Sally Heming (56 page)

Thomas Jefferson would die thinking his lottery was going
to save Monticello. And he died hard, just like Elizabeth Hemings.

He had persisted in riding to the very end. Isaac and Eston
would lift him up on Eagle, aged like him, and he would ride out alone, with
Eston or Burwell or Isaac following at a safe distance to watch over him. He
would be out for hours, his white hair whipped by the wind, his coattails
flying. When he no longer could ride because of the terrible pain, he
semireclined on his couch, unable to either sit, lie, walk or stand.

"The doctors are trying to keep the old man alive
until the Fourth," Burwell said on the third of July. "I don't think
he's going to make it."

"I swear he will," I replied.

On that day, it was Burwell who had understood and lowered
his head. When Burwell left the room, I realized I would soon have to give my
master up to his white family, which was gathering. Martha, who was at Varina,
would never make it up the mountain in time.

He was mine alone.

"The letters," he murmered.

So he had not burned them all.

I went to his desk and opened the drawers one by one.
Mementos, locks of hair, a ribbon of mine, secret things I had never dreamed
of, faced me as each drawer opened and closed. I spied a soft lock of fine
blond hair. Which dead baby was it? I fell upon a packet of my letters.

"You found them?"

"Yes."

"You know ... what you must do ... Please?" It
was the first time he had ever addressed that word to me. "Ask Burwell to
do it," I whispered, "for I cannot." I backed away from the
desk.

He reached out his right hand and clutched at my skirt. The
twice-broken wrist was doubly twisted with arthritis, the hand atrophied. I
slipped to my knees to come closer to him and looked into his eyes. They were
the eyes of a young man; the same sapphire blue as always. One dies with the
eyes one had as a child, people say. Even when the body is unrecognizable with
illness and age, eyes are the eyes of childhood.

"Did you love me?" he asked.

After thirty-eight years he still had to ask.

"Lord, keep me from sinking down....

"Lord, keep me from sinking down.

"Lord, keep me from sinking down,"
I repeated over and over again into that silence. A whole kingdom of
silence. A whole world of silence.

When Burwell entered the draped study, there were tears
streaming down his face.

"He left everything to Jeff Randolph. Madison and
Eston are freed by his will. They are left under the guardianship of John, who
is also freed. Joe Fosset is freed ... so am I."

I stared at Burwell, waiting, but he stood there, his face
contorted, his hands hanging loosely at his side, a look of grief on his face
which resembled nothing if not stupidity. Still I waited. Waiting was my
natural condition.

"He didn't free no ... women."

I smiled. So he held me even in death. I had guessed as
much when I had not been summoned to the dining room. I sat smiling. My smile
must have been as stupid to see as Burwell's.

The death of a master, good or bad, is always a catastrophe
for the slave. Sometimes he grieves out of real affection for the dead master,
but mostly he grieves for the state of his future, which from that moment on is
as vague and dangerous as his first journey out of his mother's womb.

Death of the master meant sale, separation from the land,
from friends, and, if there were any, from wife and husband. And most of all,
from children. The white family always took these outpourings of grief as proof
that they were beloved, or of how much the dead master had been.

The Randolph family assumed as much, though here there was
true grief as well. My master had been a "good master." The Randolphs
were genuinely moved by the sorrow and mourning of the Monticello slaves. What
they did not know, however, was that the slaves knew very well that Thomas
Jefferson had died penniless, bankrupt, with a lottery on his land and his
creditors hounding him to his very last breath. And they knew, too, that sooner
or later Monticello, as had his other plantations, would fall.

It came sooner rather than later.

At Christmas I found Martha alone, standing in the
threadbare blue salon, her heavy silhouette against the light, her white hair
making an angry halo around her head. To my surprise, this day she had on gray
silk, not black, an old dress, let out and pieced to accommodate her bulk. As I
stood waiting for her to speak, I thought of our lives. We were only nine
months apart, and I looked into the fifty-five-year-old face, so familiar to
me, even more than in youth—a female replica of her father's face.

Age had marked it as it had not my own. The fair and
fragile skin was etched with a thousand lines around the mouth and eyes, the
skin crumpled like linen, the mouth drawn down in unhapppiness. Tiny red veins,
broken under the skin, gave it a flushed appearance. Her blue eyes had been
burned gray by some internal fire. I could hardly see the eyes, so pale were
they behind the spectacles she was now forced to wear.

My mistress. Had her life been so much different from mine?
Or as happy, for that matter? Slave or free, white or black, women were women
and they were indentured to husbands, fathers, brothers, children, in sickness
and in health, in death and life, to pain and pregnancy, work exhaustion, grinding
solitude, and waiting. Ah, God, above all, waiting. It was all in Martha's
face.

I waited. I knew what she had to say to me. I was to go on
the block. The rumors were no longer rumors. In less than a month, Monticello
and the remaining plantations would be auctioned off and everything on them,
including the seventy-odd slaves. The inventory had already been taken by Jeff.
I was listed as worth fifty dollars. And Martha? Was she worth any more than I?
The domain we had struggled for in an undeclared war that had lasted
thirty-eight years was no more to be fought over. It lay under our feet and
hung over our heads, a decaying, awful parody of its master and builder.

This, then, was the last battle.

If the power had been hers, I thought, the endurance was mine.
My face, I knew, was without line or crease; my complexion clear; my hair still
black and abundant; my figure, except for a thickening at the waist and ankles,
the same.

Martha took off her spectacles, which left scarlet bruises
on her nose and brow.

"Ah, Sally."

"Martha."

We stood facing each other, sentinels to four decades of
lies.

"I have something to tell you ... such terrible
news.... I don't know just how to ..."

I waited for her to finish speaking. The words droned on
without meaning. I then found myself staring at Martha in disbelief as she
continued.

"... and as he instructed me, you were to be freed
within two years of his death, as soon as Eston was of age and could act as
head of the family. I thought... forgive ... that this day ... that today was a
good day.... Eston will be twenty-one in a few months... until then you may
stay here, at least until July, as the house will not be sold, but you must
know, since you people know everything, that the auction is the beginning of
the year."

The date of the auction! Her voice suddenly reached me,
clear and fraught with meaning.

"We cannot hold out any longer, Sally, and I dare not
wait any longer to give you your papers. I hereby free you as my father wished,
but could not acknowledge for ... reasons of his own. He asked me to tell you
this. He petitioned me, begged me, to free you. And for his sake I do
so
."

Here she paused, waiting for me to make the proper gesture.
But what gesture was there to make? I knew of none. "You have nothing to
say?" she asked. "Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing," I repeated.

I thought of my mother and her mother. It would have been
slavish to have said anything. And I was not her slave.

"I think you could at least express your thanks. He
petitioned me, but only I have the power to make you free. I could have allowed
you to be sold on the block with all the rest!"

I stared at Martha. Did she really think she had the power
to free
me?
Free
me
with a piece of paper, when I couldn't free myself with all
the total yearning of a whole lifetime?

"Martha, I have no thanks to give. You cannot free me.
Even
he
could not free
me. He couldn't free me living, he couldn't free me dying, and he can't free me
dead. He did what he had to do, as have you and I. I am an old woman, Martha,
worth fifty dollars, and you are as worthless. Our lives haven't been all that
much different, and death has us both by the hair. Can we not at least explain
ourselves one to the other before it's too late?"

"You think I'd ever
explain
myself to you? I would rather
die." Martha's voice was strangled with anger. "Recognize that—"
I began.

"Recognize! Do you think I'd ever recognize you?
Recognition for the harm and slander you caused an innocent and great
man?"

She would lie to herself to the end. She waved the white
envelope in the air above my head like a child's gift.

"A thank you from the family?" It was our family
she spoke of. "Recompense from the family? A souvenir from this house? A
silver watch, perhaps?"

"Everything I'll ever need in recognition I've had,
and souvenirs I have more than enough, even to silver."

What I did then, I don't regret, but it was a gesture as
futile as our lifelong lies. I did it in cold anger and hatred of that white
power she waved over my head. I pulled out the locket with the miniature John
Trumbull had given me at Cowes and showed her his face: the same face in
miniature that Martha always carried with her, the image she thought was hers
and hers alone, I had carried for thirty-seven years around my neck.

The lock of his hair, blood-red, slipped from its place and
fluttered to the floor. She made a gesture as if to stoop and catch it, then
straightened with a sob, almost touching me. I fell back. Lie, I thought, lie
to yourself, for it is your only hope. Deny me if you wish. Deny me with your
last breath, your last cent, for in time, in this land, it will come to that.

"He loved me more than you! He loved
me!
You are nothing, you black slut! You
slave whore! You know your children are not his! Never! They'll never be
his!"

"Perhaps, but I was his. He loved me, Martha. It is
not out of vanity or pride that I say it, but that was how it was between us.
We loved. It was all that mattered."

"How can you speak of love between a master and a
slave... between a hero and chattel?"

"We had no need to speak of it...."

"You were nothing to him! A convenient slave paramour,
a... receptacle!"

The evil words clattered like iron nails in the coffin of
silence. There was nothing but pure hatred between us now. Martha's face
pressed into mine and I looked into its decay as if in a mirror. Those eyes
would not leave mine. She would not leave me in peace. The breath. The feverish
face. We were like two bitches worrying over a rotting and long-dead carcass.
Didn't she understand that it was over?

Then she drew back. Dread seized me by the throat like some
wild animal. She was going to tell me something.

"Didn't you ever love me?" she whispered.

It was the same thing her father had asked. A wild,
uncontrollable desolation bore down upon me. A howl like that of a wild animal
caught in my throat. When ... when would they understand this farce and this
tragedy? I knew that only the one who stopped loving, who stopped needing love,
would survive. And hate seemed to drop over me like a veil. Love had left me, and
hate had filled that space. The grief and loneliness without him; the empty
meaningless days and nights dissolved like dry straw. Hate lifted me up in a
kind of exaltation. The white envelope which said I was free but which I knew
would never really free me remained in her hand.