Sally Hemings

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  She had stared at Critta. Her master had said nothing to her all those days. Had Burwell known? Fanny? Had he really thought she would not find out? Or had he simply decided to let someone else tell her? He had not had the courage to tell me, Sally Hemings thought. But then she had never had the courage to tell him of James’s nightmare either.

  “For weeks,” Critta had continued, “when any of the house servants entered a room, the conversation stopped. I swear I will never understand white people. Do they really think their lies fool the people who serve them? They go around whispering ‘Not in front of the servants,’ yet they done butchered a poor boy in front of the servants! They commit their crimes in front of the servants. They commit murder in front of the servants!”

  Sally Hemings stood up, trembling, blocking the light, drawing in the room with her breath. She stood against the window as she had stood in the doorway of her cabin the day the census taker had come up her road. Except that now the violet was outside. The deep shadows of a sunless afternoon. The clock ticked over another moment of silence.

  “You! You don’t know nothing about slavehood,” her sister had said. “You brush your silk skirts against it, that’s all. Petted and pampered and hidden and lied to. . . . Buried alive by your lover! You ain’t never puked from the smell of whiteness … begged God to take this cup from you. . . .”

  “Critta,” she had said, “you are crying. . . .”

  “Aw God, have mercy on us! Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven, have mercy!”

  “Critta. . . .”

  Sally Hemings’ face was seamed with rivulets of tears. They fanned out like delicate transparent lace on ivory satin.

  Critta had accused her of not knowing anything about slavery. But she had known everything there was to know. Critta had been ill-used. She had been raped and scorned. But Critta was she and she was Critta. They were and always had been one and the same, and they in turn had been one with every black field hand bent over the tobacco and cotton that had kept their white family in servants. Yet what had they known about their servants? She knew everything there was to know.

  The servants surprised the master at stool and fornication, childbirth and menses, in every secret intimacy. They knew if he was clean or filthy. Everything that was spotted, soiled, unwashed, creased, rumpled, worn and discarded, they picked up, and washed, folded and mended, and laid out anew for him. They knew if their master slept alone or not, and with whom. They recognized his waste and his possessions. They knew the true color of his hair and the true age of his sorrows. They saw him in fear and pain, jealousy and anger, lust and happiness. They knew his bastards, because most times they were their own children. Their master’s footsteps were as familiar as their own, his voice recognized in the midst of company.

  They saw him fight vice or honor it, swallow truth or pronounce it, flatter for power, gossip for amusement, wife-beat for amusement, flog out of viciousness.

  They knew if he destroyed out of envy or built out of pride. They knew his station in life and how he came to it. They knew if he hoarded his money or spent it, honored his debts, believed in his God. They smiled at his follies, laughed at his jokes, defended his reputation, nursed his children, despised or respected him as they pleased, obeyed him if they were compelled, ignored him when they had a mind to. They brought his children into the world, laid out his dead, buried his forgotten, hid his sins from the world, even from God—if they could. But not even they could always do that. And still the master thought he could speak the truth only out of their earshot, never in front of the servants. . . .

  Sally Hemings drew in her breath just as the hour struck. The jerking shadows of the firelight etched into the shadows of her face. The horror of the murder had lost the allure of memory and stood exposed before her there on the cabin floor—the dreadful amputated stump of slavery itself.

  She and Critta had stood that day, servant to servant, concubine to concubine, and had been one with their mother and their mother’s mother and her mother. One long line: The African and the beast hunter Hemings, the housekeeper and the slave master Wayles, the slave mistress and the American Jefferson. . . .

  He had not told her. His hands had been bloodied with his kin’s crime, and not only had he pretended not to know it, he had pretended that she would not know it. Those hands that had drawn her and had known her in all the secret places had not revealed his white secrets. And hers? Had her hands revealed her black secrets? James’s nightmare? Her hands that had soothed and caressed, had they been any less bloody? Didn’t she have James’s blood on her hands? On those immaculate hands she had kept so soft for him. And Critta, had her hands been free of blood? Had they not served the same murderers? And the slave boy George, hadn’t he lain down on the meat block for his masters; and his fellow slaves, hadn’t they tied him up and looked on and kept silent?

  How many had they been to witness murder? How many of them had been grown men? How many of those grown men would it have taken to overwhelm two white men and their guns? How many had thought only about their own flesh, their own sons; their precious flesh opening under a steel ax, their blood spraying like mist onto the heated air; their heart carved out on the butcher’s table.

  They were all bloodied, thought Sally Hemings. The whole race was bloodied. Not only with the real blood of suffering, the real blood of chains and whips and hatchets, but the blood of race, polluted, displaced, and disappearing in rape and miscegenation, and cross-ties of kin—that fine lace of bastardy that stretched across the two races like the web of a spider filled with love and hate—claiming cousins and nephews, daughters and sons, half sisters and half brothers. . . . The whole race was bloodied, the whole race had served with bloodied hands and had wiped them on their masters.

  They had washed and scrubbed and polished and glazed, but how could they, bloodied as they were, have cleaned anything? How? Sally Hemings’ mouth formed the word, but there was only silence, and a lonely woman in a cabin on the boundary of Monticello.

  She had never revealed to Thomas Jefferson that she had known about Lilburn and Isham. But she had turned away from his hands that day. From his touch. From his “darling.” And if she had told him, what would he have said? That it had had nothing to do with them. He would have spoken about “the insanity of mankind.” He had always taken things out of the specific, out of reality and made an abstraction of them. But men were real. Blood was red. George and Lilburn and Isham and James and Meriwether were not merely “mankind.” They had been his blood. If he hadn’t been responsible for his own blood, for his own issue, for his own race, then who had been responsible? So she had left it unsaid. She had forgiven him for so many things. Why not one more?

  And the years had passed like seeping water from a drying well. Silence between them. A whole kingdom of silence.

  The peeling gray mansion of Monticello stood bleak and deserted on its mountaintop while the wind howled and snow swirled around it.

  Sally Hemings sat until she could no longer see her hand before her face, and then she rose and went out into the snowstorm, hugging her shawl, her skirts dragging in the white satin layer of crystals beneath her feet.

  She went to her henhouse to gather some eggs, and on her way back she saw him again ahead of her, breaking pane after pane of silvery light, and then she knew that the circle was closed. It had been twenty-four years since Thomas Jefferson Hemings had strolled away, thirty-one since James had died, and forty-four since she had last seen Marly. Should she hurry to catch up with him, she thought, stay twenty paces behind, or return to the mansion?

  In the white mist, breathing softly, Sally Hemings listened to the coursing of her blood. She pressed her hands against her womb, and whispered, more to herself than to the dark figure, who, after all these years, still strode his Elysian fields:

  “Tell me it is not true, love, that I was never happy. . . .” But she knew then, she had made her pact with the infernals. The number of kisses it might take to redeem her now was
beyond even the power of Thomas Jefferson.

  “Martha gone and sold Monticello, Mama.”

  Mama?

  “Mama, Monticello’s sold! To tradespeople in Charlottesville!”

  Madison Hemings was desperately trying to pull his mother back from her reveries. She was standing in the December evening. It was six o’clock. She was chilled yet she would not move. He tugged at her, shaking the delicate snowflakes that had settled on both of them.

  He had helped pull a drowned man out of the Ravina once. He remembered the incredible weight of that waterlogged body—it seemed a hundred times the weight of a normal man. He remembered the pull of his muscles, the strain, the ache to drag the broken body up on the bank, and how he had stood there breathless, staring at the bloated shape, heavier than lead and no longer human.

  “Mama?”

  Sally Hemings felt herself being wrenched upward by an incessant humming in her ear, like a dying fly at the onset of winter. It was her son Madison.

  “What did you say, Madison, honey?”

  “Mama! I said Martha done sold Monticello to the druggist named Barkley in Charlottesville for his business and two thousand five hundred dollars. The price of three slaves! Ain’t the Randolphs’ no more. Ain’t Papa’s no more!”

  Madison was shocked. For the past five years, only the mansion itself and grounds surrounding it had remained: empty, deserted, decaying, but still theirs, a link to the past. In the spring, they would have been going up to the cemeteries to clean and weed and replant. . . .

  “Mama, you be careful going up there to the cemetery, ’cause you’ll be trespassing now. . . . Every time you pass the boundary line, you’ll be trespassing. . . .”

  Sally Hemings stared up at her gray-eyed son. So much like James … the same cat eyes. He had filled out in the past year. The ranginess and some of the violence was gone. Mary McCoy, she guessed. Madison and his black freeborn Mary McCoy. They would marry tomorrow. She stared up at him, but she didn’t have to ask if it was true about Monticello. She knew it was. The mansion. Houses died or were killed, just like people. She felt neither pain nor sorrow. The last link with the world was gone. She could drift now, she felt light. As light as snowflakes drifting.

  The weight of that house, which had been on her shoulders since she was seventeen, slipped off.

  PART VI

  1812

  Monticello

  CHAPTER 38

  SUMMER 1812

  Love songs are scarce and fall into two categories—the frivolous and light and the sad. Of deep successful love, there is ominous silence.

  W. E. B. DU BOIS, The Souls of Black Folks, 1953

  SALLY HEMINGS stood in the middle of Mulberry Row. Her hands were on her hips, her face protected from the sun by a wide-brimmed hat. Around her, children, dogs, chickens, horses, and slaves swarmed and threatened to capsize her not more than a hundred yards from the Big House. She surveyed what the summer of 1812 had wrought. Her body was tensed and leaned slightly forward.

  Along Mulberry Row, there continued the incessant thump of the nailery, the weaving cottage, the blacksmiths’ and the carpentry shop. From the stables came the sound of snorting, restless animals. The stables held stalls for thirty-six horses, and they were full, with the rest tethered on the pasture land behind. Bacon, the overseer, had given up trying to feed the forty carriage horses of the guests. He had begun to cut down on the feed, but the master had reprimanded him severely for it. Edmund Bacon had just arrived in the kitchens with a wagonload of his wife’s mattresses to supplement the depleted resources of Monticello. Every bed was full and in the upper rooms and attic, mattresses were strewn everywhere; servants slept on the floor on straw pallets in the hallways and corridors, which were so narrow Sally Hemings had to step over sleeping bodies every morning to get to her smokehouses and larder.

  Larder, she thought. Edmund Bacon had killed a whole beef day before yesterday and it was completely gone! Like hordes of boll weevils, the summer company had gone through their supplies like a field of cotton, leaving nothing in its wake. They had come from everywhere: Richmond, Charlottesville, Louisville, Alexandria, and a dozen other places farther away.

  About the middle of June, the travel would commence from the lower part of the state to the Springs, and there would begin a perfect throng of visitors. Whole families came with carriages, riding horses, and servants, sometimes like now, three or four gangs at the same time. Their carriages and buckboards lined the mile-long road to the house, and they stayed and stayed, from overnight to all summer: not only family but friends, neighbors, sightseers, and even total strangers. A dog yelped around her skirts and she gave him a hard kick. The table would be set for forty tonight, and the children, white and black, would eat in the kitchens.

  She saw three housemaids coming from the washhouse farther down the road, their arms full of snowy, newly washed and ironed linen. A footman was following with two mattresses on his head.

  Sally Hemings yelled at him. How many times had she told him not to carry mattresses on his nappy head! To tie it with a clean rag! He turned, stuck his tongue out, and continued on his way. Two other housemaids came by her carrying slop jars, a small child, who was crying, trailing one of them. Around her wafted the cooking odors of the midday meal, savory and pungent in the torpid air; farther down Roundabout Row, in one of the slave cabins, somebody was cooking chitterlings from the freshly killed hogs.

  After Thomas Jefferson’s return from Washington City, she had stood under the shade trees on the east lawn and watched Martha Randolph, with her wagon train of household goods, and all her children, make her way up the mountain for good. She had finally come to stay, she with her brood of children and her mad husband. Not that her family had had any place else to go. They had become penniless, with debts so overwhelming they could barely pay the interest on them. Thomas Mann had excelled his father-in-law in spending money and raising debts. She wondered if Martha were pregnant again. Thomas Jefferson had pleaded with her. What was he to do? Let them starve? Leave Martha, his only living child, at the mercy of her husband? His only living white child? And since then there had been no mistake about who was now mistress of Monticello. Thomas Jefferson had broken his vow. He had brought a white mistress back to Monticello: his own daughter.

  “But you promised me!”

  “Martha isn’t a ‘white mistress,’ for heaven sakes, she’s my daughter … your niece, our family!”

  “And who runs Monticello?”

  “Martha does.”

  He had said it. And he would not be moved on this; she knew him too well. There was an air of indifference about him now, a calm produced by the gratification of every wish. Beneath the suave manners, the glacial serenity, the almost deferential politeness, remained that special Virginian brutality that came from the habit of despotism and privilege, of never being crossed, of handling blooded horses, controlling ambitious men, ruling your own small kingdom, and contemplating your own place in history. He had forgiven himself everything, and he didn’t care if she forgave him or not. He was letting the Almighty do His own work. But she had kept the keys.

  “Sally Hemings, what on earth are you doing standing out there in the hot sun with your hat on when you know I need you right this minute, you hear me?”

  I hear you, Martha. I barely hear you over all this racket; this noise and heat and running back and forth and hammering and yelling and screaming and crying and playing children, and horses and cows and chickens; but I hear you, thought Sally Hemings, and I’m coming. Just don’t rush me, not today.

  It was the anniversary of her mother’s death five years before. She would never forget her. An image seared her and then dissolved. What was a black woman’s life? What was a woman’s life? Sally Hemings decided to ignore Martha’s summons for the moment. She let the waves of noise and smells ride roughshod over her, hardly caring, because in a few days she and her master would escape from the crowds to their unfinished hideaway, Poplar For
est, leaving Martha to cope with feeding, housing, and entertaining almost fifty people.

  When, she thought, were people going to stop persecuting Thomas Jefferson with their “most felicitous and cordial and heartfelt thanks for your hospitality”?

  They were officeseekers, relations, friends, artists, biographers, young Daniel Webster, Madison, Monroe, foreigners, natives, the famous, the near great, nonentities, and total strangers. They pretended to come out of respect and regard for him, but she thought that the fact they saved a tavern bill had a good deal to do with it. She was tired of seeing them come and she was tired of waiting on them, and, most of all, Monticello just couldn’t stand the drain much longer!

  There were several ladies, parasols in hand, strolling along the edge of the west lawn not fifty yards from her, and on it, a dozen children, mostly Randolphs and Hemingses, were playing blindman’s bluff. She looked up. At night the very floorboards of the house seemed to sag under the weight of humanity housed within. Maids and footmen and butlers, many of them promoted only for the summer crowd, broke the dishes, scorched the linen, mislaid the supplies, dropped the platters, and were slow as molasses to obey. This summer had seemed worse than any other. Her master seemed more withdrawn than ever, Martha more present.

  Let Martha lead the table at Monticello and preside over this mad-house, she thought. They would go to their hermitage for half the summer and all the fall, in their new octagonal brick house, and laugh and talk and tell old tales. She smiled.

  “You know how many names they got for Papa’s chamber pot?”

  “Beverly!”

  “Well, Mama, it’s true. I heard Mammy Ursula talking to Fanny the other day ‘cause little Ned had an accident, ‘cause he fell asleep.”

  “What?”

  “Papa’s State of the Union came out and spilled all over Ned’s head!”