Sally Heming (10 page)

Her eyes had turned darker. A strand of black hair had
escaped from its knot. He wanted to go down on his knees and hide himself in
the folds of that skirt again. Surely, it was going to be all right. Surely, he
wasn't going to lose her over this.

"Forgive me, I didn't realize..."

"Forgive you because you didn't realize ... That's
what black folks are here for. To forgive white folks because they didn't
realize. Forgive me. Forgive me. My father said it. My lover said it. My white
sons will say it. Yes, I forgive you. All of you, and your insufferable
arrogance. But I never want to see you again."

"Please..."

"You are not welcome here anymore."

"I beg you..."

"If you come back, Nathan, I'll have Madison throw you
out." She went on before he could cut in again. "I'm tired, Nathan.
I'm tired of white men playing God with my flesh and my spirit and my children
and my life, which is running out. I thought you understood that.

You've left me nothing of my own. Not even my color! I've
been asked to give, and give, and give, and now I can't give any more. I can't
forgive another man, Nathan. I'm sorry."

He had made one of those blunders of enormous consequence
that only a fool or the very young makes. One that afterward plays again and
again in the mind like a set piece in a game of chess long after the match has
been lost. It would seem to him incredible, later, that such a small
miscalculation, flung so nonchalantly on the board, would have cost the game.

"Oh, God." He groaned. "Tell me what to do.
I'll do anything. Pay any price."

"That's what all white men say." There was
dullness and pity and contempt in her voice. "You are just like all the
rest. You haven't understood anything of what I've told you all these months.
You still think I exist by your leave. You always will."

The bitterness shocked him. She meant what she said. He had
not understood.

"Please, I love you."

"That's what all men say. That's what he said. That's
what he said!"

Suddenly, there was no Sally Hemings. No Nathan Langdon.
There was only unfathomable, uncontrolled black rage. A rage that went far
beyond the terrified young man who skimmed and rocked on its surface like a
storm-tossed skiff.

Sally Hemings rose like some outraged goddess in her
sanctuary, now defiled. Like pure crystal light, her rage, he felt, could maim
or kill at will. There was something diabolical and possessed in the scream
that echoed after Nathan Langdon as he fled from her.

That sound would remain for him one of the bitterest and
cruelest memories of his life.

For a long time, Sally Hemings stared at the receding
figure of Nathan Langdon. Then her head snapped back. There was a pressure in
her head that seemed to push her neck forward and made her want to lower it.

When she looked down, there were spots of blood on her
apron. Blood. Her nose was bleeding. She lifted the white apron and buried her
face in it. Blindly she whirled and entered the darkness. She let her apron
drop.

She owned nothing, except the past. And now, even that had
been taken from her. She had been raped of the only thing a slave possessed:
her mind, her thoughts, her feelings, her history. Among all the decisions of
her life, she realized, not one was ever meant for herself.

Sally Hemings was trembling. She went to her dark-green
chest. This moment she knew had been coming ever since that April day the
census taker had arrived at her door, interrupting her solitude, disturbing her
memories, changing her color. She took out a small linen portfolio, opened it,
and stared at the yellowing, unframed sheet within. It was a pencil drawing, a
portrait of her as a girl in Paris. She had never shown this drawing to
anyone—not to her sons, not to Nathan Langdon, not to Thomas Jefferson. She had
never reasoned why. Except that somehow, on this small scrap of paper, John
Trumbull seemed to have captured something that made her see herself for the
first time. This one was the sole image of herself that belonged only to her.

For a long time she studied the delicate lines on the aging
paper. Had she ever been this young? Could she ever believe, invisible as she
was, betrayed, and drowning in this sea of loneliness, the generations passed
from her, that she had loved? ...
Had loved the
enemy....

She turned and strode to the fire. Sacrifice. For one
instant of pain, she hesitated, and then she threw her image into the fire.
Blood. A blood sacrifice.

For one moment her eyes went to the small bundle of cloth
and clay on the mantle. What more did the gods want? She strode again to the
chest and stared down at the yellowing diaries.

"In order to burn them I would have to forget
you."

There was a slight smile on her lips as she began to burn
paper. She burned through the afternoon. The last to go were her diaries. As
she knelt, tearing the pages one by one, her eyes shone like a cat's in the
light of the fire, her face was streaked with tears. George ... George. Like
George. A human sacrifice. She destroyed all but the last diary. There was
still one more thing she had to do. She tried to rise. Her long black hair had
loosened and fell like a nun's chaplet over her shoulders to her knees. She no
longer had the strength to pull herself up, so she continued kneeling in an
attitude of prayer, her diary open to the last page on her bloody apron. There,
before her, in small neat script, was the account of hours: every visit with
its date and length of stay Thomas Jefferson had made to Monticello from the
time she had returned to Virginia with him. Re-enslaving herself. Thirty-eight
years. Thirty-eight years of minutes, hours, months. A certainty that her fate
was something more than a personal one overtook her.

Like an abbess at her devotions, she repeated each date.
The last inscription was not the date of his death, but the date of his last
return to Monticello, twenty-six years before.

She would make this act her very own, she thought: neither
black nor white, neither slave nor free, neither loved nor loving.

She burned it. She felt a deep calm. She no longer feared
anything; not death itself. She had crossed that line. Even if they hanged her.

As for Nathan Langdon, he had helped her leave her life.
She never intended to see him again.

CHAPTER 8

JERUSALEM,
1831

The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave
rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under
the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation....

thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia, 1
790

There was
not one black
person to be seen as Sally Hemings stood in the white mob disguised by her
color, shoulder to shoulder with other tense women and men who had come to
Jerusalem. It had taken her and Eston one week to get to this place; yet she
had felt compelled to be here in the chill of this November day, a long, once
elegant cloak covering her from head to foot.

The remnants of Nat Turner's army, twenty-eight in all, had
been destroyed or apprehended, and thirteen of them, including the woman, had
been executed—all without confessing. There remained only Nat Turner; only Nat
Turner had confessed, and this was his trial. As reports and rumors of Turner's
revolt had spread through Virginia, Sally Hemings had been so affected by it
that she, who for almost thirty years, had never ventured outside the
boundaries of Monticello, now stood in this place, in awful danger, against the
will of her sons.

It was as if Nat Turner's giant hand (for she thought of
him as being immense) had pushed her into this heaving crowd that seemed to
rest in the hollow of some enormous bloody bosom, now calmed and stroked by the
awe of true massacre.

She felt as if this man had taken her hand and lifted her
out of the loneliness after Nathan Langdon, after the destruction of her
diaries. Now, alone, she faced the truth of her life: she had loved the enemy.
She had denied and denied and denied the mesmerizing violence of Turner and his
avengers that had been around her and in front of her and a part of her,
always. Nat Turner, the nullifier of her life.

The silence was deep and sensual; she felt the fear
and
hatred
and
dread of her blackness like twin
asps at her bosom. She had begged
and
pleaded and finally forced Eston to bring her here without being able
to give a reason, but now she knew there was one: to force back invisibility
forever, to confront her life. The danger was immense. Blacks, slave or free,
all over Virginia, were hidden, crouched behind locked doors or plantation
masters. Reprisals had been heavy, sweeping through counties as far away as
Alberdale, as far south as North Carolina. Already more than a hundred blacks
had been killed in the orgy of revenge that followed the two-day insurrection.
Fifty-five whites had been killed. The number glowed before her. Blacks had
perished because of the color of their skin, but for whites to perish for the
same reason was revolution!

They were not invincible!

It was like the day she had stood in the yellow salon in
Paris and listened to her brother James describe what was going on in the
streets of the city. Blue blood had proved as red as peasant. White blood would
flow as easily as black. Virginia had begun to bleed. This day's wound was
staunched for the moment, but, like some royal disease, it would result in a
never-ending hemorrhaging. Invincibility, Sally Hemings knew better than most,
was in the mind. Her head whirled. She saw now the contradiction of her life.
The weight of every moment of it. The weight of power was being exchanged. Just
as, for two delirious days, the power of life and death had passed from white
hands to black, so the power over her life and death passed at last from her
master's hand to her own.

The thought rocked her back on her heels. She swayed
slightly, and as she did the crowd stirred with her as the courthouse door
opened. Sally Hemings clutched her son's arm with both hands as Turner stepped,
stumbled, and was half-dragged into the dappled sunlight.

Eston's arm trembled under her clutching hands. They were
without doubt the only black witnesses to this awful moment.

The pale woman standing beside her bastard son had thought
she knew all about real power. Sally Hemings had spent forty years of her life
in daily contact with one of the most powerful men in America. She had seen his
friends and his enemies sweep in and out of their mansion in quest of power or
in homage of it. She had never understood until now, however, why men lusted
after it with such ferocity; why they fought, killed, slandered, flattered,
begged, worshipped, begot sons in its name. All the Burrs, the Hamiltons, and
the Washingtons that she had seen come and go had never been able to convey the
meaning of it as well as this black man about to have terrible things done to
him. He was now being dragged, spit upon, and kicked. He seemed half-crazy;
wounded, a hunted animal, caught. Yes, this man's dignity had become real power
to her. There was something almost obscene about seeing it here, so naked. This
man had killed her enemies. For her! He had taken them on and fought them to
his last breath. For her! He had stood while she had done nothing for herself
all these years except submit. She wanted to cover the convicted man with her
cloak. To blot out a vision of herself more terrible than she had ever
imagined. She felt herself sinking into this white world as into a watery
grave.

She raised a hand above her head as one does in drowning,
but it was really to signal Nat Turner that he was not alone. Her hand was
dragged down by her distraught son, in whose blue eyes she saw tears of fear
and loathing.

Nathan Langdon made his way through the restless ugly
crowd. He had ridden two days from Washington City to get here. He was haggard
and uncoordinated in his movements; his face showed the same savage and
perpetual bewilderment that had clouded his features since his precipitous
departure from the Hemingses' cabin three months ago.

He shoved and pushed at random, but it was like trying to
move some great mountain of flesh. People felt neither pressure nor pain.
Shoulders and elbows knocked and prodded into tissue without the least response
from the victim. Langdon even found he was shoving women in his frenzy to reach
the courthouse before it adjourned and spewed out the criminals.