Sally Heming (58 page)

"Now here's a perfect lady's maid, tall, beautiful,
bright, breeder, a child sold along with the female, two months'... one lot,
ladies and gentlemen, one lot. Ursula.

"Twenty years old, ladies and gentlemen, look at that
body. Born to breed. Look at those breasts. Ladies and gentlemen, do I hear
four fifty? Do I hear it? Do I hear five? Five for the lot, ladies and
gentlemen. Buy her and get the sire of the next lot. Do I hear five fifty? Five
fifty, once, five fifty twice, five fifty three times. Going, going,
gone."

Critta's Milly, sold to Mississippi. James Hubbard sold to
Kentucky. Washington Hemings, my nephew, sold to West Virginia. Critta had
fetched one hundred dollars despite her age. Nance, six hundred and fifty
dollars with two adolescent grandchildren thrown in. Betsy, her daughter, sold
pregnant at one thousand to North Carolina. Betsy's husband brought five
hundred, sold to Georgia. Isaac brought seven hundred and Wormley six hundred.
Davey Bowles, the highest price of all, one thousand dollars, sold to New
Orleans.

At the end came the "extra articles" prized
because of their beauty, their color, their training, their pedigree. The white
Hemingses came under that category... all my sister's children, Lilburn, Henry
Randell, Martha, Maria, Dolly. Peter Hemings, as a first-class chef, brought
five hundred. His twin boys brought seventeen hundred for the pair.

John had given his seven hundred to a white man to buy his
son, and Joe Fosset bought his wife for nine hundred fifty, and his mother,
Mary, for twenty-five dollars. My room, with all my possessions, had been
sealed. Only later would John be able to retrieve them. I had only the clothes
on my back. But I had the locket. If only I had tried to sell it. The little
money I had with me, I had hoped to buy one or two of the children, perhaps
Critta's ten-year-old Nancy, or Rachel's six-year-old twin girls. I wanted to
save one or two small children, my sister's children being grown and too
expensive. I hadn't realized that they would not be sold one by one, but in
lots. In lots of three or four children for two to four hundred dollars. Too
late, I realized I had not enough money to buy a lot. Too late, I realized that
the locket was my condemnation to everlasting hell.

I had stood like a survivor of a shipwreck who had managed
to be pulled ashore and lay half-drowned on the rocks. The worst was the end,
when the leftover children and women were sold in lots away from their
husbands, or mothers, or children. The screams of the children, the cries of
the mothers, the groans of the fathers and husbands rang in my ears.

Then I saw him before me on the block, unclothed, his lean,
naked, white body covered with its soft red down as I had seen him when I was a
young girl; the wide square shoulders; the long, heavy-wristed, heavy-thighed,
heavy-angled body with its powerful neck supporting the delicate head; the
leonine burst of thick auburn hair. A white, male, shorn of his gifts, his
power, his possessions, his history, his family, his children, his lands, pale
and vulnerable.

Over the hallucination, I heard the auctioneer
droning—"Prime male, unusually strong, intelligent, trained as a
carpenter, a gardener, a horse trainer, a secretary, a musician ... useless in the
fields, but a good breeder. Going once, going twice, going three times. Sold!
Sold for seven hundred dollars...."

PART VII

1835

Albemarle County

CHAPTER 45

JUNE
1835

St. Claire laughed. "You'll have to give her a meaning
or she'll make one."

H
arriet
beecher stowe,
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
1852

Philadelphia, July
4th,
1776

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself,
violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a
distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into
slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their
transportation hither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of
infidel
powers, is the warfare of the
christian
king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market
where
men
should be bought
and sold. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative
attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce, and that this
assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now
exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchasing that
liberty of which
he
deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obstruded them;
thus paying off former crimes committed against the
liberties
of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit
against the
lives
of another.

thomas jefferson

The Declaration of Independence,
1776
(Excised from the
final draft by consensus)

Nathan Langdon released the pressure of his thighs and
reined in his horse. He had just taken the rotting dilapidated barrier on the
western slope of Monticello at full speed, and now he rested in the cool,
vaulted overgrown forest, still criss-crossed with Thomas Jefferson's bridle
paths.

It was the first time he had returned home for the summer
in two years. The handsome face and the pure gaze were slightly touched with
the cynicism of his profession. He was a Washington lawyer now, considered one
of the best, and he was Washington-wise and Washington-weary, full of
compromise, adroit at survival, and totally successful. The beautiful mouth
revealed a line of disappointment. There was no more black or white in his
life, only infinite shades of gray.

As the brilliant June light filtered down, flecking the
fair hair and the flanks of his mount, Nathan was suddenly invaded by a
pervasive, unfounded premonition of disaster, a rising dread as he continued up
the mountain to the mansion.

When he came to the leveled-off clearing at the top of the
mountain, he stared in horror at Monticello. It stood naked. The lofty elegant
shade trees that had protected and surrounded it for seventy years had all been
cut down, the stumps still white, raw, and ugly. Even in his shock, Nathan
Langdon's legal mind registered the fact that he was trespassing. Monticello
had been sold last year to a pharmacy shop owner in Charlottesville, the new
rising race of a new era: that of the common man.

Nathan stared at the decaying gray facade. It was deserted.
Burwell's paint had peeled off, Joe Fosset's iron balconies were rusted and
crumbling, John Hemings' shingles were warped or missing. It no longer belonged
to Sally Hemings. Langdon smiled. It no longer belonged to the heirs of Thomas
Jefferson. Why did he always think of it as belonging to Sally Hemings instead
of the other way around?

It was now five years since his first meeting with Sally
Hemings. Four years since his banishment. He had learned nothing more of her
than what he had known from the beginning. He had encountered only evasiveness
and omissions.

Terror seized Nathan. If this is what they had done to what
had been Thomas Jefferson's mansion, what had they done to Sally Hemings?

Langdon started down the mountain toward her cabin,
fighting a rising anguish. Where was she? What had become of her?

He rode within sight of the tiny cabin but he didn't dare
approach. The old yearning returned, something—as infinitesimal as a rustling
branch or a leaf, or the wind, or a pebble beneath his mount's hoof, or the
sound of his own heart beating—held him back.

In the distance he saw the small figure emerge from the
house. She was alive. Who was it, he thought, who had said: ...
and then consider what mere Time will do ...: how if a man was great
while living, he became tenfold greater when dead. How a thing grows in the
human imagination when love, worship and all that lies in the human heart is
there to encourage it.... Enough for us to discern far in the uttermost
distance, some gleam ...in the center of that enormous camera-obscura image to
discern that at the center of it all was not a madness and a nothing, but a
sanity and a something.

He watched her as she stood, her arms wrapped around
herself. And as he watched her, Nathan Langdon felt the gulf between them. It
had grown, he realized, with the years. Even as he stood there unknowing, the
distance separating them was a canyon, a bottomless crater, a fissure in the
earth, uncrossable, unbridgeable, unfathomable, unforgivable. The sound of
summer thunder rolled over the Blue Ridge Mountains, a distant prediction of
turbulence to come. What Nathan Langdon did not know is that the turbulence to
come, which he would witness in sickness and despair, would claim the lives of
three of Sally Hemings' grandsons. A bitter struggle that would cost five
hundred thousand lives. One life lost for every slave freed.

Sally Hemings stood in the violet rectangle of her cabin,
her arms outstretched, her palms pressed against the oak doorframe, the dark
shadows framing the still lovely face. She contemplated the cherished and
familiar landscape. It calmed her. The lush Southernness soothed her nerve
ends, the colors washed over her flesh so long contorted and deep with memory.
Memory had no shame. All were equal before it. Then she stepped outside. Her
body dove into the languid summer landscape like a swimmer, and her head lifted
as if she sensed a presence. She looked toward the Blue Ridge. But all she saw
was the dark-green forest and luminous sky and all she heard were the sounds
that summer makes.

She had never reached out beyond her triple bondage. She
had clung stubbornly to the only thing she had ever found of her own in life:
love, and love had been more real to her than slavehood. And she had survived
both. This was the truth of her life.

Sally Hemings closed her eyes against the sunlight and against
the blinding pain in her head. She stood in her own embrace, triumphant; beyond
love, beyond passion, beyond History.

And surrounding the two solitary figures, lost in the vast
intractable wilderness of the American landscape, was the infinite chiaroscuro
of silence, where all biographies become one.

She picked up her skirts and started up the mountain toward
the safety of her beloved shade trees, just as, with a kind of violence, the
census taker turned away and headed back down her road.

AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although
a bibliography
would be long and out of place here, I feel I must acknowledge certain
published and scholarly works not previously mentioned and without which this
book could not have been written. They are not, of course, responsible for any
errors, interpretations, or misinterpretations I have made.

First, Fawn Brodie's book,
Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History,
and her two articles published in
American Heritage,
"The Great
Jefferson Taboo" and "Thomas Jefferson's Unknown Grandchildren."

Second, the memoirs of Madison Hemings, of Edmund Bacon, of
the ex-slaves Israel Jefferson and Isaac Jefferson, as well as the diaries of
Aaron Burr and John Quincy Adams.