Sally Heming (53 page)

Beverly. His beloved Beverly had "strolled"
without saying goodbye. Had deserted him when he needed him most. And what
about Oglesby? If Beverly had been absent from the carpenter's shop, he had
been absent from his tutor's classroom as well; but Oglesby had not sent word
that he was missing.

When Beverly had stayed beyond his twenty-first birthday,
he had somehow felt that this slave son would remain by his side, that this one
was more his than the others. He was a brilliant boy, and it had grieved him
that his education had not been what it should have been. Oh, he had given him
Oglesby and books, but the recognition, the incentive, these he had withheld.
Just as he had withheld the love he had felt for his son. Out of pride, he thought.

"You knew he was leaving?"

Thomas Jefferson was standing in the room of the mother of
his runaway son. He had waited until now to confront her—he had wanted to
confirm Beverly's absence with Oglesby and be sure that she had known Beverly
was gone.

"Yes," she answered.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because he didn't want you to know."

"Why?" he exploded. "I would never have
stopped him from leaving!"

"He knew you would never stop him from leaving ...
because of your promise. That is why he didn't want you to know ... he didn't
want your permission."

Sally Hemings was guessing. This flight was one she had not
planned. She didn't know why Beverly had suddenly decided to stroll. He had
simply given up. Given up loving or hating his father, she didn't know which,
and left. Before her master had left for Montpelier, he had sold twenty men,
women, and children to his son-in-law Jack Eppes for four thousand dollars. His
son-in-law had agreed to let the families remain together and to turn them over
with the grounds to his son, Francis, when he came of age. In this way,
Beverly's cousin, Mat, thirteen, was to become the property of his white cousin
Francis, also thirteen years old.

Then, over at Edgehill, Thomas Mann sold Fennel's
four-year-old Ely to Edmund Bacon for two hundred dollars. One day Fennel came
home from the fields and his daughter wasn't there anymore. His wife lay in a
faint; their baby girl had been sold away from them. Fennel had come riding
from Edgehill to Monticello to recover his daughter from Edmund Bacon. When
Bacon had heard Fennel was coming, he pleaded with her to calm him, as "he
didn't want to harm him."

She had heard Fennel come howling down Mulberry Row as door
after door closed upon his terrible face—the face of a man already dead, for
wasn't he here to kill the white man who had bought his daughter or the one who
had sold her? He had been pursued all the way from Shadwell by the black
overseer, Jim, who had caught up with him almost in front of Elizabeth Hemings'
former cabin. He had clubbed Fennel to the ground, and then had taken him
tenderly in his arms. A ring of black men stood watch while Fennel had howled
his grief into the night, within hearing distance of the Big House, howled like
an animal, like the wild wolves that sometimes came up to the very doors of the
slave cabins. His cries had washed over Monticello, over her and her children,
safe within the mansion. Finally, dazed and beaten, Fennel had been lifted
gently and flung over Jim's horse, and Jim had taken him back to his
plantation.

That was when Beverly had left.

"Where is he?"

Sally Hemings was too tired to be frightened by the tone of
her lover's voice. The violence of it was like a taste in her mouth. What could
he do to her that he hadn't already done? She waited while her lover struggled
to bring himself under control. She waited as she always had, supple and coiled
and ready to spring to the left or the right, or fling herself down the center
of his fury, depending on how it struck.

"I won't tell you," she said evenly,
"because he doesn't want you to know where he is. He doesn't want any help
from you. He's gone. North ... as a white man. Of all your sons, he is the only
one who hates you."

Thomas Jefferson stared at the woman who had been his
mistress for thirty-five years. He would never completely understand her. She
had raised these slave children, and if this son hated him it was because he
had been taught to hate.

His long, gaunt figure moved quickly as he raised his slave
wife from her chair. He knew now why this sensation, this chill, this sense of
jeopardy was so familiar to him. He had never known, all these years, if one
day he might not wake up, or come home, and find this woman gone. He drew her
to him and looked into the eyes, which burned back at him like the sun.

I will free his sons.

Then she broke.

"Oh God, another gone!"

"And thank God for it," said Thomas Jefferson.

He felt his own throat go dry as he watched her strain away
from him, watched her tremble once more above the abyss of contradiction which
was their life together, peering over the edge into that moment he knew would
come one day; when he would no longer be able to hold her, when she would
choose to follow Beverly.

The woman looked up at the man.

Thomas Jefferson braced himself, as the small body he held
against him crumbled, the tiny hands raking and clutching the material of his
frock coat.

"Sally. Mother. Don't cry. Please don't cry." He
was disconsolate. His face was a mask of helplessness, bewilderment, and rage
that resembled nothing so much as that of the slave father Fennel.

CHAPTER 41

SPRING
1822

The Spring
cut through her
like the memory of a lover's quarrel. The May sun was high in the sky as she
wandered down toward the sheep pastures, taking the shortcut through the sparse
woods on the east slope. The moss had turned from silvery gray to emerald green
and the ground under her feet was covered with white clover that looked like
new-fallen snow, except that the earth was warm, not cold, and it was May, not
December. New life was reaching out, claiming its inheritance. The earth, in
its eagerness, was warm enough to walk barefoot. She stood among the black
pines and inhaled the spring silence, opening her mouth wide in a soundless
scream.

Thomas Hemings had given his father a grandchild, a white
grandchild. Her son had secretly announced the birth of a little girl to her. A
little white girl.

God, stand up for bastards, she thought. She shook her
head. Martha had finally abandoned her husband. Thomas Mann Randolph had been
elected to the governorship of Virginia, to everyone's surprise, and Martha had
refused to accompany him to the governor's mansion in Richmond, preferring to
remain with her father at Monticello. She had finally made her choice between
husband and father.

Also, to everyone's surprise, Thomas Mann had proposed a
plan for the emancipation of all slaves in Virginia and their deportation out
of the state. Crazy Thomas Mann Randolph had had the courage to do something
that his father-in-law had never dared. The proposition was defeated in the
House of Burgesses. Thomas Jefferson had remained silent on the issue. Her sons
had been beside themselves. The enormous prestige of their father could have
saved the bill, they were sure. But he had said nothing to help his son-in-law.

It was the last thing he could have done for his slave
children. It was the last thing he could have done for his precious Harriet,
his only other daughter.

Harriet. Didn't he know he would lose her, too? More, even
than his sons, she was lost to him. His darling little girl.

Sally Hemings came out of the woods. She saw her daughter
converging on her from the direction of the house. The daughter had seen the
mother and now she hurried. She didn't want to face her. Not now. But it was
too late to escape back into the green. She stood and watched.

She could almost imagine that it was Maria who came
running, so light and young and fragile and like her, except in height, was the
young girl who approached. Harriet was now nineteen. She ran with her sunbonnet
in her hand, and the light struck her auburn hair, which her mother had never
cut and which was drawn back in a long braid reaching to her waist. As she ran,
she held her head down under the weight of it. When the young girl stopped
before her, there was only the slightest blush of pink under her cheeks.

"Mama..."

Sally Hemings looked into the emerald-green eyes of her
daughter. She was out of breath and very beautiful. And she, the mother knew,
was next.

Her twenty-first birthday.

Beverly had been gone for almost six months.

This would be her last ball as a slave. But Harriet Hemings
expected to attend others on her own. The music of the slave orchestra wafted
out over the expanses of lawn and jasmine bushes, the banks of roses and
flowering magnolias of the Prestonfield Plantation. In the light from the tall
windows of the ballroom sat an assembly of maids, carriage boys, valets, body
servants, drivers, outriders, lackeys, footmen, and mammies: every shape, age,
condition, and color of slavehood. Slavehood. She would peel it off like a
dirty petticoat. She had been raised like a lady by her parents, educated with
her cousins, and then, to her shock, had seen her adored playmates turn into
masters overnight. Nothing would ever erase that pain. But then her mother had
explained to her who she was and what would eventually happen to her.

The magic of her twenty-first year, when she would be
freed. Free, as her father had promised her mother long ago in Paris.

And so she had played the game, but always in her mind was
the knowledge of her reward, the breaking of the evil spell cast on her by ...
by whom? Whose fault was it that she was a slave? Her father's? Her country's?
God's? Her mother had never been able to explain this to her satisfactorily,
and she had never dared ask her father.

Hope had been her birthday. Now she was slave about to be
free, black about to be white; girl about to become woman; without a past,
about to be given a future; all for her birthday. She looked up at the sky. The
moon was no more than a white sliver in the immensity of blackness. And what if
the sky were white and the moon black? she thought.

Harriet had come into the circle of light from the ballroom
windows, where she stood with the rest of the servants, entranced with the scene
unfolding inside. The slave orchestra broke into a sprightly quadrille. Without
the knowledge of the dancing white people it was playing Gabriel Prosser's
song. Harriet shook her head and laughed with the rest of the servants while
the whites continued to dance. Wasn't it typical, she thought, of white people
to dance to a tune they didn't even know the words of. The whole South was
dancing to a tune they didn't know the words of. The ladies and their escorts
swung and looped, turned, skipped, grouped, and regrouped, forming circles and
breaking like water on a creek bed.

Harriet's slender foot tapped to the music; her hips began
to move. Suddenly, someone caught her from behind and swung her around. The
maids and the lackeys had begun to dance in the circle of white light. They
would continue to dance as long as their masters, far into the night, laughing
and flirting, cooler outside than their sweating masters inside. They would
outlast them, and then have to drive them home, undress them if they were drunk,
wash them if they puked, pick up their clothes where they had dropped them, and
put them to bed.

Harriet's skirts bobbed and swayed as her feet kept time
and she sang the words of Gabriel Prosser's song:

There was two a-guarding Gabriel's cell

And then more in the jail about;

And two a-standing at the hangman's tree

And Billy was there to get Gabriel out.

There was musket shot and musket balls

Between his neckbone and his knee,

But Billy took Gabriel up in his arms

And he carried him away right manfully.

They mounted a horse and away they went,

Ten miles off from that hanging tree,

Until they stopped where the river bent

And there they rested happily.

And then they called for a victory dance,

And the crowd they all danced merrily: