Sally Heming (24 page)

CHAPTER 18

SUMMER,
1789

The twelfth of July
1789
was a Sunday. There had been riots and food was becoming
more and more scarce. The dismissal of the minister, the defiance of the
National Assembly, the stubbornness of the king, all conveyed a sense of
impending disaster those first weeks of July. Now, the streets were all
plastered with enormous-sized
De Par le Roi
inviting peaceable citizens to remain indoors.

From my window, I could look down the length of the
Champs-Elysees—eight hundred and twenty double steps according to my master—to
the place Louis XV. I could also see, around the bronze statue of Louis XV, the
dragoons and hussars assembling in their red-and-white-and-yellow uniforms. All
sorts of rumors ran rampant, and James went to the Palais Royal every day to
see what he could find out. At twelve, the cannon went off as usual when the
sun passed its meridian, but this day, its low thunder struck gloom and disquiet
in the hearts of almost everyone.

Through my master's telescope I watched in the distance as
a growing crowd, festooned with green cockades, grew and like a flight of
locusts filled the place Louis XV. There were some people armed with axes,
staves, others with picks and pitchforks. I knew James was somewhere in Paris.
Perhaps even in the very mob which was now entering the square. I saw the crowd
being charged upon by the German Hussars; I heard noises of shots, sabers
flashed clearly, and puffs of smoke from muskets rose like tiny clouds over the
heads of the men. Then the crowd exploded along what streets and alleys they
could, and suddenly the square was empty with the soldiers pursuing agitators
and Sunday strollers alike up the avenues. It was a fascinating spectacle and I
sat by the window all day.

When darkness fell, all the roads out of the city,
including our own Champs-Elysees, were blocked by pickets and barriers. There
were stalled carriages and vehicles of all sorts. Traffic, wheel to wheel, immobile
from the tollgate all the way to the place Louis XV.

On Monday, Paris was like a tomb. When James and my master
went out to investigate, they found that no one had reported for work; all had
joined the rebellion. Everything was closed, except for wine and bread shops.
James was sent to prowl the Palais Royal he knew so well and to report back to
the mansion. When he returned late that evening, he told us that the people
were busily sewing cockades to be worn, not the green of d'Artois, but the red and
blue of Paris, on a white background which stood for the constitution. They
called it the
"Tricolore."
Our ministry was ecstatic. The people of Paris had chosen the colors of
the American Revolution.

Outside our house, the streets were deserted and silent.
That evening, by a special new order, every window was lit in every house. I
tried to imagine Paris, a maze of winding narrow streets, deserted, crossed by
the large boulevards also deserted, except for the shadows of the National
Guard patrolling with their torches and flares. All the lights of Paris, no
more than a gathering of fireflies compared to the blazing lights of
Versailles, where the National Assembly sat through the night. We slept little
and by dawn on Tuesday both James and Thomas Jefferson had abandoned the
mansion.

While the Hotel de Langeac was locked and barred, the hot
July sun rose and the National Guard prepared to march on the Hotel des
Invalides. By the end of the day, the Bastille, the fortress dungeon which was
the very symbol of the king's unlimited power, had been stormed and taken.

James was an eyewitness to that event, which had marked the
turning point of the rebellion. Later on, James, like Monsieur de Tude, would
often drink and dine out on the tale of the storming of the Bastille. That
night, in the oval salon of the hotel, servants and masters alike were held in
thrall to the present. Even James's own highly developed imagination could not
embellish the drama of that siege. How much he actually saw and how much he heard
about, I would never know, nor would any of his audience, but as he told his
tale, we fully sensed the extent of the drama. We sat, Martha, Polly, Mr.
Short, Petit, our professors, and all the other servants, spellbound while, in
his strangely accented French, he recounted the Fourteenth of July.

He had slipped out of the mansion in the middle of the
night and joined his comrades at one of the cafes near the Palais Royal. He had
slept on the floor for the rest of the night, rising again at six. Hot rum had
been served. Someone had pinned a tricolor cockade on him; the women had stayed
up all night sewing. He had taken a butcher's knife from the kitchen as his
only arm, and now he joined the milling militia as they surged halfway up the
Champs-Elysees and turned toward the Invalides, where someone had said there
were arms to be had. James, still in the light-yellow livery of the Hotel de
Langeac, unwashed, already lightheaded on the morning's rum like the rest,
became one with the thousands of marching men and women. A strange elation had
stolen over him, he said, his heart had beat in rhythm with that of his
neighbor, as if everyone were one huge crawling animal of which he felt one
particle of skin, one strand of hair.

The mob arrived at the walls of the Invalides, and the
garrison did not fire upon them as the walls were scaled and the gates flung
open. They had rushed in, spreading through all the rooms and passages of the
great building. A roar went up as the place where arms had been was found and
seized. Those nearest snatched, struggled, and clutched at them. There was no
order, no leaders, no officers as James looked around him and saw thousands of
firelocks hoisted onto thousands of shoulders with the cry of "On to the
Bastille!" The dreaded prison-tomb with walls nine feet thick which was
the Bastille had been battered down, the drawbridge lifted and manned with a
cannon since Sunday. Since early morning the cry had been, "On to the
Bastille!" and as the cry went up again the whole suburb of Saint-Antoine
was marching as one man. The people, now armed, turned as a flock of wild
geese, homing toward the eight grim towers that one could see over the rooftops
of Paris from almost every point in the city. The new army arrived at the
drawbridge of the Bastille at one o'clock. By five o'clock, all the soldiers
were covered with blood. The wounded and the dead were being carried into the
houses along the rue de la Cerisaie. For four hours the crowd howled before the
gates.

Cannon and musket shots from the towers hit at random,
crumpling men and women who sank and then were crushed under the weight of
others pressing forward. The crowd increased until it spilled down and over the
quais of the Pont Neuf. Then, without warning, a cry rumbled back like a wave
over the sweating, bleating heads ... the Bastille had surrendered.

The Bastille was taken. The Bastille had fallen.

James threw up his arms. We were all hanging on to his
every word. The forward motion of the mob, like a wave, surged headlong toward
its goal, and had not the National Guard wheeled around and leveled its guns
against its own, the mob would have plunged suicidally by the thousands into
the moat of the prison. The governor of the Bastille tried to kill himself but
was taken prisoner. His captors meant to take him to the Hotel de Ville through
the cursing, clutching crowd; only his bloody scalp, held up in a victorious
hand, arrived. The head, aloft on a pike, was now traveling through the
streets. The rest of him had been torn to pieces.

The evening sun was setting, and James, feverish and
exhausted, battered and dirty, fell quiet as did his awed audience. The word of
the fall of the Bastille had begun to spread over Paris, and, amid gunfire, we
heard the sound of music. The people of Paris were dancing in the streets.

We put James to bed and, despite the bath, the smell of the
gunpowder hovered over him. He sat propped up on his pillows grinning. His eyes
seemed to say this: This slave from Virginia's made history today. This slave
ran with the Revolution! His eyes said to me: I am mine. We are going to take
ourselves to freedom. If God let me do this, then He will leave us take our
freedom without running. Take ourselves, without stealing. We are going to be
free. Everything is changed.

He smiled and I smiled back.

CHAPTER 19

SEPTEMBER
1789

It was amidst
the ceremonies
and processions that followed the fall of the Bastille that I found I was with
child.

"Tu es enceinte,"
said Marie-Louise. She looked at me with kindness and exasperation as I
stared at her in disbelief. She had warned me and now she was afraid all her
concoctions of parsley, rue, and camphor, or any of her other remedies would be
of no avail.

I roamed the streets in a daze, weakened by the cramps in
my stomach and the constant nausea. Te Deums filled Notre Dame every day, and
procession followed procession, with gay young women in white muslin tied with
tricolor sashes moving among the crowds. The processions and the bread lines
grew longer. One day I decided never to return to the mansion.

I took refuge with Madame Dupre on the rue de Seine.

She guessed at once what had happened; she took me in her
arms, and urged me to return to the safety and comfort of the Hotel de Langeac.

"Sooner or later," she said, "you will be
forced to abandon your child. Paris is notorious for that." She paused.
"There are three thousand abandoned children a year in Paris. Surely you
don't want to add to that sad number?"

"But you don't understand," I replied, "this
is not just a bastard child, it is a slave bastard. It will belong to my
master, Monsieur Jefferson."

"But of course it is his!"

"No, Madame, that is not what I mean. I mean it is his
not only by blood but by property. It is his property to do with what he likes,
just as he can do with me what he likes. I am not free, Madame."

There was a long silence as Madame Dupre tried to
assimilate this information.

"You mean you are a slave, like the Africans in
Martinique and Santo Domingo?"

"Not like the Africans. I
am
African. I am black."

At this, Madame Dupre seized me and dragged me into the
light of the window. She looked searchingly at my face and body, at my hands
and nails. At the texture of my hair.

"Then you are a metis?"

"Yes."

"Go back to him. Go back and demand your freedom and
that of his child. Demand it in writing and stay here in Paris. You will find a
protector. I promise you that. On French soil you are free and you shall stay
free. But return to him. Give him the chance to express his instincts as a
father and a lover. You may be surprised. He loves you."

"I don't want to be loved. I want to be free."

"Do you really, my child? You love him as well, and
there is no freedom in that."

She looked at me with her wise, cynical eyes and shook me
gently by the shoulders.

"Rentre a la maison,"
she said to me. "Go home.
Tu veux rentrer,
n'est-ce pas?"

"Oui"
I answered,
"I want to go home."

A week after my departure I returned to the mansion. I had
stolen myself and now I tried to replace the stolen object quietly, as if it
had never been taken from its owner. I entered through the courtyard and
servant quarters in trembling expectation of meeting my brother James, but it
was Petit that I met in the reception hall. He looked at me without surprise,
but with studied annoyance. What havoc I must have wrought in the household to
have put any expression, let alone anger, on those cold features ... as I
searched his face, looking for a clue as to what awaited me, a warm expression
stole over his face.

"Do not be alarmed, but ... he is ill. He has been in grips
of a migraine headache for almost a week with no relief....James has gone again
to fetch Dr. Gem."

I remembered from Monticello the violence of these sudden
headaches that were powerful enough to render my master senseless. I tried to
remember what remedies had been used at Monticello to ease him.

"Petit," I said, forgetting my own predicament,
"it is possible to get camphor and ice and ..."