Sally Heming (3 page)

"You must know them by sight. Pretty much everybody in
town knows who they are. They work around the university."

"It's been a long time since I've been home. You see,
I just arrived from the North not too long ago. I don't know much of what has
been going on for the past four or five years ... but now I'm staying to help
my family."

"Oh, you a lawyer? You look like one."

"Not exactly yet, but shortly. I intend to finish my
studies this year at the university. I've already spent four years studying up
at Harvard."

"Many of those brick buildings—and the carpentry and
windows and metal work—they were done by my brothers, Robert Hemings and John
Hemings, for Master Jefferson when he started to build his school. Now Madison
and Eston do a lot of repairing and additions, since they are the most familiar
with the original work. You see..."

Her voice floated like silk scarves, sweeping and billowing
the simple everyday language into a honeyed intimacy. He wondered whether she
was, by nature, a talkative woman. Certainly many of his visits to the isolated
farmhouses in Albemarle County had ended in long bouts of conversations with
lonely farm women. Yes, he sensed a loneliness, a sadness here. Charmed,
Langdon kept her talking, adding little bits of gossip he had picked up in
town, explaining himself and his family to her (something he had done so often
at Harvard it was by now second nature). He realized she knew a great deal
about what went on in Tidewater. He had always remarked that the Negroes had a
wonderful art of communicating among themselves. Information and gossip would
run several hundred miles in a week; but where had she learned the art of conversation
that would do justice to a lady in these backwoods?

They spoke late into the afternoon, the fair, blue-eyed
youth and his mysterious hostess. He, with his feet planted solidly on the
floor, hunched forward in his seat, elbows on knees, his large hands folded
loosely in front of him. She, also leaning away from her chair, swayed slightly
with the conversation, or suddenly propelled herself backward as her girlish
laughter responded to some amusing tidbit of gossip. She knew everything and
everybody, despite the fact she hadn't been near the town in years.

The lovely face glowed with the pleasure of unaccustomed
male company. The pretty hands gesticulated, folded and unfolded, or moved to
fondle a large oval locket that hung on a velvet ribbon around her neck—her
only adornment except for the ruby earrings—but obviously a valuable and
beautifully executed jewel.

Surely I'll have leave to come again after such a long
conversation, thought Langdon. He tried to find more anecdotes and gossip to
please her. Never in all his drawing-room experiences had he striven so hard to
entertain a woman. When she laughed he was hopelessly flattered. Would her sons
appear? Langdon wondered. He wanted to see what they looked like. Madison and
Eston Hemings. Their names brought the reality of the outside world back to
him. The pails of water stood like sentinels on each side of the door,
unattended.

Piedmont, like the rest of Virginia, was caught up in the
political and racial torment of the times, Nathan mused. Already, the distant
thunder of the coming conflict could be heard if one cared to listen. Virginia
had tightened its slave laws the past years, measures which invariably affected
the freedmen as well. The large cities in the South, including Charlottesville
and Richmond, were armed camps. There was the scent of violence in the air, and
families were already divided on the slave issue. Tensions were high, and
repressions against the black population had increased tenfold. It had been
deemed a crime since
181
4
to teach a slave to read. There were curfews as well as passports and
grade-shotted cannon for those who didn't respect it. There were kidnappings
and lynchings, and daily public whippings for even accidental infractions.

In this year alone more than seventeen resolutions
concerning slavery had been introduced and debated in the House of Burgesses.
The spread of slavery was fiercely fought state by state, territory by
territory. A sinister stillness had taken hold of the soft, low-lying
countryside from Williamsburg to Richmond. Wrapped in an unnatural suffocating
calm, the elements seemed to be waiting for some sign.

Langdon finally gave up waiting for Eston and Madison. As
the shadows lengthened, Sally Hemings gracefully brought the conversation to an
end, and, before he knew it, he was out of the cabin and on his way down the
footpath toward his buckboard and thirsty mules.

The census taker had spent all afternoon in her cabin. How
strange, she thought, he had spoken to her as if she had been a white woman.
She watched him disappear and reappear among her apple trees as he made his way
toward his buggy carrying the two pails of water. She saw the tall figure
emerge at the bend beyond the orchard, approach his mule team, and water them.
Then he set down the pails and got into his buggy. She expected him to drive
away, but he sat there for a long while. She watched him as the sun got lower
in the sky and the silence broke with the beginnings of night sounds. Still he
did not move. Maybe he's waiting for the boys. Maybe he has questions to ask
Eston as the head of the family. But what could they be? Nobody was interested
in their lives. A few dates in a Farm Book, a price in an account book, a bill
of sale, a number in the ledgers of a census taker. No more. At least no more
than she was telling.

Her silence was what had kept her alive and sane in this
world where everything had been taken from her except these last two sons. And
even they knew little about her life. Slaves revealed as little as possible
about their origin and background to their children. It was an old trick. Not
to speak was not to put into words the hopelessness of having no future and no
past. But now, her sons had that future. It was only she who had none. And the
past... what did she really feel about the past?

Sally Hemings continued to watch the census taker as he sat
motionless in his wagon. Why could he not bring himself to drive away?

Nathan Langdon had descended the steep footpath leading
away from the Hemings' cabin. He had felt the woman's eyes on him, felt the
backward pull of her silence and her peculiar sadness. He could not rid himself
of the feeling that once, before today, somewhere, he had seen her. He
acknowledged an eerie recognition in their meeting. He smiled. Fate? Reincarnation?
How many nights at Harvard had he spent discussing just such nonsense. He was
an atheist, like Jefferson. No God could have a hand in anyone's affairs on
this earth, for if He did, how could He make such a mess of things?

Monticello, he thought. It had to be Monticello. He had
been in the mansion only once in his life, as a student when Jefferson was
already a very old man. It must have been in
'25,
before he had left for Boston. A cousin of his had invited
him to sit in the presence of the great man at dinner.

The memory was still vivid. The straight, thin, enormously
tall man with the burning eyes and thick white hair, was pale and still
freckled, though age had given his face a delicate transparency, and the famous
voice had turned edgy and slightly petulant. Thomas Jefferson had dominated the
dinner and the company of younger men with vast and brilliant monologues,
virtuoso pieces almost like music, which were occasionally interrupted by
sullen and inexplicable silences when his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. But
his rejoinders were always precise and to the point. He dearly loved a
metaphor, an elegantly turned phrase, and had a genius for storytelling. People
around the table spoke a little louder than normal, as is often the case with
old people, but, so far as he knew, there had been nothing wrong with
Jefferson's hearing or any of his faculties. Even then, at eighty, Thomas
Jefferson was known to ride twenty or thirty miles a day. He, Langdon, had sat
awed and silent while the conversation had ranged from the tobacco crop to
Italian and French wines; the annexation of Cuba; the Monroe Doctrine; the
Second Missouri Compromise; and the raging political struggle over the
extension of slavery in Illinois.

At the end of the meal, over which his daughter Martha
Randolph had presided, Jefferson had been taken with malaise, Langdon
remembered. He had floundered in midsentence, gagged, and turned pale, then
abruptly pushed back his chair, almost tipping it over. His daughter had
quickly taken charge, and, with the help of one of the guests had led the old
man from the table. As the company milled around the dining room, Langdon had
glimpsed Jefferson being handed over to another woman, who had led him away.
Sally Hemings? The small figure had been dwarfed by him; the small sleek head
had not reached the stooped shoulders of the fainting man. He remembered, too,
a fleeting glimpse of a coiled braid.

The picture was so sharp; it startled Langdon out of his
reverie. He leaned down and absently stroked the warm living flesh of his
mules, as if to bring himself back to the present. Then he got out his ledgers.
He "knew" everyone in Albemarle County—by sex, age, religion, and
occupation; by property, political party, race, and condition of servitude. But
the two people he thought about at the moment didn't figure on his list.

One had been rich, famous, powerful, covered with honors,
and years in the greatest office of the land, respected and loved. He was dead
and buried. A permanent fixture in American history. The other had been a
slave. A woman despised for her color and her caste; and yet still alive, and
so had to be counted.

He opened to a new page in his ledger. If Sally Hemings was
who and what people said she was, then Thomas Jefferson had broken the law of Virginia.
A law punishable by fine and imprisonment. And he, Langdon, was an official of
the United States government and a Virginian. He hesitated for a moment and
then wrote:

Eston Hemings, Male,
22.
Head of Family. Occupation: Musician. Race: White

Madison Hemings, Male
25.
Occupation: Carpenter. Race: White.

Sally Hemings, Female, between
50
and
60.
Without occupation. Race: White.

Whatever he thought of Thomas Jefferson, author of the
Declaration of Independence, third president of the United States, there was
one thing he, Nathan Langdon, was determined that Thomas Jefferson would not be
guilty of: the crime of miscegenation.

CHAPTER 2

MONTICELLO,
1815

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual
exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the
one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and
learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ
of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what
he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy
or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his
slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present.

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

Mr. Francis C. Gray

March
4,1815
Monticello

Sir,

You asked me in conversation, what constituted a mulatto by
our law. And I believe I told you four crossings with the whites. I looked
afterwards into our law, and found it to be in these words: "Every person,
other than a Negro of whose grandfathers or grandmothers anyone shall have been
a Negro, shall be deemed a mulatto, and so every such person who shall have
one-fourth part or more of Negro blood, shall like manner be deemed a
mulatto"; L. Virga
1
792,
December
17:
the case put in the first member of this paragraph of the
law is
exempli gratia.
The latter
contains the true canon, which is that one-fourth of Negro blood, mixed with
any portion of white, constitutes the mulatto. As the issue has one-half of the
blood of each parent, and the blood of each of these may be made up of a
variety of fractional mixtures, the estimate of their compound in some cases
may be intricate, it becomes a mathematical problem of the same class with
those of the mixtures of different liquors or different metals; as in these,
therefore, the algebraical notation is the most convenient and intelligible.
Let us express the pure blood of the white in capital letters of the printed alphabet,
the pure blood of the negro in the small letters of the printed alphabet, and
any given mixture of either, by way of abridgment in
MS.
letters.