CHAPTER 42

 

OCTOBER 1825

 

 

"Sally!"

It was Martha's voice, sharp with anxiety. I didn't know why I had come down the east stairs from my room as if I had been summoned, but I was in the hallway when she called. I saw her leading her father from the dining room, where he had—as usual—been entertaining a group of young students from the University of Virginia.

The door had been left ajar, and I could see the assembled young men, several of whom I didn't recognize.

As was his custom, Thomas Jefferson's place had been set separately, at a small table which was now empty, the chair pushed back. The young men were all on their feet, and several were peering anxiously through the opening of the doorway.

"Sally, he's been taken with a malaise," Martha said.

"No, Martha, I'm perfectly all right now."

"Here, let me help you."

He leaned heavily on me. I felt the tremor of his hand on my shoulder. How fragile and weak it was. Those hands that had had so much strength, that had guided, shaped, designed, and caressed. Now they rested, palsied and without weight, on my shoulder. I turned my back to open the door, and slowly we made for his room across the hall.

"Get Burwell," he murmured.

Burwell's gone to Charlottesville, I thought in panic as I looked over my shoulders beyond the open door into the glare of the candle-lit dining room. Then I thought without surprise, He is dying.

 

 

From Harriet's departure on, misfortune had plagued us. No sooner had my master recovered from his fall from the terrace than he had ridden and had been thrown again by Brimmer. Stubbornly, he had ridden once again, and this time it had been Eagle that had slipped while fording a river and my master, entangled in the reins with his crippled wrists, had almost drowned. Next had come a fever that had confined him to his bed for three weeks. Then a flash flood had swept away the dam he had been building for over a year. He began to sink under the weight of his debts, which seemed to have no end. He had had to borrow from his son-in-law Jack Eppes and had pledged Varina, Martha's estate. Then his eldest and favorite granddaughter, the lovely and gentle Anne, whom we called Nancy, died, believed by everyone to have been killed by the brutality of her husband. Charles Bankhead, a young, handsome aristocrat, had turned out to be a drunkard, a bully, a coward, and a wife-beater. Many a time one of the overseers, or Burwell himself, had saved her from a beating by her husband.

Six years earlier, Jefferson Randolph had accosted Bankhead on the courthouse steps in Charlottesville and accused him of abusing his sister. Bankhead had responded by stabbing Jeff several times with a long knife. When Thomas Jefferson had heard the news, at nightfall, he had mounted his horse and galloped down the mountain the several miles to Charlottesville. Then, before I could stop Beverly, he, too, had saddled up and ridden out to find his father. "He'll kill himself in this weather," he had said. Fear in his face, he had taken Brimmer and sped. When Beverly arrived at the store where Jeff had been taken, he saw his father kneeling by the head of his wounded grandson, weeping. Jefferson Randolph had been conscious and when he saw his grandfather crying, he too had started to cry. Burwell and Beverly had watched in silence. Jeff, unlike his sister, had survived.

It was Eston who rode out after Thomas Jefferson now, fearful that he would come to some harm. He would ride down to his university that Eston and Madison had seen the inside of only as carpenters....

In one way or another, all my master's "sons" had forsaken him. Thomas Mann in insanity, Bankhead in brutality, Jack Eppes in premature death, Madison and Monroe in ingratitude, Meriwether Lewis in suicide, Thomas Hemings in flight, Beverly in whiteness. There was only Eston who remained a son. And in his hurt and melancholy and loneliness, he had shown more affection and tenderness to Eston than to any of our other children. He had given Eston Maria's pianoforte, encouraged his music, paid for his lessons; given him and Madison a plot of land of their own to earn money. Madison had become a fine fiddler, but even this tired and tardy recognition left me unmoved. I was like a piece of ground too long soaked with water which remains damp and cold even when the sun appears.

In the end, it was the master who sought his sons and their love, their attention, who wanted more from them than was his due; for if he had loved them, had he trained them as sons, a fierce and loyal love would have been his. His white grandchildren would never be able to give him the special kind of desperate love his yellow children would have laid at his feet. His grandsons were, after all, one generation removed from his flesh. Madison, Thomas, Eston, and Beverly were the sons of his passion.

 

 

At the end of 1824, one man who could remind him of our beginnings arrived at Monticello.

Resplendent, Lafayette returned again in February to Monticello, at the end of his triumphal tour of America, where he was laden with honors and voted by Congress two hundred thousand dollars and a township of land in appreciation for his services to the country during the Revolution. For my master, it must have been a bitter mockery of our own desperate situation.

General Lafayette's first visit to Monticello had had the aura of an official visit. There had been more than three hundred people present to witness the two old men shuffle into each other's arms, tears flowing.

The crowds had gathered outside on the west lawn that day to see with their own eyes the meeting of the two heroes of the Revolution. The fastidious and luxury-loving Lafayette had not changed his tastes, nor his mode of living, I saw, French Revolution or no French Revolution. As the elegant carriage rolled onto the flattened clay and sand, a dapper, finely dressed Lafayette had descended amidst cheers.

The last visit was quiet and more intimate, the true closing of a circle begun so long ago, the rendering of accounts, toting up of long-lost memories.

It was during this second visit that I made the acquaintance of Lafayette's companion, the mysterious Frances Wright. She sought me out, eager to speak. Frances Wright, a rich, well-born orphan of Scottish descent, was rumored to be General Lafayette's mistress and had been his constant companion for several years.

She was twenty-nine-years old and Lafayette sixty-seven. The thirty-two years difference between her and her general was three years more than the difference between me and my president. She too had to fight Lafayette's daughters for a part of his affection, and if she had begged him either to marry her or adopt her, as was rumored, it was in the same futile hope of legitimate protection for her love as I had dreamed of for mine, and with the same despair.

Frances Wright was as tall as Martha Jefferson. Her hair was magnificent, but she was not especially pretty. Her fortune, her education, her unmarried state had given her a freedom and an independence unheard of for a woman. There was about her carriage, something of the radiance of a young man unafraid of whatever fate had in store, and confident that she would overcome whatever it was.

She did not seem in the least affected or aware of my position, or my color. I sat and listened as she outlined her ideas on emancipation, not only of slaves but of women. She was the first abolitionist I had ever met. I longed to speak to her of Thomas, of Beverly, of Harriet, but they were no longer Thomas, Beverly, or Harriet. They no longer existed in my world. They existed in the white world now, and I had no right to speak of that world to anyone, white or black.

One day, Frances took my hand and spoke to me passionately.

"Merely freeing and enfranchising the Negroes is not enough for them to participate in a free society. Only after they have been given some education and trained to support themselves can their freedom be meaningful."

She spoke with fervor of the communities set up by two men in Pennsylvania, Robert Owens and George Rapp. She spoke of helping slaves and whites alike live on a basis of equality, somewhere in the West or South, paying with her own fortune, where the slaves would be not only freed but educated. Blacks and whites would go to school together, people would be free to love and marry whom they chose. She also spoke to me about a woman called Mary Wollstonecraft, an Englishwoman, who had written a book on the emancipation of women called the Vindication of the Rights of Women.

"More than ever, it must be proved that black and white can and must live together," she lectured. "Since the Missouri Compromise, we have a country that is divided between slave and free societies. It cannot and will not endure thus...."

It was the first real courage I had ever encountered in a woman. Frances Wright evoked a vision of life I did not recognize, and it seemed just as well that my life's illusion was near its end.

"Oh, Sally Hemings, let's understand what knowledge is ... let's clearly perceive that accurate knowledge regards all equally. Truth is the same for all humankind; there are not truths for the rich and truths for the poor, truths for men and truths for women, truths for blacks and truths for whites, there are simply TRUTHS....At least this much I have learned. While you are bound can any American woman say she's free? Can any American woman say she has nothing to do with slavery? And can you, Sally Hemings, say you have nothing to do with us? With me? We are all you and you are we... and THAT'S the truth.

"Nowhere outside my investigations of the rights of slaves could I have acquired a better understanding of my own rights ... womanhood's own rights. The anti-slavery cause is the high school of morals in this land. The school in which human rights are more fully investigated and better understood and taught than in any other. Is this country a Republic when but one drop of colored blood shall stamp a fellow creature for a slave? ... Is this a Republic while one half of the whole population is left in civil bondage ... sentenced to mental imbecility?"

I smiled. Oh, if only Harriet could hear her, I thought.

"You don't count the bonds of love and passion as one more bondage? You, a modern woman?"

Frances Wright smiled back at me. It made her face beautiful.

"Love and civics unfortunately don't necessarily go together," she sighed.

 

 

Later that year, she purchased two thousand acres of land for her new settlement of Nashoba, fourteen miles from Memphis, Tennessee, and there she put her ideas on women and Negroes and education into practice. When her experiment failed, her name would become, as mine had once been for the public, equal to every vice, and she would be denounced as "The Great Red Harlot of Infidelity," just as I had been denounced as "Black Sal." Her name, as mine had been, would be coupled with the unspeakable crime of miscegenation.

At the same time that Lafayette left America and Frances Wright left Virginia, Jeff Randolph tried to organize a lottery of our estates to satisfy my master's creditors. Timidly, he had showed me his letter to the Virginia Legislature for permission for the lottery, carefully enumerating his services to the nation.

Thomas Jefferson begging! I wept. "Why not ask John Adams?" I asked. But he shook his head slowly. The nation and Virginia had forgotten him. He was too proud to ask Adams. His son, John Quincy, was now president of the United States, and who knew how John Quincy Adams felt about Thomas Jefferson?

 

 

Thomas Jefferson would die thinking his lottery was going to save Monticello. And he died hard, just like Elizabeth Hemings.

He had persisted in riding to the very end. Isaac and Eston would lift him up on Eagle, aged like him, and he would ride out alone, with Eston or Burwell or Isaac following at a safe distance to watch over him. He would be out for hours, his white hair whipped by the wind, his coattails flying. When he no longer could ride because of the terrible pain, he semireclined on his couch, unable to either sit, lie, walk or stand.

"The doctors are trying to keep the old man alive until the Fourth," Burwell said on the third of July. "I don't think he's going to make it."

"I swear he will," I replied.

On that day, it was Burwell who had understood and lowered his head. When Burwell left the room, I realized I would soon have to give my master up to his white family, which was gathering. Martha, who was at Varina, would never make it up the mountain in time.

He was mine alone.

"The letters," he murmered.

So he had not burned them all.

I went to his desk and opened the drawers one by one. Mementos, locks of hair, a ribbon of mine, secret things I had never dreamed of, faced me as each drawer opened and closed. I spied a soft lock of fine blond hair. Which dead baby was it? I fell upon a packet of my letters.

"You found them?"

"Yes."

"You know ... what you must do ... Please?" It was the first time he had ever addressed that word to me. "Ask Burwell to do it," I whispered, "for I cannot." I backed away from the desk.

He reached out his right hand and clutched at my skirt. The twice-broken wrist was doubly twisted with arthritis, the hand atrophied. I slipped to my knees to come closer to him and looked into his eyes. They were the eyes of a young man; the same sapphire blue as always. One dies with the eyes one had as a child, people say. Even when the body is unrecognizable with illness and age, eyes are the eyes of childhood.

"Did you love me?" he asked.

After thirty-eight years he still had to ask.

"Lord, keep me from sinking down....

"Lord, keep me from sinking down.

"Lord, keep me from sinking down," I repeated over and over again into that silence. A whole kingdom of silence. A whole world of silence.

 

 

When Burwell entered the draped study, there were tears streaming down his face.

"He left everything to Jeff Randolph. Madison and Eston are freed by his will. They are left under the guardianship of John, who is also freed. Joe Fosset is freed ... so am I."

I stared at Burwell, waiting, but he stood there, his face contorted, his hands hanging loosely at his side, a look of grief on his face which resembled nothing if not stupidity. Still I waited. Waiting was my natural condition.

"He didn't free no ... women."

I smiled. So he held me even in death. I had guessed as much when I had not been summoned to the dining room. I sat smiling. My smile must have been as stupid to see as Burwell's.

 

 

The death of a master, good or bad, is always a catastrophe for the slave. Sometimes he grieves out of real affection for the dead master, but mostly he grieves for the state of his future, which from that moment on is as vague and dangerous as his first journey out of his mother's womb.

Death of the master meant sale, separation from the land, from friends, and, if there were any, from wife and husband. And most of all, from children. The white family always took these outpourings of grief as proof that they were beloved, or of how much the dead master had been.

The Randolph family assumed as much, though here there was true grief as well. My master had been a "good master." The Randolphs were genuinely moved by the sorrow and mourning of the Monticello slaves. What they did not know, however, was that the slaves knew very well that Thomas Jefferson had died penniless, bankrupt, with a lottery on his land and his creditors hounding him to his very last breath. And they knew, too, that sooner or later Monticello, as had his other plantations, would fall.

It came sooner rather than later.

 

 

At Christmas I found Martha alone, standing in the threadbare blue salon, her heavy silhouette against the light, her white hair making an angry halo around her head. To my surprise, this day she had on gray silk, not black, an old dress, let out and pieced to accommodate her bulk. As I stood waiting for her to speak, I thought of our lives. We were only nine months apart, and I looked into the fifty-five-year-old face, so familiar to me, even more than in youth—a female replica of her father's face.

Age had marked it as it had not my own. The fair and fragile skin was etched with a thousand lines around the mouth and eyes, the skin crumpled like linen, the mouth drawn down in unhapppiness. Tiny red veins, broken under the skin, gave it a flushed appearance. Her blue eyes had been burned gray by some internal fire. I could hardly see the eyes, so pale were they behind the spectacles she was now forced to wear.

My mistress. Had her life been so much different from mine? Or as happy, for that matter? Slave or free, white or black, women were women and they were indentured to husbands, fathers, brothers, children, in sickness and in health, in death and life, to pain and pregnancy, work exhaustion, grinding solitude, and waiting. Ah, God, above all, waiting. It was all in Martha's face.

I waited. I knew what she had to say to me. I was to go on the block. The rumors were no longer rumors. In less than a month, Monticello and the remaining plantations would be auctioned off and everything on them, including the seventy-odd slaves. The inventory had already been taken by Jeff. I was listed as worth fifty dollars. And Martha? Was she worth any more than I? The domain we had struggled for in an undeclared war that had lasted thirty-eight years was no more to be fought over. It lay under our feet and hung over our heads, a decaying, awful parody of its master and builder.

This, then, was the last battle.

If the power had been hers, I thought, the endurance was mine. My face, I knew, was without line or crease; my complexion clear; my hair still black and abundant; my figure, except for a thickening at the waist and ankles, the same.

Martha took off her spectacles, which left scarlet bruises on her nose and brow.

"Ah, Sally."

"Martha."

We stood facing each other, sentinels to four decades of lies.

"I have something to tell you ... such terrible news.... I don't know just how to ..."

I waited for her to finish speaking. The words droned on without meaning. I then found myself staring at Martha in disbelief as she continued.

"... and as he instructed me, you were to be freed within two years of his death, as soon as Eston was of age and could act as head of the family. I thought... forgive ... that this day ... that today was a good day.... Eston will be twenty-one in a few months... until then you may stay here, at least until July, as the house will not be sold, but you must know, since you people know everything, that the auction is the beginning of the year."

The date of the auction! Her voice suddenly reached me, clear and fraught with meaning.

"We cannot hold out any longer, Sally, and I dare not wait any longer to give you your papers. I hereby free you as my father wished, but could not acknowledge for ... reasons of his own. He asked me to tell you this. He petitioned me, begged me, to free you. And for his sake I do so."

Here she paused, waiting for me to make the proper gesture. But what gesture was there to make? I knew of none. "You have nothing to say?" she asked. "Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing," I repeated.

I thought of my mother and her mother. It would have been slavish to have said anything. And I was not her slave.

"I think you could at least express your thanks. He petitioned me, but only I have the power to make you free. I could have allowed you to be sold on the block with all the rest!"

I stared at Martha. Did she really think she had the power to free me? Free me with a piece of paper, when I couldn't free myself with all the total yearning of a whole lifetime?

"Martha, I have no thanks to give. You cannot free me. Even he could not free me. He couldn't free me living, he couldn't free me dying, and he can't free me dead. He did what he had to do, as have you and I. I am an old woman, Martha, worth fifty dollars, and you are as worthless. Our lives haven't been all that much different, and death has us both by the hair. Can we not at least explain ourselves one to the other before it's too late?"

"You think I'd ever explain myself to you? I would rather die." Martha's voice was strangled with anger. "Recognize that—" I began.

"Recognize! Do you think I'd ever recognize you? Recognition for the harm and slander you caused an innocent and great man?"

She would lie to herself to the end. She waved the white envelope in the air above my head like a child's gift.

"A thank you from the family?" It was our family she spoke of. "Recompense from the family? A souvenir from this house? A silver watch, perhaps?"

"Everything I'll ever need in recognition I've had, and souvenirs I have more than enough, even to silver."

What I did then, I don't regret, but it was a gesture as futile as our lifelong lies. I did it in cold anger and hatred of that white power she waved over my head. I pulled out the locket with the miniature John Trumbull had given me at Cowes and showed her his face: the same face in miniature that Martha always carried with her, the image she thought was hers and hers alone, I had carried for thirty-seven years around my neck.

The lock of his hair, blood-red, slipped from its place and fluttered to the floor. She made a gesture as if to stoop and catch it, then straightened with a sob, almost touching me. I fell back. Lie, I thought, lie to yourself, for it is your only hope. Deny me if you wish. Deny me with your last breath, your last cent, for in time, in this land, it will come to that.

"He loved me more than you! He loved me! You are nothing, you black slut! You slave whore! You know your children are not his! Never! They'll never be his!"

"Perhaps, but I was his. He loved me, Martha. It is not out of vanity or pride that I say it, but that was how it was between us. We loved. It was all that mattered."

"How can you speak of love between a master and a slave... between a hero and chattel?"

"We had no need to speak of it...."

"You were nothing to him! A convenient slave paramour, a... receptacle!"

The evil words clattered like iron nails in the coffin of silence. There was nothing but pure hatred between us now. Martha's face pressed into mine and I looked into its decay as if in a mirror. Those eyes would not leave mine. She would not leave me in peace. The breath. The feverish face. We were like two bitches worrying over a rotting and long-dead carcass. Didn't she understand that it was over?

Then she drew back. Dread seized me by the throat like some wild animal. She was going to tell me something.

"Didn't you ever love me?" she whispered.

It was the same thing her father had asked. A wild, uncontrollable desolation bore down upon me. A howl like that of a wild animal caught in my throat. When ... when would they understand this farce and this tragedy? I knew that only the one who stopped loving, who stopped needing love, would survive. And hate seemed to drop over me like a veil. Love had left me, and hate had filled that space. The grief and loneliness without him; the empty meaningless days and nights dissolved like dry straw. Hate lifted me up in a kind of exaltation. The white envelope which said I was free but which I knew would never really free me remained in her hand.

I didn't need anything anymore. I didn't need Martha. Martha needed me to free, but I didn't need Martha to free me.

I, like my mother and her mother before her, had survived love.