Sally Heming (45 page)

His sixty-one years lay lightly on his shoulders. His hair
was now gray. His troubles of five years ago were gone with the daily horseback
riding in which he indulged. His skin was clear and high in color. His thick
neck and wrists gave an impression of great physical force, even though his
frame was slender, long and shackling. His feelings ran strong and deep, buried
under the surface of a seemingly sunny and even-tempered disposition, but I
knew him as he was: passionate to the point of cruelty, sensitive to the edge
of brutality, eager for approbation to the limits of honesty, constant in love,
lonely behind his facade of perfection, and imperfect in his fear of
loneliness. Our fate had been tested by scandal, our love tempered by it. And
our family grew like a many-rooted oak on our mountain. We were safe. Or so I believed.

In the spring they brought Maria up the mountain on a
litter made out of rope and wood borne tenderly by Burwell, John, Davey, and
Israel. She was dying from the complications of childbirth.

"Things change, only to remain the same," he
said, standing framed in the doorway of her room. And it was true that it was
now I rather than my mother who nursed and fed and washed and tended Maria, and
it was my son Thomas who stood with Maria's son, Francis, wide-eyed in the
hall.

The horrible ulcerating breast was surely gangrenous by
now. The pain so intense that even laudanum gave no ease. In the afternoon,
when the pain seemed the worst, I would sit for hours holding Maria in my arms,
and thus her father would find us when he came to the door of her room to stare
silently. He had withdrawn in a solitude with his books and his horses, as if
they could nullify the fact of Maria's agony. But her agony was not to be
nullified, neither by him nor me nor Maria.

I would brush her long auburn hair that fell to her waist,
still lush and luxurious, until it began to come out by the handful. This I
tried to hide from her, saving all the long strands, as the hairdressers in
Paris used to do, to supplement the natural hair of their mistresses with
chignons and poufs.

A nauseating sweetish smell clung to this exquisite woman
not yet twenty-six, and I desperately changed her three or four times a day.
She who had never been overly fond of dress or ornament was calling for her
jewels. She who was always vexed by allusions to her beauty now required them
from me, her sister, her husband, her father.

After her husband's visit, for which she would endure hours
of toilette, she would turn her face to the wall and cry. As for her son, she
would not let him enter her room. My own anguish lay buried deep within me. I
was only waiting.

The day was fine and hazy, with a mist that hung low, even
in the afternoon. On the mountains, with their tops bright with sunlight, every
blossom and bush pushed its way toward the warmth of the sun. Suddenly, there
was only the sound of my own breathing in the room. It was so still that I
looked at the sealed window to make sure that the sun, the sky, and the
unfolding nature were still there. And then I knew why it was so silent.

She had died. Without a word, her hand in mine. I too made
no sound. No sound the human voice could make could express the pain I felt. I
stayed beside her a long time before I finally rushed from the room to inform
the small group that was still at supper: her husband, her son, her father, her
sister. Then I returned to the room to wash and bathe her for the last time.
Like my mother before me, I wept, for now I could weep as I wrapped her in
white linen and then covered everything in the room. I descended into the
garden, and with Wormley, I cut every spring flower there was, leaving not one
remaining in all the vast gardens to insult her death with its life. I filled
her room with them, scattering them on the beds, and blocking the light with
them. Only then did I allow her white family into the room.

We stood staring at each other over the fresh grave of
Maria and that of her child, who had succumbed to convulsions.

Maria's death settled between us like a hungering beast,
separating us from each other, ugly and terrible. Fear descended upon us, and
over her grave we clutched at life. We clung to each other in our despair and
our grief and we hurried back up the mountain as if the Reaper himself were
pursuing us.

A new life was made that day, for my third son, Madison,
would be born nine months afterward to the very hour....

The second four years of my master's mandate began. For the
second time, he had walked to the Capitol flanked by excited crowds and popular
acclaim. For the second time, he delivered an inaudible speech to the gathered
crowds, and again it was only the next day when they were able to read it in
the newspapers that they knew what he had said.

Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken
in New Jersey, a misty July dawn
1804,
but my master's country was at peace except with one
nation.

An irresistible current moving west was making it a white
man's country. The white man was crushing the Indian as he crushed the slave
under the heel of the boot he placed on every inch of soil he could tread. The
land which now stretched from the Carolinas to Vermont, and from the Atlantic
shore to the Appalachian Mountains contained, according to the new census, five
million whites, two million slaves, one million mulattoes, and an undetermined
number of native Americans.

In the past four years, my master, as president, by fair
means and foul, had transferred fifty million acres of Indian land from their
sovereignty to the United States, paying a total of one hundred and forty-two
thousand dollars; one-tenth of a penny an acre, or as he said, the equivalent
of one hundred and forty-three prime male Negro slaves.

For another four years, he would be lost to me and
Monticello. I was barred from the President's House. But I determined one day
to set my foot on its planks. Davey Bowles brought me secretly, at my stubborn
request, to Washington that winter. I traveled by night in a curtained
carriage, and slipped into the mansion by the servants' entrance. It was more
than ten years since I had ventured from Monticello.

Shielded by the Monticello servants there, hidden during
the day by Burwell, I roamed at night the unfinished cavernous rooms that I
knew I would never see again. I noted the fixtures, the hangings, the
paintings, and the stiff old-fashioned furniture that had been installed by the
Adamses. After the elegance of the Hotel de Langeac, the President's House
seemed crude, barnlike, cold, and dismal. The roof leaked, there was no heat,
the stairway sagged, gloom and dust were everywhere. Even Thomas Jefferson had
an unkempt, run-down appearance.

The large kitchens, where Edy and Fanny worked with Peter,
were the only cheerful rooms in the whole house. I visited Petit, who was
installed in Georgetown, a gentleman farmer, and Davey Bowles managed to take
me out driving in one of the carriages to see Washington City.

It was a place of incredible distances, interspersed with a
few scattered buildings; a quagmire of mud when the sun shone, and a sea of
frozen ruts during the winter nights. The gaunt wooden skeleton of the Capitol
building rose like a gallows on the hill, while swarms of workmen and slaves
struggled in the soft earth with the enormous white stone that had begun to
sheathe it. Surrounding the Capitol was the Federal City, which consisted of
seven or eight boardinghouses, the best being Conrad and McMunn, and all of
them brimming over with senators and representatives. There was a tailor shop,
a shoemaker, a printer, a washerwoman, a grocer, a stationer, a dry-goods
establishment, and an oysterhouse.

This, then, was the new capital of the United States. The
swamps on all sides emitted the putrid odors of decay and a rancid fog hung
over the city half the time, as the inhabitants fled at the first hint of the
malarial fevers that periodically swept the city.

I inspected the half-finished Capitol, where John
Trumbull's paintings would hang; the mansions surrounded by wastelands
stretching down Pennsylvania Avenue to Georgetown reminded me of those that had
been constructed back when I was in Paris on the Champs-Elysees.

The Champs-Elysees. It stretched dimly now, its perspective
fifteen years behind me. The fashionable golden and white buildings that had
been so "modern" then must have already settled into old-fashioned
respectability. Respectability! I laughed to think what the Federalists would
think of Sally Hemings in the President's House. But such was my master's
popularity that even if I had been found out, no one would have now dared to
print the story. "Dusky Sally" was as dead as James T. Callender.

But, as fate would have it, just before I was to return
with Davey Bowles to Monticello, I met in the confines of the gloomy mansion
the only person in Washington sure to recognize me: Dolley Payne Todd Madison.
She, who already considered the President's House hers, had come in,
unannounced, by the kitchens, and surprised me in the company of my master.

"Why Sally Hemings of Monticello!"

I remained silent.

"What on earth are you doing in Washington? Have you
deserted Monticello for the kitchens of the President's House?" Not at all
shocked, she had remarked my condition.

"Another Hemings for Monticello? Good! We need all the
little pickaninnies we can get these days.... And if it is a boy, could I ask
you to name it Madison, and you'll have a fair gift for the name, too! I
promise you." She looked at my master. "Might she do that, Mr.
Jefferson? Name it Madison if it's a boy, and Dolley if it's a girl? Now don't
you say no...."

The flat pasty face with its upturned mouth smirked with
malice. The tiny bead-eyes sunk into the flesh of her puffy face matched the
necklace around her fat short neck. She was no longer a beauty, Dolley Madison.
Ensconced in the ruffles and frills she loved, always in pastel colors that did
nothing for her complexion, which had turned sallow in her middle age, she
resembled nothing more than a multicolored cabbage.

My master stood helplessly and more than a little foolishly
aside. He was the president of the United States, yet he could say nothing.

I bided my time while she took her revenge. Her marriage to
Master Madison had not produced children, and her bitterness and disappointment
in this made her more cruel perhaps than she would have been had she been a
mother. Well, I thought, why not? Madison was a fine name, and I truly liked
Master Madison, but no child of mine, I vowed, would ever be named Dolley.

In the dim, drafty hallway, we circled one another like
antagonized she-wolves—the rough floor planks cut into my felt slippers. I kept
my eyes on the neatly shod feet of Dolley Madison. Her boots were pale-blue
suede. I kept my eyes down, but I staked my territory. Even if I had been
white, I would have been trespassing, but being black, I was an invader of all
that was sacred.

She stepped back out of my circle, our pact made. A name
for silence. That she should symbolically try to take the seed planted in my
womb which rightfully should have been planted in the womb of a white woman—in
her womb—was her duty. Mine was to survive and prevail without murder. We both
did our duty.

Madison Hemings was born the following January, on the
nineteenth day of that month, a bright, sandy-haired, and gray-eyed boy.

The Southern white woman is the chief slave of the master's
harem.

dolley madison, 1
837

CHAPTER 35

MONTICELLO,
1806-1808

"Jamey done 'strolled.' "

"What?"

"He gone. Masta, Jim, Bacon, whole plantation knows
where he is but ain't nobody going after him...."

As usual, it was Elizabeth Hemings who had the news of
Jamey's flight first. Critta's son was now seventeen, the same bitter, bright,
violent seventeen that his namesake, my brother James, had been. I wondered
when Jamey had decided to run away. Was it when he had witnessed his father and
his uncle fighting over his mother? Or had it been that lonely winter when he
had been left on the mountain while his mother had fled to Bermuda Hundred with
Maria?

For the first time in his life, Thomas Jefferson had had a
slave, James Hubbard, flogged severely in public, not just because he kept
running away, which he had done with regularity now since he was twelve, but
because he kept running away from
him....
Yet he must have known in his heart that this one would never be a
slave again. He would die first—die being beaten or die running. I, who had
written his pass for him, had accepted that. Why did my master not accept
something so simple? There came a time in some men's lives when they were
simply no longer slave material. If that meant that they were dead men, well,
they were dead men. That's all. The imponderable and excessive rage of masters
at fleeing slaves mystified me. It was not just a matter of losing valuable
property. They all, including my own, acted so abandoned, ready to kill rather
than love again. What was it the slave did to the master's pride, I wondered,
for him to be so mortally wounded by flight?