Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (56 page)

The white people amid whom I was attempting to pass soon made it abundantly clear, through their own shoves and curses, that I would never make it to Evelina if I did not master my rage, that my only hope was to take advantage of my own white skin and flowing hair, and so, instead of cursing, pushing and pummeling, I kept my arms at my sides and said, over and over, “I'm sorry. Excuse me. I have to get through. Please. I'm terribly sorry.” Despite all my efforts, I must still have been a bizarre spectacle, because it is impossible for me to imagine that I could have concealed the utter contempt that propelled each one of these niceties from my lips. Nevertheless, my strategy worked; the curses ceased, shoulders parted to allow my passage, and there were places in the crowd where I had plainly been recognized, and scores of people stood aside to let me pass as if I were royalty.

I was not tall enough to see over the heads surrounding me, and so I did not once glimpse Evelina during the whole of my progress to the crowd's far edge. And then all I saw was a chaotic assemblage of horses, wheels and Negro men, some dressed in full livery, others in straw hats and sackcloth coats. I began running from one of these servants to the other, asking—shouting, really—if anyone knew where I might be able to find McFlynn's carriage, and most of them—no doubt thinking me an insane white woman—merely looked over my head, down at their feet or otherwise pretended not to hear me.

In the end it was only one servant's involuntary glance across the road that enabled me to spot Evelina, hunched and silent, seated in a fenced enclosure on the back of a hay wagon that was already rocking and rumbling off a brown field and onto the road. McFlynn and his driver were seated at the front with their backs to me.

And here, at last, I became the insane woman whom everyone had imagined me to be, as I ran after the retreating wagon, shouting out, “Evelina! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I love you! I love you! Evelina! I love you!” Now it seems odd to me that I should have professed my love to this woman, because during most of my association with her, especially when she was my own servant, she had often irritated me, and I had never found her sufficiently industrious or remotely intelligent. But as I ran after that wagon, my love for her was passionate and true, and if it had been possible to gain her freedom by throwing myself under the wheels of the wagon, I would have done so without a thought.

But the wagon only gathered speed as I raced toward it over the frozen, rutted, red earth of the East Road, and it was clear that even if my heart had not already been pounding and my breaths had not been burning in my throat, I had no chance of catching up with it.

But then a horse by the side of the road started—perhaps at McFlynn's driver's cries—and lurched in front of the wagon, pulling its gig along with it. McFlynn's horses veered left, and the driver yanked on the reins, avoiding a collision and bringing the wagon to a halt. And so, still shouting my love and my sorrow and not caring who heard me, I redoubled my pace, and in instants I was gripping the posts at the rear of the wagon.

I had not been able to tell as I ran if Evelina had been even aware of my pursuit, but now she was looking straight at me under her lowered brow. As I, unable to gather air sufficient for speech, only sobbed and gasped wordlessly, she placed her hands on the bed of the wagon and dragged herself as close to me as her chains—fastened to the base of the driver's seat—would allow. Over her shoulder I saw that McFlynn had turned to look at me. He yanked the whip out of the hand of his driver—who was exchanging curses with the driver of the gig—and lifted his leg so that he might step over the seat and into the back of the wagon.

I didn't care what he did with that whip. I almost longed to feel its sting on my shoulders and cheek. Evelina's face was now only inches from mine. I looked into her eyes, which seemed filled with animal fury. She was milling her mouth in a peculiar fashion, as if she were engaged in some terrific struggle to regain the power of speech, and then, exactly as the driver cried out and the wagon jerked forward, yanking the posts from my grip, something white shot across the space between us.

As I watched Evelina draw away from me, her new master behind her, one hand gripping the back of his bench, the other holding his whip high in the air—though only to steady himself as the wagon tilted into and then out of a rut—I felt her warm saliva, still fragrant of the inside of her mouth, oozing down my nose and onto my lips. . . .

T
he story of my own life is like a fairy tale, and you would not believe me if I told to you the scenes enacted during my life of slavery. It passes through my mind like a dream. Born and reared as free, not knowing that I was a slave, then suddenly, at the death of Jefferson, put upon an auction block and sold to strangers. I then commenced an eventful life.

I was sold to Col. John R. Jones. My father was freed by the Legislature of Virginia. At the request of Mr. Jefferson, my father made an agreement with Mr. Jones that when he was able to raise the amount that Col. Jones paid for me he would give me back to my father, and he also promised to let me learn the blacksmith trade with my father as soon as I was old enough. My father then made a bargain with two sons of Col. Jones—William Jones and James Lawrence Jones—to teach me. They attended the University of Virginia.

Mr. Jefferson allowed his grandson to teach any of his slaves who desired to learn, and Lewis Randolph first taught me how to read. When I was sold to Col. Jones I took my books along with me. One day I was kneeling before the fireplace spelling the word “baker,” when Col. Jones opened the door, and I shall never forget the scene as long as I live.

“What have you got there, sir?” were his words.

I told him.

“If I ever catch you with a book in your hands, thirty-and-nine lashes on your bare back.” He took the book and threw it into the fire, then called up his sons and told them that if they ever taught me they would receive the same punishment. But they helped me all they could, as did his daughter Ariadne.

Among my things was a copy-book that my father gave me, and which I kept hid in the bottom of my trunk. I used to get permission to take a bath, and by the dying embers I learned to write. The first copy was this sentence, “Art improves nature.”

—The Reverend Peter Fossett

“Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson”

New York Sunday World

January 30, 1898

 

Account Book

1. Sally Hemings was not freed in Thomas Jefferson's will but “given her time” by Martha Randolph, an arrangement that simultaneously avoided the scandal that might have arisen had Thomas Jefferson freed her himself and, since she was not technically free but only allowed to live as free, enabled her to evade the Virginia law that required freed slaves to leave the state. Her sons, Madison and Eston, were exempted from the law through a dispensation granted, at the request of their father, by the state legislature.

2. Joseph Fossett worked many years to earn enough money to buy back his wife, five of his children and five grandchildren. In 1840, once it became clear that Colonel John R. Jones would never allow Fossett to buy back his son Peter, the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. Although he was also unable to buy back his daughter, Patsy, she ran away from her new master within the year and was living in Cincinnati at the time of the 1850 census.

3. Burwell Colbert never rescued any of his children from slavery. His elderly mother lived at Monticello until the great house was finally sold in 1831. He would visit her from time to time, clean up the house and tend the garden, but mostly he worked as a painter and glazier at the University of Virginia. When he was fifty-one, he married a twenty-year-old freewoman and started a new family.

4. Wormley Hughes, a favorite servant, who dug Thomas Jefferson's grave, was also given his time by Martha Randolph, but his wife and their eight children were sold to separate buyers in Charlottesville. Jeff Randolph bought them all back immediately after the auction, and over the next four years, he bought eighteen more members of Hughes's extended family, all of whom were reunited at Randolph's Edgehill Plantation.

5. Forty-two of the approximately two hundred human beings auctioned at Poplar Forest and Monticello ultimately found freedom or lived out their lives in comparatively beneficent servitude with members of Thomas Jefferson's extended family. The rest were dispersed among households and plantations across Virginia and perhaps in neighboring states. Their fates are entirely unknown.

. . . It is late. The fire is out. So maybe it is five or six in the morning. The room is frigid and still dark. I can see my breath by candlelight. I don't know why I have been writing all of this.

No. I do. I do.

I said that I wanted to understand, but that is not true. What I wanted was absolution. I thought that by admitting my sins I would somehow be freed of them. That is all I really cared about. Instead I am only more despicable to myself. When I finished my narrative, I needed company. In truth, I wanted my mother—which shows how friendless I have made myself. Mrs. Martha is here. And Mr. Jeff. And their servants. But I can no longer stomach white people, and the servants won't talk to me. In my presence they behave as if they can neither see nor hear me. I am invisible to them. I am nothing. And it is true: I am not white. I am not black. So I am nothing.

I wrote earlier that I could have said no to Mr. Jefferson, but that is not true either, because were I to have said no to him, I would have been saying no to myself, and because whatever else I may have gotten from him, I also got the world. I don't mean only that I went to France, though had I not, perhaps nothing that happened afterward would have been possible. I mean that he opened up the world to me through his conversation, his great, endlessly restless mind, through his brilliant and powerful friends and, perhaps most of all, through his books. To reject all of that would be to reject the person that at so many moments along the way I was so thrilled to be becoming. And even now, the notion of emptying my mind of everything that I have gained through my association with Mr. Jefferson fills me with a sort of panic, as if I am pulling a coffin lid down upon myself.

There should be nothing wrong with what I have done. The right to know, to learn, to be able to investigate, savor and inhabit the world through one's mind as well as one's person, ought to be as “unalienable” as any of the other rights Mr. Jefferson enshrined in his Declaration. Yet for me the exercise of this
right has come at too high a moral cost. By becoming the woman I am now, I lost my self—if by “self” we mean a way of being in the world that one can recognize as one's own.

Earlier tonight, after finishing my narrative, I went down to the kitchen and stole a bottle of Mr. Jefferson's wine—a very good Ledanon. I say “stole” because it had already been packed for auction, as tomorrow everything in this room will be similarly packed. This is the last time I shall ever stay here. After tomorrow this room will be an empty space, containing nothing but echoes and dust. I wanted the wine because I thought it would give me comfort. And when I had finished the bottle without feeling comforted in the least, I “stole” another, hoping it might give me sleep—and that it did, but only the sort of sleep which is a senseless whirling in a dark that is itself whirling with lurid fancies and fears.

And then, only minutes ago, I was awakened by a vivid memory that had come suddenly into my head. I remembered Mr. Jefferson laughing. It was in Paris, not long after our love had truly commenced. We were lying side by side in bed, looking into each other's face, exchanging small kisses. Then, all at once, he shook his head and said, “Oh, Sally, what are we doing?” And then he began to laugh, out of sheer happiness at what had come to pass between us, and I laughed, too. I laughed for joy.

As soon as that memory took possession of me, I began to sob. I sobbed and sobbed and couldn't stop, thinking what a hell life is that such moments of goodness and beauty should end up being so damnable and depraved. I sobbed until, exhausted, I turned on my side, hoping for a little more sleep. And as my face pressed into the pillow, I realized that I could still smell Mr. Jefferson. He was still there. Thomas. Tom. My Tom. And I breathed deeply, thinking that this would be the last time I would ever have any part of him inside me.

B
everly left Monticello and went to Washington as a white man. He married a white woman in Maryland, and their only child, a daughter, was not known by the white folks to have any colored blood coursing in her veins. Beverly's wife's family were people in good circumstances.

Harriet married a white man in good standing in Washington City, whose name I could give, but will not, for prudential reasons. She raised a family of children, and so far as I know they were never suspected of being tainted with African blood in the community where she lived or lives. I have not heard from her for ten years, and do not know whether she is dead or alive. She thought it to her interest, on going to Washington, to assume the role of a white woman, and by her dress and conduct as such I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered.

Eston married a colored woman in Virginia, and moved from there to Ohio, and lived in Chillicothe several years. In the fall of 1852, he removed to Wisconsin, where he died a year or two afterwards. He left three children.

—Madison Hemings

“Life Among the Lowly, No. 1”

Pike County
(Ohio)
Republican

March 13, 1873

A
drizzle grays the air when Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings visit the Museum of Miscegenation. They approach the columned and domed marble edifice (which Thomas Jefferson cannot help but notice is in the Palladian style) along an avenue of plane trees, all-but-invisible droplets drifting between bare branches tipped with the tiny lettuces of just-bursting buds. The drizzle coats the square cobbles like breath upon a mirror, and Sally Hemings, wearing leather-soled shoes, finds the footing so slippery she has to cling to Thomas Jefferson's arm until they are inside the museum.

They have come unannounced, but as soon as they step through the glass doors into the cavernous lobby, a security guard nudges a young man in a trim black suit standing next to him and nods in Thomas Jefferson's direction (no one, of course, knows what Sally Hemings actually looks like). The young man immediately goes over to the information desk, picks up a telephone and dials.

Swimming-pool-size banners hanging from the ceiling advertise two new shows: THE MYTH OF PURITY and EUGENICS
:
PAST
,
PRESENT AND FUTURE, but Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings are interested in neither. They have come, after many second thoughts and much procrastination, to view the entire wing of the museum devoted to their thirty-seven-year relationship.

The young man has put down his telephone and seems on the verge of approaching them, so they turn their backs and hurry across the lobby toward a considerably smaller banner:

THOMAS JEFFERSON & SALLY HEMINGS
AN IMPOSSIBLE LOVE

Just as they pass through the doorway beneath the banner, Sally Hemings looks over her shoulder and sees that the young man has been joined by a stocky gray-haired woman in a magenta suit with a knee-length skirt. She has one hand on the young man's forearm, as if holding him back. They are both staring at Sally Hemings, but neither budges nor makes any show of greeting.

The interior of the gallery is so dim that the spaces between the spotlit exhibits seem fogged with granulated pencil lead. Thomas Jefferson is already standing beside a vitrine. Sally Hemings rushes over and takes his arm again, feeling less exposed pressed against his side.

It seems that in their hurry to escape notice, they have entered the show through its exit. The vitrine into which Thomas Jefferson is looking contains his silver spectacles, star-shaped inkwell and shoe buckle. Sally Hemings carried these in her bag when she left Monticello, and she gave them to their son Madison shortly before her own death. These items look far too paltry to be arrayed on velvet under a golden spotlight. But seeing them after such a long time, Sally Hemings is so weakened by sorrow that her fingertips and legs go trembly. Thomas Jefferson glances at her with a sad smile.

“I'm glad you kept these,” he says. “The inkwell especially.”

She smiles hesitantly and nods. She cannot answer. She lets go of his arm.

“I don't recognize the buckle, though,” he says. “Are you sure it's mine?”

“It was in the lodge. I went there not long before I left Monticello. It was under the night table.”

Thomas Jefferson's smile has vanished. He gives her hand a long, firm squeeze. “Oh, God, Sally.”

“Do you want to go?”

“No. That would be a waste. We've come all this way.”

Some of the displays are amusing—particularly the dioramas. One shows Thomas Jefferson standing in front of a fireplace playing a violin while mannequins representing his granddaughters, Ellen and Cornelia, both looking about eleven years old, whirl, elbows linked, in a merry jig. Almost everything is wrong with this exhibit. First of all, Cornelia absolutely hated dancing, in part because her actual proportions—unlike the mannequin's—verged on the elephantine. Second of all, no one's clothes make sense. Thomas Jefferson is wearing a braided, gold-buttoned, royal blue frock coat, which is far too formal for so humble and domestic an occasion. And his waistcoat is an absurd geranium red, such as a tavern keeper might wear. The girls, by contrast, are in mauves and pigeon gray, which they would have considered too dour and old-fashioned even for their grandmothers.

Most ludicrous of all are the faces of the mannequins, ostensibly based on portraits painted “from life.” Thomas Jefferson, at least, looks as if he belongs to his own family—though not any closer to himself than a
second or third cousin, and the grin on his face is the sort that only accompanies intense discomfort of the lower intestine. The mannequins representing the girls both look like demented elves, neither bearing the faintest resemblance to the actual Ellen and Cornelia.

Sally Hemings is also in the scene, though her face is not visible, since she is shown watching the family merriment from a dark hallway.

In every single one of the dioramas and modern illustrations, Sally Hemings's face is either in shadow or turned away from the viewer. This is because, as the captions to the displays repeat time and again, if any portraits of her were ever made, none has survived. She understands that the absence of her face represents the museum curator's desire both for historical accuracy and to make a statement about her “invisibility” in Thomas Jefferson's world, yet she can't help but feel affronted that she alone, of all the people represented, is deprived of the most significant physical manifestation of identity, especially since the faces of every other member of the Jefferson family and social circle could hardly be less historically accurate.

She is also disturbed to see the knives, forks and spoons she remembers as shiny copper and silver looking black and withered, and the blue china plates off which she ate thousands of meals now only partially reconstructed assemblages of variously discolored fragments. Particularly disturbing is a display of miscellaneous bits of pottery unearthed at Monticello, in which she notices two arced pieces of the jam jar in which she buried La Petite. Thomas Jefferson passes right over this display without even noticing what it contains, and she doesn't bother to inform him. She lingers behind as he moves on to other exhibits, however, and it is a long while before she can bring herself to stand near or talk to him again.

In the end she is moved to return to his side and, finally, to take hold of his hand by the responses of the other people in the gallery—about half of whom obviously have African ancestry. The overwhelming message of the show, rendered anew in exhibit after exhibit, is that when it came to the Africans with whom he spent almost every day of his life, Thomas Jefferson was a selfish and spitefully prejudiced hypocrite—which, indeed, he was, Sally Hemings realizes far more clearly now than she ever did at the time, though that is not all that he was. As he and she move between pools of illumination in the twilit rooms, people are constantly murmuring sourly to one another and making comments like, “What a bastard!” Or, “I used to admire this guy!”

Thomas Jefferson gets few second glances, however, and maybe one or two stares, but no one comes up to him, no one cups a hand over his or her mouth and whispers into a neighbor's ear while glaring at him fiercely. But as he and Sally Hemings are watching a video in which some of his writings on slavery are read aloud by an actor, a man of African descent does look directly at Thomas Jefferson, and says in a loud voice, “This country would have been a hell of a lot better if all the
white
people had been sent to Ohio or Canada!”

Thomas Jefferson responds to this man's words and, indeed, to every other overt or implicit disparagement he receives that day, as he always responds to criticism: by pretending not to notice it.

As he and Sally Hemings are leaving the video, she takes his hand in both of hers, moves her lips next to his ear. “I hope this is not more than you can bear,” she says.

At first he only sighs heavily without speaking. But after a long moment, he says, “It seems that I never . . .” He is silent another long moment, then shrugs and pats her hand. He doesn't look her in the eye.

As they draw near the end—which is to say the beginning—of the show, they come to a vitrine displaying the very gown that Sally Hemings was wearing the day they went to see le Comte de Toytot fly in a hot-air balloon and that she was also wearing later that night, when Thomas Jefferson forced himself into her room.

They stand side by side in front of the vitrine, as if before an apparition, their faces tremulous with the repeated impacts of possibility and doubt. The gown, suspended in midair by nearly invisible fishing line, is the only item in the whole exhibit that seems untarnished by time, its yellow silk radiant in the spotlight and its white underskirts as brilliant and luxurious as clouds.

After a moment they notice a guard standing next to them. He is dark-skinned and heavyset, and he is smiling at Sally Hemings. “Would you like to try it on?” he says.

“Is that allowed?” she asks.

The guard nods beneficently. “For you, of course.”

He pulls out a set of keys, attached to his belt by a chain, unlocks the back of the vitrine and detaches the gown and its underskirts from the fishing line. As he hands them to Sally Hemings, he nods wordlessly toward the door of a women's room.

She takes the gown and skirts into her arms as if they are the wasted
body of a child. When she emerges from the women's room, her expression is solemn and intent. She is barefoot, clutching her raincoat against her chest.

The guard has left the room, and for the first time since they entered the museum, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson are entirely alone. “You have to do me up,” she tells him, and turns her back. “The stays are missing, and there is no hoop. I'm sure I'll look terrible.”

“It will be fine,” says Thomas Jefferson as he fastens the many little buttons from just below her waist to the nape of her neck.

And, indeed, when she hands him her raincoat and turns to face him, she seems hardly to have changed since she last wore the gown so many years ago.

She is looking into his eyes, waiting, still solemn and intent. He is afraid to speak. He is feeling so many different kinds of sorrow, but also a lightening of spirit—something very like hope.

She swallows and parts her lips, as if to form a word. But then she clamps her mouth into a thin seam, and the skin around it goes yellow. She is still looking into his eyes, and he is looking into hers.

The guard has returned, stepping sideways through the door, glancing over his shoulder toward the room he has just left. Then he looks directly at Sally Hemings, tilting his head to one side, his brow furrowing and his lips going into the lumps and twists of someone who wants to smile. Finally he shrugs and parts his open hands in the gesture that signifies helplessness. There are murmurs in the next room, and the whisper of shoe soles on polished wood.