Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (53 page)

I
was born . . . at Monticello, Jefferson's beautiful Virginia home, on June 6, 1815, just before Waterloo. Jefferson was an ideal master. He was a democrat in practice as well as theory, was opposed to the slave trade, tried to keep it out of the Territories beyond the Ohio river and was in favor of freeing the slaves in Virginia. In 1787 he introduced that famous “Jefferson proviso” in Congress, prohibiting slavery in all the Northwestern Territory, comprising the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. He had made all arrangements to free his slaves at his death by making three prizes of his property, &c.

—The Reverend Peter Fossett

“Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson”

New York Sunday World

January 30, 1898

I
t is 1809, and the world is white, particulate, hurtling and loud. First Thomas Jefferson cannot feel his fingertips, then his feet fade away, and then the outside of his right leg. His lead horse leaves bloody tracks in the snow.

He has a boiled egg and two glasses of cider at the posthouse while his horses are being changed. The hostler stamps the snow off his boots, scattering white chunks across the gray floorboards. “Everything's ready, Your Excellency.”

“No,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Don't call me that.”

“Sorry,” says the hostler, his nose claret red, his cheeks the unsteady red of a not-quite-ripe peach. After half a breath's hesitation, he adds, “President Jefferson,” and lowers his head.

Thomas Jefferson is not the president either. Not anymore. He will never return to Washington. One last swallow. The tankard comes down on the hacked tabletop with a satisfying bang. He thanks the hostler and the innkeeper.

The hostler follows Thomas Jefferson outside and watches from the porch as he is taken apart by the hurtling snow. The harness clinks, the muffled thumps of eight hooves grow ever quieter. Thomas Jefferson diminishes. Grays. His body fragments. And between the fragments is a fierce gray-white. The fragments whirl away. Vanish. First one. Then another. Then another and another. Then dozens at once. Finally there is nothing left but that gray snow, which is only white snow in the shadows of the numberless flakes hurtling sideways between the earth and that clean, clear emptiness above the clouds.

 

Account Book

1. After having refused to pursue Tadeusz Kościuszko's bequest of $20,000 to buy his slaves freedom, Thomas Jefferson, desperate to pay off some of his debt, sold a large number of them to Francis Eppes, his daughter Maria's only surviving child, for $3,500—an arrangement that kept the slaves within his own family and the slave families relatively intact.

2. On February 20, 1826, the Virginia state legislature agreed to allow Thomas Jefferson to pay his debts by disposing of most of his land and buildings—the Monticello great house excluded—through a lottery, which he expected would bring him $112,500. The plan was put aside when a committee of New Yorkers convinced his grandson, Jefferson Randolph, that more money could be raised through contributions from wealthy patriots throughout the country. Unfortunately, this effort returned only $16,500, though Thomas Jefferson never learned of this fact, and went to his grave believing that his grandson's efforts to save the plantation had been successful.

3. After Thomas Jefferson's death, Jeff Randolph attempted to hold the lottery after all, but people were far less interested in helping the Jefferson family than in helping Thomas Jefferson himself, and so the effort failed, leaving the family only one alternative.

4. On November 3, 1826, Jeff Randolph placed the following advertisement in local newspapers:

EXECUTOR'S SALE

Will be sold on the premises, on the first day of January, 1827, that well known and valuable estate called Poplar Forest, lying in the counties of Bedford and Campbell, the property of Thomas Jefferson, dec. within eight miles of Lynchburg and three of New London; also about 70 likely and valuable negroes, with stock, crops, &c. The terms of the sale will be accommodating and made known previous to the day.

On the fifteenth of January, at Monticello, in the county of Albemarle; the whole of the residue of the personal property of Thomas Jefferson, dec., consisting of 130 valuable negroes, stock, crop, &c. household and kitchen furniture. The attention of the public is earnestly invited to this property. The negroes are believed to be the most valuable for their number ever offered at one time in the State of Virginia. . . .

. . . Joey touched my shoulder and said, “Aunt Sally,” his voice an urgent whisper. I turned around and saw a man walking toward the stable with two sets of shackles, one in his hand, the other draped over his shoulder. Two other men walked behind him. One of them had an antique musket slung through the crook of his arm; the other carried a coiled cowskin in his hand and had a pistol in his belt.

The sun had barely risen, and we were standing in front of the solitary open stable door. The opposite door had been nailed shut and was fortified by having a wagon backed against it. The wagon was also to serve as the auction platform, and Mr. Broomfield, the auctioneer, was standing on it issuing instructions concerning the arrangement of crates into a sort of staircase to make ascent and descent more expeditious. A rough fence, with a gate only wide enough to allow the passage of one person at a time, had been built inside the open stable door. And behind that fence stood all the good people whom I had known since they or I were born. A couple of babies were crying, but most everyone else was silent or murmuring in the lowest of voices. Even the children were silent, clutching at their mothers' skirts or standing alone, eyes wide in infantile astonishment, hugging themselves against the cold.

An acrid tang, such as I had never smelled outside of a slaughterhouse, hung densely in the dim air inside the stable. Even before I fully apprehended the nature of that odor, I became wild with the desire to flee—not out of any fear for my person but simply because I knew that the world was about to be revealed to me as a miasma of agony and shame. Yet I could not, for I had promised Joey that I would stand by him—dear Joey, whom I had thought of as my own child during the years after his mother, my sister Mary, was sold to her husband, Colonel Thomas Bell. Joey and I were among the handful whom Mr. Jefferson had chosen to free—as were my own two boys, who were in Charlottesville with Joey's mother, looking for a house in which they and I might live. Of my immediate family, only Critta and Peter were to be sold, but Miss Maria's son
had solemnly promised that he would buy and free Critta, and Danny Farley (who was Joey's brother and who had already bought his own freedom) agreed to do the same for Peter. Joey had returned from Charlottesville only an hour earlier, having received similar promises regarding his wife and nine children, and he had come to the stable door to give his family the news, as well as a parcel of oatcakes made by Mary.

And so I stood my ground, though it might be better to say I swayed upon it, for my mind was aswirl with such a diversity of passions and worries that I had to clutch at Joey's hard shoulder to keep from falling.

Mr. Jeff was walking toward the man with the shackles. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. Not two minutes previously, he had been standing beside Joey and me, telling the crowd inside the stable that although he had gotten bids from Georgia farmers, he would not allow “my people” to go to anyone but “good Virginians.” And now here he was, walking toward these grim and unwashed men—“good Virginians” presumably, whose virtue was exemplified by the shackles, guns and whip they carried.

“Welcome!” he said. “Welcome!” And in a voice that couldn't have been more amiable were he speaking to dearest friends, he told them that the “viewing” wouldn't begin for another hour but that they should feel free to look around the house, the entire contents of which would be put up for sale in the coming days.

It is happening
,
I thought as I watched this scene.
Nothing can stop it now
.
And yet, despite these asseverations, I simply could not believe that Mr. Jeff, who had always seemed the quintessence of decency and good cheer, should be a party to this impending monstrosity. As Mr. Jefferson reached the extreme of his old age, he had become far less active in the affairs of his plantation, with the result that his overseers had been exercising more and more control, and many of them had been unable to suppress their intrinsic cruelty. On being installed as steward by his grandfather, Mr. Jeff had dismissed the most abusive overseers and encouraged the remainder to exercise a policy of fairness and restraint. Cruelty was not banished from the plantation. In fact, Mr. Jeff himself had presided over a thrashing, but life definitely became easier for all the slaves. And so when word got around about how deeply Mr. Jefferson was in debt, most people believed that Mr. Jeff would find a way to discharge that debt with minimal pain. I had myself. There was even talk that he had come up with a scheme whereby
enough money might be raised through a lottery to enable Mr. Jefferson to free all of his slaves upon his death. But absolutely no one had ever imagined that Monticello would simply cease to exist. So here we all were, staggering in disbelief and terror, and here was our supposed savior in congenial conversation with two men sure to bring misery to any number of us.

After his first glance, Joey had turned his back on Mr. Jeff and the men and was calling out to his wife, who was not visible in the central part of the stable and must have been huddling in one of the stalls to keep warm. Hearing no reply, he called again and again, “Edy! Edy! Edy!,” his voice growing ever more worried and shrill.

Joey's anxiety seemed to awaken the fear in the stable. Children began to cry. A woman called out, “Please, Jesus!”—it was Evelina, who had cared for my Beverly and Harriet when they were babies and who now had three young girls of her own. Her cry of despair was answered by others from around the room: “Help me, Lord!” “Precious Savior!” Slowly people began to emerge from the stalls and get up off of the benches, buckets and heaps of hay where they had been sitting, and crowd toward the fenced door.

“All right!” said Mr. Byrd, who, with Mr. Henderson, was standing guard outside the door—each of them holding a stout staff about five feet long. Mr. Jeff had stationed other overseers carrying firearms around the back and sides of the stable, so as not to “unduly disturb” the people inside with the sight of their weapons. “All right!” Mr. Byrd said again, putting his staff between Joey and the fence, as if to pry him away. “You best be going, Fossett.”

“I've got to speak to my wife.”

“You best be going,” said Mr. Byrd. “We ain't got no time for such carrying-on.”

“I've got to speak to her,” said Joey. “Just let me speak to her!”

By now a crowd had gathered at the fence, and from the back of it Edy called, “I'm here, Joe! I'm here!”

Mr. Henderson banged his staff repeatedly against the stable door, waved with his other hand and shouted, “All right, everybody! Just you calm down! There's no cause for consternation. Just go back to where you was sitting!”

“Edy!” Joey called out.

“I asked you nicely,” said Mr. Byrd, now brandishing his staff like a club.

“Please, Mr. Byrd,” I said. “He only wants to comfort his wife and children.”

“Let him speak!” called a firm male voice from the crowd inside the stable.

Mr. Henderson was now pounding on the door with his staff as if he wanted to break it down. “That's enough, now!”

“You see?” Mr. Byrd said. “Look at the trouble you started!” He jabbed Joey in the ribs. “You best get away now, or you gonna find yourself on the other side of that fence.”

Joey didn't utter a sound but looked Mr. Byrd straight in the eyes, trembling with rage.

Mr. Byrd raised his staff high into the air, as if he were going to smash it down on Joey's head.

Without thinking, I grabbed the raised arm and cried, “Please! No!”

Mr. Byrd shoved me aside and shouted, “Out of my way, Miss Sally!” Then he swung the staff down hard on the frozen ground between Joey and me. “I don't care what Mr. Jefferson said! Or Mrs. Randolph! Or anybody! You cause trouble here, you gonna find yourself inside that fence!”

Hearing the commotion, a pair of overseers had come around from the right side of the stable—both carrying muskets—and a man with a blunderbuss was standing in front of Mr. Broomfield's wagon.

I was so filled with fury at that moment that I wanted to grab Mr. Byrd's staff right out of his hand. There were one hundred and twenty-six people inside that stable and only some ten armed men outside—including the men with the shackles. If all of those inside rushed that makeshift fence, they could have burst right through it. Certainly some of them would have been shot, but they had the white men so grossly outnumbered they could easily have overpowered them, taken their guns and headed off to freedom in the north. In my rage, nothing seemed simpler to me.

As I stood glaring at Mr. Byrd, the crowd quieted and Mr. Henderson stopped banging his staff against the wall. A voice called out from behind me, “I'm sorry, everybody.”

It was Mr. Jeff, walking back from the men with shackles—who had their weapons at the ready and a grim eagerness in their eyes.

“I know how you feel,” said Mr. Jeff, his voice unsteady with emotion. “I, too, wish that this day had never come. Mr. Jefferson and I did everything we could to prevent it, but we were defeated by the banks and by some very bad
luck. And now that this terrible day is upon us, all that we can do is try to get through it in the best way possible. I know that nothing I can say will take away your worries and sorrow. And I am sorry about that. I promise you that I will do everything in my power to make sure you go to the very best masters possible. But the only way I'm going to be able to do that is if this auction proceeds in a calm and orderly fashion. If you show yourselves as the good people I know you are, then good people are going to want”—he fell silent a long moment before he finally swallowed and finished his sentence—“to take you home.” He swallowed again. “I am sorry. I wish there was another way.”

I was standing just behind Mr. Jeff, and I wanted to jab my fingernails into his pink neck. He had ceased being anyone I knew, let alone my own nephew and a man I had liked and respected. He was evil incarnate, and I wanted to drag him to the ground and stamp on his face.

I did nothing, of course.

Inside the stable a couple of women began to weep, but everyone else remained silent and still.

Over Mr. Jeff's shoulder, I saw a man named Moak Mobley standing at the back of the crowd. Just from the set of his shoulders and jaw, I knew that every muscle in his strong body was rigid with fury, and the same rigidity was in his eyes, which were looking directly at me. He was well within the shadows, but there was such ferocity in his gaze that his eyes seemed alight with white fire.

Mr. Mobley had done me a grave disservice many, many years ago, and in all the time since, I had scrupulously avoided being in his presence and had kept my head averted when our paths had happened to cross. But now I looked straight into his eyes and hoped that the intensity of my rage would be a match to his. I wanted him to know that I, too, despised the shameless duplicity of Jeff Randolph and of all his family, whose protestations of sympathy, sorrow and regret were simply their way of hiding their damnable guilt from themselves. I wanted Mr. Mobley to know that with every fiber of my heart I desired nothing more than for all Negro people to rise up as one and rid themselves of white tyranny. But the longer I looked into his eyes, the more I came to feel that he did not see me at all, that his rage was so ferocious it had blinded him and that I was nothing before his eyes but a vapor, a ghost, a last crumbling atom of a world obliterated by hate. . . .