Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings (4 page)

I
n the movie the blond Martha undresses in the presence of the young actor in the copper-colored wig before the ball is even over. As Thomas Jefferson watches the precipitate emergence of her boyishly lean body with a horrified fascination (how could anyone so besmirch Martha's reputation by suggesting such heedless passion!), she coughs. It would seem that she is now entirely undressed, her skin a wavery gold in the firelight to the young actor's wavery orange—for he, too, would seem to be undressed, though it is not possible to see the whole of either of their bodies, since their heads and shoulders alone fill up the entire luminous wall. That cough is the only thing that seems real in this fevered and intolerable scene.

Martha did cough—exactly as the actress does—their first night at Monticello after their wedding, when they were in a state not unlike that of the gold and orange people on the wall, only they were under a heap of counterpanes in his two-room cabin, their breath steaming in the lamplight, the falling snow ticking at the windows. Martha coughed, and in that beautiful moment of their being together, Thomas Jefferson suddenly feared that she might be sickly and that he would lose her—this woman who had made him happier than he had ever been in his life.

As he hears that cough in the dark theater, he is bereft once again, and aghast that fate should have taken her from him a mere ten years later. He must have made some sort of sound, because he feels a warm hand stroking his own and looks over to see Dolley Madison watching him with a furrowed brow and sympathetically pursed lips. “Don't worry,” she mouths, then turns her gaze back to the brilliant wall.

. . . When I was a very young child, the fact of slavery—my own enslavement and that of everyone I knew well and loved—was a sort of deadness beyond the world in which I believed myself to live. Before the age of six or seven, I don't think I had any idea we were slaves. In part this was because we were called “servants” and “laborers” by the Jeffersons, and those were the words that we ourselves used. I can't recall ever hearing my mother refer to herself or to any member of our family by the term “slave.” Also, I never lacked for food. I lived in a solid cabin that was kept warm in the winter by a stone fireplace, and for much of my childhood I was able to wander about Monticello as freely as a dog. This seemed a good and ordinary life to me—nothing like “slavery,” at least insofar as that word had any meaning for me.

I lived with my mother and three of my siblings (I was the youngest) just across the lawn from the great house, and our closest neighbors on the mountaintop, apart from the Jeffersons, were house servants, craftsmen and mechanics—most of them my siblings and cousins. My mother was immensely proud of our family's elevated standing and said that we had achieved it because we were smart, hardworking, and we knew “how to get along.” By contrast she had nothing but contempt for what she called “ignorant” or “no-account niggers.” I grew up equating these people almost exclusively with the field laborers, who lived down the hill from us and who, those days, mainly picked tobacco on the hilltops a quarter mile and more to the east and south of the great house.

As a child I had little comprehension of how much harder the laborers worked than did my mother or any of the other skilled servants among whom I lived, and so whenever I happened upon them being marched along the roads at sunrise and sunset, I tended to see their filthy clothing, their lowered heads and sullen expressions as manifestations of their fundamental character, rather than of their exhaustion, their bitterness and the injustice of their lot. I was curious about these people and especially about their children, who seemed louder, tougher and more daring than the children who lived near the great
house, but I was also afraid of them and kept my distance. At night, when we would hear the laughter and songs, and sometimes the screams and angry bellowing that would come up the hill from the field laborers' cabins, my mother would mutter, “Heathen savages,” and offer a prayer of thanks to Jesus for having saved her.

Like most small children, I never doubted that what my mother told me was the truth, and so I shared both her pride and her disdain. If I had imagined that anyone at Monticello might have been slaves, it would have been the field laborers, but certainly not us. I considered myself lucky to have been born into a family of such intelligent and industrious men and women, and to be leading what I could only believe was a good life. When my mother told me to get down on my knees and thank Jesus, the gratitude I offered up was sincere. And yet from a very early age, a small part of me knew—or rather felt, for I could not allow myself to truly know—that my good and fortunate life was not what it seemed.

When I was five or six, a circus came to Charlottesville and my mother decided to take me to it on a Sunday—her day off from her duties as Mrs. Jefferson's body servant. Everyone was talking about the circus's dancing bear and trick riders, but I was most eager to see the acrobats, who, from my mother's description, I thought could actually fly and so must have had wings like angels. I was also very excited because my mother dressed me in my favorite gown, which was dark blue with red trim on the hems of the sleeves and skirt. It had been passed down to me from my sisters Thenia and Critta, but it had originally belonged to Mrs. Jefferson when she was a girl.

We were in the kitchen of the great house getting some water and bread to take with us on the ride into town when Mrs. Jefferson suddenly appeared. I all but ran up to her, hoping that she would notice that I was wearing her gown.

“Ah, Betty!” she said, not giving me a glance. “I've been looking for you all over. I need your help.”

My mother put her hand on my shoulder. “But I'm taking Sally to the circus.”

Mrs. Jefferson seemed to notice me for the first time and gave me a curt smile before speaking to my mother in a firm voice. “I'm sorry, I'm afraid this is an emergency, and there won't be time for that.”

My mother darted her eyes at me, and for an instant she looked shocked, as if she had just been slapped—but in the next instant she shook my shoulder, her
face knotted with irritation, and said firmly, “You be good, baby girl!” She followed Mrs. Jefferson out of the room, as if the whole idea that she and I might have gone to the circus had been my own foolish fancy.

This was the moment when I had my first intimation that my proud and strong mother was afraid of Mrs. Jefferson—a woman whom I had always thought of as elegant and kindly. And as that stunning realization dilated within my consciousness, my mother's fear instantly became connected to dozens of other odd events, many of them ordinary (a grimace turning into a smile, a heavy sigh followed by a cheerful “I'm coming!”) and a few so troubling that they seemed inscribed with fire upon my brain (the time my sister Mary, who was already a grown woman when I was born, cried out and clutched my mother's arm when she saw Mr. Corbet, one of the overseers, walking toward her and then calmly let him lead her away; or the night my mother's friend Johnny sat in the corner of our cabin, speechless, his face like stone, his eyes fixed on something invisible). All of these events seemed to be instances of adults not allowing themselves to admit to plain, if very troubling, facts. Even as I stood in that kitchen after my mother had gone, I experienced another such evasion, though a far more modest one: Ursula crouched beside me and said, “Don't worry, honey pie—that circus isn't any fun anyway!”

All of these recognitions came together in a mind too young to make sense of them, but I do believe that they were the origin of an unsettling feeling or vision with which I became afflicted not long afterward. Night after night throughout my childhood, as I lay upon the verge of sleep, the events of my day—conversations, squabbles, games and chores—would come back to me but seem to be surrounded by something that I came to think of as “the deadness.” I didn't have a clear conception of the deadness, except that it was bleak, dark and profoundly frightening. And in its shadow all the events of my day, which had seemed so vital and real as they were happening, would become thin and pale—a pathetic charade. There were nights when the deadness was so all-encompassing that I would writhe in panic, feeling I could not take enough air into my lungs and wanting desperately to escape. . . .

 

 

Facts

The average life expectancy at birth in late-eighteenth-century Virginia was thirty-eight years for males and forty-one years for females. The equivalent figures for nonwhite men and women were thirty-three and thirty-five years, respectively. If a white male were to survive adolescence, his life expectancy rose to about fifty years, whereas the female life expectancy did not increase appreciably, in part because four percent of women died in childbirth. The average woman, white or black, had six or seven children, a third of whom would die in infancy. One factor contributing to these high mortality rates is that doctors and midwives did not habitually wash their hands before procedures until the late nineteenth century.

Women's finances were controlled by their fathers before marriage and, afterward, by their husbands. If a widow or unmarried woman was not independently wealthy or being supported by relatives, she could become a governess, shop clerk, seamstress, domestic servant, field-worker or prostitute. The wages for most legitimate jobs were so low, however, that many single women, especially if they had children, had no choice but to make money on the side by prostitution. It is also true that female domestic servants were commonly expected to grant their masters sexual favors—discreetly, of course. Those who were not discreet enough generally lost their jobs and, their reputations ruined, often could find no other work than prostitution. On average a woman lived four years after becoming a prostitute, with the most common causes of death being venereal disease, murder, suicide and alcoholism.

The male head of a household was called “master,” as were male shopkeepers and teachers. One attribute all of these men had in common was that they were allowed to beat their subordinates. Although violence within the home was generally looked down upon, husbands were understood to have the right to physically punish their wives for such transgressions as adultery and persistent insubordination, and most people considered the occasional beating a necessary incentive in children's moral and even
academic education, so much so that teachers often had a rack of canes behind their desk or a paddle leaning against the wall in the corner.

Shopkeepers—craftsmen especially—were allowed to beat their employees for moral failings such as laziness or stealing—although the term “employee” does not adequately represent the relationship between the master and the one or more boys or girls who worked for him as apprentices or indentured servants and who were bound to him, generally until the age of twenty-one, receiving no compensation for their work other than food, clothing and a place to sleep—often just the floor of the shop. Industrial workers of the time got a mere pittance for their labors and worked in brutal and dangerous conditions that could make today's sweatshops seem luxurious.

This was the context in which slavery existed during Sally Hemings's lifetime and which conditioned her attitude toward her own servitude and her relationship to Thomas Jefferson. Although freedom was always preferable to the brutality, indignity and injustice of slavery, the actual difference in the quality of life between the free and the enslaved was not as dramatic as we are prone to imagine today—especially when we consider that as hard as life could be for the white working class and poor, it was massively harder for African Americans, even those who had gained their freedom.

And while according to our own standards, marriage during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might also seem close to slavery, people of Sally Hemings's time still cried for joy at weddings, and Jane Austen, who was Sally Hemings's almost exact contemporary, could write as if marriage were the greatest happiness that could befall a woman. People adjust to their circumstances. People subject to the most barbaric cruelty can still delight in a baby's laugh or feel moments of perfect contentment lying on a grassy hillside in the sun. There is something beautiful in our capacity to accommodate atrocity, even if it can also be our undoing.

 

“I will make it good. . . . I will be gentle. You will see. . . .”

 

. . . It was impossible, of course, that I could remain in ignorance of my true situation for very long. The first person to tell me that I was a slave was a girl named Elsie, who was a year older than me. I must have been close to seven at the time. I knew instantly that what she said was true, but I denied it anyway. She laughed and said, “Are you stupid! Don't you know all colored folks are slaves?”

Not long afterward I began hearing tales from other children about masters putting their slaves in iron collars or whipping them until the skin was torn off their backs. Most of these stories were told by boys, who wanted nothing more than to see me shriek, gag or burst into tears. I resolutely deprived them of that satisfaction by gritting my teeth behind an expression of world-weary indifference, but of course I could not help being affected. The most horrifying tale I heard was of a master who hung his slaves from hooks on the rafters as if they were meat. The image of those poor people impaled and writhing seized control of my thoughts and kept me awake for nights on end.

I did not, at first, give these tales much credit—in part because of the salacious delight with which the other children told them. It seemed clear to me that if these boys believed the tales they were telling, they would have been aghast and afraid for their own skins. I also didn't believe the tales because I had never heard of anything comparable at Monticello. There were no iron collars here, no meat hooks; there wasn't even a whipping post. Yes, there were thrashings from time to time, but nothing like the senseless and extreme cruelty of the masters in the stories the boys told me.

People were thrashed for stealing, for being drunk and belligerent, for not doing their work. While there were some overseers who were excessively assiduous in the detection of such crimes, or in the execution of punishment, a semblance of order prevailed at Monticello that, although it might only have resembled actual justice, nevertheless did make the punishments predictable and therefore substantially avoidable (“Keep out of the woods and the bear
won't bite,” was how my brother Peter put it). But more to the point, whatever excesses did occur never seemed extreme enough to transgress common notions of ordinary human cantankerousness.

Yet, as today's events have shown only too clearly, while Mr. Jefferson was not without principle, he was nevertheless criminally self-indulgent and self-deceived, and as repulsive as it is for me to consider—indeed, I am again overcome by nausea as I commit these words to paper—such horrors could never have come to pass were there not some cold and dank precinct of his heart impervious to even the faintest sympathy for those who labored and suffered so that he might live in comfort. . . .