Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (50 page)

T
here is nothing in her head. Nothing in her heart. She walks because she has nothing to do. Sometimes she turns in a circle, like a leaf in a breeze, watching a sky full of clouds swirl around her head. Sometimes the yellow fields, buzzing with cicadas, seem to rise and fall as she breathes. We pity her. She thinks her fancies are her real, true life. She thinks she is free. We know that nothing good is ever given, only taken. We know that a master's promises are equal to a snake's hiss. We know that forgiveness is surrender and that the road to freedom runs through hate.

I
t is normal for Thomas Jefferson to have up to twenty visitors a day when he is at Monticello, but ever since the publication of Callender's articles, his visitors have numbered fifty or more, with many of them not actually wanting formal audiences but only to spot “the African Venus” and “Tom,” her supposed child. Every time Sally Hemings steps out of her cabin or the great house, she sees at least one person looking at her, sometimes two or three and, once, a small crowd. So far no one has actually approached or called out to her, but often people point or whisper into one another's ear, and she worries that it is only a matter of time before she is accosted once more, as she was in Charlottesville, or that something worse will happen to her or her children.

When there is no letup in the number of visitors after a week, Thomas Jefferson decides to send Sally Hemings to Poplar Forest, the most distant of his plantations, eighty-three miles southwest of Monticello. He tells her that she will be “more comfortable” there while the scandal is still raging. Not only do very few people know that he owns the property, it is practically on the frontier. Nobody there has much interest in Federalist newspapers, or in any other form of printed matter, so she is far less likely to be troubled by curiosity seekers.

She leaves the following morning, as soon as there is enough light for Tom Shackelford to see the road. In her arms she holds sixteen-month-old Harriet. And seated at her side is nine-year-old Evelina, Harriet's “nurse.” Beverly has stayed behind with his grandmother. The journey takes three days. They spend the first night lying on a tarpaulin underneath the carriage and the second in the servants' quarters behind Flood's tavern in Appomattox. They arrive at Poplar Forest just before sundown, and Tom Shackelford heads back to Monticello before the sun has risen the following morning.

There is no great house at Poplar Forest, only the former steward's cottage, built half a century earlier by Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law when the plantation was an acre of stumps in an interminable forest at the edge of the known world. The present steward, Mr. Chambliss, built himself a
brick house on a small rise, from which he can survey most of the plantation, and so the original house, unoccupied eleven or more months out of the year, is neglected and moldering. Its roof leaks, and many of its clapboards, especially on the southern side, are paintless and weathered gray. Thomas Jefferson recently had the inside painted teal, sage green and liver pink, but the furnishings are all boxy and rough-hewn—built by farmers rather than a joiner. The whole house smells of termites and mice, and the sheets on the beds feel moist against the skin and have the acrid tang of mildew.

There are no servants living in the house, but Mr. Chambliss sends his cook, Mag, in the mornings to make dinner, portions of which Sally Hemings saves for that night's supper and the following morning's breakfast. Every couple of days, Jemma comes to dust and otherwise make sure the house is, as she puts it, “in fine shape for Mr. Jefferson”—which phrase is only one of the many ways by which she expresses her resentment at having to serve Sally Hemings and her daughter (though not Evelina) as if they were white. Mag feels the same way, as do all of the other Negroes with whom Sally Hemings comes into contact at Poplar Forest. The worst are the field laborers, who never speak to her when she encounters them on her walks but only cast her sullen gazes and seem to be awaiting with a preternatural patience for the first opportunity to take revenge upon her for her privilege. She is lonely most of the day and frightened all of the night. Every creak and thump in the darkness sends her bolt upright in bed, her whole body trilling with the cold electricity of fear.

She has met Mr. Chambliss several times at Monticello, where he struck her merely as bland and unintelligent, and embarrassingly deferential to Thomas Jefferson. Here, however, he is not the least bit deferential, but self-possessed to the point of being imperious. His every motion seems calculated, and his expressions emerge only gradually on his face, as if they are rising from primordial depths. He smiles a lot, but with his eyes averted, and he seems always to be in the process of executing some secret plan that he believes is going exceptionally well. He is unfailingly polite in a superficial sense—he even addresses her as “Mrs.” Hemings—but every now and then she catches him looking at her, and she can see in his eyes not only that he has mentally removed every stitch of clothing from her body but that he wants her to know he is relishing everything he sees.

The servants and laborers never meet his eye when he gives orders but listen with their heads bent and don't even glance at his back when he walks away. They do exchange weighty glances with one another, however, and they sometimes lift their eyes to Sally Hemings. Then they just do what they were told.

On their second day at Poplar Forest, when she and the children take a shortcut behind the barns on their way to a duck pond, she spots a post with a rope lashed around it just about as high as a man might reach, with the two lengths of the rope dangling down about a yard on one side of the post. They are twisted and kinked in a way that indicates they have been knotted many times. The lower half of the post is stained a brownish black with what can only be blood. As soon as she understands what, in fact, this post is, she picks up toddling Harriet and grabs Evelina by the hand. “Where are we going?” the older girl says in surprise. “I forgot something,” says Sally Hemings. “We have to go back. I have to get something.” Once they are all in the house, she slams and locks the door and tells Evelina that she is too tired to go to the pond. Maybe they will go another day.

S
he walks. We watch her from the fields, our hands salty, yellowed and stinging from tobacco leaves. We watch her as we swing picks along the road. She walks because she has nothing to do. She holds down her straw hat against the wind, so that she might preserve her precious whiteness. Her step is light. She sings. She is a bauble. She believes that she lives outside the world created by the cowskin, but nothing she believes is true.

In this world—our world—everything is simple. The cowskin is our Devil. The cowskin uses our fear to teach us helplessness. The cowskin uses our rage to teach us silence. It eats our souls as it eats our flesh. It blends our sweat with our tears and causes our blood to run in rivers. And yet it gives us a justice unknown to the white man. It teaches us that in a world of evil, the evil in our hearts is innocence. It tells us that we are angels because we live in hell. We are beatified by pain. We are beatified by hate. Hate is our hope. Even as our lives drip into the dust, we have entered the Promised Land.

I
t astounds Sally Hemings that Thomas Jefferson could ever imagine that she might be “more comfortable” under the sway of Mr. Chambliss. Sometimes she thinks this just another instance of how incompletely he comprehends the facts of his own existence. He cannot find his spectacles even when they are resting on top of his own head. He can pick up a cup of coffee that has sat on his desk for an hour or more and be genuinely perplexed that it is cold. It has often seemed to her that Thomas Jefferson's brain is so labyrinthine that ordinary human understanding simply gets lost in it.

Yet with every day she spends at Poplar Forest, she asks herself more frequently if the comfort he was talking about was not hers at all but only his own.

As soon as she returned from her awful trip to Charlottesville, she asked Thomas Jefferson to show her the newspaper articles about him and her. “They're just a lot of nonsense,” he told her. “There's no need to trouble yourself over them.”

“Don't I have a right to see what's been said about me?”

His lips crumpled dubiously. “Really. There's no need.”

“You've read them,” she said. “So why shouldn't I?”

For a moment he seemed about to argue. Then he just shrugged and pulled a thick handful of newspapers from a drawer in his desk. “You can burn these when you're done with them,” he said. “Better yet, tear them up and put them in the privies.”

From the newspapers she learned all the nasty and absurd things that had been said about her (among which was a cruel poem by John Quincy Adams, who, like his father had been so kind to her when she was in London), but she also learned that people were saying much more cruel things about Thomas Jefferson. He was being called a disgrace to the nation, an offense to public decency and a traitor to his race; people said that he should be impeached, tarred and feathered, driven out of Washington or locked in the madhouse at Williamsburg.

“I'm sorry to have caused you so much trouble,” she said, flinging the
last of the newspapers onto the table. When he only met her words with the buckled brows of incomprehension, she added in a more neutral voice, “How are you going to deal with all this?”

He puffed his lips disdainfully. “It's nothing. It will pass.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. It was impossible for her to believe that such threats—and the outrage that inspired them—would not cause him considerable political damage, to the point where he might have to retire from the presidency. The outrage in some of the editorials and letters was so ferocious that she could imagine one of his enraged critics challenging him to a duel, or even just shooting him in the street. He had already received death threats, after all, and even had to travel around Washington with an armed guard for a whole week the previous April. Why should Callender's articles not inspire more of such murderous intentions?

“I'm not going to worry until I have reason.” He smiled wryly and flicked his hand as if chasing away a fly. But then he became thoughtful. “We shall see what transpires.”

The next day he told her about his plan to make her “more comfortable.” He also told her that he, too, needed “a little peace and relaxation” before returning to Washington and so would be joining her after five days.

The prospect of soon having Thomas Jefferson at her side has been her one consolation during all her loneliness and anxiety at Poplar Forest. She waits for him in happy agitation the whole of the fifth day. But by nightfall he still hasn't arrived, nor does he arrive the next day or the one after, and he sends her no word of explanation. As time passes, she finds herself increasingly defenseless against her worst fantasies: that Thomas Jefferson sent her to this foul and frightening place not just to hide her away but to get rid of her once and for all; or that Mr. Chambliss has already received instructions to set her to work in the field, where she, too, might become stooped and glowering and possessed of only one hope: revenge; or that Thomas Jefferson simply told Mr. Chambliss to sell her to whoever would be willing to pay for her; or that he should feel free to use her however he pleases.

Such grim possibilities come to her at all hours of the day, but she is generally able to quell them by devoting herself to little Harriet or by reading (she brought half a dozen books with her from Monticello, including Locke's
Conduct of the Mind
and a translation of Fénelon's
Adventures of
Telemachus
). But in the night her fantasies arrive as implacable certainty, and she waits, sweat-glossed and with a pounding heart, for the door to fly open and for Mr. Chambliss to drag her screaming down the stairs and shackle her into the back of a wagon that will take her away from everything she loves and all that she has ever known.

 

Of all the damsels on the green,

On mountain, or in valley,

A lass so luscious ne'er was seen,

As Monticellian Sally.

Yankee Doodle, who's the noodle?

What wife were half so handy?

To breed a flock of slaves for stock,

A blackamoor's the dandy.

—John Quincy Adams

S
he dances on a dust cloud, believing herself outside the evil. We pity her. She whirls, hand atop her head, believing she escapes black by being white and white by being black. But there is no escape, and nothing outside the evil. Not one thing. The white people know this—the
real
white people—but they know it only in secret. They know it in their nightmares and in their never-ending fear. They know it in their belief that all men are born evil and that only the cowskin makes them good. And the gun. And the jail cell. They know it in the cowskin's bitter whistle and in the snap of splitting flesh. And they know it most of all in their churches, where love-your-enemy incinerates in hellfire.

I
t is the fourth day after the one on which Thomas Jefferson promised to arrive, and Sally Hemings is alone among trees. Sunbeams angle between slender branches and long trunks, and the air is cool and still where she walks—though from time to time there is a seething in the treetops.
This is good
, she tells herself.
This is helping.
Being immersed in the beautiful and the familiar is giving her a measure of hope. And strength.

She has been walking for half an hour and will walk an hour more. She left the house in a frenzy of anger and shame, afraid of how close she had come to doing something horrific.

Harriet had awakened, crying plaintively, every ten minutes all night. She would suckle herself back to sleep but would continue to twitch and grimace and groan, until finally her crying would start all over again. Her clout had to be changed three times during the night. The first time Sally Hemings got Evelina to do it, but after midnight it was more trouble to wake the girl than to change the clouts herself. It was only just before dawn that Harriet finally sank into a sound sleep, but by that time Sally Hemings was hot-eyed, with humming nerves and an endless stream of ghastly and sordid realizations flooding her mind.

Harriet slept later than usual but was awake by eight, and thereafter the day was the same as the night: She would suckle without being satisfied and refused to swallow even a mouthful of solid food. Over and over she would fill her clout with watery muck, which, more often than not, would leak onto the floor or the bed or wherever she happened to be sitting or lying, including, one time, Sally Hemings's lap. Angry red pimples came up on the delicate folds between her legs—but she only shrieked when her mother tried to salve them with melted butter.

While Evelina was outside washing the soiled clouts, Sally Hemings paced between the parlor and the dining room, rocking her little girl in her arms, singing to her, kissing her, stopping every now and then to see if she would eat from bowl or breast—but nothing helped. And then there came a moment when yet another image of her daughter being ripped from her arms flashed into Sally Hemings's mind, but this time,
instead of paralytic despair, the image filled her with such terrific rage at the relentless cruelty and injustice of this life that it seemed to her there was no purpose in living, that all the care and work she lavished on her daughter was a sham and that, in fact, the greatest service she could do the little girl would be to smash her skull against the stone fireplace—and as this notion came to seem not a mere supposition but an active impulse taking control of her arms and hands and heart, Sally Hemings burst sobbing out the door, her baby in her arms. She ran around the side of the house to where Evelina was hanging the newly washed clouts on a clothesline. “I am an awful mother!” she said, thrusting Harriet into the girl's arms, saying, “I have to go. I'll be back. But I have to go—now!”

She strode away from the house along the wooded bank of the stream where Evelina had been doing her washing. She passed between several fields, in one of which she could just make out the bent backs and the rough, sad songs of the laborers. When, at last, the stream turned southward along the edge of a wooded bluff, she clambered to the top and entered an old-growth forest where, beneath stout and lofty maples, beeches and oaks, the passage was relatively easy.

This is where she has been walking for half an hour. This is where she has heard the wind seething in the treetops and the cries of birds and where she has begun to feel that the worst of her fears about Thomas Jefferson are exactly as unsupported by fact as the most tender of her hopes. She knows
nothing
, neither good nor bad.
Nothing at all.
And so, for the time being at least, her inescapable ignorance seems to be her only problem, the one that she must struggle with and learn how to manage.

Eventually she comes to a trail leading more or less in the direction she has already been going: west, she thinks, toward the unmapped wilderness beyond everything she has ever heard of. The trail is narrow but well trodden. She can feel how it has been worn into the forest floor by centuries of foot traffic, even in those places where it is beginning to be overgrown. This must be an Indian trail, she thinks, here since creation. If she follows it long enough, perhaps she will come to an Indian village, or to a whole country of Indians, where there are no white people at all and no colored. Maybe that would be a better place for her and her children. Maybe that would be a place where they might belong.

She is just beginning to worry about having spent so much time away from Harriet—an hour at least—when there is a furious hissing in the uppermost leaves, the tall boughs around her begin to creak and groan
and a current of dank air cools her cheeks and presses her gown against her body. It is still sunny straight overhead, but in the direction she is walking, a part of the sky has gone storm dark.

She wheels around and hurries back down the path, hoping that the sky will be slow in turning, that maybe only clouds will come or that, at the very least, the rain will hold off until she has reached the house. But the sunbeams have already withdrawn from the trees. The winds grow ever more fierce. The light dims, grows dusk gray, then a strangely luminous green. All at once there is a fierce rattling at the tops of the trees, and then huge drops begin to strike her shoulders, cheeks and hands.

The problem is that Sally Hemings did not take note of the place where she turned onto the trail and thus doesn't know where she ought to leave it so that she might make her way to the crest of the bluff and then home along the stream. When, at last, she strikes out on impulse into the trackless forest, she realizes after less than a minute that nothing around her is familiar, that she has no idea where she is going.

It is another two hours before, clothes frigid cold and hanging heavily off her body, she walks out of a field and onto the drive up to the house. For most of the last hour, she has been hoping that all of the cold, confusion and fear she has endured will be rewarded by the sight of Thomas Jefferson's landau at the house and Peter standing at the doorway under an umbrella, watching for her.

But of course there is no landau, no horses, no brother. The drive is a river through which she must splash up to her ankles to get into the house.

Once inside, though, she sees that Evelina has lit the lamps and managed to get a good fire going—in front of which she has draped a row of Harriet's clouts across a bench to dry. And the tiny girl herself is toddling toward her mother in nothing but a shirt, both arms upraised. “Mammy! Mammy! Mammy!”

Wet as she is, Sally Hemings scoops her daughter into her arms and covers her with kisses, the little girl's giggles escalating from throaty glugs to breathless clicks and cackles. As she carries Harriet toward the fire, the child tugs at the neck of her gown, and so Sally Hemings undoes her bodice and slips her cold, wet nipple into her daughter's warm and hungry mouth.