Sally Heming (7 page)

"Mama?"

"She's dead, Sally." Martha's voice was like a
rock under her.

Martha tried to rise, fell back, and then, with a moan,
threw herself over Elizabeth Hemings' still body.

Sally Hemings remained seated, staring at Martha as if she
had gone mad. Her mother couldn't be dead. Her mother had something eminently
important to tell her. She had waited all these weeks to hear it.

Like the keys to the mansion, it was information that had
to be passed on from black woman to black woman, just as she would pass it on
to her own children. Her mother couldn't be dead because she didn't know the
secret. Her mother had taken it along with her slavehood to the grave.

She felt a chill. Her mother's face was calm, smiling. She
had murdered herself before they had done it for her.

"Mama!"

Sally Hemings tore Martha's encompassing arms from around
Elizabeth Hemings and began to shake the frail body of her mother.

Even Martha, who was strong, could not unlock the two
women. It was Thomas Jefferson, who, with all his force, finally wrenched his
mistress away from her mother and carried her in his arms from the cabin, as the
other slave women began the ritual wail which echoes from cabin to cabin,
following them along Mulberry Row, as he strode grimly back with her to the Big
House.

Elizabeth Hemings had a fine funeral. All her children,
grandchildren, and their children were summoned to Monticello from the
neighboring plantations. One hundred and four descendants, all answering to the
surname of Hemings, came to pay their last respects. Black. Brown. Yellow.
White. All slaves.

here lies the beloved
elizabeth (bet) hemings of

monticello born
1735   
died
1807

"Mama—" She paused as if she expected an answer.
"I'm so lonely."

The last sound came from her throat like the rasp of a
night cricket. Sally Hemings stretched across the rectangle of earth and
pressed her face into the cool young April grass.

CHAPTER 5

ALBEMARLE COUNTY, JUNE 1831

With the morals of the people, their industry also is
destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make
another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a
very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of
a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a
conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?
That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?

thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia,
1790

It had been
more than a year
since the census taker's first visit. Several months had passed before he
appeared again, but thereafter Nathan Langdon's visits to Sally Hemings had
become almost regular. Madison and Eston had finally accepted the presence of
this tall lanky Virginian. They had become friends of a sort. Langdon never
arrived empty-handed. There was always the town news, a book, or a newspaper,
or a pamphlet, or some exotic fruit off one of the West India boats, some New
England sweets, or a tool catalogue for Eston. Today he brought her something
special.

Nathan Langdon entered and sat in the battered armchair
while his hostess placed herself opposite him. She had prepared something to
drink, and the silver platter, with its silver pitcher, was no more incongruous
than his "unofficial" visits to the recluse Sally Hemings. In the
rounded curve of the silver pitcher lay reflections, mauve and green, of the
room. There was also a pool of yellow light in the center of the tray, heavy
and still. The woman before him had raised her arm to pour into the small
goblet.

The South had anchored these two people into predetermined,
unbridgeable positions. Yet all they both represented was suddenly shrouded in
such ambiguity that it made them ill at ease. The light made this forbidden
woman almost ethereal, and, for a moment, Langdon imagined their separate
worlds coming together. He was filled with a sense of intimacy.

"What is it?" asked Sally, eyeing the package he
was offering her.

"New poems by Lord Byron. Straight off the ship from
London!"

"I have never read much poetry.... A little in French
when I was in Paris. My teacher used to give us lines to memorize...."

"Byron is the most famous English poet living."

"Thank you, Nathan. How I envy those who can express
themselves with words."

"Most people express themselves with too many words
... such as Southern lawyers. Verbosity is not lacking in any Virginian. And
what they can't talk about, they write in their journals. Even I have succumbed
to it."

"You keep a journal, Nathan?"

"Since I went North. I felt it was my duty to record
the horrors of the North as seen by a true Virginian for my compatriots who
didn't dare cross the boundaries between Heaven and Hell.... I called it
'Reflections of a Virginia Gentleman on the Manners and Morals of Boston
Society.' I fancied myself a Southern de Tocqueville....

"During your stay in France, didn't you keep a
journal?"

"I?" Sally Hemings smiled. "I was fifteen
and though I spent most of my time inside the ministry, I did see a great deal
that I felt I wanted to record. I was also there during the storming of the
Bastille in
1
789.
My brother James saw much more than I did. He ventured outside and
mixed with the crowds. It was like being in the middle of a rapid, he said. I
will never forget that day."

"And you kept a record of it?"

"A childish record, but a record nevertheless."

"It should be a precious document."

"My diary, a precious document? For me, perhaps. Maria
gave it to me on the boat sailing to France. I could hardly write at the
time.... I have since copied those first attempts over...." Sally Hemings
stopped talking. She wanted to change the subject. Did he think she could be
persuaded to share her most private possession?

She frowned. When she had decided to receive the census
taker as a "caller" rather than as a representative of the class and
power that governed her life, she had done so impulsively, responding to a
strength and warmth she sensed in him. He had never asked to visit, nor had he
been invited; yet week after week, he appeared at the cabin. Why she continued
a relationship which she knew to be dangerous to her sons, she didn't know. And
now she felt trapped. What was it that made her look forward to his visits?
Vanity? Yes, she enjoyed the attentions of a young man, his strivings to please
her. Loneliness? Perhaps. Langdon seemed to infuse a confidence in her she had
never known before.

In the long afternoons of recounting her past, she had
discovered that she had indeed had a life: a life full of deep and complex
feelings. When he had questioned her, she had answered him in the only manner
she was capable of: truthfully. Searching for the right tone, the exact phrase
evoking as accurately as she could what she remembered. A sort of conspiracy
had developed between them. There were times she didn't even feel like
mentioning his visits to Eston and Madison. After all these years, she thought,
how could she again be anticipating a man's visit? She found herself careful of
her clothes, of her hair.

The secretive nature of their relationship seemed almost
fitting. Had it not always been thus with her? Always the forbidden? It would
have been more fitting, she thought, if, instead of exchanging thoughts, they
exchanged pleasures. This would have been much more acceptable than what they
were doing; for thoughts, feelings, and memories were all a slave, or an
ex-slave, had to call her own. Even Thomas Jefferson had bowed to that rule. He
had loved her as a woman and owned her as a slave, but her thoughts had always
remained beyond his or anyone's control.

Nathan Langdon realized he had crossed the invisible
barrier Sally Hemings had put between them and she smiled back at him.

"My writing upsets me. It reminds me that so many
years have elapsed since anything has happened in my life."

"Do you know of the famous poetess who lived in
Boston, named Phillis Wheatley? She was an ex-slave and highly praised for her
poetry."

"No, I have never heard of her."

"I hear the abolitionists publish her widely."

"Even in the South?"

"Oh, publications slip in. Many people read and like
her poetry and don't know that she was black and an ex-slave."

"You should say 'freedwoman,' not ex-slave, Nathan.
You make it sound like a punishment instead of a liberty."

Nathan Langdon stared at the small face gazing intently
into his. He wondered how these conversations would sound to an eavesdropper of
his own color. In the beginning, he had posed simple questions, staying away
from the subject of slavery. Yet as this had been the central element of her
life, it was impossible not to touch on it in a thousand ways. As Sally
Hemings' life story was unfolding, both the narrator and the listener had been
overwhelmed by the weight and breadth of it. Langdon was awed at the intricacy
of the information he was receiving. He was also well aware that it was
compromising him both politically and emotionally. He had by now become
hopelessly attached to this woman. More than that he had become involved with
her.

He was spellbound by the fading echoes of her existence as
bits and pieces came to him.

Sally Hemings regretted her confidences to Nathan, yet on
the days that he didn't come she was disappointed. She still prepared for his
visits carefully, reaching in her memory for incidents or names that would
impress or amuse him. Despite herself, she spoke more and more openly. She
opened drawer after drawer of memories, which she rearranged, changed, aired,
discussed, and counted, like linen. Her volatile performances, for that was
what they were now, excited and fascinated Langdon.

"They were just men," she would say with a smile
when she spoke of those heroes already carved in marble (all except the dubious
Aaron Burr). She and her sisters and her uncles and her mother and her mother
before her had all been an unseen army, treated as if they could not see, hear,
or feel.

Clinging to her words, Nathan followed the complicated
plots and the many famous characters, slave and free, devotedly. Now, Langdon
hardly asked a question. There was no need. Words followed in an unending
stream. Sally Hemings spoke with a kind of desperation, willing him to
understand. Sometimes she would take on the accent of the person she was
describing. She was a talented mime. She didn't realize that while she was
merely recounting her past to Nathan Langdon, she was in fact uncovering a
person she had never known from a life she had had no sense of. From these
afternoons emerged a new Sally Hemings.

CHAPTER 6

ALBEMARLE COUNTY,
1831

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is
just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature
and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of
situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by
interference!

T
homas jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia,
1790

Nathan Langdon
had run into the
close-mouthed, protective silence of Tidewater society concerning the Hemings
affair, as well as the "official" family denial by the Randolphs. But
everyone knew the reason the Hemingses were left in peace; the reason Sally
Hemings would not budge from the frontier of Monticello. For Nathan Langdon,
the Hemings affair was a parenthesis in the Institution; it neither condemned
nor knighted it. He felt that there was something sinister in this blatant
misuse of a master's absolute power. But then, did one have absolute power when
one was in love? That Sally Hemings was a victim was certain. Her
submissiveness was what had made her the perfect slave, but, to his mind, the
perfect woman as well. To misuse his moral or physical power over a woman,
however, was abhorrent to him. A man's power over a woman was like the master's
power over a slave. It came from an innate superiority.