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 Forest, 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 madhouse, 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!"

Beverly had begun to laugh. He had a laugh like his father's, she thought, short and abrupt, and likely to bring tears to his eyes if prolonged. Sally Hemings had laughed as well. Her lover had built an inside toilet, which was the object of much mirth among the household slaves. He had invented a way to move his chamber pot by a system of ropes and pulleys and wheels along a tunnel leading from the house to an opening in the ground about twenty-five feet away. It had been christened "The Underground Railway," over which traveled his "runaways." She and the other household slaves had elaborated on the theme until now there were "inaugural addresses" pronounced "in-all-urine-ass-dresses,"

"states of the union,"

"cabinet meeting,"

"Federal Reserves,"

"Treasury bonds,"

"ultimatums,"

"levees," and "Indian Treaties."

"Aunt Bett found a new name," Beverly had continued. "She said they were his "manumission papers." But in that case, he ain't shat in a long time!"

"Beverly!"

"I named it his Declaration of Indepen—"

"Beverly!"

"Now, Beverly, you want a good switching," she had said to his grinning face. But she had been laughing too hard for him to believe her. Blasphemy! She had tried to explain to her sisters how the mansion on the Champs-Elysees had been of the most modern construction, and had had as well as bathrooms, lieux anglais, or indoor water closets.

"That may be very well and good in Paris, France, honey, but trouble is, sister," Bett Hemings had said, "once this thing gets out there, there is still got to be a slave standing there ready to catch it, and empty it! Typical that Thomas Jefferson can't invent nothing that don't have a slave on the receiving end of it...."

She saw him now in the distance saddling up one of the bays he loved so much. First thing he had done when he came back from Washington City was to build a new carriage. John had built the body, Joe Fosset had done all the ironwork, and Burwell had painted every bit of it. Only the plating had been done in Richmond, and a finer carriage there was not in Albemarle. That carriage, with its four bays, Diomede, Brimmer, Tecumseh, and Dromedary, each pair guided by a slave, with Burwell outriding on Eagle, was some pretty sight, almost outshining in splendor his cousin John Randolph's, with his blooded horses and his slaves following with perhaps a dozen more.

The Randolphs.

They were the bane of her existence.

The Randolph blood.

It was the tragedy of her life.

Without it, Martha might never have returned to Monticello and Thomas Jefferson.

Without it, she and Martha might have lived out their lives apart.

The Randolphs, and God knows there were enough of them, were strange people. John Randolph was one of the most eccentric men who ever lived, and Thomas Mann Randolph was well nigh his equal. Like two identical steers. Having Thomas Mann on the mountain permanently didn't make her sleep any easier. Thomas Mann didn't like it any better—living with his father-in-law and watching his wife worship the ground her father trod on, any more than Thomas Jefferson liked his son-in-law drinking and acting crazier and crazier. But Martha was in such bliss to be back up here, she didn't seem to notice that her husband was crazy. Jim, the overseer at Legos, had told her the other day that Thomas Mann had driven Dromedary over to Edgehill and right into a row of haystacks, just like that. Scattering them in all directions and covering himself with straw. When he had reached the overseer and finished his business, he had calmly declared that he thought an old bull must have gotten into the wheat field, 'cause he had seen a good many shocks overthrown and scattered on his way over. As serene as you please, when he had done it himself, she thought. The overseer had laughed, because he knew Thomas Mann Randolph was crazy as a loon! Burwell said he had seen him take Dromedary's tail and run him up the mountain as fast as he could. And he was in money trouble too. Bad. Selling his slaves for cash.

Then there was Anne Cary, Thomas Mann's sister. She had been brought to trial for infanticide with her cousin and lover Richard Randolph. That had rocked the gentry!

Her thoughts were interrupted by the screams of the half-naked children who came racing by her; Ceres, the bull terrier, on their heels. Sally Hemings looked up into the lacy greenness of the immense ash trees that shrouded the Big House in shadow—trees planted by her lover before she was born. She loved these trees. Encompassing her in their soft violet shade, they seemed to stand between her and the world. Protecting that strange love which was her secret and her burden.

A dull pain struck her temple. She was almost forty years old. If she lived as long as her mother, there was as much of her life behind her as in front of her. And in those forty years she had had to learn slowly, like her mother before her, like every female before her, the uses of love.

And Martha. Everything would be all right, she thought, if only there were not two mistresses at Monticello, as if there could really be two mistresses of anything.