Sally Hemings

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  “He will not lie, and he cannot avow, so there is nothing left except silence,” I said.

  “Silence,” Elizabeth Hemings spat out into the white room, “or sale.”

  For one moment my heart seemed to stop as she uttered the dreaded words. Sale! Had I lived too long in Monticello, hidden, petted, spoiled, and loved? Had I forgotten it was love that ceded, and not the white world? Then I said:

  “He will not sell me, Mama. And he will not abandon me or send me or the children away. Not for me, not for his daughters, not for his friends, not for his enemies, not even for the presidency.”

  “And why, pray, daughter?”

  “Because he cannot live without me.”

  It was true. I had made it so. This had been what I had wanted. There was no triumph, no smugness, no pride; there was not even joy in my voice. Only the reality of how it was between us.

  “He cannot live without me.” The words fell like pebbles in the room. They seemed to take a long time to reach my mother, as if they had been thrown down a deep well. But the words struck the sides of my being like flint against flint, and, like flint, struck fire in me. We had won.

  “I’ll have the keys to the mansion now, Mama.”

  After a moment, my mother unfastened the great iron ring with its score of keys. The dull glint of forged iron struck the light. Their metallic music was the only sound in the room except for the tick of the clock. I knew she would never understand. Why now? Why at a time when we had been betrayed by servants and neighbors, why, when everything was lost, when I should be fleeing for my life and those of my children, when I should be paralyzed with fear, why had I decided to stand, when I had never stood before? She would never understand. Yet I knew I was right. This was the line. This was the battle. This was the test that Thomas Jefferson would have to pass. If he passed this trial, it meant victory for us. A feeling almost of elation filled me. We had the power of love on our side. We were stronger and better than the monstrous iniquity we had sprung from. I held out my hands. My mother placed the mass of iron into them. I took the keys and weighed them, and then, without a word, attached them to the black ribbon at the waist of my black-and-white calico dress. The keys hung low and nestled into the folds of my skirt. Elizabeth Hemings recognized the orderly transition of power just as my master did; that day, Monticello had passed from one ruler to the next. Her reign was over.

  “We wait, Mama,” I said a moment later, “in silence. We wait and we let them rant and rave. But, if they really want to hear about Southern gentlemen and Negro mistresses, we have some stories to tell, no, Mama? We can start with John Marshall, the chief justice of the United States. Virginians talk in their sleep, you once said, Mama. And who hears them? Their servants.”

  Elizabeth Hemings looked at me with dawning respect. I hadn’t spent three years in France for nothing.

  “Now you know why Martha and Maria have left for Washington, when they have always refused until now,” I said.

  “To dampen the scandal by their presence.”

  “Yes. And to keep Dolley Madison from the head of the presidential table.”

  “I never could figure why they both left.”

  “Now you can. And now, I want the word spread among the slave population. My name is never again to be mentioned. Nor those of my children. To anyone black or white. I do not exist anymore, nor do my children. My name on our people’s lips is forbidden. Forbidden! Spread it among our people, black and white, on pain of being fired or sold. And tell Jim I want to see him.”

  I dismissed my mother.

  It was only when Fanny and Edy returned from Washington that I learned the amplitude and the viciousness of the campaign which had raged about us. It was from Fanny that I heard the part of a poem by the famous Irish poet Thomas Moore that referred to me, and that was making the rounds of the kitchens and salons in Washington and Virginia, in New York and Baltimore, in Boston and Philadelphia.

  Fanny, who could write, had copied it out on the back of a sheet of butcher’s paper in her large childish scrawl:

  The patriot, fresh from Freedom’s council come,

  Now pleased retires to lash his slaves at home;

  Or woo, perhaps some black Aspasia’s charms,

  And dream of freedom in his bondsmaid’s arms.

  I stared at the large printed letters. Freedom. What had I won? I had bound him to me as surely as I was bound to him. Nothing could change that. Not poems or ballads, not slander or insults, not the crudeness of mankind. My tears fell on the oiled paper and rolled off, making no mark, just as I made no mark on the surface of the world; except for these lewd cries of indignation, crude obscene scrawls, smirking winks of slander and perfidy.

  Fanny’s excited voice dented my thoughts.

  “You is the most famous black lady in the whole United States! I tells you, you is famous! I saw a letter about you in a Philadelphia newspaper, but it was too long and hard for me to copy it. And in Washington—you is the talk of the town! But we servants don’t say nothing about what we knows, or don’t know. And poor Masta Jefferson—as if every Virginia gentleman that holds the title ain’t messed with a black mistress. Why they family gives them one at sixteen or seventeen. How can they expect that they don’t cherish them later? I do declare, white people are one strange breed of humanity. They do everything they want and then cry distress when they do gets around to people who don’t do it, because they ain’t got it to do it with! I do declare, I’m glad I got me a black husband. A good black man. And don’t have to be sniffing after no white masta who is hell on earth!”

  My mother looked at the bisquit-colored Fanny.

  “Yo Mammy,” she muttered.

  “Yourn,” replied Fanny, evenly, without blinking.

  She was a match for my mother, and she knew it. Not only did she have the estimable advantage of being cook at the president’s house, she could read and write as well. Fanny held Elizabeth Hemings’ eye, but, before the onslaught came, I stepped between them.

  “Enough, Fanny,” I said. “I know you and Davey so tried Master Jefferson’s patience with your squabbling that he sent for Mister Bacon to sell you both in Alexandria.” I looked at her. “I trust you begged your way back into his good graces, since you are standing here and not on an auction block.”

  “I hear it’s mostly died down,” Fanny said contritely. “I expect it’s finished, Sally. But Lord knows, it sure made a stir! You can’t imagine. . . . Them white folks is outraged.”

  “Then let it be finished. Lord God. ’Cause we is sick of it at Monticello,” Elizabeth Hemings said as she took Fanny by the shoulders, and with a slight push, propelled her toward the door of her kitchens.

  He still would sell a slave in pique or to assure his domestic tranquillity. He was still white. He was still the master. And he was not the same in his white world. My master amongst white Americans was not the man I knew. I wished he would come home. I wished he would come home where he was safe and loved. People, I thought wearily, like horses, tire; and the uses of silence born and bred into every slave, would serve me well.

  CHAPTER 33

  MARCH 1803

  Love is, in a great degree, an arbitrary passion, and will reign, like some other stalking mischiefs, by its own authority, without designing to reason.

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1794

  Duty’s a slave that keeps the keys,

  But love, the Master goes in and out

  Of his goodly chambers with a song and shout

  Just as he please—just as he please.

  DINAH MARIA MULOCK CRAIK (date unknown)

  IT WAS MARCH before Thomas Jefferson arrived again on his mountain. His slave family rushed to greet him. Thomas, Beverly, and Harriet. He seemed to hesitate in greeting them, then he saw her. She approached timidly.

  “Thomas,” she said softly.

  “Thine own,” he replied, adding his harsh short laugh.

  “Thomas. Thoma
s. We … you cannot. The risk …” But the risk has already been taken. And pride had sealed it. They had won.

  “The thermometer at sunrise today, my darling, was thirty-four degrees. I have marked it in my book. I have taken it every day for the past four months and I didn’t drop the thermometer once.”

  His voice was husky and scarred as it was that day in Paris. She began to cry. She knew he would listen to no one, accept no advice, no opinions, nor have this passion discussed, revoked, diluted, appended, crossed out, objected to, or any part of it destroyed. She would not be excised. She would not be censored. She would not be discarded. She would remain at Monticello.

  There was irony and love in his voice:

  “Hold, little one,” he said. “The peach trees begin to blossom and I see the well has plenty of water in it after having been dry for eighteen months.”

  She pressed her head into his chest, and his great hands came up and cupped her skull. Her tears wet his vest and shirt. Here was her victory, written in his haggard and loving face. They were like the lone survivors of an earthquake. It had shaken the mountain, but the mountain was still there.

  Thomas Jefferson sat making delicate sketches of the plan for his new pleasure ground: a grove of the largest trees, shaded with poplar, oak, maple, linden, and his beloved ash trees. A green labyrinth, which had at its center a small temple: a safe place.

  His troubles were far from over.

  This trip was to try to avoid the possibility of a duel with his old friend John Walker over his wife. Callender had not stopped his pen. With the aid of the Northern papers he had enlarged its scope to include the Langhorne letter to George Washington involving his nephew Peter Carr. Then there was the everlasting charge of atheism, of Jacobinism, and now the threat of publishing his letters to John Walker over something that had happened thirty-three years ago! It was insane.

  “Why have you not married some woman of your own complexion?” The Virginia Gazette.

  He ground his teeth. Why? “Tell me who die,” he thought, “who marry, who hang themselves because they cannot marry. …” He prayed that Sally had not seen most of what had been written about them. He came home feeling defeated. Everything reminded him of his two families and the problems they faced. The presence of Maria and Martha in Washington last winter had dampened all but the most infamous gossipmongers. They had not deserted him. He had had his explanation with them and now he must arrange a meeting with his injured friend and avoid a duel at all cost. He had already talked his son-in-law Thomas Mann out of a duel with his cousin John Randolph for the sake of Martha; now Madison must do the same for him. He could not leave either his white family or his slave family unprotected by his death.

  Thomas Jefferson looked up at his slave wife as she entered his rooms. She appeared terribly small to him and fragile.

  She wouldn’t know the worst!

  The following day James Madison arrived at Monticello. He was bringing good news. He had interceded in Thomas Jefferson’s favor, and there would be no duel.

  “I can’t tell you how relieved I am, Mr. Madison, with the outcome of this unfortunate affair … and how I thank you.”

  “Mr. President, I don’t think Mr. John Walker was any more anxious for a duel than you.”

  “My dear Mr. Madison, I’ve never even held a pistol in my hand. The very idea of one man murdering another in the name of injury is insanity. We already have enough ways of men killing men without inventing an etiquette for it.”

  “The law of Virginia ‘honor’ is a rather crude one, sir.”

  “Mostly the law of vanity, dear sir. I am a simple man. I accept with relief your intervention in this senseless affair and am quite satisfied that Mr. Walker has accepted my apology.”

  James Madison noted a slight hesitation. Thomas Jefferson was anything except a “modest” man and “insanity” or not, he was a Virginian brought up in its codes and mores. The Walker affair had distressed him much more than he was willing to admit. And his vanity had indeed been touched. There was yet one more thing.

  “As for the other calumny …” began James Madison, “I believe Mr. Monroe would be happy to take her.”

  Madison couldn’t bring himself to say Sally Hemings.

  “Take her?”

  Thomas Jefferson swayed slightly and the blood rushed from his face.

  “Temporarily, of course,” added James Madison, alarmed at the sudden pallor of the man standing before him.

  “Take her where?”

  “Why doesn’t she … I believe … she has a sister Thenia at Mr. Monroe’s. She could … retire there with her children until the time when—”

  James Madison raised his eyes from the silver buttons on Thomas Jefferson’s waistcoat and looked directly into his eyes. How could Thomas Jefferson not know in what political danger he was? He, James Madison, simply had the duty to warn him that Virginia would not tolerate, even from Thomas Jefferson, certain unpardonable things. He had to understand.

  James Madison involuntarily stepped back. The cold blue eyes had now turned a deep aquamarine.

  “The Hemingses are mine,” said Jefferson. “All of them. I will deal with them personally.”

  “I didn’t mean to presume …” began Madison. He concentrated on controlling the tremor in his voice. He brought his handkerchief out of his waistcoat and mopped his brow. He had gone too far. Too far for his own good. Relieved, he realized that Thomas Jefferson had already dismissed the subject. His face had taken on the serene expression Madison knew so well: his public face. The flash of his inner turmoil had been suppressed. Thomas Jefferson seemed even taller to Madison as, towering over his small person, he took him by the shoulder and flashed one of his rare smiles. The sudden intimacy made Madison blush.

  “We have come this far, Mr. Madison. But we still have a long road to travel … full of the most dangerous ruts for the carriage of State.” Thomas Jefferson’s smile disappeared. “You know, Mr. Madison, how I feel about your rightful place in the political scheme of things… I’m an old man. Compromise comes hard to me, but you have a brilliant talent for negotiation. A nation isn’t shaped in a featherbed. …”

  Madison started. It was a strange choice of words, but Thomas Jefferson didn’t seem to notice.

  “Shall we get back to the important issues of the day? Put this demeaning and ridiculous affair behind us. You have a long way to travel, my dear Madison. After all, we can’t disappoint Mrs. Madison, can we? She’s dead set on redecorating the President’s House. And God knows, it needs it!”

  Both men laughed.

  The night before he left the safety of Monticello for Washington City, Thomas Jefferson sat alone in his study and brooded on what he had written in his account book in August 1800. He knew now that there would be no duel, thanks to the sturdy and tenacious Madison. Callender could be silenced—the others were mere copiers. He could end the outcry in the Republican press; if only his friends could end the clamor in the Federalist press.

  He must bring his families through the crisis of Callender but he must navigate the United States through the bloody aftermath of Napoleon and the specter of his troops arriving at the Mississippi; he must control an undeclared war on Tripoli; cope with the Indian boundaries which were constantly violated as the nation pushed them farther and farther West; he must reduce the public debt, distribute the surplus in the Treasury—at least, at last, the slave trade was outlawed; and he must bring to a successful end the secret negotiations with France for the purchase of Louisiana and mount his expedition to the Pacific. He had already chosen his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, as head of the expedition, and he would take back to Washington City his new secretary, Lewis Harvie, who was loyal enough to have threatened to kill James Callender.

  Callender. His Judas. Sally Hemings was only a pretext. Before he had left for Washington, he would put down his for all to see. He had also made a census of his family.

  He lit his candle in the darkening study, opened hi
s account book and wrote:

  Shortly after Thomas Jefferson had returned to Washington I looked at his account book and found the pages open to the census he had written in it of his family.

  I stared at it for a long time, and then softly closed it. My master had counted Thomas, Beverly, and Harriet as free and white.

  Our love had been denounced and we had been betrayed in Virginia. Even now, the hate, the epithets made me shiver. Did he think I hadn’t heard them all? Slave, whore, slut, concubine, Black Sal, Dusky Sally, paramour, blackamoor, wench, a slave paramour with fifteen or thirty gallants of all colors, including Thomas Paine, black wench and her mulatto litter, mahogany-colored charmer, Monticellian Sally, Sooty Sal, black Aspasia … nothing was too horrible for me: my heart cut out, my tongue pulled out by its roots, my body burned, my throat slit from ear to ear, my soul sent to everlasting Hell. Perhaps they would at least triumph in sending my soul to Hell, but for the rest it was too late. My master and I were both anchored to a past and a passion nothing could disavow. I had prayed for proof and he had given it to me.

  He had paid the worst of all possible prices: public humiliation. To have been scourged at the public whipping post for slaves would have been easier for him than that price: the loss of his public image, the façade he cherished almost as much as he cherished the façade of Monticello.

  He had paid. There was something he could do: remain silent. And this silence would be payment. Payment for my servitude, which he would not change. Payment for our children, whom he did not recognize. He had paid with a kind of helpless, bewildered pride, for I was Monticello.