Shouts, cries, and kisses greeted the master of Monticello as he dismounted.
“How you all.” He laughed. “Peter, what have you got good?”
“Masta, I got guinea hens and carré of lamb. I got rabbit in mustard, the way you like it, and Masta Meriwether Lewis’s mother done sent over three of her hams for you!”
Everybody burst into laughter as he grabbed Eston, tottering on unsteady legs, and swung him around, sweeping him off the steps, and into his arms.
After that, there was bedlam as the children, black and white, tumbled down the stairs of the portico to greet the riders. Thomas Hemings beat Thomas Randolph to the reins of his father’s horse. He was half an inch taller than his father, with the same luxurious red-auburn hair, blue eyes, rangy loose body, which was still awkward and uncoordinated from the growth of the past year.
Every summer for the past seven years, when the hordes of visitors descended on the estate, Thomas had been sent away to a neighboring farm almost fifty miles away, returning again only for the winter. This year would be the same, and the precious months before June would be the only ones in which he would see us until Christmas. But then, this Christmas would be different, I thought. This Christmas Thomas Jefferson would be home with his sons.
James Madison was now president. Dolley Todd Madison was finally mistress of the President’s House, I thought, smiling. My master had been forced to borrow eight thousand dollars from Mrs. Tabb in order to pay his overdue bills before leaving the capital, according to Burwell. His inheritance of debts over eight years in the President’s House was horrendous and his embargo against England and France had ruined him. It had hit the Southern states even worse than the mercantile states. His friends, the Virginia plantation-owners who had counted themselves rich, found themselves, like him, with useless assets on their hands, and a pile of debts. My master’s tobacco was worthless; wheat had fallen from two dollars a bushel to seven cents; land values had been completely swept away. The only wealth that remained were slaves. The only industry that seemed destined to survive in Virginia and reap sickening profits was the breeding of slaves for inland trade to the deep South. He had returned home penniless and depressed. The Louisiana Purchase was the only thing he could take real pleasure in.
Meriwether Lewis’s mission, in the beginning, had been a secret one. Under the guise of exploring the Territory for “literary” reasons, Meriwether and William Clark were to open up British territory for private traders, since they had been forced out of business by government traders on this side of the Mississippi and had been resentfully inciting discontent among the Indians. Why not, Thomas Jefferson had asked himself, divert their hopes of profit in the direction of the Missouri River? He could kill two birds with one stone: the government traders would be left in undisputed possession on this side of the Mississippi, with the aim of bringing the Indians into debt and forcing them to sell their lands; while the dispossessed private traders could open up new land for trade which now went to Great Britain. If traders went, settlers would not be far behind, and the Territory would become white instead of red.
He had needed someone he could trust for the expedition, someone who could combine daring, prudence, woodsmanship, surveying, familiarity of the Indian character, with a good knowledge of botany, natural history, mineralogy, and astronomy. What better choice than his brilliant secretary Meriwether?
My son Thomas had dreamed day and night of that expedition, had begged his father to let him go, although he was much too young. Meriwether Lewis had chosen William Clark and his slave York to go with him. For two years and four months, they had toiled and marched the uncharted wilderness. Of this my master was proud. But even this happiness, we were to discover, was mortgaged.
It was at the end of summer, the September golds and oranges already turning into October’s reds and browns. As if in a dream, repeating itself, I heard the heavy tread of Davey Bowles in the hall, the strangled anguished cry, only this time it was a male cry. I had time only to turn to see Thomas Jefferson burst into his study, his face contorted with grief and incomprehension.
Meriwether Lewis had committed suicide in Tennessee. He was dead at exactly the same age as James. The cold terror of that self-murder ran through me as I stared in fearful apprehension at his wild grief.
James gone. And Maria. Jamey. And Michael. And Mama. And now Meriwether. Death lay around our feet, like the neat piles of raked leaves Wormley had left scattered on our lawn. Thomas Jefferson had turned away from me.
I knew how much my master had liked Meriwether Lewis. He had taught him surveying, as my master’s father had taught him. He had taken him on as private secretary, and it had been Meriwether who had assuaged the loneliness of the sinister President’s House in Washington City. He had introduced Meriwether into the circles of power, and when he had needed a leader of the expedition to the Pacific, who had he chosen out of his “family” but Meriwether? He had thought of the danger, I knew, but had refused to shield a “son” from becoming the first to explore it simply because of his own fears for safety. And Meriwether had done him proud. He had become a hero and my master had covered him with honors, made him governor of Louisiana. And now Meriwether Lewis was dead by his own hand: Accused by James Madison, another “son,” of mismanaging Louisiana. As dead as James, and for reasons perhaps as unknown.
“All my hopes were in Meriwether. He was the last. Why must I always lose what I love? Why can I never hold what I cherish? Why have I no sons of my own?”
His words stunned me. What about the census of his family? I had seen it with my own eyes..
I said quietly, “But you have four sons.”
Could not Thomas or Beverly be instructed in botany, in astronomy, in surveying; could not Madison or Eston learn natural history, mineralogy, Indian affairs? I wanted to scream.
He took a long time to answer me. “I don’t have four sons. You have four sons.”
Silence.
I had burned for him and I had birthed for him. Seven times I had descended into that valley from which neither his wife nor one of his daughters had returned. And my sons stood as testament and hostage to a body I could never call my own. I felt an explosion of insulted motherhood, all red and brown, like the leaves scattered on the lawn outside the window.
His back was turned to me. My eyes sought the iron poker lying within my reach near the chimney. I wanted to strike that broad blue-sheathed back. I wanted to strike and strike again, with all my strength, to smash him. Oh God, I wanted to kill him, for now, after all these years, I understood what he had understood from the beginning, but had not had the courage to tell me. He had renounced his sons from the day of their birth!
The red and brown were swimming now in patches of blackness, like a flickering candle. Snatches of darkness overtook the colors. I reached for Joe Fsosset’s iron poker. The master had no sons, the slave had sons. The white man had no sons, the black woman had sons. It was she who had lusted, not he. She who had seduced, not he. No, Beverly or Thomas or Madison or Eston could not be instructed in mineralogy or botany, in Greek or Latin, in music, in architecture, in natural history, in astronomy. They would never count as real sons.
Never.
Then why had he clung to us all these years. Why had he bound us soul and flesh to him? Why had he not relinquished and freed us? And why, why had I stayed?
Love me and remain a slave.
Now the colors had darkened.
The iron poker appeared dull and lethal. His back was still turned to me. In my mind’s eye I struck and struck and struck. I wanted to see the look of surprise as he turned to defend himself. I wanted to see terror and disbelief in those innocent eyes. Then I wanted the poker to smash that high-arched nose, to see that expression of mild benevolence disappear under blood. I wanted him dead. Dead as Meriwether. Finally, all the colors became that almighty color: black.
I felt horror for us all. Master. Concubine. Bastards. I no longer had the strength to l
ift Joe Fosset’s poker over my head.
I didn’t—would never—have the courage to kill Thomas Jefferson.
But I would free his sons.
I swung around, my back against the deep, many-hued valleys with its army of black pines, and faced the impeccable whiteness of Monticello.
I put my mind to it methodically, as if making up a household inventory. When would Thomas Jefferson Hemings “stroll” away? How much money did he need? How much did I have? Could I sell my sapphire bracelet secretly in Richmond through Burwell? Would he or would he not say good-bye to his father? Where would he go? Who could I trust to help him? Did it really matter that he was nineteen and not the “promised” twenty-one? He was white enough to pass for white, as his father had said of Jamey. Would he leave Monticello a white man? Could he do it to save himself?
No, Thomas Hemings would not say good-bye to his father, to be charmed or willed or loved out of going away. Yes, he would leave Monticello a white man. At the top of my stairs, I stared into the mirror, just as I had one day twenty years before in Paris. The long Calvary of the renouncement of one child after another was beginning.
But the departure of my eldest son did not go as I had planned. I had not planned that he would meet his father unexpectedly on his stolen horse, with all the money I had in the world on the Fourth of July.
The father and son met on the wide front lawn of the west facade of the mansion, under my window, each on horseback. Thomas Jefferson was hatless as usual, his fine sandy-gray hair lifted in the breeze, wet from the summer dawn; my son’s deep auburn hair as wild and thick as his father’s. They seemed almost a double image, the same long, pale faces, stubborn chins, and pale hooded eyes.
They faced each other for a long moment, their horses stock-still under their expert hands. So still that they resembled two equestrian statues in the pink morning; sculpture erected to commemorate some long-ago and forgotten heroic deed. A slight movement of the horses, nervous and ready to run, shattered the illusion. They rose in their saddles as one and drew together in an embrace that lasted a long time. It was Thomas who broke the hold of his father, who then spun his horse and sped away at a reckless gallop on sloping terrain, taking a nearby hedge in a jump that would have unseated anyone except him.
My son reined in his horse, frightened by the sudden movement, and sat a long time looking after the vanishing horseman.
I gazed at my own reflection distorted in the thick glass. I placed my hands in front of me, between myself and the windowpane. They were soft, strong, and steady. On my left hand, I wore a wide yellow band of gold. Wife. My hand came down upon the window hard, but it would not shatter.
Thomas Jefferson Hemings turned and looked back at the columned facade. In something like a salute, he raised his arm as he turned and rode away down the mountain.
PART V
1834
Albemarle County
CHAPTER 37
DECEMBER 1834
The female slave, however fair she may have become by various comminglings of her progenitors, or whatever her mental and moral acquirements may be, knows that she is a slave, and, as such powerless. . . . She has parents, brothers, sisters, a lover, perhaps, who all suffer through her and with her.
MARGARET DOUGLASS (from prison), 1853
Though the effects of black be painful originally, we must not think they always continue so. Custom reconciles us to everything. After we have been used to the sight of black objects, the terror abates, and the smoothness and glossiness, or some agreeable accident of bodies so coloured, softens in some measure the horror and sternness of their original nature; yet the nature of their original impression still continues. Black will always have something melancholy in it. . . .
EDMUND BURKE, “On the Sublime and Beautiful,” 1756
SALLY HEMINGS closed her eyes and remembered. The smooth eyelids slid over the dark openings set like caves in a clay mountain, leaving the pale oval countenance flattened and glowing like a polished bone in the dark of an unearthed grave. In the cabin, the fine French clock of onyx and bronze struck the hour, then ticked over a new minute of silence. In her mind she saw her son ride away.
She rose from where she was sitting and went over to the light. Carefully, she untied the black velvet ribbon she wore around her neck, and opened her locket. She took out the lock of red-auburn hair and brushed it with her lips. Then she stared at the painted image in the locket for a long time. Tomorrow was another son’s wedding day.
Scrupulously, with the edge of her muslin scarf, she wiped the tears that had fallen onto the portrait. Then she replaced the bright lock within and closed the case, the fine mechanism of the lock giving her a moment’s satisfaction.
She stared out of the window, remembering another December more than twenty years before. Another kind of “black death.” The December of the murder at Rocky Hill, in 1811.
“T.J.’s dead sister, Lucy’s boys, Lilburn and Isham,” her sister Critta began, “been condemned for killing, and dismemberin’ Lilburn’s body servant, George, out there in west Kentucky. The news is just reachin’ Virginia.”
Critta had sat in the darkness of her secret room at the top of the staircase and told her the bad news from Kentucky. That was the reason why her master had snatched her up, along with Fanny and Burwell, and fled to their newly finished house at Poplar Forest. Away from the mansion.
“Last December, on the night of the fifteenth, Lilburn decided to chastise his slave George and ordered a bonfire built in the meat house of the plantation, and ordered all his slaves present. There, Lilburn and his brother Isham had two slaves tie up that poor boy, not two years older than Beverly, and then laid him on the meat block. First people thought Lilburn was only going to whip George. ‘Hand me that ax,’ Lilburn told his brother. Then the people thought Lilburn only going to chop off a finger or an ear, or maybe a whole hand or foot. But Lilburn first cut off the boy’s two hands and flung them into the fire and then cut off his feet. Then the people knew Lilburn’s goin’ to kill his slave. Lilburn started chopping and the people started groaning. Lilburn continued on with the slaughter and the people fell silent. Some say Lilburn chopped the head from the body, others say he threw George into the fire and burned what was left of his slave alive. All this because George broke a favorite milk pitcher of his dead mother. All this because Lucy Jefferson Lewis’s linen kept gettin’ ripped and her aprons kept disappearin’, and her dishes broken.”
Critta had paused. Sally Hemings stared at the trickle of saliva that had formed at the corner of her sister’s mouth. Wasn’t it James’s dream that Critta was telling her? James’s dream that she’d known in her bones for twenty-four years. Was she mad, her sister?
“And then people wailed into the night, and of course, according to them superstitious slaves, they done stirred up nature itself because an earthquake, they call it the New Madrid, an earthquake now rocked the Mississippi and it flowed backward, turned red, and overrun the banks, and all the ground shook and trembled, and windstorms came, and lightning, and all sorts of strange occurrences came on that night; and Lilburn’s wife went mad with the knowledge of what he done, and fled to her brother’s, and her ravings brought Lilburn and Isham to their ruin. . . . The slaves buried what was left of George, and Lilburn locked up his raving wife in the house. But the sheriff of the county came around asking questions, and when Lilburn’s hound dog dug up a jawbone, and the sheriff seen it was a human jawbone, he got the Lewis slaves and made them tell where they had buried George, then he made them dig up the rest of George’s charred bones. Lilburn and Isham were arrested for murder and taken to Salem and indicted.”
There had been a small sigh of exhaustion, and Critta had stared out the window for a long time saying nothing. Winter still lay on the land. The Blue Mountains were shrouded.
“The sheriff released them two brothers,” Critta had continued, “on bail of five thousand dollars to await their trial, but Lilburn made a suicide pact with
his brother to shoot each other over the grave of their mother. Isham fired and Lilburn he fell dead. Isham fled, but he was captured after a few days. He was tried for his brother’s murder and sentenced to be hanged. But before they could hang him, he escaped and is still not found.”
“And this is true, Critta?”
“As true as death, sister.”
“And how … how do you know?”
“How could I not know?” Critta said in disgust. “White people knows. So it follows that anything they know, we know.”
“But how?”
“Lilburn and Isham’s father was in Virginia at the time. The Lewis slaves, they all knew. Then it come in from the West on the slave intelligence, the trial in the newspapers. Only reason you ain’t read it is that Masta Thomas hid the newspapers. White people don’t know how many slaves can read. White people going around tiptoeing and whispering and slamming doors in their servants’ faces and locking them, and shutting their mouths in front of the servants. As if we wouldn’t know of it! They sat around here with blank faces with you and Masta Jefferson gone. He high-tailed it out there to Poplar Forest with you, like he could get away from it. Silence when you entered a room. Looks. They really think we don’t know what’s going on.”
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