CHAPTER 5

ALBEMARLE COUNTY, JUNE 1831

With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?

thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1790

It had been more than a year since the census taker's first visit. Several months had passed before he appeared again, but thereafter Nathan Langdon's visits to Sally Hemings had become almost regular. Madison and Eston had finally accepted the presence of this tall lanky Virginian. They had become friends of a sort. Langdon never arrived empty-handed. There was always the town news, a book, or a newspaper, or a pamphlet, or some exotic fruit off one of the West India boats, some New England sweets, or a tool catalogue for Eston. Today he brought her something special.

Nathan Langdon entered and sat in the battered armchair while his hostess placed herself opposite him. She had prepared something to drink, and the silver platter, with its silver pitcher, was no more incongruous than his "unofficial" visits to the recluse Sally Hemings. In the rounded curve of the silver pitcher lay reflections, mauve and green, of the room. There was also a pool of yellow light in the center of the tray, heavy and still. The woman before him had raised her arm to pour into the small goblet.

The South had anchored these two people into predetermined, unbridgeable positions. Yet all they both represented was suddenly shrouded in such ambiguity that it made them ill at ease. The light made this forbidden woman almost ethereal, and, for a moment, Langdon imagined their separate worlds coming together. He was filled with a sense of intimacy.

"What is it?" asked Sally, eyeing the package he was offering her.

"New poems by Lord Byron. Straight off the ship from London!"

"I have never read much poetry.... A little in French when I was in Paris. My teacher used to give us lines to memorize...."

"Byron is the most famous English poet living."

"Thank you, Nathan. How I envy those who can express themselves with words."

"Most people express themselves with too many words ... such as Southern lawyers. Verbosity is not lacking in any Virginian. And what they can't talk about, they write in their journals. Even I have succumbed to it."

"You keep a journal, Nathan?"

"Since I went North. I felt it was my duty to record the horrors of the North as seen by a true Virginian for my compatriots who didn't dare cross the boundaries between Heaven and Hell.... I called it 'Reflections of a Virginia Gentleman on the Manners and Morals of Boston Society.' I fancied myself a Southern de Tocqueville....

"During your stay in France, didn't you keep a journal?"

"I?" Sally Hemings smiled. "I was fifteen and though I spent most of my time inside the ministry, I did see a great deal that I felt I wanted to record. I was also there during the storming of the Bastille in 1789. My brother James saw much more than I did. He ventured outside and mixed with the crowds. It was like being in the middle of a rapid, he said. I will never forget that day."

"And you kept a record of it?"

"A childish record, but a record nevertheless."

"It should be a precious document."

"My diary, a precious document? For me, perhaps. Maria gave it to me on the boat sailing to France. I could hardly write at the time.... I have since copied those first attempts over...." Sally Hemings stopped talking. She wanted to change the subject. Did he think she could be persuaded to share her most private possession?

She frowned. When she had decided to receive the census taker as a "caller" rather than as a representative of the class and power that governed her life, she had done so impulsively, responding to a strength and warmth she sensed in him. He had never asked to visit, nor had he been invited; yet week after week, he appeared at the cabin. Why she continued a relationship which she knew to be dangerous to her sons, she didn't know. And now she felt trapped. What was it that made her look forward to his visits? Vanity? Yes, she enjoyed the attentions of a young man, his strivings to please her. Loneliness? Perhaps. Langdon seemed to infuse a confidence in her she had never known before.

In the long afternoons of recounting her past, she had discovered that she had indeed had a life: a life full of deep and complex feelings. When he had questioned her, she had answered him in the only manner she was capable of: truthfully. Searching for the right tone, the exact phrase evoking as accurately as she could what she remembered. A sort of conspiracy had developed between them. There were times she didn't even feel like mentioning his visits to Eston and Madison. After all these years, she thought, how could she again be anticipating a man's visit? She found herself careful of her clothes, of her hair.

The secretive nature of their relationship seemed almost fitting. Had it not always been thus with her? Always the forbidden? It would have been more fitting, she thought, if, instead of exchanging thoughts, they exchanged pleasures. This would have been much more acceptable than what they were doing; for thoughts, feelings, and memories were all a slave, or an ex-slave, had to call her own. Even Thomas Jefferson had bowed to that rule. He had loved her as a woman and owned her as a slave, but her thoughts had always remained beyond his or anyone's control.

Nathan Langdon realized he had crossed the invisible barrier Sally Hemings had put between them and she smiled back at him.

"My writing upsets me. It reminds me that so many years have elapsed since anything has happened in my life."

"Do you know of the famous poetess who lived in Boston, named Phillis Wheatley? She was an ex-slave and highly praised for her poetry."

"No, I have never heard of her."

"I hear the abolitionists publish her widely."

"Even in the South?"

"Oh, publications slip in. Many people read and like her poetry and don't know that she was black and an ex-slave."

"You should say 'freedwoman,' not ex-slave, Nathan. You make it sound like a punishment instead of a liberty."

Nathan Langdon stared at the small face gazing intently into his. He wondered how these conversations would sound to an eavesdropper of his own color. In the beginning, he had posed simple questions, staying away from the subject of slavery. Yet as this had been the central element of her life, it was impossible not to touch on it in a thousand ways. As Sally Hemings' life story was unfolding, both the narrator and the listener had been overwhelmed by the weight and breadth of it. Langdon was awed at the intricacy of the information he was receiving. He was also well aware that it was compromising him both politically and emotionally. He had by now become hopelessly attached to this woman. More than that he had become involved with her.

He was spellbound by the fading echoes of her existence as bits and pieces came to him.

Sally Hemings regretted her confidences to Nathan, yet on the days that he didn't come she was disappointed. She still prepared for his visits carefully, reaching in her memory for incidents or names that would impress or amuse him. Despite herself, she spoke more and more openly. She opened drawer after drawer of memories, which she rearranged, changed, aired, discussed, and counted, like linen. Her volatile performances, for that was what they were now, excited and fascinated Langdon.

"They were just men," she would say with a smile when she spoke of those heroes already carved in marble (all except the dubious Aaron Burr). She and her sisters and her uncles and her mother and her mother before her had all been an unseen army, treated as if they could not see, hear, or feel.

Clinging to her words, Nathan followed the complicated plots and the many famous characters, slave and free, devotedly. Now, Langdon hardly asked a question. There was no need. Words followed in an unending stream. Sally Hemings spoke with a kind of desperation, willing him to understand. Sometimes she would take on the accent of the person she was describing. She was a talented mime. She didn't realize that while she was merely recounting her past to Nathan Langdon, she was in fact uncovering a person she had never known from a life she had had no sense of. From these afternoons emerged a new Sally Hemings.