Sally Heming (34 page)

As she hurried along the passage and came into the dining
room of the mansion, the sounds of hammering and sawing assaulted her. After
everything he had promised, Thomas Jefferson was tearing up the house again,
one day before Christmas! And Sally Hemings was no help at all, egging him on
in all those ideas.

Elizabeth Hemings' face softened at the thought of the new
baby; a girl child, Harriet, more beautiful than Sally, more beautiful than
anything she could have imagined.... There was another new baby over at
Edgehill, too. Martha Jefferson Randolph had delivered promptly every year
since she had fled Monticello into the arms of her cousin Thomas Mann.

She liked Martha and wished her well, but her departure
from Monticello had been a great relief. It left Sally Hemings mistress and,
through her, she, Elizabeth Hemings, continued to rule. Elizabeth Hemings
bumped into Big George.

"How's ol' Jimmy holdin' up?" He smiled at her.
"You'd think this here's a daughter's weddin' the way Masta Jefferson a
carryin' on."

"It ain't every day that the masta goes around freeing
people, Big George. He ain't been none too generous with this here freedom you
might say." Elizabeth Hemings smiled wickedly. Her son Robert was the only
other slave she knew of that Thomas Jefferson had ever freed, and he had bought
his freedom with borrowed money.

"Bett and Queenie out there, Big George," she
called after him. "You get them to help you get out all that heavy silver,
you hear? Get it all out. Sally tends to dress a table tonight you ain't never
seen the likes of!"

When Elizabeth Hemings entered the hall of the west
portico, she found her daughter on her hands and knees, arranging the velvet
drapery and the presents at the foot of the Christmas tree. With characteristic
quickness of movement, Sally Hemings spun on her heels and was on her feet by
the time her mother reached her side. She was now twenty-two years old, and
twice a mother.

"Everything is ready for tomorrow, Maman."

Elizabeth Hemings nodded at her beautiful daughter and
winced at her "Maman." She had affected it ever since her return from
France, and Elizabeth Hemings didn't like it. She had never dared tell her
daughter this, however, so she continued to sprinkle her conversation with
French expressions. Elizabeth looked up at the immense tree.

It was the tallest Virginia pine they could find on the
slopes of Monticello, and it almost toppled over with the weight of the decorations,
many of which her master had brought back from France. The French had taken up
the Anglo-Saxon habit of decorating Christmas trees with a fervor and
imagination that had outshone the often modest homemade decorations that were
traditional in the United States. The French decorations gleamed like jewels
and were the special joy of her daughter, who had taken it upon herself every
year to trim the tree. The delicate silk balls with their silver pom-poms, the
crystal snowdrops and lace snowflakes and the spun sugar James had spent a
whole day creating, mingled with the cloved oranges and the pine cones. The top
of the tree touched the ceiling of the entrance hall where tomorrow the white
family and all the house servants would gather around after dinner for the distribution
of presents.

"Tomorrow is going to be one happy day,
daughter."

"Oh, Maman, James will be free at last! If it hadn't
been for me, he would have been free years ago. I... I was so sure that things
were going to turn out differently."

And what about you? Elizabeth Hemings wanted to say, but
she held her tongue.

"How's little Harriet?"

"She's fine, Maman. I just left Suzy's cabin. She had
finished nursing." Her daughter's dimples flashed in a quick smile of
excuse. Elizabeth Hemings was silent. She loathed the fact that her daughter
would not nurse Harriet. Her daughter knew this. She had given her to a newly
delivered young slave who worked in the cotton mill to wet-nurse while she
bound up her breasts in the French fashion to get rid of the milk.

"Bring her into the house, daughter. She can sleep
with me. I'll get John to bring in her cradle. Suzy can come in to nurse hers
and yours together."

"But I enjoy ..." Sally Hemings began.

"Now, daughter, it's decided." Elizabeth Hemings
had spoken.

Sally Hemings dropped to her knees to straighten a fold of
velvet drapery at the foot of the tree. She had no intentions of giving up
Suzy's nursing.

"Let Big George do that, Sally," Thomas
Jefferson's musical voice rang out behind them as he strode into the hall from
his study.

"I much prefer to do it myself, Master. The crystal
snowflakes from Paris are so delicate, and we can't get any more. I found some
we didn't use last year. Martha will be so surprised...."

"And how is Harriet?"

"Harriet is fine, Master. I've just come from
her."

Elizabeth Hemings turned away. The look she caught between
the two people embarrassed her. She didn't understand it. She never would.

Christmas Day that year of
1795
was warm and sunny. It was almost four o'clock when Big
George and Martin slipped away from the dining room, where the white people
were lingering over the last meal James would cook at Monticello. He had helped
me light the hundred Christmas tree candles. James, Ursula, Peter, and my
mother were in the kitchens laboring over and admiring this last triumph of
James: the rich turtle soup. James had made one of his specialties: a roast
pork, fragrant with fresh herbs, garnished with its own deep-fried
chitterlings, walnuts, and mushrooms. The meal continued with pigeons and pheasant
baked in a pastry. An endless succession of vegetable platters followed. James
had outdone himself. All kinds of pies ended the feast, along with profiteroles
and the fashionable new French dessert: ice cream. Toasts of fine Burgundy and
clarets, more groans, cries for the "Chef," and the meal ended.

There had been eighteen white people at the table with as
many servants, one behind each chair for this special dinner. When the banquet
was over, the company filed in from the dining room, flushed and happy. Big
George gathered all the servants and the increasingly homesick Petit for the
celebrations that were to follow. The children of the house, both black and
white, were holding on to their mothers or their nurses. Although part of the
house was already being torn down, the central hallway was still intact; its
pale-blue damask gleamed in the reflected candles we had just finished
lighting. The late-afternoon sun and the glow of the Christmas-tree candles
imparted a golden haze to the entire company. The sculptured busts of Voltaire,
Lafayette, and Washington seemed to be staring down from their pedestals.

I stood to the left of the master, with the other slaves in
a semicircle. Martha stood to the right of her father, the white people curving
in an arc to her right completing the circle.

Outside the sun was setting. The plantation slaves were
gathering two hundred strong. Their good-natured conversations wafted through
the glass doors of the vestibule toward the circle around the pile of packages.
The black half of the circle faced the other half, the white half that was in
turn closed by Martin and the ten-year-old Michael Brown, son of George Wythe
and his freed mulatto mistress, Lydia Broadnax. His father had acknowledged him
publicly as his freed slave, son of his housekeeper. All of Albemarle County,
however, knew the truth, for he did nothing to hide either his pride or his
love for his only son. Michael had been brought so that he could enjoy the
celebrations and stuff himself with Christmas dinner with the other slave
children in the kitchens.

As I stood, the two-month-old Harriet in my arms, the
five-year-old Thomas Hemings clutching my skirts, I became only one in the web
of blood ties that weaved itself in and across and around the two parts of the
circle, binding one half to the other in arabesques as twisted and complicated
as the hanging strands of silver cord on the tree above us. My mother had
gathered nine of her fourteen children; facing her were two of Master Wayles's
daughters. Elizabeth Hemings was either mother, stepmother, grandmother, aunt,
or great-aunt to practically everyone present. To those she was not actually
related to by blood, she was related to by bonds of property. This kingdom was
hers, and she ruled as queen mother, a force of life to be revered and reckoned
with by both black and white. She had loved, reared, nursed, birthed, served
each person in this room.

There were no secrets for her here, neither heart nor body
that she did not hold the key to—just as her iron ring held the key to every
room and closet in Monticello. In her arms was one of Martha Jefferson's
children.

My eyes went now to the white side of the circle and my two
half sisters, Tabitha Wayles Skipwell and Elizabeth Wayles Eppes. It was
Elizabeth who had sent me to Paris with Polly Jefferson so long ago. I caught
the eye of Martha, standing next to her husband, Thomas Mann, whom she had
loved for such a short time and who was now sinking into the melancholy which
would lead him to insanity. Had she rushed into marriage, two months after we
arrived from Paris, in order to escape me and her father's connection with me?
I wondered. If so, she had been mistaken in her father's hold upon her, for
though she lived at Edgehill, forty miles away, she clung to Monticello. Pity
rose in me as I surveyed Thomas Mann Randolph. His bulk was growing with each
year, along with his violent temper that had become legend in Virginia. His
drinking sometimes sent his desperate wife and children scurrying to safety at
Monticello. He was now looking at his wife with that same baffled, expectant
expression with which my brother had sometimes looked at me. They both knew no
other man would ever supplant Thomas Jefferson in either her heart or mine. And
it was driving Martha's husband crazy.

Next to Thomas Mann stood James Madison, small, round,
birdlike, timid, and insignificant—a schoolteacher dressed for a funeral,
Elizabeth Hemings once said. He gazed in silent adoration at his unexpected
prize, his bride the widow Dolley Todd. It was said that Madison—to his great
surprise—had captured his new bride from the attentions of Aaron Burr. She
stood beside him, resplendent in rose satin trimmed in silver, a gray chiffon
scarf was tucked into the low-cut bodice that revealed a splendid bosom, and
her eyes roamed restlessly over the assembly, not liking very much what she
saw.

James Madison, I thought, was a real politician. He would
succeed where my master—fastidious, uncompromising, stubborn, proud— never
would. Politicians, I had long decided, should not be very bright, or at least
should not think very much. And, I thought, if I were free ... I gazed at the
glorious Dolley Madison. She reminded me of certain French ladies I had
observed. There was the same cynicism hidden under the soft feminine manner,
the same ability to manipulate, even this rustic company, to shine, and put
herself in the best light. There was a sharp mind behind her pretty appearance.
She had, I sensed, the ambition to succeed. Dolley Madison would succeed
because she had no competition. And envy, mingled with the constant ache of my
own deprivation, invaded me.

My dress. It was four years old, the last of the dresses
from Madame Dupre. I gazed at the emeralds glistening in the earlobes of James
Madison's wife and at the matching bracelet on her plump arm. A wife, I
thought. A real wife. Recognition. Nothing delineated me from the other
servants except my position of honor next to the master, the tiny ruby earrings
fastened in my ears, and the heavy silver locket around my neck. I lifted my
chin.

George Wythe looked proudly at his mulatto son, who had the
same round face, the same soft intelligent eyes as his father. Michael Brown
was splendidly dressed, in the Quaker fashion, his shorts in buff with white
stockings. His long brown uncut curls reached his shoulders and hung loose,
giving him an angelic, princely look. My mother adored him and envied his
education. He excelled in Latin and Greek, mathematics and astronomy taught him
by George Wythe, who was determined to prove him brilliant not only beyond his
color and station but beyond his age as well, and there was the wanness of
overwork about his face.

Next to Master Wythe stood Polly, and next to her our
cousin Jack Eppes. From the frightened child I had escorted to Paris and the
uncertain adolescent that had returned with me, Maria had become the serious
and remote beauty who stood timidly beside the man she deeply loved, and had
been afraid to tell her father she wished to marry.

All last year, after her return from Philadelphia, I had
nursed her through illness after illness. She had inherited the health of her
mother, and her delicacy. Her mother had loved and accepted my mother and her
children as part of her inheritance. For Maria, too, the Hemingses had always
been a part of her life, and she had long ago acknowledged that still another
Hemings, the one she loved best, held a permanent place in the affections of
her father.