CHAPTER 19

SEPTEMBER 1789

It was amidst the ceremonies and processions that followed the fall of the Bastille that I found I was with child.

"Tu es enceinte," said Marie-Louise. She looked at me with kindness and exasperation as I stared at her in disbelief. She had warned me and now she was afraid all her concoctions of parsley, rue, and camphor, or any of her other remedies would be of no avail.

I roamed the streets in a daze, weakened by the cramps in my stomach and the constant nausea. Te Deums filled Notre Dame every day, and procession followed procession, with gay young women in white muslin tied with tricolor sashes moving among the crowds. The processions and the bread lines grew longer. One day I decided never to return to the mansion.

I took refuge with Madame Dupre on the rue de Seine.

She guessed at once what had happened; she took me in her arms, and urged me to return to the safety and comfort of the Hotel de Langeac.

"Sooner or later," she said, "you will be forced to abandon your child. Paris is notorious for that." She paused. "There are three thousand abandoned children a year in Paris. Surely you don't want to add to that sad number?"

"But you don't understand," I replied, "this is not just a bastard child, it is a slave bastard. It will belong to my master, Monsieur Jefferson."

"But of course it is his!"

"No, Madame, that is not what I mean. I mean it is his not only by blood but by property. It is his property to do with what he likes, just as he can do with me what he likes. I am not free, Madame."

There was a long silence as Madame Dupre tried to assimilate this information.

"You mean you are a slave, like the Africans in Martinique and Santo Domingo?"

"Not like the Africans. I am African. I am black."

At this, Madame Dupre seized me and dragged me into the light of the window. She looked searchingly at my face and body, at my hands and nails. At the texture of my hair.

"Then you are a metis?"

"Yes."

"Go back to him. Go back and demand your freedom and that of his child. Demand it in writing and stay here in Paris. You will find a protector. I promise you that. On French soil you are free and you shall stay free. But return to him. Give him the chance to express his instincts as a father and a lover. You may be surprised. He loves you."

"I don't want to be loved. I want to be free."

"Do you really, my child? You love him as well, and there is no freedom in that."

She looked at me with her wise, cynical eyes and shook me gently by the shoulders.

"Rentre a la maison," she said to me. "Go home. Tu veux rentrer, n'est-ce pas?"

"Oui" I answered, "I want to go home."

A week after my departure I returned to the mansion. I had stolen myself and now I tried to replace the stolen object quietly, as if it had never been taken from its owner. I entered through the courtyard and servant quarters in trembling expectation of meeting my brother James, but it was Petit that I met in the reception hall. He looked at me without surprise, but with studied annoyance. What havoc I must have wrought in the household to have put any expression, let alone anger, on those cold features ... as I searched his face, looking for a clue as to what awaited me, a warm expression stole over his face.

"Do not be alarmed, but ... he is ill. He has been in grips of a migraine headache for almost a week with no relief....James has gone again to fetch Dr. Gem."

I remembered from Monticello the violence of these sudden headaches that were powerful enough to render my master senseless. I tried to remember what remedies had been used at Monticello to ease him.

"Petit," I said, forgetting my own predicament, "it is possible to get camphor and ice and ..."

"We've tried everything ... Mademoiselle ... except your return.... I pray that it will relieve him."

"Why did he not look for me?"

"I do not know."

"And James?"

He ransacked Paris for you."

"But I was at Madame Dupree's!"

"She swore you were not. She even let him enter and search the rooms."

I smiled. How had she managed to fool James with me installed in her attic?

"Come," he said, not unkindly. "You'll have to face him sometime." Then, turning toward me just as we arrived in front of the apartment, he said, as if in explanation of the state in which I would find my master:

"You dealt him a blow I would not have thought possible." Now he seized my shoulders gently and turned me toward the door.

I entered the apartment. The curtains were tightly shut and my eyes were unaccustomed to the darkness. In the room, there was the same undefinable odor of gunpowder that had stalked the streets of Paris three weeks before. I recoiled as it smote me, and turned to flee. His voice sounded and held me there.

"Why did you do that to me."

The long ashen figure, fully dressed, sat up on the bed, and the face I looked into was one of such desolation my heart almost stopped. The voice was husky and scarred. The fury was barely controlled.

"Why did you do that to me?" he repeated evenly.

"I'm with child. That is why I ran away."

I threw this at him, meaning to convey to him all the despair and loneliness of the past week of rebellion, but instead a fierce joy took hold of me.

"Sally..."

"I will not give birth to a slave! I am free now. I will never birth slaves!"

A flush of color came into his deathly-pale face. I stood apart from him—some yards—afraid to approach, stubborn, and poised for flight. It was he who then fell back in pain. I wavered, but held my ground.

"I know ... that I cannot hold you against your will. Our ... your child I consider free and will always consider free. You have my word. I recognize that you are free, as free as your heart permits."

I was lost. My heart was his, and he knew it. I faltered, cornered, weak.

"I want him born on French soil...."

"We must go home, Sally, but it is only temporary. We will return."

"That is not enough ... I want—"

He began to speak very softly to me, drawing me nearer and nearer. Making me strain to hear until I knelt beside him. His voice was low and sweet, as if he were maning a young wild falcon to the block. There were tears streaming down his face and promises on his lips.

His promises mingled along with mine in the sultry darkness. No, I would not leave him again. No, I would not die in childbirth. No, I would not claim my freedom.

Yes, my children would all be free. When? At twenty-one. Twenty-one. Five years more than I had been on this earth.

His voice and his face hovered over me, held me. He touched and pained me with his terrible loneliness. Never would I cause such pain again. My own needs, my own loneliness, seemed nothing compared to his—his needs were so much mightier than my small ones, his space in the world so much more vast and important than any place I could imagine for myself. Slowly, I succumbed to his will.

"Promise me you will not abandon me again."

"I promise, Master."

"I swear to cherish you and never desert you."

"Yes, Master."

"I promise solemnly that your children will be freed," he said. "As God is your witness?"

"As God is my witness."

"Bolt the door," he said.

We returned once more to Marly, my master and I. We stood side by side on its heights and looked down for the last time, feasting on the panorama. The September landscape was deep and still; I fixed this vision in my mind, vowing to return to it. Here, I still believed, anything was possible. I vowed to keep this dream.

I sensed the same languor invading us both: it was like the rustling of leaves, deep and continuous, barely audible except to the soul; a sweetness that surprised both of us, for I knew he felt it, yet it never occurred to either of us to speak of it. There would always be such silences between us, partly from prudery or because of our temperaments, but also because there were so many things that must remain unsaid. All our lives. I turned toward the immense figure in dark blue standing silently beside me, and between me and the world. I was beginning to understand this strange, impulsive, melancholy man, full of contradictions and secrets, this man who owned me, my family, and my unborn child.

How did it matter that he was master and I slave? That he loved me and risked much for me? That he took more space in the world than most men did, did not concern me, neither his fame nor his power. I cherished him.

My hand was taken in his. I let it lie where it had been placed. The future and our happiness, like Marly, stretched out before me, total and shoreless. The surrounding fragrance drugged me, and made me careless of what awaited me just beyond my view.