Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (27 page)

R
ed is a lie, as are blue, gold, alizarin, sage, cyan, indigo and brown. These words are lies we tell ourselves, because we want to mean something definite and real by them, but we can't. No single color can be described by red, only an infinite and borderless spectrum of hues whose profound and essential differences are obscured by the word. Likewise with the names we call every other color. All we can have of color is the color before our eyes, which is both itself and never itself, which exists only in that split instant we define as now, and never again, nor ever before, but which also does not exist, insofar as it is ungraspable, unreliable, always hurtling away from us and never more than a complexly enticing and beautiful void.

S
ally Hemings is ashamed, because while she was in France, she forgot that nothing she experienced was real. The Patsy and Polly she knew there, the Thomas Jefferson and, maybe most of all, the person she believed herself to be—none of these people were real, or at least none of them has survived the weeks at sea and the month on the road from Norfolk to Monticello.

Well, maybe Jimmy was real. Maybe Jimmy was the only one who always knew about the huge gaps between the way things seemed, the way they actually were and the way they ought to have been. And maybe that's why he's always so sad. Jimmy is sad all the time now, and she doesn't know what she can do to help him.

.
 . . There was a time, not long after our return from France, when I saw Mr. Jefferson as he truly was. I remember that moment with a nightmarish vividness, and yet it had no more effect on me than if it had never happened. How is this possible? How is it that from that very moment I did not become an entirely new woman?

That return was very hard on us all. After Paris, Monticello seemed a gray heap of lumber, brick, blurred china and boredom, where no truly beautiful gown had ever swirled and where no silk-shod foot had ever danced. Our spirits were buoyed by the fact that through significant glances, shared reminiscences and by simply speaking French, we were able to pay homage to the beauty, intelligence and grace that we each saw as the essence of Paris. But in the end, all of our nostalgia could do little to preserve us from the knowledge that we were living on a tiny island in the midst of a vast wilderness populated by the brutish and the dim.

Things between Mr. Jefferson and me had grown very distant. We had never been alone during our travels so never had an opportunity to be anything to each other apart from master and servant. Matters were not helped by the fact that everybody in our party—Miss Martha, Miss Maria and Jimmy—suspected, at the very least, the true nature of my association with Mr. Jefferson. Not a word was said by anyone, but every now and then I would find myself the object of an emphatic gaze, or of a
double entendre—for example, Miss Martha's remark that it was a “perfect bore” the way young women would throw themselves at her father. “One would think they had no sense of their own dignity,” she added, without ever even glancing in my direction. And neither did Miss Maria, her solitary auditor apart from me. There was very little of friendship between the three of us now, although at the same time the sisters seemed to find it extremely difficult to treat me as their servant. They were incapable of issuing me a direct request, and so, to keep the peace, I did my best to anticipate their needs.

Everything was made more complicated by the fact that I was
enceinte
during our travels—three and a half months by the end. I hoped that people would attribute the new puffiness of my cheeks and bosom to my having been too fond of French pastries, but anyone so disposed could easily have recognized my condition for what it was—and, of course, it would not be very long before I would be unable to hide the truth from anyone.

This latter fact was a particular source of discomfort to Mr. Jefferson. While he was never less than considerate with me, his uneasiness about what people would think grew more palpable every day, and it was equally clear that his ardor for me had diminished significantly. Gone were those breath-stopping glances filled with longing that had made the charade of our last months in Paris such a delight and a torture. The contrast was so striking that his merely friendly consideration seemed coldness to me.

Everything became worse upon our arrival in Norfolk, when Mr. Jefferson received General Washington's letter asking him to be secretary of state in the new government. He proclaimed loudly that he would not accept the offer under any circumstances and that if he were to remain in this country (he had left France with the assumption that he would be returning once the revolution there was over), it would only be as a farmer; he was done with public life. And yet it was clear to everyone—himself included—that this was an honor he could not turn down. From then on, his brow was perpetually crimped with irritation, and he kept to himself, writing letters. During the entirety of the two weeks we stayed with Miss Maria's dear Aunt and Uncle Eppes, with whom she and I had lived before her father sent for her from France, Mr. Jefferson confined himself to a dark room, suffering one of his periodical headaches.

We arrived at Monticello just before Christmas, and from that moment on, Mr. Jefferson became entirely absent from my life, once again locking himself in his chambers for most of every day and then spending the holidays with, as he put it to me, “my family.”

Given that I was carrying within my person the youngest member of that family, I could not help but take affront, even if none had been intended. And yet, at the same time, I was becoming more and more aware that my association with Mr. Jefferson was unnatural and untenable. I began to dwell, in particular, on a fact I had known since childhood: that when Mrs. Jefferson was on her deathbed, he had promised her he would never remarry. He had never
mentioned this promise to me, but maybe that was because he knew there was no need—my mother had been right there in the room when he'd made it. In any event, during our first days home that promise came to seem the nail in the coffin of my association with Mr. Jefferson. I spent much of my time telling myself that I had been a fool to have imagined any other outcome, that whatever affection my celebrated master might have felt toward me had been only an artifact of our time abroad, and wrong from the beginning, and that I would be better and happier when it was behind me. I was, in short, looking for reasons to hate Mr. Jefferson, and so it was not long before fate answered my call.

One morning, after I had been home less than a week, I woke from a night riddled with grotesque dreams and bouts of feverish anxiety and decided to take a long walk, in the hope that it might restore my peace of mind. I had not gone more than a half mile before I came upon a gang of Negro men rebuilding a stretch of road that had fallen away in a mud slide. They were singing as they worked, a slow song that sounded like the very exhaustion I could see in their bent backs, in their hanging heads and in the wrists they dragged across their sweating brows.

This was the first time since my return from France that I had come across a work gang, and so, to a considerable extent, I saw this once-familiar sight with a foreigner's eyes. During my three years in Paris, I never encountered another slave apart from my own brother—and, of course, he and I were not slaves either, at least from a legal point of view. More important, we dressed better and lived better than many of the French—including some shopkeepers and most of the people working barrows in the market squares. Although I never forgot that I was a slave during those years, for most of that time my enslavement was a mere detail, lacking urgency or the solidity of fact. And so, oddly perhaps, my unconscious assumption on first catching sight of these men bent over their shovels was that they were free—and thus my instantaneous correction hit me like a hammer blow, or like several in succession:

They were not free.

Neither was I.

We were all the victims of a grotesque crime perpetrated by white people—and by Mr. Jefferson in particular.

As I happened on the scene, an overseer was shoving one of the men—or, in
fact, a boy who looked to be about fourteen, though most likely he was sixteen. He had huge brown eyes and bone-thin limbs and was clearly incapable of working like the other men. With every shove, and in the most repulsive and obscene language, the overseer asked the boy if he was a girl, an old woman, a lazy sod. And even as each shove nearly knocked him over, the boy kept trying to do his work but was too tired to scoop more than a handful of soil onto his shovel, and even that would be spilled by the overseer's blows. What most shocked me was that none of the men did anything to help him. There were eight of them and only the one overseer, but they just kept shoveling and chanting as if completely oblivious. The overseer was unarmed, but he did have a cowskin coiled on his belt—a symbol so potent it seemed to entirely emasculate all of these tall and strong men.

And then something very strange happened. One moment I was wondering if Mr. Jefferson might actually have been the one to hire this overseer, and if he might even have placed that cowskin into the overseer's hand, and in the next I was running back up the road in abject terror, feeling that I was being borne down upon by some doom so malevolent and vast as to be unimaginable. Only once the stable roof came into view over a copse of locust trees and my breaths began to burn in my lungs did I slow to a walk and think again and again that this man who had just appeared to me in so hateful a form was the very man whose child was growing within my body, the man who had run the back of his finger so tenderly along my cheek, looked so fondly into my eyes and told me that I was beautiful, that there had been a time when he had wanted to die, but that now, because of me, his life was a joy.

“Such a joy,” he had said so very tenderly. “Such a joy.” . . .

 

On Slavery (Private)

On January 26, 1789, only three months before the commencement of his sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Edward Bancroft, “As far as I can judge from the experiments which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.” Up until this point, Thomas Jefferson had advocated for the emancipation of slaves almost exclusively on the basis of their fundamental rights to equality, justice and freedom, but from now on, in his private letters, he would argue that captivity had so destroyed the independence of spirit and habits of industry in slaves that they could not be freed until these virtues had been reinculcated through training and more humane treatment.

Like many other forward-thinking white people in the north as well as the south, he also worried that were slaves freed en masse, their outrage at past treatment combined with the bigotry of whites would inevitably result in race war—a catastrophe avoidable only if emancipation were held off until a “probable & practicable retreat” could be found for newly freed slaves, possibly in Canada or Ohio but most likely in the West Indies, West Africa or Latin America, which were already inhabited by “people of their own race & colour” and had climates “congenial” to the African constitution.

The primary personal implication of these new arguments was that he could relax. There was no longer any moral urgency regarding the emancipation of his own slaves, and while he may have been obliged to treat them in such a way that they might regain their virtues of industriousness and independence of spirit, it was possible for him to argue to himself that he was already doing just that—as, for example, with the top-flight culinary education that he had provided James Hemings, whom he also allowed to travel great distances in France on his own, often carrying a considerable amount of money.

In the years after his return to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson trained
many of his slaves to be carpenters, furniture makers, blacksmiths, chandlers, cooks and pastry chefs—with the primary beneficiaries of this policy being members of the extended Hemings clan. It should not be forgotten, however, that by having so many skilled craftsmen working for him Thomas Jefferson was able to build one of the most beautiful houses in the United States, and to fill it with excellently made furniture (often of his own devising), and to enjoy coq au vin, bouillabaisse, ratatouille, crêpes and bûche de Noël.

Those slaves who needed to be literate for their work were also taught to read and write. Unlike at other plantations, no one at Monticello was forbidden to acquire these skills. Indeed, in 1796 Thomas Jefferson even advocated for the establishment of public schools for enslaved and free black children. And in later years he encouraged his grandchildren to give reading lessons to any house slave who showed an interest, though it is also true that he worried that literate slaves could forge manumission papers for themselves and others (his writings on slavery are filled with such contradictions).

Some slaves were paid for their work (though only a fraction of what white workers received), some received a share of the profits their work helped generate, and a few were made overseers, most notably at a small nail-manufacturing plant, which for roughly a decade beginning in 1794 was by far the plantation's most profitable venture—though, in general, Thomas Jefferson was not a skilled farmer and made very little, if any, profit most years from his vast plantation. Slaves were also allowed to have their own small gardens and to raise chickens, and could sell whatever they grew or raised to neighbors, including the Jeffersons.

It is hard to know how many people benefited even marginally from these comparatively liberal practices, but most likely no more than a hundred, which is to say only a small proportion of the more than six hundred human beings whom Thomas Jefferson owned over the course of his lifetime and whom he famously referred to as both his “family” and “those who labor for my happiness.”