Sally Heming (47 page)

"Free us! Free us! Free us, Thomas!"

"I would have to banish you from me ... by law, and I
cannot...."

"Oh God, how can you keep me ... us, in such an
abomination?" I stood, my back to the staircase as he came toward me.
"By loving you," he said quietly. "Why do you do it?"

"Because I love you."
Love me and remain a slave.

"And what do you wish me to do about that?" I
whispered. "Love me."

"You think love pardons everything."

"Does it not?" he replied gently, reaching for
me.

"Have I not loved you since I was a girl of fifteen,
Thomas?"

Love me and remain a slave.

"This is the only way I have to love. This is the only
way I have to love and protect you. This is the only way I have to keep you
safe."

"The only way?" I whispered. "But you are
the President of the United States!"

He said not a word. He had turned stone-white. I reached up
and brought his face down to mine, searching his eyes for hope. But I found
none. There was no safe place for us. He could no more protect me than my
mother could! He thought my safety was in slavery. She had thought it was in
freedom. Now I knew that both of them were wrong. His country hated me and my
race enough to do murder. His friends had sanctioned the killing of the man
Thomas Jefferson had loved liked a father. And his son. If they had done this
to their own ...

What would they do to me? And my children?

White America meant to destroy me, my lover, and my
children. These people meant murder. Lydia had known it. Mama had known it, and
now it would be my turn. I was alone. I could expect no help from Thomas
Jefferson. He had been warned, and he had chosen to disdain this warning; but I
vowed never to forget it. Never. There would be no freedom, no recognition, no
emancipation, no flight, only stubborn silence would rule our lives from this
day hence. If I had ever hoped that somehow, someday, my lover, who stood
before me like a monument, would avow his yellow children, I laid that hope to
rest in the graves of Michael Brown and Elizabeth Hemings. As for me, I could no
longer afford his grief, his misery, his plea for forgiveness. Their deaths had
unearthed the long forgotten specter of emancipation and his abnegation had
sealed it.

I would not be destroyed, I would survive. I would survive
Marly, mother and master.

He began to cry in rage and I took him in my arms. So he
too had thought we had a safe place.

That winter, he unleashed the Embargo of
1807
upon the country after the frigate
Chesapeake
was attacked by
the British.

"Now they have touched a cord which vibrates in every
heart," he said. "Now is the time to settle the old and the
new."

The embargo lasted two years and ruined Virginia.

Once more he stubbornly proposed to a stubborn Congress the
prohibition of the African slave trade. He welcomed home with joy Meriwether
Lewis, returned safely from his expedition in Louisiana. And he tried Aaron
Burr for treason.

The bitterness and resentment I felt against my lover,
against my fate, I turned against Aaron Burr. When there were so many white men
to hate, why did I choose Aaron Burr? Was it because of that one frank stare of
lewdness that day in Philadelphia? Was it because he was the first man, black
or white, who with one look of contempt had insinuated that my whoredom was of
my own asking?

I hated him. I badgered my master for news as he sought
affidavits against Aaron Burr from New Orleans to Maine, from Indiana to New
Jersey. I wrote to him constantly, always stressing the danger of assassination
from this man, of the duel with Hamilton, of his hatred, of his threat to my
master's power. And he wrote meticulous letters home describing his progress in
gathering evidence. He commanded me to burn the letters. But these letters,
like all the others, I vowed to keep until my dying day.

Aaron Burr was brought to Richmond for his trial, which had
the air of a country fair. People swarmed into the city. Balls and dinners were
given in his honor. He strode the streets with his daughter Theodosia on his
arm, the immaculate dandy. Besides himself, his defense lawyers were Edmund
Randolph and George Wickham, the defenders of George Sweney. The trial opened
with a hundred government witnesses, and my master's arch enemy John Marshall
presiding. I followed the trial passionately, but like the trial of George
Sweney, the outcome had been predetermined by Chief Justice John Marshall. The
jury returned a verdict of "not guilty because, not proven guilty."

The great treason trial was over. And by the end of that
trial, in January
1808,
the African slave trade was abolished. I was again with child. My
seventh. The next May I gave birth to a son, whom I called Eston, my only child
born in the presence of his father, who celebrated his birth as if he were
white.

CHAPTER 36

MARCH-OCTOBER
1809

Here arise questions of value, tact, and tolerance.... For
what, one must ask at last, would these Southern ladies and domestic slaves
have known and felt about their being relatives? And what would it have meant
for Jefferson whose only son died unnamed at the age of three weeks, to send into
safe oblivion, a mulatto son who is said to have looked very much like him?

erik h. erickson
,
"Dimensions of a New Identity," Jefferson Lectures,
1973

There is love-making and love-making in this world. What a
time the sweethearts of that wretch, young Shakespeare, must have had.... The
poor creature that he left his second best bedstead to, came in second best all
the time,... Fancy people wondering that Shakespeare and his kind leave no
progeny like themselves! Shakespeare's children would have been half his only;
the other half only the second best bedstead's. What would you expect of that
co-mingling of materials?

mary boykin chestnut,
A Diary from Dixie,
1840-76

Thomas Jefferson Hemings
and Thomas Jefferson Randolph raced each other down the mountain to
greet their father and grandfather. My master's second term as president was
over.

Bareheaded, their identical red curls flying in the March
wind, the cold and speed raking their already high color, the two boys made for
Shadwell, four miles away, as fast as they could without crippling their
horses.

I was thirty-six; Thomas, nineteen; Beverly, almost eleven;
Madison, four; Eston, one; and their sister Harriet, almost eight. Martha was
also thirty-six; Jeff, seventeen; Anne, eighteen; Cornelia, ten; Ellen,
thirteen; Virginia, eight; Mary, six; her Madison, three; and Benjamin, one.
Maria's only child, Francis, was eight. Nineteen years of childbearing.

The children were scattered on the steps of the mansion,
Randolphs and Hemingses mixed together, as always. The boys were fair, their
bright, red-blond and auburn heads like wild poppies among the dark heads of
the girls, who took after Thomas Mann, except for Harriet, who had the thick
red hair of her father.

Both Thomas Jeffersons had fled out of the schoolroom when
Jim, the overseer, brought the news that the master had already arrived on
horseback at Shadwell, and was riding hard through the March snowstorm for
home. The boys, blinking back the glare of swirling snow-flakes which lay on
their shoulders and their horses' flanks like powdered sugar, raced to meet the
returning ex-president halfway down the mountain. With shouts of joy we could
hear all the way to the mansion, they had accompanied him the rest of the way
to Monticello, riding on either side of him, pressing jealously as close to him
as their horses would allow.

In a mist of fine snow, the whole household of Monticello
stood on the west portico waiting. Besides myself, Martha, and our families,
there were the household slaves and their children. Everything had been ready
for weeks. Wormley had been working by torchlight in the gardens to get all the
tree planting done. Five hundred peach stones had been put in and as many
pecans, new English turf planted for seedlings, every blade of winter grass
manicured, every hedge, every bush, every flower bed in the vast gardens dug,
raked, nourished, and attended to. A week had been spent hog-killing, the
butcher planks running red, the house resounding with the high-pitched cries of
the black-and-white Calcutta hogs, each weighing between three and four hundred
pounds. Peter had sweated over the mincemeats, sausages, bacons, hams, pickled
ears and skin, scrapple, and hog fat for soap and candles. In the house,
Critta, Mary, and Edy had shined floors and polished silver for a month. There
had been a great deal of sewing, too. I had wanted a new dress as had Martha,
Anne, and Ellen, and all the other children. Six seamstresses had been kept
busy for a month. Ursula had sorted, mended, rewashed, and used up seven kegs
of starch on the household linen. I had left nothing to chance, the house
sparkled, candles burned, and I stood watching the young men and their famous
father and grandfather ride toward me. It had been eight years. Thomas
Jefferson was coming home forever.

Shouts, cries, and kisses greeted the master of Monticello
as he dismounted.

"How you all." He laughed. "Peter, what have
you got good?"

"Masta, I got guinea hens and
carre
of lamb. I got rabbit in mustard,
the way you like it, and Masta Meriwether Lewis's mother done sent over three
of her hams for you!"

Everybody burst into laughter as he grabbed Eston,
tottering on unsteady legs, and swung him around, sweeping him off the steps,
and into his arms.

After that, there was bedlam as the children, black and
white, tumbled down the stairs of the portico to greet the riders. Thomas
Hemings beat Thomas Randolph to the reins of his father's horse. He was half an
inch taller than his father, with the same luxurious red-auburn hair, blue
eyes, rangy loose body, which was still awkward and uncoordinated from the
growth of the past year.

Every summer for the past seven years, when the hordes of
visitors descended on the estate, Thomas had been sent away to a neighboring
farm almost fifty miles away, returning again only for the winter. This year
would be the same, and the precious months before June would be the only ones
in which he would see us until Christmas. But then, this Christmas would be
different, I thought. This Christmas Thomas Jefferson would be home with his
sons.

James Madison was now president. Dolley Todd Madison was
finally mistress of the President's House, I thought, smiling. My master had
been forced to borrow eight thousand dollars from Mrs. Tabb in order to pay his
overdue bills before leaving the capital, according to Burwell. His inheritance
of debts over eight years in the President's House was horrendous and his
embargo against England and France had ruined him. It had hit the Southern
states even worse than the mercantile states. His friends, the Virginia
plantation-owners who had counted themselves rich, found themselves, like him,
with useless assets on their hands, and a pile of debts. My master's tobacco
was worthless; wheat had fallen from two dollars a bushel to seven cents; land
values had been completely swept away. The only wealth that remained were
slaves. The only industry that seemed destined to survive in Virginia and reap
sickening profits was the breeding of slaves for inland trade to the deep
South. He had returned home penniless and depressed. The Louisiana Purchase was
the only thing he could take real pleasure in.

Meriwether Lewis's mission, in the beginning, had been a
secret one. Under the guise of exploring the Territory for "literary"
reasons, Meriwether and William Clark were to open up British territory for
private traders, since they had been forced out of business by government
traders on this side of the Mississippi and had been resentfully inciting
discontent among the Indians. Why not, Thomas Jefferson had asked himself,
divert their hopes of profit in the direction of the Missouri River? He could
kill two birds with one stone: the government traders would be left in
undisputed possession on this side of the Mississippi, with the aim of bringing
the Indians into debt and forcing them to sell their lands; while the
dispossessed private traders could open up new land for trade which now went to
Great Britain. If traders went, settlers would not be far behind, and the
Territory would become white instead of red.