Sally Heming (52 page)

The summers seemed to pass more quickly. Europe was at war.
Her beloved France was at war. The United States and its territories were at
war with England. James Madison had been re-elected. Her master had reconciled
with John, but not Abigail Adams. And now there was a fourth generation of Hemingses
on the mountain. Little Sally Hemings and Maria Hemings, as well as her
Harriet, had been sent to the weaver's cottage to learn to spin this summer.

She looked out over the land. They plowed in terraces now,
following the contours of the hilly land instead of the straight rows up and
down which had allowed the precious soil to run down into the river. Black
hands plowed horizontally, following the curvatures of the hills and hollows on
dead level; each furrow acting as a reservoir to receive and retain the
rainfall. At least, thought Sally Hemings, in point of beauty, nothing could
exceed that of these lines and rows winding and unwinding along the landscape.
She stood contemplating it all for one more moment, and then, with that
quickness of motion her lover had always remarked, she swung around, the heavy
iron ring of keys at her waist jangling like a tambourine, and entered the
mansion.

CHAPTER 40

WINTER
1819

Beverly Hemings
' eyes roamed the
hilly, hard-to-work farmland that stretched to the east. It had once been worth
fifty to a hundred dollars an acre, but now with the Panic, it was worth barely
twenty. His father was in money trouble. It had dawned on him more than three
years ago, the day they had packed up his library and shipped it up to Washington
City, the library that had been Beverly's only real education, aside from Mr.
Oglesby.

My father needs money, he had suddenly thought. That
realization had brought terror with it. Money troubles for the master meant
only one thing for the slave—the auction block. His hands had trembled as he,
along with Burwell, Harriet, and his mother, had carefully wrapped and packed
the books into the cases that had been prepared by his Uncle John and Dinsmore,
the master carpenter. The Randolph girls— Virginia, Cornelia, and Ellen—had
helped as well. When they had finished all the packing, there had been sixteen
wagonloads of books— three thousand pounds each—forty-eight thousand pounds of
his father's life. Each book had been handled, read, and touched by him.

No, Beverly was sure, he would never have sold his library,
even to the United States government, if he hadn't needed the money
desperately. The British had burned the Library of Congress when they had
burned the Capitol during the war. He remembered with what horror and rage his
father had received the news, and now all his books were leaving.... Beverly
had burst into tears; his grief was not only caused by the sudden loss of
"his" books but the meaning behind it all. His father had let him
take out his favorites from the lots, but had made him promise never to reveal
this to a soul.

"If everyone were allowed to take out their favorite
books, me included, I would have nothing to sell to the Congress.... You
understand, Beverly, I have made a promise. I can't except anyone from the
rule, even you...."

From that day on, Beverly had had only one thought: how to
keep his father, and thus himself and his family, safe from the threat of
financial ruin that seemed to hang like a pall over Monticello. He had studied and
looked and listened and planned and prayed as he saw the net drawing tighter
and tighter around them all. And now the Panic had made everything ten times
worse. There was real fear in the air.

Beverly Hemings stood watching the cavalier tear across the
furrowed field just below the slope where he had set off his balloon. He
laughed. He knew well who it was by the checkered black-and-white gingham coat
with the huge metal buttons on it, the size of a dollar. The pantaloons were of
the same material. The rider, mounted on a bay— Eagle, he guessed—was going at
great speed. He was hatless as usual, his very head seemed on fire as his white
hair caught the golden light, and he had a lady's parasol, probably Mama's,
thought Beverly, stuck in his coat behind him and spread over his head to
protect him from the sun. Beverly's heart filled with a kind of ironic
tenderness. For his father.

It was now ten years since he had ridden home from the
presidency. The time it had taken Beverly to grow up. His mother had not so
much grown older as lighter, Beverly thought. Not so much in color; as a matter
of fact, her beautiful face had grown darker—and not so much in authority
either, for her presence was still as formidable as ever. Rather, there was
about her a gradual disappearance ... a seeping invisibility, so that even as
he heard her voice, as sweet and thrilling as ever, with its soft lilt and
slight foreign sound, it was as if it were coming to him disembodied.

If his mother was as transparent as a looking glass, his
father glowed like the sun in it. He, Harriet, Thomas, and the younger boys
seemed not even to have been created by this golden monster on his blooded,
dangerous horse, and his mother, as still and deep as a reflecting pool. He
didn't understand either of them. They were beyond mortality. They were like
stones or trees. One couldn't rile against stones, could one? One couldn't
curse trees. Beverly flung his fair hair out of his eyes.

They were the strangest couple he had ever encountered, his
mother and father. His tragic, terrifying parents.

Perhaps she is a miracle, he thought, to have loved him and
to have survived this long. But now Monticello needed another miracle—no
disembodied voices, no guardian angels, no supernatural beings were going to
resurrect this place or save it.

Jeff Randolph was fighting mightily to keep Monticello from
bankruptcy, but he was fighting a losing battle. The unprofitable condition of
Virginia estates in general, and his father's in particular, had left it next
to impossible to avoid ruin, especially with the failure of the banks. It was
he who helped Thomas Jefferson Randolph run the plantations, now that his
father had put his affairs in the hands of his grandson.

All the planters had been in bondage to the banks, which
held tons of paper on every plantation in Virginia, and this would continue
unless some change took place in the mode of working them. What the estates
needed was a complete reorganization, away from agriculture and slave-breeding.
The unprofitable land should be sold and the money invested in the developing
cities of Richmond and Fredericksville. Lumber should be their staple crop, not
slaves; they should be supplying the fast-growing cities with lumber, and
making investments that would make possible the exploitation of the thousands
of acres of forests that belonged to them. Beverly was certain they had the
means to save Monticello and make a fortune to boot. But no one would listen to
him. It seemed so simple to him. His father didn't want to be a slave-breeder,
didn't want to live off the labor of slaves. Instead of slaves working in
wheat, tobacco, and cotton fields, whose crops were at the mercy of Northern
bankers and boll weevils, they should have freed men, each with their family,
housed in community housing, working for wages in Monticello lumber yards, nail
factories, iron works.... Goodness knows, they had labor!

With the rendezvous of the boats from western Virginia only
a few miles away at Milton, they could ship thousands of tons of nails, thousands
of cubic yards of good Virginia pine to the newly building cities, the
settlements of the Louisiana Territory, not to mention the rebuilding of
Washington City. And what about wagon wheels?—with the iron, the lumber and the
manpower available, they could make millions of wagon wheels for the West. It
just took a little business sense, something his Virginia aristocrat cousins
knew nothing about. The nail factory, for example, was ludicrous. Run by an
illiterate slave and a dozen children. It should be twenty times bigger, run by
a foreman, white or black, it didn't matter, with men and the latest tools and
forges. They had the land to build a real factory, not those miserable cabins
they called a factory. White people were settling the Territories, and white
people needed nails, iron pots, wagon wheels, farm tools, ax heads. And why
not? Iron parts for the new steam engines, rails for the new steam carriages.

Beverly stopped abruptly. This was a good way to go crazy,
he thought bitterly. He was nothing. A slave chattel. Why was he standing here
watching his eccentric father ride, dreaming of a fortune in nails and lumber?

Yes, he would leave him in the end, this man whom he hated.
Whom he wanted to adore. He had no choice. He was outlawed from him by his mothers's
blood.

His father dismounted next to him. It always amazed Beverly
that he was taller than his master, as broad, and now, with the years piled on
Thomas Jefferson, stronger, much stronger.

"Thank you, Beverly. You, Isaac, be sure to wipe off
Eagle. Wipe him down and rub him good. He's as tired as I am."

"Yessa, Masta."

Beverly had waited almost an hour for his father to return.
He had wanted to talk to him about his ideas for the nailery and the south
forests. But now his courage faltered. He knew that the only thing his father
really wanted to talk about was his university. The university that he,
Beverly, would never see the inside of, except as a carpenter or a floor
polisher.

Last year he had ridden out with his master, his Uncle
John, and the white workmen and slaves to commence the building of the
university. Bacon had fetched a ball of twine from Davey Isaacs' store in
Charlottesville, and his uncle had found some shingles and made some pegs; and
they had all gone out into the fields that had belonged to Master Perry, now
the grounds of the University of Virginia, and struck out the foundations of
the building.

His father thought he could build a university that would
take his mind off his decaying fortune, his mortgaged estates, his terrifying
debts. His father would go on talking about his university in his presence
without the least acknowledgment that every word was like an arrow in his
breast: the new professors, the new buildings, the library, the rotunda, the
future students ... while he was trying to think of something that would keep
Monticello from being sold out from under his father's ... seat, Beverly
thought grimly, and them along with it!

"Well, come, Beverly, if it can't wait. You've been
standing there on one leg. Where's Jeff? What did he send you to tell me?"

Jefferson didn't send me to tell you anything, Father,
thought Beverly. Jeff doesn't know how or what to do to save you. But I do. If
only you would listen. I do. Me. Your bastard.

"Well, now, before you start in, Beverly, go fetch
Jeff and see if you can find Joe and John. I've just been over to the
university and I've got some new things to discuss with them. John has got to
agree to do the planking the way Dinsmore says. I know it will be more
expensive that way, but in the long run we'll save on nails."

Thomas Jefferson turned and looked Beverly in the eye.
Their eyes were level; they were the same blue; there was the same frost in
them that hid their real feelings from the world. Both pairs of eyes turned
dark when anger or contradiction plagued them, as both reflected the rarity of
their intellect. A kind of sullen brilliance rotated between father and son
like a planet.

"Well, boy, what are you waiting for? Find your
uncles!"

"Yes, Master."

Beverly caught the smell of horse on his father. He needs a
bath, he thought.

He turned away. What had he hoped?

"Did you know that Beverly has been absent from the
carpenter's shop for about a week?"

Thomas Jefferson, who had just returned from James
Madison's Montpelier, looked up with surprise into the face of his overseer of
thirteen years, Edmund Bacon. He asked Bacon to repeat what he had just said.

"I said, Did you know that Beverly has been absent
from the carpenter's shop for about a week?"

Thomas Jefferson thought for a moment that Bacon had left
the door open behind him and had let in a blast of cold December air. He knew
that Beverly's origins were no secret to Edmund Bacon. His overseer had waited
a week to tell him of his son's disappearance and now he stood before him, his
face a mask betrayed by the anger and incomprehension in his eyes. When would
it end, this deceit that even servants judged? This unbearable waste?

It was the beginning of
1822,
and his university was entering the last stage of
completion. In another year or so it would open its doors to fifty or sixty
young men. His dream was almost within his grasp. He opened his mouth to ask
for details, to demand why he hadn't been informed before, perhaps even to send
Bacon looking for him, but to his surprise he found he was speechless.