Authors: Barbara Chase-Riboud
It was Petit who now joined the circle between Martin and
George Wythe, unwittingly attaching the white half of the circle with the
black. Our eyes met. Affection? Pity? Horror at this Monticellian
"family"? He shrugged and with a wry smile looked at Martin, his
black equivalent.
Thomas Hemings tugged at my skirt and his father's hand
came down on his head in a caress.
My brother moved next to me. I shifted two-month-old
Harriet, whom I held in my arms and reached down for his hand. It was cold. He
was trembling violently. I increased the pressure of my hand in his, hoping to
quiet him while the distribution of the presents went on. Then I registered the
movement the other side of me. My master began to speak. He began to announce
what I couldn't, yet must, believe: the emancipation of my brother. James had
won. He was being given at last what he had vowed never to steal. But the
speech was ringing with phrases which under the circumstances were
self-righteous and pompous. I felt humiliation for James and embarrassment for
my master.
James's mouth twitched downward as he whispered to me,
"I should have blackmailed him years ago ... I notice he doesn't mention
anything about back pay." James's salary had stopped the moment he set
foot in Virginia. "This morning he gave me thirty dollars and a
horse."
"... with a flare of genius for the culinary arts and
the temperament—or I should say the temper—that goes with it..." Thomas
Jefferson was finishing his speech, "he has served me faithfully,
devotedly, and unselfishly in his craft and art, and I am loath to part with
him. He shall ever have in my heart and my affections a special place, just as
his brother Robert does for all of us here, and I am sure there is not a person
present that does not wish him every happiness in his new and justly deserved
...
freedom!"
I looked up at my brother, who was almost as tall as my
master. This ceremony, I had been shaken to find, not only released him from
his long bondage as a slave but from the bonds of a vow which had kept him in
chastity all these years. It had been last summer when I had finally gotten the
courage to ask him about a wife. He had laughed in my face. "Since when do
slaves marry?"
"A wife is a wife whether she is married or not."
"You think I would spill my seed as a slave! To father
other slaves! You think I would enrich some white master by breeding more
slaves for him. If I spill it, it will be as a free man who can father free
children. This I vowed long ago. In Paris. I vowed I would never touch a woman
as a slave. My life has been celibate, sister," he had said. "I have
never known a woman."
I looked now into those clear eyes. They looked over my
head to hold those of his ex-master, in a gaze of such love and hatred that
Martha and I, the only persons present whose eyes had not strayed from James
Hemings, lowered our heads over our respective babes in arms.
Thomas Jefferson was thoroughly moved by his own speech. He
blinked back his tears and turned away from James. Petit, to Thomas Jefferson's
surprise, was crying. He felt a small hand on his sleeve.
"They are waiting for you, Master," a voice said
softly just as the excited drone from outside swelled into a babble of cries:
"Presents! Presents! Master. Master ..." He gave the signal for the
company to pass through the glass doors of the hall onto the west portico and
stand facing the multitude gathering in front, as a cry—half-cheer,
half-plea—went out from the throng of slaves, now jumping up and down in
anticipation and cold.
Sally Hemings and Martha started to distribute the
Christmas bundles. Martha handed out the clothes. His slave wife handed out the
presents, the sweets, the cider, and whisky.
The lines seemed never ending, yet Thomas Jefferson knew
that his Farm Book was mightily depleted of the names of many of his slaves.
Secretly, he had had to sell more than a hundred slaves to cover outstanding
debts that went back twenty years, and still the end was not in sight. He had
been forced to sell Elk Hill—the estate he had wanted to give to Maria as a
wedding present—for ready cash. The debts he had undertaken had mounted, with
accumulated interest, to an unbearable load. In desperation, he had sold slave
upon slave to meet the claims upon him. His son-in-law had attended to the
details, so that nowhere did his name appear on the sale of his property. Yet
the results had been disappointing. He had averaged only about forty pounds a
slave; there had been a time when a good Negro had brought upward of two
hundred. He had even been compelled to break up one family, something he hated
to do, simply because the male was too valuable and essential. He had asked his
brother Randolph to buy the wife and children or, failing that, to sell them to
some good master in the vicinity, so that they might remain near their husband
and father. No others, he had instructed, were to be sold under any circumstances,
in the immediate neighborhood.
Thomas Jefferson looked out with emotion over the heads of
his slaves. There would soon be a mortgage on all of them in order to finance
the rebuilding of Monticello.
I always had a fancy for a closet with a window I could
more peculiarly call my own.
abigail adams,
1
776
CHAPTER 27
SPRING
1796
I
bent over
the fine-lined drawings on the blue-squared French architectural paper
of my master's new plans for Monticello. I leaned over his shoulder as he
explained to me how he was to change my house. Now was my chance to ask for
what I wanted. The demolition had already begun, with his workmen prying loose
three to four thousand bricks a day; the noise, the confusion, and even the
danger at times resulted in achieving what war and revolution had never been
able to produce in my mother. She would cry every day. Most of the household
was camping out. Only his bedroom and study had any semblance of order, and it
was here, before his drawing table, that he was seated while I stood behind
him, my arms about his neck on a fine spring day. He had made great plans for
his house. He had in mind to remove the second-story attic and spread all the
rooms on a single floor. In place of the attic, he wanted an octagonal dome,
like the one on the Hotel de Salem in Paris that we had visited so many times.
Around the interior of this dome would be a mezzanine balcony, thus providing
privacy for the bedrooms intended for his white family. In his own apartments
on the ground floor, he envisioned a double-height ceiling with a skylight and
a bed alcove between the bedchamber and the study accessible to both, and with
a passage between them. To do this, he must demolish the fireplaces that stood
where his bed would stand.
I had never asked him for anything before. Even now, with a
new life in my womb, pressing into the solid warmth of his back, his hands
encompassing mine, my lips on his hair, I hesitated, but the closeness and his
excitement at the new changes gave me courage. He shifted his good hand to hide
his infirm hand, as he was wont to do.
"What is it?" he asked, as if he sensed my
agitation.
"I should like you to design ... to build a room for
me." I went on quickly, before he had time to respond. "A secret room
adjoining yours where I may pass to and from without crossing the public hall
where anyone who happens to be about may see me," I said. There was not a
servant or member of the household who did not know that only I had access to
the apartments of the master. I was mistress of his bedchamber and his
wardrobe. His premises were forbidden to all, including his daughter. Yet I
felt naked every time I had to enter by the public hall, always full of people:
visitors, workmen, servants, relatives. It would be so easy to find me a little
space of my own somewhere. I longed for the shadowed recesses and the vast
apartments of the Hotel de Langeac with its endless attic rooms, secret
corridors, unused apartments. Here, every space was occupied by slave or
master. Twenty servants ran in and out of the main house, not counting all the
other people, and even once a horse.... I recounted all this without stopping,
as if I would run out of courage before I ran out of breath. Only the ticktock
of the French clock broke the sound of my breathing. Outside a whippoorwill
trilled.
"You shall have your room," he said.
I waited for him to tell me where and how, but he said no
more. There was a mischievous look on my master's face, as if he had had in
mind to build me a room all along. I raised him from his seat, put my arms
about his waist, and kissed him.
That same spring Thomas Mann Randolph and Martha went to
Warm Springs, leaving their children at Monticello. The servants of Edgehill
were whispering that ever since the birth of Thomas Jefferson Randolph, their
master was losing his mind, driven by the dark forces that seemed to overtake
all the Randolphs in their prime. He and Martha had traveled as far away as New
York seeking relief, and Martha had turned more and more to Monticello and her
father for solace and comfort. Polly, who was now at home, my mother, and I would
care for them. There had been many a time when Martha would take refuge in
Monticello, having run away from her husband.
"What are you going to do about Martha coming here so
often?" said Elizabeth Hemings.
"What can I do? She's her father's daughter, and
Monticello will be hers and Polly's one day. It is her right. Besides, she's
lonely, I think, and unhappy."
"Poor man, he can't help his sickness. First thing,
she won't have a husband."
"I think that would suit her just fine," I
answered. "Would it suit her father as well?"
A throb of jealousy sounded deep in me. Elizabeth Hemings
always knew where to probe for her answers.
"I think it would. He needs her. He dotes on her and
he loves her." I didn't add, "more than he loves me," but I
thought it. "He doesn't like his son-in-law," I added.
"Well," my mother said, "he is not the first
hard-riding, hard-drinking, evil-tempered bad Masta Randolph these parts have
seen. Think on his cousin John Randolph of Roanoke. Rumor has it he don't have
no head for business. Thomas Jefferson be well to put this plantation in other
hands than his. Seems he's practically ruined."
"It's Martha's dowry they are living on."
"That's so, now."
I sighed. "As if you didn't know, Maman!"
"Well," chuckled my mother, "we got to keep
our white folks informed and—"
"And spied upon twenty-four hours a day," I said.
"Don't we belong to them twenty-four hours a
day?" replied Elizabeth Hemings. "When they give us a few hours'
freedom every day, we'll give them a few hours' peace."
"You'll never forgive me for coming back, will you? Or
dragging James back here for all those wasted years...."
"Daughter, all that's history now. What's left is
between you and Thomas Jefferson. James is free. He's over there in France,
cooking for them nobles like he dreamed."
"I forgot, Maman."
Elizabeth Hemings looked at me without understanding.
"It's harder, maman, to forget freedom than slavery.
Over there, I had forgotten what it was like, if I ever knew. You raised me as
free as any white child in the Big House. I came back to that, not to my real
condition."
"You came back because of that child."
"No, Maman, I came back because I didn't remember who
I was."
"You remember now, don't you."
"Yes."
"And the masta didn't do much reminding, did he?"
"I don't think he truly remembered, either. We were
like children. He with his illusions, and I with mine."
"You were a child, then, true; but he had no excuse
except his own selfishness."
"It wasn't true selfishness, Maman. White people are
different from us."
"They ain't different, daughter, they simply expect to
get what they want or what they need in life, that's all. It never occurs to
them—as it
always
occurs to us—that
they won't get what they need, nor what they want. You want to stroll away?
Nothing stopping you."
"Nothing?"
"He wouldn't pursue you. There's enough gossip
already."