Sally Hemings

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  CHAPTER 34

  MONTICELLO, 1803-1805

  “Familia” did not (originally) signify the composite ideal of sentimentality and domestic strife in the present day philistine mind. Among the Romans, it did not even apply in the beginning to the leading couple and its children, but to the slaves alone. Famulus means domestic slave and familia is the aggregate number of slaves belonging to one man. . . . The expression (familia) was invented by the Romans in order to designate a new social organism that head of which had a wife, children and a number of slaves under his paternal authority and according to Roman law, the right of life and death over all of them.

  FRIEDRICH ENGELS, The Origin of the Family,

  Private Property, and the State, 1884

  God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and concubines: the mulattos one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the sky.

  MARY BOYKIN CHESTNUT, A Diary from Dixie, 1840-76

  Oh, how can you think of slaves and motherhood!

  Look into my eyes, Marianne, and think of love.

  KATE CHOPIN, “The Maid of Saint Phillippe,” 1891-92

  THE NEWS of the Louisiana Purchase came like a bolt of thunder at the beginning of the summer. The guns were fired in Richmond, the bells rang, and there was great rejoicing. The news of Master Monroe’s success in Paris caused a sensation all over the nation and made him the hero that would someday make him president. My master had doubled the territory of the United States, purchasing the whole expanse of Louisiana and the Floridas for fifteen million dollars.

  “Typical of Thomas Jefferson,” Elizabeth Hemings declared, not without pride, from the vastness of her kitchens. “He sets out to buy four acres and a mule, and ends up with a plantation and a herd of cattle!”

  “No, Mama. He set out to buy New Orleans and he has ended up buying an empire.”

  Now that we had weathered the worst of Callender and the Federalist newspapers, it seemed we had reason enough to celebrate. On the sixteenth of July, the cabinet agreed to the purchase of Louisiana, and on the seventeenth, Meriwether Jones danced a jig on the west lawn of Monticello. It was not to celebrate the Louisiana Purchase but to celebrate the death of James T. Callender. He had been found, dead that morning, in the James River, drowned in three feet of water.

  A year passed. A year free of scandal, although Monticellian Sally still rose now and again in the press.

  My master won his re-election by a landslide, losing only four electoral votes out of one hundred and seventy-six, and not one for Aaron Burr. It was his moment of greatest triumph, for he knew, if he ever was to know, that the whole nation loved him. I felt keenly the pleasure of his triumph. Gone were his protests of disdain, his abhorrence of public office, his flight from using power. Truly, this outpouring of love and gratitude was enough to turn the head of a man who, more than anything else, loved to be loved.

  His sixty-one years lay lightly on his shoulders. His hair was now gray. His troubles of five years ago were gone with the daily horseback riding in which he indulged. His skin was clear and high in color. His thick neck and wrists gave an impression of great physical force, even though his frame was slender, long and shackling. His feelings ran strong and deep, buried under the surface of a seemingly sunny and even-tempered disposition, but I knew him as he was: passionate to the point of cruelty, sensitive to the edge of brutality, eager for approbation to the limits of honesty, constant in love, lonely behind his façade of perfection, and imperfect in his fear of loneliness. Our fate had been tested by scandal, our love tempered by it. And our family grew like a many-rooted oak on our mountain. We were safe. Or so I believed.

  In the spring they brought Maria up the mountain on a litter made out of rope and wood borne tenderly by Burwell, John, Davey, and Israel. She was dying from the complications of childbirth.

  “Things change, only to remain the same,” he said, standing framed in the doorway of her room. And it was true that it was now I rather than my mother who nursed and fed and washed and tended Maria, and it was my son Thomas who stood with Maria’s son, Francis, wide-eyed in the hall.

  The horrible ulcerating breast was surely gangrenous by now. The pain so intense that even laudanum gave no ease. In the afternoon, when the pain seemed the worst, I would sit for hours holding Maria in my arms, and thus her father would find us when he came to the door of her room to stare silently. He had withdrawn in a solitude with his books and his horses, as if they could nullify the fact of Maria’s agony. But her agony was not to be nullified, neither by him nor me nor Maria.

  I would brush her long auburn hair that fell to her waist, still lush and luxurious, until it began to come out by the handful. This I tried to hide from her, saving all the long strands, as the hairdressers in Paris used to do, to supplement the natural hair of their mistresses with chignons and poufs.

  A nauseating sweetish smell clung to this exquisite woman not yet twenty-six, and I desperately changed her three or four times a day. She who had never been overly fond of dress or ornament was calling for her jewels. She who was always vexed by allusions to her beauty now required them from me, her sister, her husband, her father.

  After her husband’s visit, for which she would endure hours of toilette, she would turn her face to the wall and cry. As for her son, she would not let him enter her room. My own anguish lay buried deep within me. I was only waiting.

  The day was fine and hazy, with a mist that hung low, even in the afternoon. On the mountains, with their tops bright with sunlight, every blossom and bush pushed its way toward the warmth of the sun. Suddenly, there was only the sound of my own breathing in the room. It was so still that I looked at the sealed window to make sure that the sun, the sky, and the unfolding nature were still there. And then I knew why it was so silent.

  She had died. Without a word, her hand in mine. I too made no sound. No sound the human voice could make could express the pain I felt. I stayed beside her a long time before I finally rushed from the room to inform the small group that was still at supper: her husband, her son, her father, her sister. Then I returned to the room to wash and bathe her for the last time. Like my mother before me, I wept, for now I could weep as I wrapped her in white linen and then covered everything in the room. I descended into the garden, and with Wormley, I cut every spring flower there was, leaving not one remaining in all the vast gardens to insult her death with its life. I filled her room with them, scattering them on the beds, and blocking the light with them.

  Only then did I allow her white family into the room.

  We stood staring at each other over the fresh grave of Maria and that of her child, who had succumbed to convulsions.

  Maria’s death settled between us like a hungering beast, separating us from each other, ugly and terrible. Fear descended upon us, and over her grave we clutched at life. We clung to each other in our despair and our grief and we hurried back up the mountain as if the Reaper himself were pursuing us.

  A new life was made that day, for my third son, Madison, would be born nine months afterward to the very hour. . . .

  The second four years of my master’s mandate began. For the second time, he had walked to the Capitol flanked by excited crowds and popular acclaim. For the second time, he delivered an inaudible speech to the gathered crowds, and again it was only the next day when they were able to read it in the newspapers that they knew what he had said.

  Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken in New Jersey, a misty July dawn 1804, but my master’s country was at peace except with one nation.

  An irresistible current moving west was making it a white man’s country. The white man was crushing the Indian as he crushed the slave under the heel of the boot he placed on every inch of
soil he could tread. The land which now stretched from the Carolinas to Vermont, and from the Atlantic shore to the Appalachian Mountains contained, according to the new census, five million whites, two million slaves, one million mulattoes, and an undetermined number of native Americans.

  In the past four years, my master, as president, by fair means and foul, had transferred fifty million acres of Indian land from their sovereignty to the United States, paying a total of one hundred and forty-two thousand dollars; one-tenth of a penny an acre, or as he said, the equivalent of one hundred and forty-three prime male Negro slaves.

  For another four years, he would be lost to me and Monticello. I was barred from the President’s House. But I determined one day to set my foot on its planks. Davey Bowles brought me secretly, at my stubborn request, to Washington that winter. I traveled by night in a curtained carriage, and slipped into the mansion by the servants’ entrance. It was more than ten years since I had ventured from Monticello.

  Shielded by the Monticello servants there, hidden during the day by Burwell, I roamed at night the unfinished cavernous rooms that I knew I would never see again. I noted the fixtures, the hangings, the paintings, and the stiff old-fashioned furniture that had been installed by the Adamses. After the elegance of the Hôtel de Langeac, the President’s House seemed crude, barnlike, cold, and dismal. The roof leaked, there was no heat, the stairway sagged, gloom and dust were everywhere. Even Thomas Jefferson had an unkempt, run-down appearance.

  The large kitchens, where Edy and Fanny worked with Peter, were the only cheerful rooms in the whole house. I visited Petit, who was installed in Georgetown, a gentleman farmer, and Davey Bowles managed to take me out driving in one of the carriages to see Washington City.

  It was a place of incredible distances, interspersed with a few scattered buildings; a quagmire of mud when the sun shone, and a sea of frozen ruts during the winter nights. The gaunt wooden skeleton of the Capitol building rose like a gallows on the hill, while swarms of workmen and slaves struggled in the soft earth with the enormous white stone that had begun to sheathe it. Surrounding the Capitol was the Federal City, which consisted of seven or eight boardinghouses, the best being Conrad and McMunn, and all of them brimming over with senators and representatives. There was a tailor shop, a shoemaker, a printer, a washerwoman, a grocer, a stationer, a dry-goods establishment, and an oysterhouse.

  This, then, was the new capital of the United States. The swamps on all sides emitted the putrid odors of decay and a rancid fog hung over the city half the time, as the inhabitants fled at the first hint of the malarial fevers that periodically swept the city.

  I inspected the half-finished Capitol, where John Trumbull’s paintings would hang; the mansions surrounded by wastelands stretching down Pennsylvania Avenue to Georgetown reminded me of those that had been constructed back when I was in Paris on the Champs-Elysées.

  The Champs-Elysées. It stretched dimly now, its perspective fifteen years behind me. The fashionable golden and white buildings that had been so “modern” then must have already settled into old-fashioned respectability. Respectability! I laughed to think what the Federalists would think of Sally Hemings in the President’s House. But such was my master’s popularity that even if I had been found out, no one would have now dared to print the story. “Dusky Sally” was as dead as James T. Callender.

  But, as fate would have it, just before I was to return with Davey Bowles to Monticello, I met in the confines of the gloomy mansion the only person in Washington sure to recognize me: Dolley Payne Todd Madison. She, who already considered the President’s House hers, had come in, unannounced, by the kitchens, and surprised me in the company of my master.

  “Why Sally Hemings of Monticello!”

  I remained silent.

  “What on earth are you doing in Washington? Have you deserted Monticello for the kitchens of the President’s House?” Not at all shocked, she had remarked my condition.

  “Another Hemings for Monticello? Good! We need all the little pickaninnies we can get these days. . . . And if it is a boy, could I ask you to name it Madison, and you’ll have a fair gift for the name, too! I promise you.” She looked at my master. “Might she do that, Mr. Jefferson? Name it Madison if it’s a boy, and Dolley if it’s a girl? Now don’t you say no. . . .”

  The flat pasty face with its upturned mouth smirked with malice. The tiny bead-eyes sunk into the flesh of her puffy face matched the necklace around her fat short neck. She was no longer a beauty, Dolley Madison. Ensconced in the ruffles and frills she loved, always in pastel colors that did nothing for her complexion, which had turned sallow in her middle age, she resembled nothing more than a multicolored cabbage.

  My master stood helplessly and more than a little foolishly aside. He was the president of the United States, yet he could say nothing.

  I bided my time while she took her revenge. Her marriage to Master Madison had not produced children, and her bitterness and disappointment in this made her more cruel perhaps than she would have been had she been a mother. Well, I thought, why not? Madison was a fine name, and I truly liked Master Madison, but no child of mine, I vowed, would ever be named Dolley.

  In the dim, drafty hallway, we circled one another like antagonized she-wolves—the rough floor planks cut into my felt slippers. I kept my eyes on the neatly shod feet of Dolley Madison. Her boots were pale-blue suede. I kept my eyes down, but I staked my territory. Even if I had been white, I would have been trespassing, but being black, I was an invader of all that was sacred.

  She stepped back out of my circle, our pact made. A name for silence. That she should symbolically try to take the seed planted in my womb which rightfully should have been planted in the womb of a white woman—in her womb—was her duty. Mine was to survive and prevail without murder. We both did our duty.

  Madison Hemings was born the following January, on the nineteenth day of that month, a bright, sandy-haired, and gray-eyed boy.

  The Southern white woman is the chief slave of the master’s harem.

  DOLLEY MADISON, 1837

  CHAPTER 35

  MONTICELLO, 1806-1808

  “JAMEY DONE ‘STROLLED.’ ”

  “What?”

  “He gone. Masta, Jim, Bacon, whole plantation knows where he is but ain’t nobody going after him. . . .”

  As usual, it was Elizabeth Hemings who had the news of Jamey’s flight first. Critta’s son was now seventeen, the same bitter, bright, violent seventeen that his namesake, my brother James, had been. I wondered when Jamey had decided to run away. Was it when he had witnessed his father and his uncle fighting over his mother? Or had it been that lonely winter when he had been left on the mountain while his mother had fled to Bermuda Hundred with Maria?

  For the first time in his life, Thomas Jefferson had had a slave, James Hubbard, flogged severely in public, not just because he kept running away, which he had done with regularity now since he was twelve, but because he kept running away from him. . . . Yet he must have known in his heart that this one would never be a slave again. He would die first—die being beaten or die running. I, who had written his pass for him, had accepted that. Why did my master not accept something so simple? There came a time in some men’s lives when they were simply no longer slave material. If that meant that they were dead men, well, they were dead men. That’s all. The imponderable and excessive rage of masters at fleeing slaves mystified me. It was not just a matter of losing valuable property. They all, including my own, acted so abandoned, ready to kill rather than love again. What was it the slave did to the master’s pride, I wondered, for him to be so mortally wounded by flight?

  “Thomas, you know that Jamey’s gone?”

  “Yes. Who told you?”

  “Mama, of course.”

  “There were some Mohicans in the neighborhood, and he stole off with them, or was stolen by them!”

  “Ran off with the Indians?” I asked it innocently, but he knew as well as I that it was the
route many escaping slaves took: refuge with Indians. If they could reach an Indian nation, it was the safest and surest route to freedom.

  “They will probably take him across the Mississippi or to another tribe who will get him to Canada. I doubt if he will stay with them. He is white enough to pass for white, so let him stroll.”

  There was no rancor in his voice, but the chill of desertion was there. Even for Jamey. Jamey had chosen freedom. My master no longer “loved” him enough to go after him. I breathed a sigh of relief. He would not send the patrols after him. Thomas was now seventeen. When had he realized that the master was his father? And how long did I have before he too would stroll?

  I did not have long to ponder Jamey’s flight, for hard on his disappearance came an event that underlined the mortal danger we lived in on our mountain: a double murder. It was a murder that struck special terror in the gentry—poisoning, the one killer all Southern whites lived in dread of. More than one Big House cook had been hanged in Albemarle County on suspicion, or conviction, of poisoning her white folks.

  It was my mother who brought me the news: George Wythe, Liddy Broadnax, and their son Michael Brown had been poisoned.

  “Well, like the Richmond papers say,” she announced, “it happened a little more than two weeks ago, that is the poisonings happen then, ’cause Masta Wythe, he just died. The bells in Richmond was a-tolling like the end of the world, but poor Michael, he died more than a week ago after horrible suffering. They cut him open—the doctors—and they found the inflammation in the stomach and the bowels that’s caused by yellow arsenic, like Wormley use for the moles and groundhogs.”

  Michael Wythe Brown, two years younger than my Thomas, was now dead. He had been here for James’s Christmas emancipation. I picked up eighteen-month-old Madison. There were now two Madisons. Martha had named her last son Madison to cancel out mine in the affections of his father. White vengeance had many faces.