Sally Heming (20 page)

He straightened a lock of her hair. He was a rational man.
It was unreasonable, he thought, loving for once what he saw and felt without
wanting or trying to give a reason, and not caring much if there was one.
Sometimes her face took him back to his happiest days. His eyes rested again on
the sleeping slave. Her youth, the deepness and serenity of her sleep, stirred
him. To be that young ... Love is never a surprise to the young; but to him! He
almost laughed, then remembered she slept. He shifted position carefully and
drew her closer to him. After Dusseldorf, he had thought of her often with a
growing sense of fatality. Was it not incredible that she was here at all, in
Paris, in his arms? Was it not strange and unaccountable the circumstances of
her arrival here, of her very birth? That fateful Wayles legacy so intertwined
with the past, and now with the future? Future? What possible future except
hate and guilt could they possibly have, he reminded himself.

He closed his eyes and drifted back to the Rhine Valley,
sailing down the wide flat ribbon of it from Cologne to Hanau and Heidelberg.
His return had had a dreamlike and hurried aspect about it after Dusseldorf. By
the middle of April he had been in Strasbourg, where he had recrossed the Rhine
into France. He had hurried then, remembering for the first time the bitter
toil and poverty of the German peasants. Why had he suddenly been so touched by
the women—disheveled, worn beyond their years?

His slave stirred and opened her eyes. The low morning sun
caught their golden color and flecked green and brown into them. His heart
pounded as she reached for him.

His face still held such terror for her. She pulled back
from the lips that had brushed hers and looked into the hooded and melancholy
eyes with their fair brows, and then at the wide mouth with its slightly
upturned corners. Her master's thick, wavy hair fell around his shoulders.
There was a mat of reddish hair on his chest. Sally Hemings' eyes took in the
mysterious stubble of red beard and the fine age-lines around the eyes and the
stern mouth. There were marks of age at his throat, a slight indentation of
flesh, and suddenly she felt a piercing flash of pity for him.

CHAPTER 16

SUMMER,
1788

L
ent was over
and the promenade of the Champs-Elysees bristled with multicolored
flower borders. Tulips and dahlias, lilies of the valley and crocuses, spread
like Oriental carpets escorting the golden carriages and prancing horses of the
Paris gentry come forth to show themselves and salute spring.

From the upper window of the Hotel de Langeac I could see the
place Louis XV at the end of the Champs-Elysees and, beyond the place, the
gardens of the Tuileries filled with tiny moving figures. They reminded me of
butterflies swarming among the stone facades and the flower borders.

The gilt carriages moved down the famous
chestnut-tree-shaded promenade. I trembled at the change in my own small world.
From his daughters' maid I had become the pampered and adored mistress of
Thomas Jefferson. I was one insignificant secret amongst the many buried under
the surface of this spring procession.

It was the summer of my fifteenth year that I saw Marly for
the first time, and like my master who had been transformed by a painting in
Dusseldorf, I was transformed by Marly. I too saw what I wanted to see. Nothing
would ever be the same for me again. Marly had been the favorite palace of the
Sun King, Louis XIV, his retreat and hermitage from the glories of Versailles.
It seemed to float above the earth, in its own nature, its own sky, its own
water, its own sun. More than any of the other palaces of the kings of France,
this was the most magical one.

Imagine a young woman come with her love to Marly, standing
beside him, and looking at all this beauty for the first time.

Marly stood planted in the wild blue forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
The gardens, canals, terraces, and labyrinths stretched for miles. On each side
of the magnificent palace were six summer pavilions connected by walkways
embowered with jasmine and honeysuckle. Water fell in cascades from the top of
a hill behind the castle, forming a reservoir where swans floated. One fountain
sprouted so high, the spray was lost from sight. In the main canal, glistening
marble horses mounted by bronze men cavorted; and here and there one could see
tiny gems which were ladies moving along the paths and gardens.

The only sound was wind and water; all human sound had been
reduced by the vast scale to silence or whispered murmurings. From the top of
the hill where the reservoir of Marly's waterworks stood, the day had furnished
a rainbow. As the great mechanical wheels raised the water of the river, a pale
arc of color hung above it and faded into the colors surrounding us—the silver
white of the fountains, the multicolored flowerbeds, the cream-and-blue shadow
of the stone facades, the pearl-gray of the gravel underfoot—pastel colors;
pink and lemon, delicate greens and blues, so unlike the harsh, hard colors of
Virginia.

That day convinced me that there was no Virginia. No
slavehood. There was no destiny, it seemed, that did not include this place,
this hour, this Marly.

I looked at the tall figure standing beside me. No. Not
tall. Immense. Like some glorious eagle overlooking Marly. I studied the
familiar profile. My fifteen-year-old heart burst with pride. I could pale that
face with longing. I could part that beautiful mouth with desire. I could fill
those eyes with agony or joy.

I thought of Martha and her peers tittering and giggling in
their fine watered silks and gauzes, the greedy restlessness and ignorance of
them! Prancing by in their convent red; gossiping, silly girls who knew nothing
of men. Their feverish fantasies and sickening pride revolted me. I neither
despised them nor was jealous of them. I merely pitied them. What did they know
about being a woman?

I remembered a scene I had witnessed with Martha at the
abbey less than a year before, the mysterious and strangely seductive ceremony
of ordination for novices. I watched those girls, most of them my age, their
faces and bodies pressed into the cold, humid, unyielding stone: their wedding
day, the soft fine wool of their habits spread around them like spilled milk.
They married God as one married a man. And if one loved a man as one loved God,
was it so different? Did it really matter if it was God or man, as long as it
was not both?

I put my hands on my face and pressed my eyes red-gold, as
if the image blinded me. I opened them again. Marly was still there. And so was
he. Smiling down at me from the vast distance between us.

On the thirteenth of July,
1788,
there fell, on the very edge of harvest, the most frightful
and abnormal hailstorm ever remembered, completely destroying the crops of the
year which had already been much damaged by a long drought. For sixty leagues
around Paris, it was said, the ruin was total. The legendary Estates General,
that had not met in one hundred and sixty years, would meet again the following
May. The king had surrendered. Paris was exultant. Martha and Polly came home
from the convent, and an ominous calm fell over the city.

I had had no female companion at the Hotel de Langeac. And
so, although I did not feel that I could confide in her, Martha, when she came
home from her convent, became for me a refuge from the masculine world of the
ministry, and from my powerful lover. His impulsiveness, his vagueness,
interspersed with melancholy silences, his inexplicable bursts of passion
overwhelmed and often confused me. Later, I would conquer his moods; but at
that time I turned to Martha. She was my link with home, with my mother,
perhaps with other women. She returned my affection that summer with a warmth
we were never to recapture again. I would accompany Martha on her calls to her
school friends before they left for their summer estates. We would stroll along
the busy and crowded rue Saint-Honore, dodging the hackney coaches, or along
the chestnut-shaded cobblestones of the quai Pont Neuf, looking. We would walk
side by side, arm in arm. A lady and her maid, a slave and her mistress, an
aunt and her niece, the virgin and the concubine.

Then, one day, the first shadow of what was to pass fell
between us. As in all aristocratic households of the day, hair was dressed
daily by professional hairdressers who came to the house. There were more than
three thousand of them in Paris alone. The one appointed to the Hotel de
Langeac, after dressing my master's hair, would go to the convent to do Polly
and Martha's coiffure. There was a second hairdresser whose duty it was to
dress the hair of the servants. There was not a fine household in Paris that did
not avail itself of the services of two or three hairdressers every day.

As if in silent recognition, my master's hairdresser began
to dress my hair. Martha had no knowledge of this until one day it was
whispered to her by a friend that her hairdresser was also her maid's
hairdresser, an unheard of breach of etiquette.

"Is it true that Antoine does your hair?" We were
out walking. Her clear eyes were puzzled, not angry. I returned her gaze. It
was one of the last times we looked into each other's eyes.

"Pierre complained that he had too many heads to do
with the increase in staff, and Antoine said he didn't mind doing my hair,
since he could not come directly to you anyway." If Martha had thought
about it, this would be unthinkable. Hairdressers placed more importance on
rank and etiquette than the queen herself.

"I don't think it's fitting," Martha answered.

"Well, it's convenient, Mistress."

"I shall ask Father about it."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you, Mistress. He is so
annoyed at Antoine anyway that he will surely fire him, and where to get
another as good?"

"I won't do anything if Antoine stops doing your hair."

"What harm is there, Mistress? Besides, he does
James's too," I lied. I wanted to keep my hairdresser. "He does?"

"Yes."

"Oh ... In that case... I guess it's all right. I'm
surprised Antoine would ... If Father says so..."

"Master says so," I continued to lie.

It was the first of many lies I would tell to the white
women in my life. From that day on, I would lie to her and to others. Poor Antoine
became a milestone between me and Martha.

"My dear ... you mustn't worry if I seem ... strange
sometimes." Thomas Jefferson's voice had the familiar hesitancy of his
public speaking. "This is so unexpected and for me, so unbidden. And you
are... so young and yet so sure.... You seem as old as Eve to me, my wise
one."

It was part game and part true, he thought. There really
didn't seem to be any differences in their ages. Sometimes he wondered who was
the child. He felt so young. His naked back was to the silken draperies of his
rooms on the street side of the apartments. His huge body was framed in the
rectangles of barred, balconied windows.

He reached and cupped the head of his mistress in his giant
hands and stared across at her, pressing her tiny skull between them. Her
smallness always stirred him. He gave a short harsh laugh.

"I don't know what to do with you!"

"Don't do anything, Master," she replied,
"and it will be done."

"Thy will?"

"Thine."

Thomas Jefferson fondled the delicate skin at the back of
his slave's neck under the coiled hair. She was indeed his creature. Both in
body and in spirit. He had formed and shaped her himself, this wild flower,
into something that bordered on the aristocratic—or at least the unique, an
exotic hybrid of exquisite beauty and fascination. Her training and tutoring
was beginning to show, her musical education as well. Her voice was low, true,
with a lilting sweetness that was unforgettable. Her appreciation of beautiful
things gratified him. She had even begun to speak her native tongue
differently, and her French was perfect. He possessed something he had created
from beginning to end, without interference or objections or corrections. In a
way, he had birthed her. As much as he had his daughter. He had created her in
his own image of womanly perfection, this speck of dust, this handful of clay
from Monticello.

"I love you," he said.

"I have always loved you," said his mistress, but
he was no longer listening. He had already gone from her, not physically but
mentally, as he often did.

Sally Hemings watched secretly the proud, haughty face in a
hundred moods for a trace of herself, yet never once had the face she knew as
hers—this passionate, hungry, wounded face that had just been so close—ever
betrayed him in public. That other face, the public one, was the face of her
enemy, her master. But one she owned....