CHAPTER 7

ALBEMARLE COUNTY, AUGUST 1831

The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.—But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one's mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution.

thomas jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1790

The summer was passing and Sally Hemings' thoughts were enclosed in a soft, weary happiness. Slowly, out of an almost invisible but very deep wound, in an unceasing stream, thoughts and feelings welled up and spilled out. She felt herself floating, felt an odd excitement in answering Nathan Langdon's questions, and even while speaking was divided between pleasure and torment. She had lived a life; she was startled to perceive that life. As if it had been kept in a long underground passage which ascended now and again into the midst of tremendous events called History. History, which had left her alone in a vast, unfamiliar, unwanted wasteland.

Furtively, she looked across at Nathan Langdon. He really was quite an ordinary man, yet it was only with him that she felt this new sense of her existence. Had he given her that, or had she taken it herself? It was so hard to know.

"What are you thinking?" he said from the shadows.

"My own thoughts," she answered.

Nathan sensed a resistance, even an irritation. He knew the mood. Since summer he had treaded softly with Sally Hemings. He remained silent and let the moment pass. There would be other moments, a long series of moments in which to unravel the mystery of Sally Hemings. He would bide his time.

Nathan Langdon sighed in the stillness. It was an afternoon like many he had spent with this ex-slave. He felt himself sliding deeper and deeper into compromise with his race and his class and less and less inclined to shake himself out of a numbing lethargy, an insidious guilt that kept him peering into the faces of his slaves, his servants, his mother, his brothers, his fiancée. For what? He didn't know. He really didn't know anymore why he had returned to Charlottesville. He had certainly begun to question his earthly destiny. When Esmeralda and his mother had begged him to come, it had been with relief that he had returned South to take up the responsibilities of his family. He had made little headway in Boston. The possibility of success in the North for a Southerner, without means or influential friends, was dubious. He also knew that he was wanting in the bitter, energetic ambitions of most of his Northern schoolmates, but he had blamed this on his "Southernness." Yet his luck had been no better here in Charlottesville, where he could hardly call himself a stranger. He found it difficult to slip back into "Virginian" ways. He had acquired sharper edges in the North. At least he liked to think so. The coying slickness of Southern manners now stuck in his gullet. The only thing he had accomplished in the past year had been his job as census taker. That had ended now, he thought, and he hadn't succeeded in extending his connections or his business. He had tried to form a partnership which had not worked out well. His clerkship with Judge Miner was over and he had not been invited to stay on. He had always had a desire for public life; to shape national conduct seemed to him the highest form of achievement, he mused, but he had no money and what influence there was had to be shared with his two brothers, who also had political ambitions. There was little that was public in his solitary room, or his solitary office, or his solitary visits to Sally Hemings. He didn't think consciously of his unhappiness, or of what Sally Hemings might have to do with it. If he had, he might have prevented what happened that peaceful August afternoon.

It was several days after the much-awaited eclipse of the sun.

It was the same August 31, 1831, that the slave Nat Turner, property of Putnam Moore and born the property of Benjamin Turner, and his aide-de-camp, the slave Will Francis, born the property of Nathaniel Francis, were, with a small army of sixty or seventy men and one woman, all born slaves, sweeping through the County of Southampton, Virginia, and in two days and one night, murdering every white man, woman, and child that had crossed their path, systematically burning everything as they killed. Fifty-five men, women, and children would perish this day because of the one favor of God they held highest and in common: being white. Turner's goal was the arsenal in Richmond where, he, hoping to have gathered around him an army of hundreds of runaway slaves, had planned to organize an uprising of all the slaves of Virginia, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. He would fail.

"If your brother doesn't want it, why don't you take on the case, Nathan?"

Langdon shifted nervously in his chair. He hadn't come to see Sally Hemings today to be challenged. Confronted with a difficult decision. One that basically went against his grain. The Hemingses were one thing. Mulattoes were another.

"He didn't say he didn't want it. He said it couldn't be won in a Virginia court of law."

"I know the atmosphere, with all these new laws, is tense, Nathan, but perhaps you..."

Who did she think he was, thought Langdon, Thomas Jefferson?

"The case, as I said, is un-winnable. It will be one of those trials that is decided even before it begins."

"As are all trials concerning mulattoes in Virginia," said Sally Hemings. She had almost forgotten. If Virginia courts condoned murder, they wouldn't blink an eye at fraud.

"Yes, most."

"And you can't help him?"

"I would, if I could."

"Jefferson once tried to defend a mulatto when he was young...."

"And he lost." Nathan Langdon said this not without pleasure.

"He lost, to be sure, but he tried." Sally Hemings was trembling. She rarely asked for anything. She hadn't realized how difficult it was. "It took courage at the time," she said, and looked intently at Langdon. It had been the wrong thing to say.

"Courage or foolhardiness? You must know that with the situation as it is now, any mulatto who sets foot in a court is going to lose just for having the temerity to do so."

Sally Hemings was still looking at Nathan Langdon. There was something in her gaze that profoundly irritated Langdon. Something childish and stubborn. Or was it only his anger and terror at being compared with the great Jefferson, the constant references to him as if he were a touchstone, a holy relic?...

"But this case is different, Nathan. This man was never a slave. He was freeborn to begin with. You see, Master ... Jefferson's case was one of a slave who sued for freedom on the grounds that his mother was white, and a child by Virginia law inherits the condition of his mother. But this man was born free because his mother was freed before he was born and left the state. His father recognized him in court in Philadelphia, and he should have the same rights as any citizen of the United States, being born outside Virginia, to inherit property. In this instance, his property is his own slave kin! Brothers and sisters and uncles!"

"He is still legally a mulatto, therefore he cannot testify against his white cousins in the case. It is no longer a question of slavery but that of a black man testifying against a white man."

Sally Hemings was silent. Nathan Langdon felt the gall rise in his throat. Women. She still wanted a hero. The heroic age was over. Didn't she know that? Ended with James Madison. This was the age of mediocrity, small-mindedness, caution, calculation, money-grubbing. The age of the common man. An age that deserved what it got: Jackson, not Jefferson. Then he heard her say:

"Think if it were Madison or Eston."

"It could never be Madison or Eston."

"Why not?"

"Madison and Eston," Langdon said very deliberately, "are white. I made them white. Legally. They can testify against anybody on earth."

"White?"

"In the census. I listed them and you as white."

There was a stunned silence. Outside, only the sounds summer makes. "It takes more than a census taker to turn black into white." Her voice had an ominous quality to it: a sudden chill that should have warned him.

"After all, by Thomas Jefferson's definition, you are white."

"By Thomas Jefferson's life, I'm a slave."

"Think how much easier it is for you now, staying in Virginia with all that's going on ... not to have that sword of expulsion hanging over your head! I... decided."

"You decided." He couldn't tell whether she was going to laugh or scream. "You decided! For fifty-four years I've been Thomas Jefferson's creature, and now... now you decide it's time for me to be yours. Yours!" She began to laugh. "It's Judgment Day! Instead of being black and a slave, I'm now free and white."

Her eyes showed something of that lurid yellow that had frightened him on his first visit.

If he had been a good lawyer, or even a competent one, Langdon would at this point before it was too late have laughed and tried to turn the whole thing into a joke. Or he would have lied by saying she had completely misunderstood. But Nathan Langdon was not a good lawyer. He blundered on, insisting, explaining. Perspiration was forming on his high forehead. There were undertones, nuances, secrets he hadn't calculated and that he had no way of gauging.

Her laughter had shattered what composure he had left. Instead of reading her face, in which was reflected shock, disbelief, horror, as well as a plea for rectification, he went on pleading his already lost cause, repeating himself with a kind of childish despair. Surely she knew he had meant well. That he had done it for her!

The shrillness of her laughter had given it a loud, raucous, almost drunken quality. Then suddenly it stopped.

"Why did you have to tell me? Why couldn't you have kept quiet? What did you think you were doing—playing God?"

"I did it for you and your sons."

"Don't be a fool, Nathan. You didn't do it for me. You didn't even know me. You did it for him. To make him not guilty. To shield him ... so that he wouldn't have a slave wife!"

Her eyes had turned darker. A strand of black hair had escaped from its knot. He wanted to go down on his knees and hide himself in the folds of that skirt again. Surely, it was going to be all right. Surely, he wasn't going to lose her over this.

"Forgive me, I didn't realize..."

"Forgive you because you didn't realize ... That's what black folks are here for. To forgive white folks because they didn't realize. Forgive me. Forgive me. My father said it. My lover said it. My white sons will say it. Yes, I forgive you. All of you, and your insufferable arrogance. But I never want to see you again."

"Please..."

"You are not welcome here anymore."

"I beg you..."

"If you come back, Nathan, I'll have Madison throw you out." She went on before he could cut in again. "I'm tired, Nathan. I'm tired of white men playing God with my flesh and my spirit and my children and my life, which is running out. I thought you understood that.

You've left me nothing of my own. Not even my color! I've been asked to give, and give, and give, and now I can't give any more. I can't forgive another man, Nathan. I'm sorry."

He had made one of those blunders of enormous consequence that only a fool or the very young makes. One that afterward plays again and again in the mind like a set piece in a game of chess long after the match has been lost. It would seem to him incredible, later, that such a small miscalculation, flung so nonchalantly on the board, would have cost the game.

"Oh, God." He groaned. "Tell me what to do. I'll do anything. Pay any price."

"That's what all white men say." There was dullness and pity and contempt in her voice. "You are just like all the rest. You haven't understood anything of what I've told you all these months. You still think I exist by your leave. You always will."

The bitterness shocked him. She meant what she said. He had not understood.

"Please, I love you."

"That's what all men say. That's what he said. That's what he said!"

Suddenly, there was no Sally Hemings. No Nathan Langdon. There was only unfathomable, uncontrolled black rage. A rage that went far beyond the terrified young man who skimmed and rocked on its surface like a storm-tossed skiff.

Sally Hemings rose like some outraged goddess in her sanctuary, now defiled. Like pure crystal light, her rage, he felt, could maim or kill at will. There was something diabolical and possessed in the scream that echoed after Nathan Langdon as he fled from her.

That sound would remain for him one of the bitterest and cruelest memories of his life.

For a long time, Sally Hemings stared at the receding figure of Nathan Langdon. Then her head snapped back. There was a pressure in her head that seemed to push her neck forward and made her want to lower it.

When she looked down, there were spots of blood on her apron. Blood. Her nose was bleeding. She lifted the white apron and buried her face in it. Blindly she whirled and entered the darkness. She let her apron drop.

She owned nothing, except the past. And now, even that had been taken from her. She had been raped of the only thing a slave possessed: her mind, her thoughts, her feelings, her history. Among all the decisions of her life, she realized, not one was ever meant for herself.

Sally Hemings was trembling. She went to her dark-green chest. This moment she knew had been coming ever since that April day the census taker had arrived at her door, interrupting her solitude, disturbing her memories, changing her color. She took out a small linen portfolio, opened it, and stared at the yellowing, unframed sheet within. It was a pencil drawing, a portrait of her as a girl in Paris. She had never shown this drawing to anyone—not to her sons, not to Nathan Langdon, not to Thomas Jefferson. She had never reasoned why. Except that somehow, on this small scrap of paper, John Trumbull seemed to have captured something that made her see herself for the first time. This one was the sole image of herself that belonged only to her.

For a long time she studied the delicate lines on the aging paper. Had she ever been this young? Could she ever believe, invisible as she was, betrayed, and drowning in this sea of loneliness, the generations passed from her, that she had loved? ... Had loved the enemy....

She turned and strode to the fire. Sacrifice. For one instant of pain, she hesitated, and then she threw her image into the fire. Blood. A blood sacrifice.

For one moment her eyes went to the small bundle of cloth and clay on the mantle. What more did the gods want? She strode again to the chest and stared down at the yellowing diaries.

"In order to burn them I would have to forget you."

There was a slight smile on her lips as she began to burn paper. She burned through the afternoon. The last to go were her diaries. As she knelt, tearing the pages one by one, her eyes shone like a cat's in the light of the fire, her face was streaked with tears. George ... George. Like George. A human sacrifice. She destroyed all but the last diary. There was still one more thing she had to do. She tried to rise. Her long black hair had loosened and fell like a nun's chaplet over her shoulders to her knees. She no longer had the strength to pull herself up, so she continued kneeling in an attitude of prayer, her diary open to the last page on her bloody apron. There, before her, in small neat script, was the account of hours: every visit with its date and length of stay Thomas Jefferson had made to Monticello from the time she had returned to Virginia with him. Re-enslaving herself. Thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years of minutes, hours, months. A certainty that her fate was something more than a personal one overtook her.

Like an abbess at her devotions, she repeated each date. The last inscription was not the date of his death, but the date of his last return to Monticello, twenty-six years before.

She would make this act her very own, she thought: neither black nor white, neither slave nor free, neither loved nor loving.

She burned it. She felt a deep calm. She no longer feared anything; not death itself. She had crossed that line. Even if they hanged her.

As for Nathan Langdon, he had helped her leave her life. She never intended to see him again.