CHAPTER 40

WINTER 1819

Beverly Hemings' eyes roamed the hilly, hard-to-work farmland that stretched to the east. It had once been worth fifty to a hundred dollars an acre, but now with the Panic, it was worth barely twenty. His father was in money trouble. It had dawned on him more than three years ago, the day they had packed up his library and shipped it up to Washington City, the library that had been Beverly's only real education, aside from Mr. Oglesby.

My father needs money, he had suddenly thought. That realization had brought terror with it. Money troubles for the master meant only one thing for the slave—the auction block. His hands had trembled as he, along with Burwell, Harriet, and his mother, had carefully wrapped and packed the books into the cases that had been prepared by his Uncle John and Dinsmore, the master carpenter. The Randolph girls— Virginia, Cornelia, and Ellen—had helped as well. When they had finished all the packing, there had been sixteen wagonloads of books— three thousand pounds each—forty-eight thousand pounds of his father's life. Each book had been handled, read, and touched by him.

No, Beverly was sure, he would never have sold his library, even to the United States government, if he hadn't needed the money desperately. The British had burned the Library of Congress when they had burned the Capitol during the war. He remembered with what horror and rage his father had received the news, and now all his books were leaving.... Beverly had burst into tears; his grief was not only caused by the sudden loss of "his" books but the meaning behind it all. His father had let him take out his favorites from the lots, but had made him promise never to reveal this to a soul.

"If everyone were allowed to take out their favorite books, me included, I would have nothing to sell to the Congress.... You understand, Beverly, I have made a promise. I can't except anyone from the rule, even you...."

From that day on, Beverly had had only one thought: how to keep his father, and thus himself and his family, safe from the threat of financial ruin that seemed to hang like a pall over Monticello. He had studied and looked and listened and planned and prayed as he saw the net drawing tighter and tighter around them all. And now the Panic had made everything ten times worse. There was real fear in the air.

Beverly Hemings stood watching the cavalier tear across the furrowed field just below the slope where he had set off his balloon. He laughed. He knew well who it was by the checkered black-and-white gingham coat with the huge metal buttons on it, the size of a dollar. The pantaloons were of the same material. The rider, mounted on a bay— Eagle, he guessed—was going at great speed. He was hatless as usual, his very head seemed on fire as his white hair caught the golden light, and he had a lady's parasol, probably Mama's, thought Beverly, stuck in his coat behind him and spread over his head to protect him from the sun. Beverly's heart filled with a kind of ironic tenderness. For his father.

It was now ten years since he had ridden home from the presidency. The time it had taken Beverly to grow up. His mother had not so much grown older as lighter, Beverly thought. Not so much in color; as a matter of fact, her beautiful face had grown darker—and not so much in authority either, for her presence was still as formidable as ever. Rather, there was about her a gradual disappearance ... a seeping invisibility, so that even as he heard her voice, as sweet and thrilling as ever, with its soft lilt and slight foreign sound, it was as if it were coming to him disembodied.

If his mother was as transparent as a looking glass, his father glowed like the sun in it. He, Harriet, Thomas, and the younger boys seemed not even to have been created by this golden monster on his blooded, dangerous horse, and his mother, as still and deep as a reflecting pool. He didn't understand either of them. They were beyond mortality. They were like stones or trees. One couldn't rile against stones, could one? One couldn't curse trees. Beverly flung his fair hair out of his eyes.

They were the strangest couple he had ever encountered, his mother and father. His tragic, terrifying parents.

Perhaps she is a miracle, he thought, to have loved him and to have survived this long. But now Monticello needed another miracle—no disembodied voices, no guardian angels, no supernatural beings were going to resurrect this place or save it.

Jeff Randolph was fighting mightily to keep Monticello from bankruptcy, but he was fighting a losing battle. The unprofitable condition of Virginia estates in general, and his father's in particular, had left it next to impossible to avoid ruin, especially with the failure of the banks. It was he who helped Thomas Jefferson Randolph run the plantations, now that his father had put his affairs in the hands of his grandson.

All the planters had been in bondage to the banks, which held tons of paper on every plantation in Virginia, and this would continue unless some change took place in the mode of working them. What the estates needed was a complete reorganization, away from agriculture and slave-breeding. The unprofitable land should be sold and the money invested in the developing cities of Richmond and Fredericksville. Lumber should be their staple crop, not slaves; they should be supplying the fast-growing cities with lumber, and making investments that would make possible the exploitation of the thousands of acres of forests that belonged to them. Beverly was certain they had the means to save Monticello and make a fortune to boot. But no one would listen to him. It seemed so simple to him. His father didn't want to be a slave-breeder, didn't want to live off the labor of slaves. Instead of slaves working in wheat, tobacco, and cotton fields, whose crops were at the mercy of Northern bankers and boll weevils, they should have freed men, each with their family, housed in community housing, working for wages in Monticello lumber yards, nail factories, iron works.... Goodness knows, they had labor!

With the rendezvous of the boats from western Virginia only a few miles away at Milton, they could ship thousands of tons of nails, thousands of cubic yards of good Virginia pine to the newly building cities, the settlements of the Louisiana Territory, not to mention the rebuilding of Washington City. And what about wagon wheels?—with the iron, the lumber and the manpower available, they could make millions of wagon wheels for the West. It just took a little business sense, something his Virginia aristocrat cousins knew nothing about. The nail factory, for example, was ludicrous. Run by an illiterate slave and a dozen children. It should be twenty times bigger, run by a foreman, white or black, it didn't matter, with men and the latest tools and forges. They had the land to build a real factory, not those miserable cabins they called a factory. White people were settling the Territories, and white people needed nails, iron pots, wagon wheels, farm tools, ax heads. And why not? Iron parts for the new steam engines, rails for the new steam carriages.

Beverly stopped abruptly. This was a good way to go crazy, he thought bitterly. He was nothing. A slave chattel. Why was he standing here watching his eccentric father ride, dreaming of a fortune in nails and lumber?

Yes, he would leave him in the end, this man whom he hated. Whom he wanted to adore. He had no choice. He was outlawed from him by his mothers's blood.

His father dismounted next to him. It always amazed Beverly that he was taller than his master, as broad, and now, with the years piled on Thomas Jefferson, stronger, much stronger.

"Thank you, Beverly. You, Isaac, be sure to wipe off Eagle. Wipe him down and rub him good. He's as tired as I am."

"Yessa, Masta."

Beverly had waited almost an hour for his father to return. He had wanted to talk to him about his ideas for the nailery and the south forests. But now his courage faltered. He knew that the only thing his father really wanted to talk about was his university. The university that he, Beverly, would never see the inside of, except as a carpenter or a floor polisher.

Last year he had ridden out with his master, his Uncle John, and the white workmen and slaves to commence the building of the university. Bacon had fetched a ball of twine from Davey Isaacs' store in Charlottesville, and his uncle had found some shingles and made some pegs; and they had all gone out into the fields that had belonged to Master Perry, now the grounds of the University of Virginia, and struck out the foundations of the building.

His father thought he could build a university that would take his mind off his decaying fortune, his mortgaged estates, his terrifying debts. His father would go on talking about his university in his presence without the least acknowledgment that every word was like an arrow in his breast: the new professors, the new buildings, the library, the rotunda, the future students ... while he was trying to think of something that would keep Monticello from being sold out from under his father's ... seat, Beverly thought grimly, and them along with it!

"Well, come, Beverly, if it can't wait. You've been standing there on one leg. Where's Jeff? What did he send you to tell me?"

Jefferson didn't send me to tell you anything, Father, thought Beverly. Jeff doesn't know how or what to do to save you. But I do. If only you would listen. I do. Me. Your bastard.

"Well, now, before you start in, Beverly, go fetch Jeff and see if you can find Joe and John. I've just been over to the university and I've got some new things to discuss with them. John has got to agree to do the planking the way Dinsmore says. I know it will be more expensive that way, but in the long run we'll save on nails."

Thomas Jefferson turned and looked Beverly in the eye. Their eyes were level; they were the same blue; there was the same frost in them that hid their real feelings from the world. Both pairs of eyes turned dark when anger or contradiction plagued them, as both reflected the rarity of their intellect. A kind of sullen brilliance rotated between father and son like a planet.

"Well, boy, what are you waiting for? Find your uncles!"

"Yes, Master."

Beverly caught the smell of horse on his father. He needs a bath, he thought.

He turned away. What had he hoped?

"Did you know that Beverly has been absent from the carpenter's shop for about a week?"

Thomas Jefferson, who had just returned from James Madison's Montpelier, looked up with surprise into the face of his overseer of thirteen years, Edmund Bacon. He asked Bacon to repeat what he had just said.

"I said, Did you know that Beverly has been absent from the carpenter's shop for about a week?"

Thomas Jefferson thought for a moment that Bacon had left the door open behind him and had let in a blast of cold December air. He knew that Beverly's origins were no secret to Edmund Bacon. His overseer had waited a week to tell him of his son's disappearance and now he stood before him, his face a mask betrayed by the anger and incomprehension in his eyes. When would it end, this deceit that even servants judged? This unbearable waste?

It was the beginning of 1822, and his university was entering the last stage of completion. In another year or so it would open its doors to fifty or sixty young men. His dream was almost within his grasp. He opened his mouth to ask for details, to demand why he hadn't been informed before, perhaps even to send Bacon looking for him, but to his surprise he found he was speechless.

Beverly. His beloved Beverly had "strolled" without saying goodbye. Had deserted him when he needed him most. And what about Oglesby? If Beverly had been absent from the carpenter's shop, he had been absent from his tutor's classroom as well; but Oglesby had not sent word that he was missing.

When Beverly had stayed beyond his twenty-first birthday, he had somehow felt that this slave son would remain by his side, that this one was more his than the others. He was a brilliant boy, and it had grieved him that his education had not been what it should have been. Oh, he had given him Oglesby and books, but the recognition, the incentive, these he had withheld. Just as he had withheld the love he had felt for his son. Out of pride, he thought.

"You knew he was leaving?"

Thomas Jefferson was standing in the room of the mother of his runaway son. He had waited until now to confront her—he had wanted to confirm Beverly's absence with Oglesby and be sure that she had known Beverly was gone.

"Yes," she answered.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because he didn't want you to know."

"Why?" he exploded. "I would never have stopped him from leaving!"

"He knew you would never stop him from leaving ... because of your promise. That is why he didn't want you to know ... he didn't want your permission."

Sally Hemings was guessing. This flight was one she had not planned. She didn't know why Beverly had suddenly decided to stroll. He had simply given up. Given up loving or hating his father, she didn't know which, and left. Before her master had left for Montpelier, he had sold twenty men, women, and children to his son-in-law Jack Eppes for four thousand dollars. His son-in-law had agreed to let the families remain together and to turn them over with the grounds to his son, Francis, when he came of age. In this way, Beverly's cousin, Mat, thirteen, was to become the property of his white cousin Francis, also thirteen years old.

Then, over at Edgehill, Thomas Mann sold Fennel's four-year-old Ely to Edmund Bacon for two hundred dollars. One day Fennel came home from the fields and his daughter wasn't there anymore. His wife lay in a faint; their baby girl had been sold away from them. Fennel had come riding from Edgehill to Monticello to recover his daughter from Edmund Bacon. When Bacon had heard Fennel was coming, he pleaded with her to calm him, as "he didn't want to harm him."

She had heard Fennel come howling down Mulberry Row as door after door closed upon his terrible face—the face of a man already dead, for wasn't he here to kill the white man who had bought his daughter or the one who had sold her? He had been pursued all the way from Shadwell by the black overseer, Jim, who had caught up with him almost in front of Elizabeth Hemings' former cabin. He had clubbed Fennel to the ground, and then had taken him tenderly in his arms. A ring of black men stood watch while Fennel had howled his grief into the night, within hearing distance of the Big House, howled like an animal, like the wild wolves that sometimes came up to the very doors of the slave cabins. His cries had washed over Monticello, over her and her children, safe within the mansion. Finally, dazed and beaten, Fennel had been lifted gently and flung over Jim's horse, and Jim had taken him back to his plantation.

That was when Beverly had left.

"Where is he?"

Sally Hemings was too tired to be frightened by the tone of her lover's voice. The violence of it was like a taste in her mouth. What could he do to her that he hadn't already done? She waited while her lover struggled to bring himself under control. She waited as she always had, supple and coiled and ready to spring to the left or the right, or fling herself down the center of his fury, depending on how it struck.

"I won't tell you," she said evenly, "because he doesn't want you to know where he is. He doesn't want any help from you. He's gone. North ... as a white man. Of all your sons, he is the only one who hates you."

Thomas Jefferson stared at the woman who had been his mistress for thirty-five years. He would never completely understand her. She had raised these slave children, and if this son hated him it was because he had been taught to hate.

His long, gaunt figure moved quickly as he raised his slave wife from her chair. He knew now why this sensation, this chill, this sense of jeopardy was so familiar to him. He had never known, all these years, if one day he might not wake up, or come home, and find this woman gone. He drew her to him and looked into the eyes, which burned back at him like the sun.

I will free his sons.

Then she broke.

"Oh God, another gone!"

"And thank God for it," said Thomas Jefferson.

He felt his own throat go dry as he watched her strain away from him, watched her tremble once more above the abyss of contradiction which was their life together, peering over the edge into that moment he knew would come one day; when he would no longer be able to hold her, when she would choose to follow Beverly.

The woman looked up at the man.

Thomas Jefferson braced himself, as the small body he held against him crumbled, the tiny hands raking and clutching the material of his frock coat.

"Sally. Mother. Don't cry. Please don't cry." He was disconsolate. His face was a mask of helplessness, bewilderment, and rage that resembled nothing so much as that of the slave father Fennel.