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 offa 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."

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, thirtyone 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 snow-flakes drifting.

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