Patriot Hearts (40 page)

Between the birth of Sally’s son, and Jefferson’s departure on the first of March, six days after the wedding, Sally was able to speak to him exactly four times, one of those at the wedding itself.

It was the night after the wedding that her sister Critta had broken the news to her. “You know when they get back from their weddin’-trip, Miss Patsy an’ Mr. Randolph gonna be comin’ back here to stay?”

“Here?”
Sally’s stomach twisted with shock. She was sitting in her mother’s cabin, nursing Little Tom and listening to the din of festivities all along Mulberry Row. Now and then, drifting down from the house, the sweet skirl of Jefferson’s violin came to her, as the scent of dried flowers echoed the sun’s remembered warmth.

She felt as if the floor had dropped from beneath her. Looking up into her sister’s eyes she couldn’t even ask,
Is it true?
She knew it was.

“Mr. Jefferson asked her to, specially.” Critta, a few years older and like Sally light-complected and pretty, regarded her with enigmatic eyes. “Mr. Randolph don’t get along with his papa, over to Edgehill. But his papa’s been ill, and needs him to look after the place. And if Mr. Jefferson going to New York, he’ll need someone here to look after this place, too.”

There was an undertone of satisfaction in Critta’s voice, a kind of pleased spite. Sally had heard the echo of it all her life, when people spoke to her mother or to any of her siblings. The whole Hemings clan were set slightly apart, as left-handed members of the family who were in line to receive special favors; slaves who would be the last to be sold in bad times.

And when the master of any plantation took a woman, it set her apart still more, even from her family. As if she had sold herself, to put herself ahead of them.

Maybe it was only because Sally had their master’s promise that her son would be a free man, while Critta’s boy Jamey—Peter Carr’s son or not—could be sold like a blood-horse or a dog.

She wanted to reach out to Critta, to say,
Don’t turn against me!

But Critta would only deny that she felt anything of the kind.

And Tom of course didn’t see what the problem was, in the few minutes he was able to snatch, to speak to Sally before he left for New York. “Patsy was in charge of my household for a year in Paris, and you got along quite well,” he said, conveniently forgetting the occasions when his daughter’s needling criticism and cutting remarks had reduced Sally to tears. And seeing the look in Sally’s eyes, he took her hands. “She doesn’t know, Sally—”

He glanced over his shoulder as if to make sure they were unobserved, though there wasn’t much place for spies in a one-room cabin ten feet by fourteen. “And there’s no reason she ever has to know. You won’t be doing maid’s work until the summer…” His eyes warmed as he glanced down at Little Tom, asleep on Sally’s cot and folded thick in his quilts. “I’ll be back before then.”

But before he returned in September, Patsy was with child.

Jefferson had given Randolph and Patsy a thousand acres of his land as a plantation called Varina, and—because land was worthless without them—a hundred and twenty-five slaves. But the lowland climate of Varina was too humid for Patsy’s health. And just before Jefferson’s return, Tom Randolph’s fifty-year-old father had suddenly married a girl Sally’s age, who had let it be known that neither Randolph nor Patsy—nor, for that matter, Randolph’s sisters Nancy and Virginia—were welcome in her home.

So Patsy and her husband returned to Monticello to live.

Above her on the hillside, Sally saw Pip and her sister Bett’s son Burwell emerge from the kitchen with big wicker trays of Queensware vessels in hand. The savory odors of sugared pumpkin and roasted chicken drifted down to her as she folded up shirts and chemises, climbed the slope of the hill, the long grass rustling against her skirt. Even though she was still Maria’s maid when her charge was in residence, Sally had mastered the technique of coming silently, doing her work quickly, and departing like a shadow. It wasn’t only Tom and Patsy she sought to avoid, but Patsy’s husband: Two days ago word had gone around the quarters that Tom Randolph had had his wife’s sixteen-year-old maid Lacey in the linen room.

So much for keeping your menfolks away from the help.

There were also Peter and Sam, and Jack Eppes, who was also part of the household these days. All had so far kept their distance from Sally, even as Tom Randolph did, as if she still bore Jefferson’s mark upon her flesh.

But she’d felt them watch her. Knew they speculated among themselves about whether the master of Monticello was done with her or not.

To avoid the family, when they were at dinner—when she knew Tom was with them—she made it a habit to slip into the house through the floor-length window of Tom’s “cabinet,” the little half-octagon office that opened off his bedroom. Laying his folded shirts on the bed, Sally had to shake her head and smile.

Tom would always act just like Tom.

Every horizontal surface in both cabinet and bedroom was stacked with books, far more than could fit into the three trunks he’d allotted himself for the trip. From a lifetime of acquaintance, Sally knew he’d be awake until almost dawn Friday—the day of his departure—trying to figure out which to take and which he could bear to leave behind. Even then, he’d be sure to send for them within days of arrival in Philadelphia. Upstairs in the library the situation would be even worse.

All that first year he’d been gone, in spite of Patsy’s enmity and the demands of new motherhood and the apprehension about encountering Tom Randolph or one of the Carr brothers, Sally had sometimes made the time to steal into the cabinet and try to make some order out of the chaos there. She knew better than to even try going into the library.

Once she’d found in his desk the smashed pieces of the miniature he’d had painted of her in Paris—did he really think Patsy didn’t know? Before he’d left, she’d returned to him the letters he’d written her on his travels in Europe, fearing that if she kept them in her mother’s cabin, they’d fall into Patsy’s hands.

She had written him twice:
The tree you planted grows tall—

He had never replied.

When at the end of a year he came home—for barely six weeks at the time of the tobacco harvest, the busiest of the year—Patsy had made sure she was always at his side.

His daughter would cling to him like a lover, take him for walks in the garden that was his deepest delight. Patsy had been four months gone with child by then and frightened that like her mother she would be harmed by the birth. She had played that card for all it was worth, making sure she was at her father’s elbow the first time he and Sally saw one another after his return, and where possible, every time after that.

With an infant to look after—an infant who officially did not exist—Sally had been unable to fight her.

He was my friend,
she thought as she laid down the shirts, stood for a moment looking around her at the cabinet and the bedroom beyond. Virtually no one in the quarters, including the other members of her family, accepted that it was possible for a white to truly be a black’s friend, especially where the one was the master of the other.

It seemed to her now that they were right.

The shame of feeling what she had felt—what she still felt—kept her silent, apart from those with whom she lived as she was apart from the folks in the Big House.

As she had always, it seemed to her now, been apart. Neither of one world nor the other.

His violin lay on the desk, with the folders of his music and the little iron dumbbell that he was still forced to use, to strengthen the stiff and damaged tendons of his mis-set right wrist. On the chair were two intricately wrought pedometers he’d purchased in Paris, to measure how far he walked; on the floor all around, stacks of newspapers and correspondence, of charts and notebooks, keeping track of everything: When did peas first sprout and how long from that sprouting did it take them to be table-ready? On what date did the first redbuds bloom in the woods? Temperature and barometric pressure for every day, wind direction and speed—details of the physical world that entranced him, details that did not change or leave him as human beings changed and left. Among the papers lay a palm-sized hunk of gray flint, in which the coiled shapes of strange shells seemed to be molded, life transformed into stone.

As she slipped into the hall she heard Tom Randolph’s loud voice grate from the dining-room: “Everyone knows that the Bank is just Hamilton’s way of making money for his speculator friends.” He sounded sober still, but angry. That anger had smoldered in him since April when Patsy had testified, in open court in Culpeper County, that in her estimation his sister Nancy had indeed gotten pregnant by the husband of his sister Judith. News of that particular scandal had percolated around the quarters like an infestation of bedbugs since the winter before, when Randolph’s sister had, it was said, either aborted her brother-in-law’s baby or given birth to a child whom her paramour had then murdered and left on the woodpile: Tom Randolph had been brooding and drinking over the disgrace ever since.

Jefferson’s reply—scarcely audible, like a summer breeze whispering through the treetops—was, as always in dealing with his son-in-law, friendly, as if no scandal or difficulty existed: “…not simply a matter of States’ debts. The Bank means that only bankers can understand the country’s finances—that the purse-strings of everyone in the country will be held by the central government…”

Patsy was encouraging her husband to go into politics—Sally suspected as a way of supporting her father. A gift to him that only she could give.

But then, after years of watching Patsy manipulate her father the way her father manipulated his own political constituents, Sally would have suspected her of anything.

When Tom had returned from New York in September of ’90, he had been his usual genial self, greeting Sally with the same embrace and kiss he gave Betty Hemings, Critta, Bett, and Thenia. What more could he do, with Patsy standing by? His eyes had met Sally’s once, and had looked swiftly aside from the withdrawn hurt in them at those unanswered letters, those twelve long months of sewing for his daughter and living under her orders. And before he could look back, Patsy had taken his arm and said, “Now you must come down to visit Iris, she’s just had a child, too….”

The following day his younger daughter Maria had arrived from Eppington. A few hours behind her had appeared Aunt Marks, Tom’s silly younger sister, and after her the withered little Mr. Madison, and then two touring Frenchmen with letters of introduction from the Philosophical Society in Paris.

For six weeks, during the height of the tobacco harvest, there had been no moment for the master to find a few spare minutes to walk down to Mulberry Row unaccompanied or unwaited-for. Nor had he made the attempt. She had waited for a word from him, for even an enquiry as to how Little Tom did. None had come. It must be tiredness, she told herself, or the press of business, that made him leave the room, on those rare instances when she’d stolen a minute to try to speak to him alone. That brought that withdrawn expression in his face, when their eyes fleetingly met.

Through forty long evenings, when he returned late from the tobacco-fields to find his company still sitting outdoors taking the coolness in the starry dark, he would sit up and talk with them, sometimes past midnight—Sally would hear their voices drifting down the hill. Afterwards no sound of the violin sang from the dark of the Big House.

What had happened to change his mind?

And after that, he was gone for another year.