Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (10 page)

“A
re we here!” Polly says. “Are we here!”

The coach passes along a grand boulevard lined with row on row of geometrically shaped trees through a massive wrought-iron gate and then turns right, with a lurch like a ship surmounting a swell, into a small courtyard before a magnificent marble-and-limestone house with columns on either side of its portico and marble steps cascading down to the sandy paving.

“Are we here!” says Polly.

“I don't know,” says Sally Hemings, although, in fact, she does know; she just can't bring herself to say it.

“Are we here!”

“Yes, you silly girl!” says Monsieur Petit. “This is your new house, the Hôtel de Langeac. Your father is waiting.”

“We're here, Sally! We're here!”

Polly has grabbed hold of Sally Hemings's forearm and is shaking it up and down in her excitement. For some reason Sally Hemings is not excited. She is the opposite of excited. There is an ache in her heart and stomach, as if something bad is about to happen.

“Yes, my little Polly-Pie,” she says softly. “We're here.”

A female voice is calling, “Polly! Polly!”

At the top of the steps is a huge black door, half open, with a young woman standing in it. “Polly!” she shouts, waving her plump, pale hand. “Polly! Dear Polly!” And now the young woman has lifted the skirts of her embroidered green gown and is drifting down the stairs, her little feet appearing and disappearing beneath a white cloud of lace.

Can this possibly be Patsy? The last time Sally Hemings saw her was almost exactly three years ago. They'd both been eleven years old then, and it was the day before Patsy left Monticello for Paris. She had just been to say good-bye to her horse and was sitting on a box in front of the stable, scraping manure off her boots with a stick, tears making pale trails through the dust coating her cheeks. When Sally Hemings had asked her what was wrong, she had wailed, “I don't want to go! I'm going to hate
Paris! Why can't I stay here with Polly and Lucy?” How is it possible that this young woman, in her flowing gown, with her hair pinned high atop her head and a cameo pendant at the base of her neck, should ever have been so filthy and abject with grief? It is not just that Patsy's clothes are so elegant and her manner so refined, but that she seems even at fourteen (though she is almost fifteen) to have shot right out of girlhood and be ready for marriage.

“Patsy! Patsy! Patsy!”

Polly is so excited that she can't get the coach door unlatched, and Monsieur Petit has to walk around from the other side to do it for her. The little girl leaps straight to the ground and races up the steps. By the time Sally Hemings has lowered herself to the gritty, yellowish driveway, the two sisters already have their arms around each other and are rocking from side to side.

A number of other people have emerged from the big black door, servants mostly, though none Sally Hemings recognizes—

But then she sees a tall, dark-skinned young man in a burgundy frock coat, a yellow waistcoat and yellow stockings. It is Jimmy, of course, but somehow she can't allow herself to believe it. He smiles and waves but doesn't come down. He seems to be waiting for her to mount the steps and greet him. Jimmy is twenty-two, and except for his fine clothing, he looks almost exactly as he did at nineteen, when he left Monticello. The big difference is in his manner. There is a somber hesitancy in the way he holds himself at the top of the stairs. Or a seriousness. Maybe he, too, has shot into adulthood.

Just as Sally Hemings is about to rush up to her brother, someone else steps through the door—a tall, rangy man with white-laced red hair and alert hazel eyes. He holds his shoulders square and his head high and seems possessed of immense strength. He descends the steps with the fluid rapidity of an athlete.

Sally Hemings knows that this is Thomas Jefferson, and, indeed, he has changed less than any of the other people with whom she has been reunited. But he scares her. There is something in the length of his legs and arms, in the confident elevation of his chin and even in the happy squint of his eyes as he sees his daughters that makes it impossible for her to look away from him but that also makes her dread the moment when his eyes will turn in her direction, and he will speak, and she will be compelled to answer.

. . . My mother didn't like to talk about my father. That was another topic that would make her face go still and drab. When I asked about him, she would say, “He was just a man. But he's gone now.” Maybe it was the flat hush in her voice, but from the very beginning I understood “he's gone now” to mean he had died. I remember thinking that knowing my father was dead was my secret, as if it were something I had stolen from my mother without her noticing. But then, when I finally worked up the courage to ask her about it, she said, “That's right. Your pappy's dead and gone. You were just an apple pip when he died. He hardly got to hold you in his arms.”

I never actually grieved for my father, but I did miss him. I'd watch other children riding on their fathers' shoulders, and I would wish I had somebody who would do that for me. Or I'd see some big, strong man get down on his knee and tickle his little girl, then hug and kiss her while she laughed and laughed, and I would feel pierced through by loneliness. Of course, Bobby and Jimmy were eleven and eight years older than me and most of the way to being men—in my eyes, at least—by the time I started paying attention to these things. But they didn't love me the way a father would. Every now and then, they'd give me a little squeeze, but the main way they showed their love was by teasing. Jimmy's nickname for me when I was little was “Cider Jug.” He was always saying things like, “How come your belly's so big and round, Cider Jug?” or, “You best stay away from the men after sunset, or they'll pop your head like a cork and drink you down.”

Often when I was wandering in the woods, I'd imagine my father walking beside me, maybe holding my hand. Sometimes he'd be the one telling me the stories I told myself. I would even talk to him. I would ask him questions, then answer them aloud for him. Other times he would come to me in the middle of the night, especially when I had had a bad dream. He would sit beside my bed, stroke my hair and tell me in a low, kindly voice, “Don't you worry. Your pappy's here. Everything's going to be just fine.” And that really would help me feel better—most of the time, at least.

My father was never just some vague masculine presence; I saw him clearly in my mind's eye. He was very tall and very smart and had the mahogany skin and baritone voice of Reverend Hodder, a free man who came to Monticello to hold prayer meetings. And partly because I had such a clear and vivid image of my father, when a girl named Buttercup told me, “Your pappy is a white man,” I just couldn't believe her. “Yes he is,” she insisted. “My mammy told me. That's how come you're so high-toned and have white-girl hair.”

At first the main thing that troubled me about what Buttercup said was that she used the word “is,” which meant that my father was still alive. I went straight to my mother, who told me, “Of course he's dead! Why would I lie about a thing like that? He died when you were five months old.” And when I asked if he was white, she said, “Don't you listen to that fool talk! Your pappy was just a man. Just a plain old man.” I tried to take my mother at her word, but even at age six, it was clear to me that if my father had been a Negro, she would have said so straight out.

Once the idea that my father was white became lodged in my brain, I began to conceive of myself differently. Up until that point, I had hardly given a thought to my skin and hair—maybe because I knew many Negroes with pale skin and many “white” people whose skin had a decidedly dusky cast, especially in summer. For me, “white” primarily signified people other than “us,” those difficult, sometimes cruel, never reliable people with whom our life was inextricably and mysteriously intertwined. I didn't even know what the term “race” meant at the time and never imagined that I could be anything other than Negro. But almost as soon as I identified “white” with the color of my own skin, I began to tell myself a story that I actually was white, that my mother wasn't my real mother and that I was only being raised as a Negro by mistake. At the end of this story, the mistake would always be uncovered and I would be radiant with the sort of glory that surrounded Mr. Jefferson. I imagined everyone at Monticello, colored and white, being extravagantly happy on my behalf and staging a sort of celebration for me, after which Mr. Jefferson would adopt me, and I would live in the great house with him and his family, and I would bring my mother and siblings along as my servants, and we would all dress in silks and lace and wear the shiniest of shoes.

This story felt like another secret I had stolen from my mother, but one so
complexly shameful that I could never mention it to her and, indeed, have kept it to myself my entire life. One August night, however, when it was too hot to sleep, Critta and I took our ticks outside and spread them on the grass behind our cabin, where the faintest breeze blowing across the field cooled our sweaty limbs and faces. I had in mind a question that I had wanted to ask Critta for days but had never actually dared to speak. Now that the two of us were lying side by side, all alone under the night sky, and our privacy further ensured by the din of crickets and peepers, I drew my lips to her ear and whispered, “Buttercup said my pappy was white.”

“So?”

Critta's complacent response surprised me, and it was a long moment before I could ask, “Was he?”

“Of course!” she said. “Everybody knows that!”

“Who told you?”

“Jimmy. He was Jimmy's pappy, too, and mine. He was all of our pappy.”

This news was such a shock that I couldn't speak. Finally I asked, “Does Peter know?”

“Of course. Everybody knows except you, because you're the baby!”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“You know that Mammy doesn't like us talking about things like that.”

And that was where our conversation ended.

Years later, when I was fourteen and packing to bring Miss Maria to live with her sister and father in France, my mother was seated at the table behind me. She didn't talk while I packed, only sighed heavily and kept rubbing the palm of her left hand with the thumb of her right. I thought she was angry at me, so I did my best to fold my belongings quietly and not disturb her with questions. When I finished, I turned around and saw that she was looking straight at me, her brow all wrinkled and her eyes two sharp points, as if I'd done something horrifying.

“Come here,” she said firmly, nodding at the chair beside her. When I hesitated, she said, “I've got something important to tell you.”

I sat beside her at the table, and she cupped both of my hands in hers and squeezed them. “I never told you this,” she said, “because I didn't want you getting into trouble. Bobby, Jimmy and Thenia know, because they were old enough to remember him. But I thought it'd be easier—”

“Remember who?”

“Your pappy.”

“I already know he was white.”

She smiled, almost as if she were proud of me. “Well, that's not all he was.” Her smile got thin and crooked. She looked away. When she looked back, she wasn't smiling. “Your pappy . . .” She took a deep breath and licked her lips. “Your pappy . . . was Mrs. Jefferson's pappy. You and Mrs. Jefferson were sisters. Miss Patsy and Miss Polly are your nieces.”

My mother told me that she'd kept the identity of my father secret because she thought that if I knew I was a servant to my own family, I might say or do something wrong or I would get ideas that would only make me sad. There wasn't anything she could do about Bobby, Jimmy and Thenia, but she had told them that if they ever breathed a word to Critta, Peter and me about Mrs. Jefferson being our sister, she would “whip their backsides till they caught fire!”

“Only reason I'm telling you now,” she said, “is you're going to France. I don't think Miss Patsy or Miss Polly knows, but Mr. Jefferson surely does. And you're most ways to being a young woman now, so you've got to understand that Mr. Jefferson most surely knows you're his wife's sister, and that's a fact.”

As she said this, I started to sob and couldn't stop. The news was more than I could bear, especially as I had already been terrified about getting on a boat and traveling to a country where nobody would speak a word I could understand. My mother took me into her arms, pressed my head against her bosom and kissed my cheek over and over. “Don't you worry,” she said. “Everything's going to be fine. You're such a smart girl. Everything'll be just fine.”

S
ally Hemings is fourteen years old, and she has been in Paris for two days. Thomas Jefferson almost doesn't see her as he enters the upstairs parlor, partly because it is five-thirty in the morning, an hour at which no one else is normally awake, but mainly because she is so silent and still, a streak of darker gray before the gray of the window. She is leaning her forehead against the wobbly, bubbled glass, looking out onto the rainy courtyard, clutching the fingers of one hand in the near fist of the other. At the sound of his shoe scuffing to a stop just inside the door, she becomes a burst of flutter and flight, like a ruffed grouse startled from a hedge. “I'm sorry!” she cries. “I'm sorry! I just—” She shoots past him and out the door so rapidly that if she ever finishes her sentence, he hears not a syllable.

Q: When did you first find out that you were free?

J
AMES
: The marquis told me.

Q: The Marquis de Lafayette?

J
AMES
: [Nods.]

Q: When?

J
AMES
: Oh, I don't know. It must have been . . . Uh . . . I'm pretty sure it was the first time he came to dinner. I remember hearing him in the foyer. He had such a loud voice, and he was laughing. He and Mr. Jefferson were both laughing. And then, no more than a minute later, he came into the kitchen.
“Zheemmee! Zheemmee! Zheemmee!”
He was so happy to see me again, he said, and why hadn't I come out to greet him at the door? I didn't know what to say to that, because I'd only met him once before, when I was a kid. But then he stopped shouting, and he leaned close to my ear. “I want you to know that slavery is not tolerated in this country,” he said. “It is contrary to the laws. As long as you are here, you are as free as Mr. Jefferson.”

Q: What did you think of him telling you that?

J
AMES
: I don't know.

Q: Did you think it was strange?

J
AMES
: Well, the marquis was a strange man. I liked him, though. He was always good to me.

Q: Maybe not to Thomas Jefferson?

J
AMES
: Oh, he and Mr. Jefferson were best friends. In fact, I bet he told Mr. Jefferson what he was going to say before he even came back in the kitchen. He was just like that. The really strange thing, though, is that he had a slave himself when he was in Virginia.

Q: Really?

J
AMES
: His name was Jimmy, too, now that I think of it. There's even a famous picture of them together, isn't there, Sally?

S
ARAH
: A painting.

J
AMES
: Who's it by?

S
ARAH
: I don't remember. A French painter. I think he even came to the Hôtel once, but I don't remember his name.

Q: What about you, Sarah? When did you find out you were free?

S
ARAH
: The marquis told me, too. But Jimmy told me first. Didn't you, Jimmy? It was that first day, when you showed me my bedroom.

Q: What did you think?

S
AR
AH
: It was beautiful! It had red silk wallpaper, padded and soft, like a pillow. But it was freezing in the winter.

Q: No, I mean about being free.

S
ARAH
: Oh! [Laughs.] I didn't know what to think about that. It was strange, mainly.

J
AMES
: You were tired.

S
ARAH
: Exhausted! And I was in a new country. Everything was strange. Everything was just hard to think about then. For a long time, really.

Q: But what about after?

S
ARAH
: It was still strange.

Q: Why? How? Did you really not understand?

J
AMES
:
I
understood. I understood right away. It was easy. [Stops talking. Squeezes S
ARAH
's hand.] Sorry.

S
ARA
H
: That's okay. Go ahead.

J
AMES
: No. You first. You're the one everyone wants to hear about anyway! [Laughs.]

S
ARAH
: That's not true!

J
AMES
: Tell her to stop being so humble!

Q: [Laughs.]

S
ARAH
: Okay. . . . [Glances at J
AMES
, who takes a sip from the flask he keeps in the breast pocket of his jacket.] Uh . . . What was I saying?

Q: You didn't understand.

S
ARAH
: Okay . . . well . . . The thing is, everything is so different now. Things that seem simple now just weren't then. Even after all these years, it's still very hard for me to put it into words. I guess the main problem is that I can't think like that anymore. Nobody thinks like that anymore. But anyhow. For me, at the time, it was like I had two minds. In one of those minds, I knew, of course, that slavery was wrong. It's like what Mr. Jefferson wrote: Certain truths are self-evident. Everybody just wants to be free. We're born thinking we're the center of the universe and that we can and
should
—I think it's a moral issue for babies!—that we
should
get everything we want. Which we do for a while, because babies don't actually want very much. And that's where
the second mind comes in. Because I was born a slave. Jimmy and I were both born slaves. That's just how the world was—

J
AME
S
: That's not how it was for me. [Covers his mouth.] Sorry.

S
ARAH
: No. Speak. You've got something to say.

J
AMES
: [Looks at Q.]

Q: Go ahead. If it's all right with Sarah.

S
ARAH
: Speak, Jimmy.

J
AMES
: I only ever had one mind about slavery, and in that mind I knew that the world had made me a slave and that slavery was wrong—a crime against humanity! Unforgivable! And I knew in my heart I wasn't actually a slave, that I had never been a slave and that I was never going to act like a slave. I would only do what I chose to do, just like every other free man.

Q: And were you actually able to manage that?

J
AMES
: Yes. Absolutely! . . . But, of course, I was lucky. Sally and I were both lucky. Because of—you know: Mr. Jefferson. . . . But anyhow, that's how I felt for as long as I can remember. From way before I went to France. And, of course, from way before Mr. Jefferson gave me my manumission and I really was free. In the eyes of the law, I mean.

Q: And how was it then? After your manumission.

J
AMES
: It was the same.

Q: No. I mean . . . Well, I hadn't actually intended to bring this up until later. But . . . I mean . . . Given what happened?

J
AMES
: I don't actually want to talk about that. [Long silence.] Okay?

Q: I'm sorry.

J
AM
ES
: [Takes a sip from his flask. Puts it back in his pocket.] I refuse to talk about that. . . . It was . . . Well, it was all very complicated, and there's no way I can explain it. And I don't want to. [Silence.] Of course, slavery entered into it, but it wasn't really how you think—

Q: I—

J
AMES
: Anyhow, Mr. Jefferson only gave me my manumission because he wanted to get rid of me.

S
ARAH
: That's not true!

J
AMES
: Sure it is. He was just sick of dealing with me. I could see it in his face when I asked him. I could see how relieved he was.

S
ARAH
: No, Jimmy.

J
AMES
: But I didn't care. Fuck that. I thought—you know: I'd just go to Philadelphia and make a new life for myself. Friends and . . . maybe
travel. I wanted to go to Spain. Back to France. But the other thing is—I mean . . . Maybe if I'd been white as Sally. And . . . Well . . . you know— [Silence.] But fuck that shit!

S
ARAH
: Jimmy!

J
AMES
: What? Fuck it!

Q: I—

J
AMES
: I told you I didn't want to talk about it. So it's over. Okay? Finished! Let's just forget about it. None of that really matters anyway. That's not how it was.

Q: I'm sorry.

J
AMES
: Go on, Sally. I interrupted you. Say what you were going to say.

[Long silence.]

J
AMES
: Go on.
Really
. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have interrupted.

S
ARAH
: Don't be ridiculous. [Silence.] I said it all anyway. There's nothing to say. . . . Mainly I was like you. I knew I was a slave, and I knew it was wrong. But . . . There were just these people I'd grown up with. My family. Mammy, of course. And you, Jimmy. Peter. And Critta and . . . Well, the Jeffersons were family, too. I mean, Martha and Maria were my nieces! And, of course, there was Mr. Jefferson—

Q: Do you mind if I ask you something?

S
ARAH
: Uh.

Q: I'm surprised that you call him “
Mr.
” Jefferson.

S
ARAH
: He wanted us to. He hated the term “master.” He didn't want anybody to call him “master.”

J
AMES
: Maybe. But that didn't change anything, did it?

S
ARAH
: [Silence.]

J
AM
ES
: I mean the words we used—“mister,” “servant,” “laborer”—those were just his way of getting us to go along with the lie he was telling himself.

S
ARAH
: Not really.

J
AMES
: Well, you can believe what you want to believe.

S
ARAH
: [Silence.]

J
AMES
: [Lifts his flask. It is empty. He balances it on his knee. S
ARAH
is looking at him, but he does not meet her eye.]

Q: But still. To get back to— You know: names . . . I'm just wondering. Didn't you ever . . . ? I mean, considering—

S
ARAH
: You mean Thomas? Tom? . . . Sometimes . . . Of course there were times when I—when we were— [Silence.] Oh! . . . Oh! . . . [Weeps.]

Q: I'm sorry!

S
ARAH
: No. Really. It's nothing. Ridiculous! I guess I just got a little . . . you know: emotional. I mean, this conversation—

Q: I'm turning off the recorder.

S
ARAH
: No. Really.

Q: I'm turning it off. Maybe tomorrow—

[End of recording.]