. We ain’t got him. He ain’t come and unless he do, we ain’t going nowhere. You talking about people who followed because they was led. I’m ready to follow, but who’s going to lead? All the white folks get together even if the poor trash can’t stand the rich white folks. They get together from all the plantations to put it down. Make an example of the leaders, put the fear of the Lord into everybody. France got some troubles on its hands, and I don’t think what they be needing is a pastry cook. What they need is somebody, one body to pull their coals out of the fire, not their petit fours. …”

  “I don’t intend to go anywhere near an aristocrat or a citizen, for that matter,” James said, “but where there’s war, there’s money. That I learned from our politicians and bankers up in Philadelphia. And I intend to make a fortune. I came back for just one reason—to get my sister. You coming, Sally Hemings?” James’s voice cracked onto the still air like thunder in my ears and I sat up struck by it.

  “Come with you?” I whispered.

  “Nothing stopping you,” he said.

  “Nothing … except two children.”

  “Leave them with Mama and come back and get them, or take them with you. I don’t care which.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying, James. I couldn’t—”

  Without warning, James’s face contorted with rage. “Mama, listen to her. You hear her! Mama!” It was a scream. “Eight years and she hasn’t learned anything! After all the promises in Paris, it took him seven years to free me, and I got thirty dollars and a horse. I traded freedom for promises, because I thought he loved me: a few cooking lessons in Virginia, and I ended up giving him seven years of my life for thirty dollars and a horse, and I even said ‘Merci, Monsieur.’ He promised her her children would be free at twenty-one, pokes out her stomach with his bastards, says he loves her, and she says, ‘Merci, Monsieur.’ Fool!”

  “Coward!” I screamed. “Afraid to steal yourself! Why didn’t you run? Why? What stopped you? And now, look at you! More than five years of freedom and what do you have to show for it? Nothing!”

  “And you do? I suppose. You could have made more in a bordello!”

  “What do men make of the world for women except a bordello!”

  “And you revel in it!”

  “Men revel in it! Lovers and husbands, brothers and uncles—you all revel in it! My whoredom is yours and you know it!”

  “I know it,” he cried, “and it never leaves me, even in sleep. I want only to forget it! To leave you to it, if you want it!”

  “Then leave me to it. Leave me, leave me!” I screamed.

  “I’ll never leave you to it as long as I have breath in my body, as long as I dream at night.”

  “We all have dreams,” I said
deliberately. “You think yours are special, but they are not. I’ve had enough of chasing eleven-year-old dreams of Paris.”

  “You sound just like him. ‘Enough of chasing rainbows …’ Stay where you are. Lay up money. Be a good ex-slave. Make something of yourself. And I look at him. I look at those cold blue eyes and I say, ‘You’ve already made something of me …’ and the bastard doesn’t even understand what I’m talking about.”

  “James, you got to stop hating yourself.” This was Elizabeth Hemings speaking. Her voice trembled in a way I had never heard before. My brother’s violence had undone her. I realized she was afraid of her son. She who was afraid of nothing.

  “Mama, you ain’t got no idea what hate is,” James said.

  “I guess I ain’t,” replied my mother.

  “Women! Somebody cover you with dung and you wipe it off, wrap it up and start crooning a lullaby over it.”

  “You better go on back over there across the water, son.”

  “I’m going, Mama. I just want to know, for the last time, if she’s coming with me.” He turned to me and his eyes were dark burning holes and the look in them was the same he had turned on my master that Christmas Day five years ago.

  “You coming, Sally Hemings?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m never coming back here for you again. Save yourself, sister.”

  “No, James.”

  This time I could not keep the pride out of my voice. Was I not the legatee of my half sister? I had love. Did I not have a room of my own? I had privacy. Did I have a white mistress? No, I did run this place. Had I not saved ten black men from certain death? I had power. How could my brother speak of saving myself. I had no need to.

  James looked out. The sense of desolation he had carried all these years enveloped him with the familiarity of an old friend. Loneliness. Dislocation. Thomas Jefferson’s pompous proclamation had no more freed him than his own impotent declarations in Paris so long ago, he thought to himself. No piece of paper ever would, he had finally realized. Happiness had dissolved before him. The future no longer stretched before him full of hope, but swerved back onto itself and his past. He was not free. Only if he took Sally away … freed her, would he feel truly emancipated. Why, James wondered to himself, did he need the freedom of Sally Hemings? He looked at his sister. Suppose she never left Thomas Jefferson? Never left Monticello? What would become of him, James, who needed her freedom more than he needed his own?