Sally Heming (17 page)

His arrogance and adventurous nature stood him in good
stead as a cook, and his long, beautiful hands had begun to shape masterly
cakes and pastries. He was now in the midst of his third apprenticeship. The
first had been with a
traiteur
named Combeaux. He was calm and patient in the kitchen. Meticulous and
infinitely careful. Never did he lose his temper while cooking—the mark of a
true chef. Adrien Petit recognized this, and although he was hazy on the
dictates and protocol of American slavery, he had already indicated to
"Jim-mi" that he would be welcomed in several French households when,
as James put it, "the time came."

One day, six months after her arrival in Paris, Sally
Hemings passed the gilded mirror in the entrance of the Hotel de Langeac and
caught a glimpse of herself. She was pleased with what she saw. She had
completely recovered from her mild case of smallpox, an experience that had
terrified her and through which James and Petit and Master Jefferson had nursed
and indulged her. She had had only a few eruptions on her face, but those had
caused her untold misery. The doctor had been kind, and her ordeal had left her
without a mark on face or body.

Her provincial air and homemade country clothes had
disappeared with the fever and her new skills in dressmaking. The clear liquid
gold of her eyes gazed serenely at her image in the polished silver. She was satisfied.

Her lips turned up in a smile and two dimples flashed for
an instant on either side of her mouth. Abigail Adams had been right. It was
more criminal to be out of fashion in Paris than to be seen naked. To which the
Parisians were not averse, as Mistress Adams had noted...

The French ladies, she thought, as she looked at herself in
the mirror, displayed such an art with powder, rouge, wigs, perfumes, and
elaborate clothes that you couldn't be sure they weren't the famous dolls of
Mademoiselle Bertin, dressmaker to the queen, that traveled from court to court
all over Europe, dressed in the latest fashion.

The French ladies spent a great deal of time making
themselves beautiful, she mused. The French ladies also possessed a most
voluptuous room installed only for bathing, called a
salle de bain.
She repeated the
expression out loud. The French ladies would even sometimes receive visitors
there! They would empty a pint of milk into the water to cloud it, and called
it a
bain de lait.
The French ladies
...

The young girl repeated the new French expressions she was
learning, savoring them each time anew. She laughed outright. She was happier
than she had ever been in her life.

She was learning new and independent ways of thinking and
behaving. Her eyes no longer slid off the glances of whites. She was able to
look white people in the eye, even to address them in French or English without
hesitation.

Humming to herself, she smoothed the folds of her new
dress, pulled the hood of the soft woolen cloak she wore over her head, and
stepped out into the crisp December air.

In December a young painter from Massachusetts named John
Trumbull arrived at the mansion. I liked him from the beginning. He was to
spend some time with us, sketching the French officers who had fought in our
Revolution and doing a portrait of my master for the painting commemorating the
Declaration of Independence. He was tall and thin, with dark round eyes that
seemed to see everything and consume what they saw. Things, he told me, were lines
and planes to him, light and shadow. I asked him if he saw me this way and he
replied by making several sketches. He showed them to me.

"This cannot be me," I said to him.

"But it is. You have only to look in the mirror."

I tried to please everybody: my master, my brother, and the
girls; but it was not always easy. James had always been demanding and quick of
temper, and now he had taken on all the airs of the French servants. He took me
in charge and rationed my contacts with the other servants. Polly had wanted me
to accompany her to the convent, where the young ladies were allowed to keep
their maids, but Master Jefferson was against it. He, too, was making more and
more demands on my time and guarded me jealously from the outside world.

As consolation for my disappointment at not being allowed
to stay at the convent—it was a calm, beautiful place, which I had liked at
first sight—he had allowed me to study with Monsieur Perrault, James's tutor in
French.

"You have a lovely voice, Sally. Married to the French
language properly spoken, it will be extraordinary. Extraordinary." It was
the first compliment I had ever received outside of my slave family and I had
blushed. But Monsieur Perrault went on, without apparently noticing.

"It is not so much in the tone as in the timbre. Like
a musical instrument. A pity you have had no musical training. I am sure you
should sing. And you, 'Jim-mi,' at least you've learned how to swear in French
to perfection. A notable necessity for a chef."

Monsieur Perrault had looked from me to James. I knew he
was really very fond of "Jim-mi" despite his
"sottises"
and
"mauvais traitements.
" James was
horrible to his tutor, but diligent in his studies, preparing himself for his
"future." He never said exactly what this future consisted of. It was
a "secret," only to be revealed at the "right" moment.

There were only nine months between us, and Patsy and I
were preoccupied with the changes taking place within ourselves. I was almost
fifteen, she sixteen. Polly was still a child, but she had all the beauty and
grace denied her sister. Martha had long resigned herself to not being
beautiful but she was still unhappy about being in a country, and a society,
that placed such importance on it. Because she was plain, several beautiful ladies
befriended Martha, as she was no threat to them. She was the image of her
father, and almost as tall as he. She towered over most of the men who were
introduced to her. She had bright-red hair like her father, and freckles, which
were her despair. Still she had a kind of touching grace, and she was an
excellent horsewoman. She had her admirers, but she rarely went out in company.
Sometimes she returned home for a special party or dinner, but during my first
months in Paris, Master Jefferson was occupied with the mysterious Maria Cosway
and rarely saw his daughters, except for Sunday dinner and an occasional tea at
the Comtesse de Noailles. So, I would often visit Martha and Maria at the
convent and bring the latest gossip, of which I got an earful from James and
the other servants. Martha was annoyed by her father's infatuation with Maria
Cosway and repeatedly told me so. Her jealousy was bitter, and I was later to
feel its cruelty. I was just as envious of Maria Cosway—her exquisite manners,
her magnificent gowns, and haughty condescending and languishing airs. She came
to see Master Jefferson with a proprietary attitude that made James mimic her
behind her back, and the servants raise their eyebrows. Only Petit knew the
real story, and he was as close-mouthed about it as old Martin back at
Monticello.

"I wish she would go back to her husband!" This
seemed to explode from Martha's very soul, and I realized that Paris gossip
didn't stop at the convent gates.

"She is very beautiful."

"But so old! She must be at least twenty-five!"

We sat in silence charged with malice. How could men be so
anxious to pursue such decrepit creatures? I thought. They seemed to be made
out of some soft, pudding-like material that had nothing to do with muscles and
bones. What would they do if they had to run?

I remembered the joy I felt when, picking up my skirts, I
would race as fast as I could down the Champs-Elysees, across the fields,
toward the bridge of Neuilly, looking behind to make sure no one was watching.
I would run until I had a stitch in my side and then pause, listening to the
pumping of my heart, the pounding of my breath....

We did not know that at that very moment Maria Cosway, the
object of all our jealous envy, was already on her way back to her husband,
having quit Paris that very day for good.

Martha then turned to me and whispered, "There was a
gentleman a few days ago ... you know, who killed himself because he thought
his wife didn't love him. They had been married ten years.... I believe that if
every husband in Paris was to do as much, there would be nothing but widows
left." And then suddenly, with an emotion I didn't understand at the time,
she said, "I wish with all my soul the poor Negroes were all freed. It
grieves my heart!" And she reached over and embraced me.

CHAPTER 13

PARIS, MARCH
1788

Perhaps
I had always
known that he would claim me. Had not the same happened to my mother and my
sisters?

I watched him secretly to see if he knew, but I realized he
would know only when the moment had arrived. I could hasten or delay that
moment, but I felt powerless to prevent it.

Once I went with Martha and her father to Notre Dame
Cathedral to hear a mass by Cardinal Beaugrave. Both Martha and I were so
overwhelmed by the beauty of the cathedral and the mass that we burst into
tears. When I accompanied James on his excursions to the city, he would speak
of what our life would be together, once we had our freedom. He would speak
wildly and with arrogance, as if what he dreamed could be had at the wave of a
hand. Perhaps so, but I knew as sure as death that I belonged to Thomas
Jefferson.

I hardly strayed from the mansion on the Champs-Elysees. My
first nine months in Paris had been happy ones, and now I tried to prolong that
happiness, plunging into my studies, grateful and hardly believing my good
fortune, honing the knowledge I had acquired and forgetting the sword that hung
over my head.

Everyone was homesick for Virginia as one gray, damp
Parisian day followed the other in monotonous succession. Even the famous Paris
rats had disappeared, frozen into the sewers under the Seine on which the
nobility and bourgeois skated. There was fire after fire on the outskirts of
the city as entire shanty towns went up in smoke. The men were bored, and an
oppressiveness hung over the days as we roamed the mansion, each in our little
orbit. I remember the silence of those short days when candles burned at noon.

In January, an unheard-of freeze took hold of the city and
confined us to the mansion. We knew that the poor people of Paris had begun to
die of the cold and of starvation.

Haughty French officers came and went; Trumbull sketched
them for his painting of the Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. James became
more and more mysterious, speaking of "freedom" and "revolution"
and "liberty." Each time he would speak in this way, I remained
silent. A sense of fatality took hold of me. I was the center of a drama; yet
no one else seemed to know it. Only the painter Trumbull, with his great black
eyes, seemed to have a sense of what was happening.

"Do you like it?"

"Oh yes, Master. It is very fine."

I had come to serve his tea. He was finishing his study of
my master for his painting of the Declaration of Independence. I gazed at the
portrait. It showed a man of high countenance, young with a long and serious
face, a high brow with soft curling red hair covering it and a wide unsmiling
mouth that made him appear rather stern. It was a good resemblance.

I often sought John Trumbull's company. He was a gentle
man. Sometimes I would be impatiently waved away. When, later, he had finished
his work in Paris and was folding his easel in preparation for his departure, I
felt more alone than ever. I could not confide my fears to James. I thought of
Petit, who liked me, but he was devoted to his master, unlikely to thwart him
in anything he desired. As for the other women in the house, I was afraid of
them and realized they would have no sympathy with a so common and sought-after
situation. Above all, I was separated from Polly and Patsy by their innocence.
I was alone, in a strange world, as I waited for a sign.

Spring came.

The ice on the Seine cracked, and its black water seeped
between the glistening white. The days became longer and the candles went out.
The rats came back and the brilliant stones of Paris shone again in the pale
sunlight, which had timidly reappeared.

I was fifteen years old.

"I'm going away, Sally. To Amsterdam with Mr. Adams
and then to the Rhineland. I'll be gone for six weeks. I want you to study hard
while I'm away."