Sally Heming (43 page)

"Nothing, Mama. Even this summer, when we were all
ignorant of the danger, there were hints in the newspapers, but it is this one,
Callender's story, that has caused all the furor."

There had been others, more serious because they had been
closer to home, I thought. Callender was a foreigner, a Northerner, an enemy.
These other men were friends and neighbors. The editor of the
Frederick-Town Herald,
for example, had
been seen in Charlottesville, by Burwell and Davey Bowles, asking questions of
servants and neighbors and townspeople and of the small outlying farmers who
got their wood from Monticello. All those who had known my master from birth
knew who I was. They knew who my mother was. There was one calumnious article
after another, the most recent from the
Virginia Gazette,
whose article had asked the same questions and got the same
answers.
"Why have you not married some worthy of your own
complexion?"
one had written in an editorial.

My eyes filled with tears. I heard my master's voice:
"Tell me who die... who marry, who hang themselves because they cannot
marry...."

I stared at the white back of one of the draped pale damask
armchairs from the hotel in Paris, and fondled the richly carved wood.

"I believe he will never say anything to anyone about
me."

"Daughter, you don't understand white men. They loves
you. Sometimes all they lives. But when you go up against they real life, they
white life, white friends, white children, white power, you got to lose. You
got to be cut down. You got to be put away. Thomas Jefferson's real mistress is
his politics. It was that way with Martha and it's that way with you. Nothing
will stand in the way of that. No woman will ever keep him from that. Even a
white wife would not have been as bad as this.... He will send you away. He has
got to do it. His white folks will destroy him if he don't. At least he has got
to say what is true is not true...."

"He will not lie, and he cannot avow, so there is
nothing left except silence," I said.

"Silence," Elizabeth Hemings spat out into the
white room, "or sale."

For one moment my heart seemed to stop as she uttered the
dreaded words. Sale! Had I lived too long in Monticello, hidden, petted,
spoiled, and loved? Had I forgotten it was love that ceded, and not the white
world? Then I said:

"He will not sell me, Mama. And he will not abandon me
or send me or the children away. Not for me, not for his daughters, not for his
friends, not for his enemies, not even for the presidency."

"And why, pray, daughter?"

"Because he cannot live without me."

It was true. I had made it so. This had been what I had
wanted. There was no triumph, no smugness, no pride; there was not even joy in
my voice. Only the reality of how it was between us.

"He cannot live without me." The words fell like
pebbles in the room. They seemed to take a long time to reach my mother, as if
they had been thrown down a deep well. But the words struck the sides of my
being like flint against flint, and, like flint, struck fire in me. We had won.

"I'll have the keys to the mansion now, Mama."

After a moment, my mother unfastened the great iron ring
with its score of keys. The dull glint of forged iron struck the light. Their
metallic music was the only sound in the room except for the tick of the clock.
I knew she would never understand. Why now? Why at a time when we had been
betrayed by servants and neighbors, why, when everything was lost, when I
should be fleeing for my life and those of my children, when I should be
paralyzed with fear, why had I decided to stand, when I had never stood before?
She would never understand. Yet I knew I was right. This was the line. This was
the battle. This was the test that Thomas Jefferson would have to pass. If he
passed this trial, it meant victory for us. A feeling almost of elation filled
me. We had the power of love on our side. We were stronger and better than the
monstrous iniquity we had sprung from. I held out my hands. My mother placed
the mass of iron into them. I took the keys and weighed them, and then, without
a word, attached them to the black ribbon at the waist of my black-and-white
calico dress. The keys hung low and nestled into the folds of my skirt.
Elizabeth Hemings recognized the orderly transition of power just as my master
did; that day, Monticello had passed from one ruler to the next. Her reign was
over.

"We wait, Mama," I said a moment later, "in
silence. We wait and we let them rant and rave. But, if they really want to
hear about Southern gentlemen and Negro mistresses, we have some stories to
tell, no, Mama? We can start with John Marshall, the chief justice of the
United States. Virginians talk in their sleep, you once said, Mama. And who
hears them? Their servants."

Elizabeth Hemings looked at me with dawning respect. I
hadn't spent three years in France for nothing.

"Now you know why Martha and Maria have left for
Washington, when they have always refused until now," I said.

"To dampen the scandal by their presence."

"Yes. And to keep Dolley Madison from the head of the
presidential table."

"I never could figure why they both left."

"Now you can. And now, I want the word spread among
the slave population. My name is never again to be mentioned. Nor those of my
children. To anyone black or white. I do not exist anymore, nor do my children.
My name on our people's lips is forbidden. Forbidden! Spread it among our
people, black and white, on pain of being fired or sold. And tell Jim I want to
see him." I dismissed my mother.

It was only when Fanny and Edy returned from Washington
that I learned the amplitude and the viciousness of the campaign which had
raged about us. It was from Fanny that I heard the part of a poem by the famous
Irish poet Thomas Moore that referred to me, and that was making the rounds of
the kitchens and salons in Washington and Virginia, in New York and Baltimore,
in Boston and Philadelphia.

Fanny, who could write, had copied it out on the back of a
sheet of butcher's paper in her large childish scrawl:

The patriot, fresh from Freedom's council come,

Now pleased retires to lash his slaves at home;

Or woo, perhaps some black Aspasia's charms,

And dream of freedom in his bondsmaid's arms.

I stared at the large printed letters. Freedom. What had I
won? I had bound him to me as surely as I was bound to him. Nothing could
change that. Not poems or ballads, not slander or insults, not the crudeness of
mankind. My tears fell on the oiled paper and rolled off, making no mark, just
as I made no mark on the surface of the world; except for these lewd cries of
indignation, crude obscene scrawls, smirking winks of slander and perfidy.

Fanny's excited voice dented my thoughts.

"You is the most famous black lady in the whole United
States! I tells you, you is famous! I saw a letter about you in a Philadelphia
newspaper, but it was too long and hard for me to copy it. And in
Washington—you is the talk of the town! But we servants don't say nothing about
what we knows, or don't know. And poor Masta Jefferson—as if every Virginia
gentleman that holds the title ain't messed with a black mistress. Why they
family gives them one at sixteen or seventeen. How can they expect that they
don't cherish them later? I do declare, white people are one strange breed of
humanity. They do everything they want and then cry distress when they
do
gets around to people who don't do it, because they ain't
got it to
do
it with! I do
declare, I'm glad I got me a black husband. A good black man. And don't have to
be sniffing after no white masta who is hell on earth!"

My mother looked at the bisquit-colored Fanny.

"Yo Mammy," she muttered.

"Yourn," replied Fanny, evenly, without blinking.

She was a match for my mother, and she knew it. Not only
did she have the estimable advantage of being cook at the president's house,
she could read and write as well. Fanny held Elizabeth Hemings' eye, but,
before the onslaught came, I stepped between them.

"Enough, Fanny," I said. "I know you and
Davey so tried Master Jefferson's patience with your squabbling that he sent
for Mister Bacon to sell you both in Alexandria." I looked at her. "I
trust you begged your way back into his good graces, since you are standing
here and not on an auction block."

"I hear it's mostly died down," Fanny said
contritely. "I expect it's finished, Sally. But Lord knows, it sure made a
stir! You can't imagine.... Them white folks is outraged."

"Then let it be finished. Lord God. 'Cause we is sick
of it at Monticello," Elizabeth Hemings said as she took Fanny by the
shoulders, and with a slight push, propelled her toward the door of her
kitchens.

He still would sell a slave in pique or to assure his
domestic tranquillity. He was still white. He was still the master. And he was
not the same in his white world. My master amongst white Americans was not the
man I knew. I wished he would come home. I wished he would come home where he
was safe and loved. People, I thought wearily, like horses, tire; and the uses
of silence born and bred into every slave, would serve me well.

CHAPTER 33

MARCH
1803

Love is, in a great degree, an arbitrary passion, and will
reign, like some other stalking mischiefs, by its own authority, without
designing to reason.

mary wollstonecraft,
Vindication of
the Rights of Women,
1794

Duty's a slave that keeps the keys, But love, the Master
goes in and out Of his goodly chambers with a song and shout Just as he
please—just as he please.

dinah maria mulock craik
(date unknown)

It was March
before Thomas
Jefferson arrived again on his mountain. His slave family rushed to greet him.
Thomas, Beverly, and Harriet. He seemed to hesitate in greeting them, then he
saw her. She approached timidly.

"Thomas," she said softly.

"Thine own," he replied, adding his harsh short
laugh.

"Thomas. Thomas. We ... you cannot. The risk ..."
But the risk has already been taken. And pride had sealed it. They had won.

"The thermometer at sunrise today, my darling, was
thirty-four degrees.
I
have marked it in my book.
I
have taken it every day for the past four months and
I
didn't drop the thermometer once."

His voice was husky and scarred as it was that day in
Paris. She began to cry. She knew he would listen to no one, accept no advice,
no opinions, nor have this passion discussed, revoked, diluted, appended,
crossed out, objected to, or any part of it destroyed. She would not be
excised. She would not be censored. She would not be discarded. She would
remain at Monticello.

There was irony and love in his voice:

"Hold, little one," he said. "The peach
trees begin to blossom and
I
see the well has plenty of water in it after having been dry for
eighteen months."

She pressed her head into his chest, and his great hands
came up and cupped her skull. Her tears wet his vest and shirt. Here was her
victory, written in his haggard and loving face. They were like the lone survivors
of an earthquake. It had shaken the mountain, but the mountain was still there.

Thomas Jefferson sat making delicate sketches of the plan
for his new pleasure ground: a grove of the largest trees, shaded with poplar,
oak, maple, linden, and his beloved ash trees. A green labyrinth, which had at
its center a small temple: a safe place.

His troubles were far from over.

This trip was to try to avoid the possibility of a duel
with his old friend John Walker over his wife. Callender had not stopped his
pen. With the aid of the Northern papers he had enlarged its scope to include
the Langhorne letter to George Washington involving his nephew Peter Carr. Then
there was the everlasting charge of atheism, of Jacobinism, and now the threat
of publishing his letters to John Walker over something that had happened
thirty-three years ago! It was insane.