For a long time after La Petite’s death, Sally Hemings has trouble staying asleep and so falls into the habit of leaving her bed at the faintest hint of pink in the eastern sky and going for a walk, partly to talk herself out of a roiling tangle of bitterness, sorrow and longing that come to her in a different configuration every day and partly to lose herself in the movement of her muscles, the sweet chill of the air in her throat and the thrum of the wind in bare branches.
There is a new building on Mulberry Row. The cockeyed, rain-grayed log cabin that everyone called the “toolshed” (in fact, it was where Thomas Jefferson and a team of workers lived while constructing the first section of the great house) has been replaced by a tall white clapboard building with a stout stone chimney on one side—a smithy.
Most mornings, as Sally Hemings sets out on her walk, she can hear the urgent huffing of the bellows as the blacksmith gets his fire going and, as she returns an hour or so later, the clink and clang of a hammer on steel. She has seen the blacksmith from time to time, resting on a box in front of his shop at midday or lumbering with his head lowered toward his cabin somewhere down the East Road. He is in his thirties, she thinks, though with a patch of completely white hair above his left eye. His shoulders are massive and his forearms as thick as her calves. His skin is middle dark—the color of glazed stoneware—and he has a round, heavy-cheeked face with large, weary eyes. She has never said a word to him. Her mother tells her he is “simple.”
One day in early March, just after Thomas Jefferson has left for New York City, Sally Hemings is coming back from her walk and notices that for the first time (perhaps because the weather is warm) the smithy’s front door is open. Peering into the dark interior, she sees what looks like a red-hot bar of iron floating in midair and gracefully twisting itself into a knot. She wants to walk up to the door to get a better look, but she is too self-conscious so keeps walking. The next day, however, when she sees the door open again, she feels less timid.
The heat of the forge warms her nose and cheeks before she is even an arm’s length from the door. At first all she can see inside the building is the glow of the burning coals, but then a low, merry voice calls out, “Don’t be shy, pretty lady,” and an orangish smear in the darkness coalesces into the round-faced blacksmith looking straight at her and smiling. “Come on in!” he says. “Ain’t nothing to be afraid of in here.”
“I don’t want to disturb you,” she says.
“Pretty girl like you can’t never disturb nobody! Come on in. Come on in. Je vous en prie!” He laughs. “I know you know what that means! Je vous en prie!”
The air inside the smithy is so hot it dries out her nostrils and the back of her throat. She wants to take off her coat but doesn’t think that would be proper. The blacksmith is in shirtsleeves, with his collar open to the top of his greasy leather apron. The skin on his neck and chest is glossy with sweat.
“I bet you know all kinds of French after living in Paree,” he says. “My mammy came up to Virginia with a family from New Orleans, so I been speaking French practically since the day I was born. Je vous en prie! Je vous en prie!”
The blacksmith’s name is Sam Holywell.
When Sally Hemings starts to introduce herself, he cuts her off. “I know who you are! Everybody talking about Miz Sally this, Miz Sally that. You pretty near famous around here.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she says, rather unhappy at the news.
“Oh, no! That’s a fact!” He laughs. “You just about famous as Mr. Jefferson.”
She coughs, in part because of the dryness in her throat. “I was wondering if I might watch you work for a moment.”
“Sure,” he says. “Make yourself at home. Most likely you’ll get bored, though. Ain’t been making nothing but horseshoes the last two days.” He nods at the jumbled heap against the wall behind him, then picks up a hammer and a pair of tongs. “You best stand back, now. Sparks be flying. Wouldn’t want to spoil that beautiful coat!”
Sally Hemings takes a step back and half sits on a barrel.
The work is nothing like what she thought she saw through the door. It’s all banging and flipping and banging some more. No graceful twisting in midair. Nothing graceful at all, in fact. And so noisy she has to keep her fingers in her ears. But even so, she is amazed by how rapidly and precisely all that clangorous hammering knocks the bar into an arc and then tapers that arc into a perfect horseshoe.
After a final inspection, he flings the still-glowing shoe into a barrel of water, where it hisses and sends up bubbles of steam as it sinks to the bottom. “So that’s it,” he says. “Not much of a show.”
“I thought it was amazing,” she says. “You make it look so easy, but it must be so hard.”
He smiles shyly as he puts down his tools, and Sally Hemings decides he has a lovely mouth. “Thanks,” he says, glancing at her in the eye. “It’s not all that hard, but it sure makes a body thirsty!” He mops his forehead with the back of his arm, then dips a ladle into the same barrel where the horseshoe is still sending white bubbles to the surface. He lifts the ladle to his lips, slurps the water down, then dips the ladle in again and holds it out to Sally Hemings. “Want some?”
“Oh, no, no,” she says. “Thank you.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with it!” He smiles. “Tastes a bit from the iron. But that’s good for you. Makes you strong. Go ahead.”
She takes a sip and gags at first but manages to swallow it. “Thank you,” she says. The water is warm. It tastes like ash.
“My pleasure!” He smiles at her happily, his large, dark eyes aglint with the daylight pouring in through the open door. “You sure is a pretty woman! Hope you don’t mind me saying that!”
Sally Hemings blushes and looks at her feet. “Well, I guess I better be going. Got my own work to do.” As she moves toward the door, she smiles and says, “That was wonderful. Thank you so much.”
“Je vous en prie!” he says, with a big grin. “Je vous en prie!”
“Merci bien,” she replies, stepping sideways out the door. As she turns toward the great house, where it is time for her to wake Maria with a cup of hot chocolate, she feels a surprising pang of sorrow. Sam’s not simple, she tells herself, he’s just kind.
The next day, on her way out for her walk, she carries a tin pitcher of fresh water over to the smithy. No one answers her knock, so she leaves the pitcher on the ground. By the time she comes back, the door is open and the pitcher is gone. She knocks again, sticks her head in the door and says, “Morning, Sam!”
“That you, Miz Sally?” He glances over his shoulder as he dumps a shovelful of coal into his forge. Then he leans the shovel against the wall, wipes his hands on his apron and walks toward her.
“I just wanted to make sure you got that pitcher I left you.” She looks over his shoulder but can’t see the pitcher anywhere.
“I figured that was you!” He laughs. “I surely did! And thank you very much. Nothing wrong with my water here, but it don’t hold a candle to water straight from the well.” The pitcher is on a shelf just beside the door.
Sam is looking right at her with his big dark eyes and smiling so appreciatively that she feels another pang in her breast, but this one is warm, and it makes it hard for her to talk. “Well, all right,” she says. “Maybe I’ll come by for it later in the day, so I can bring you some more tomorrow.”
“Ah, you don’t have to do that!”
“It’s nothing.” She blushes. “See you later.”
When she stops back at the smithy on her way to have supper with her mother, Sam hands her the pitcher and tells her, “Now, you hold on a minute! Don’t you go anywhere!” He hurries over to the water barrel, rolls up his sleeve, plunges in his arm nearly up to the shoulder and pulls something out that he immediately wraps in an old rag. As he walks back toward her, he pats and rubs the rag over the object it concea
ls. “You know what this is?” He pulls back the rag and holds up what look like two horseshoes joined tip to tip so that one shoe opens to the right and the other to the left.
Sally Hemings is stumped. “A hook?”
“It’s an S!” he says proudly. “The letter S. And do you know what name starts with S?”
She laughs. “I know one name that does!”
“I bet you do!” he says. “And the other one is Sam. Sally and Sam! Thought you should have something to remember me by!”
She wants to give him a hug, but doesn’t dare. So she just shrugs her shoulders and smiles. “Thanks, Sam. That is so kind of you!” As he hands her the S, she gives his thick, hard hand a quick squeeze. “I’m truly touched.”
That night at supper, as she is telling the story of her encounters with Sam, her mother frowns smugly and starts shaking her head.
Sally Hemings cuts herself off in midsentence. “What?”
Her mother just keeps shaking her head.
“What?”
“Nothing,” says Betty. “Just don’t let yourself get all sweet on him.”
“I’m not!” Sally Hemings declares, though her face turns crimson.
“Well, that’s good. One thing I know about this life is you ain’t never gonna be happy if you let yourself want things that just can’t be.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know exactly what that means.” Betty folds her arms, tilts her head to one side and gives her daughter a hard stare. “Men gonna keep talking their sweet talk. Nothing they can do about that. That’s just the way they is. But no man with half a brain’s gonna let himself get caught plowing the master’s field—that’s one thing you can count on.” She gives her head a firm, slow shake. “And I know what I’m talking about.”
“You don’t know anything!” Sally Hemings snatches the S off the table and grips it in her lap.
“Oh, baby girl,” her mother says sadly.
“Don’t talk to me!” She leaps up from the table, knocking the chair over backward. “My life is nothing like your life!” She is at the door before she has even realized that is where she is headed, and then she is striding away from her cabin, still not knowing where she is going but thinking she might walk down the East Road.
Her mother is a spineless fool. She always talks about herself as if she is strong and wise and independent, but, in fact, she is constantly collaborating with her own enslavement. Sally Hemings is never going to let herself be like that. She is done with Thomas Jefferson. She was stupid enough to let herself be swept along by his sweet-talking, his sentimentality and his white-man’s blindness to the realities of slavery. But never again! If he comes back to her on his knees, she’s just going to turn her shoulder and say she is finished with him, and she’ll keep on saying she is finished until he finally gives up and goes away. And she knows he will go away. Because he’s not one of those men who’s led around by his little head; he’s led around by his heart. And that’s why she has a power over him. And that’s why—in this one way, at least—she is free. People may not know it now, but they will soon. They’ll see that she’s not the master’s woman. Not anymore. And then everything will be different. That’s when her real life will begin.
When she sees Sam Holywell the following morning, he smiles at her, tells her how pretty she is, but when she stands close to him, he backs away. And when she looks him straight in the eye so that he might know all the feeling that is in her heart, he looks right over her shoulder. And that is when she understands that he was only flirting with her because he wanted to feel like a big man—a man who isn’t afraid to get back at the master through his woman. The problem, of course, is that he is afraid—and knowing that, Sally Hemings loses all respect for him.
Sally Hemings is cleaning out the bottom drawer in Maria’s dresser when she finds the very same primer that Thomas Jefferson bought for her in Paris. How did it get here? Why would Maria have bothered to pack a child’s book? And why would she put it at the bottom of her dresser under all of her outgrown petticoats?
The thin volume is partially wedged under the board at the back of the drawer, and as Sally Hemings slides it out, she feels that the paper is far softer than when she was reading it with Thomas Jefferson. The pages turn without resistance and fall flat upon one another without even a whisper. There are dark stains on some of them, and next to the picture of a dog biting a man there is a child’s pencil drawing of an angry face with big teeth. Clearly this is not the primer she had in Paris but perhaps the one from which Maria learned to read, and Martha too, and possibly even their mother before them, or even Thomas Jefferson himself. She is touched that he sought out this particular book for her in Paris, but she is also excited to discover that she remembers almost all of the couplets on the first two pages.
She brings the primer back to her cabin, and that night, by the light of a pine knot burning in a tin bowl, she tries, once again, to read the title of Notes on the State of Virginia—the very volume that Martha employed in her hasty reading lesson and that she subsequently gave to Sally Hemings as a gift. Almost immediately, however, she encounters two formidable obstacles: The first is that she no longer remembers what the book’s title might be, except that one of the words is Virginia. And the second is that almost all of the letters that she will need to read the title’s first word would seem to belong to the couplets that Thomas Jefferson skipped over because they contained biblical names.
Since Jimmy and Bobby are both away with Thomas Jefferson in New York, the only person she knows who can help her read is her half brother John, whom Thomas Jefferson arranged to have tutored while they were in Paris, so that he could make sense of treatises on carpentry and joinery. John opens the primer on a table in the joinery shop where he is an apprentice and reads off the mysterious couplets one after another as easily as if he were reciting a prayer. He has Sally Hemings repeat them with him until she, too, is able to rattle them off as if she is actually reading. He also explains that some of the letters—which Sally Hemings thinks he calls “owls”—can be pronounced in many ways, and these he rehearses with her until she, too, has mastered the pronunciations of all five “owls.”
For some reason she is able to absorb John’s lessons far more easily than Thomas Jefferson’s, and as she senses this new knowledge expanding within her mind, she feels as if she is experiencing a revelation on the magnitude of Eve’s when she first bit into the apple. John tells her that Thomas Jefferson’s book is far too difficult for her and offers to give her the very first book he ever read, but she is determined that by the time Thomas Jefferson has returned from New York, she will have mastered his book.
Back in her cabin, she finds that the title’s first three letters (corresponding to Noah, Oak and Timothy) reveal their secrets to her instantly. She has more trouble with the fourth letter (corresponding to Eagle), because she thought the first word was “Note,” but now it seems to be “No-tee,” a word she has never heard of before. (It turns out that the full range of sounds designated by the “owls” did not last in her memory the length of time it took to walk from the joinery to her cabin.) The final letter (one she knows very well) solves the problem. The word is “Notice,” though she thinks it strange that it should be spelled as if it is pronounced “No-teese.” The next word is easy: “own”—though she is not sure how that word might connect to “notice,” a secret she hopes will be revealed by the following word. That word, however, utterly flummoxes her. She can think of no way the sounds for Timothy, Hat and Eagle might be combined into a word. The same is true for the next word: “Staa-tee”—what on earth is that? She thinks she understands the following word—“oaf”—but when she adds all the words together—“Notice own ??? Staa-tee oaf”—she sounds like a madwoman muttering on a Paris street. So now she experiences a new revelation on the magnitude of Eve’s: that she is utterly stupid, that reading is much t
oo hard for her and unimaginably boring.
She wants to tear Thomas Jefferson’s book into tiny pieces, but instead she flings it into the hidey-hole under her bed, flings the primer after it and covers the hole with the trunk containing all of her fine clothing from France.
Heaps of creamy clouds fill the sky from horizon to horizon, hazy sunbeams fanning diagonally between them. It is September, the season of goldenrod and fat cattle, of orange dust, balmy afternoons and faintly tarnished skies; a time when the orioles and bobolinks are gone and the cries of the jays and crows grow louder.
Thomas Jefferson has been in New York for six months, serving as secretary of state, and the first Sally Hemings knows of his return is when she sees Goliah carrying a pair of scuffed and mud-splattered riding boots down to the stable to be cleaned and polished.
A little later she is hanging her own wet gowns and shifts on the line in front of the kitchen and hears the clatters and clinks of china and silverware coming from a porch that looks down onto the yard.
She turns her back to the porch and sings as she works, softly, her voice hardly more than a vibration between palate and tongue. Once the last shift has been pegged to the line and is shedding droplets into the red dust, she puts her basket against her hip and turns toward the kitchen door.
There is a darkness overhead.
“Good afternoon, Sally,” Thomas Jefferson calls out heartily. He is resting his elbows on the porch railing, and their faces are not more than three yards apart.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Jefferson.” Her voice is flat, merely polite. She circles the basket with both arms and pulls it tighter against her pelvis.
He seems to be waiting.
“Welcome home,” she says.
“It’s good to be home.” He smiles broadly, looking directly into her eyes.
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Page 27
