Yesterday Edy Fossett told her that an article about her and Thomas Jefferson had appeared in a Federalist newspaper—but Edy had only heard tell of the article, not read it herself. When Sally Hemings asked what it had actually said, Edy replied, “Just silliness and balderdash! I don’t know why people trouble themselves with those rags!”
Mrs. Mickel glances at her as she stands by the door but doesn’t meet her eye. There are two other people in the store—a white woman and her grown daughter—and Mrs. Mickel is explaining to them that she is all out of baleen and won’t have any more until the week after next, but if Miss Clark—the daughter—is in a hurry, the wooden stays are almost as good. There follows a long conversation comparing the virtues of various types of stays, during which Sally Hemings keeps a few steps to the rear, waiting her turn, grateful for the opportunity to calm her hammering heart. She doesn’t know what she will do when she finally has to leave—except that she won’t go back to the stage office along Main Street, but maybe along Market and Little Commerce, although that would take her considerably out of her way.
Sally Hemings has been coming to this store for close to thirteen years, ever since she got back from Paris. Mrs. Mickel used to love it whenever she brought in Martha’s or Maria’s French gowns for copying or repair, and she could talk for hours about the quality of their materials and the fineness of the design and the stitching. Even those beautiful dresses became old-fashioned, however, and Mrs. Mickel was close to tears the day Maria asked to have one of Martha’s passed-down Parisian gowns altered so that it might look more stylish. Ever since Maria’s marriage, however, Sally Hemings has mostly come into the shop on her own business. She and Mrs. Mickel have that placid affection that arises between shopkeeper and customer over years of counter-side chitchat, and of learning bits and pieces of each other’s life, and of watching each other age. It is clear Mrs. Mickel thinks Sally Hemings a kindred spirit.
Miss Clark and her mother simply cannot decide whether to settle for the wood stays or hold out for the baleen and hope the latter come in on time. Sally Hemings keeps waiting for Mrs. Mickel to cast her a surreptitious eye-rolling glance, but no such glance is forthcoming.
At last the women reach a decision: They will have the dress made now and perhaps substitute baleen stays for the wood at a later date. Mrs. Mickel tells them she has just exactly the material they will want for the bodice and skirt, and then she calls for Nora, her Irish servant, to bring out the new shipment of silk.
Nora does as instructed, and while Miss Clark and her mother consider the skeins of evergreen, midnight blue and burgundy silk, Mrs. Mickel retreats to the back room with Nora for a couple of minutes. When she returns, she continues to ignore Sally Hemings, even though her two other customers have little need of her attention.
After a couple of minutes, Nora also emerges from the back room and indicates to Sally Hemings with a lateral glance and a hook motion of her hand that she should go out the front door and meet her in the alley.
Nora is only twelve, and as she speaks, she keeps her eyes on the ground. “Mrs. Mickel told me to tell you,” she says, “that she is sorry, but she will no longer be able to serve you in her store.” After a moment of silence, the girl looks up with her almost-Oriental, coffee-brown eyes. “I’m sure she doesn’t mean it,” she says. A nervous smile flashes across her face, and then a wince of sorrow and shame.
Sally Hemings’s only response to the message is to ask whether Nora thinks it would be possible to make her way to Market Street via mewses and alleys.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know, miss,” says the girl, and Sally Hemings decides to give it a try.
There is nothing in her head. Nothing in her heart. She walks because she has nothing to do. Sometimes she turns in a circle, like a leaf in a breeze, watching a sky full of clouds swirl around her head. Sometimes the yellow fields, buzzing with cicadas, seem to rise and fall as she breathes. We pity her. She thinks her fancies are her real, true life. She thinks she is free. We know that nothing good is ever given, only taken. We know that a master’s promises are equal to a snake’s hiss. We know that forgiveness is surrender and that the road to freedom runs through hate.
It is normal for Thomas Jefferson to have up to twenty visitors a day when he is at Monticello, but ever since the publication of Callender’s articles, his visitors have numbered fifty or more, with many of them not actually wanting formal audiences but only to spot “the African Venus” and “Tom,” her supposed child. Every time Sally Hemings steps out of her cabin or the great house, she sees at least one person looking at her, sometimes two or three and, once, a small crowd. So far no one has actually approached or called out to her, but often people point or whisper into one another’s ear, and she worries that it is only a matter of time before she is accosted once more, as she was in Charlottesville, or that something worse will happen to her or her children.
When there is no letup in the number of visitors after a week, Thomas Jefferson decides to send Sally Hemings to Poplar Forest, the most distant of his plantations, eighty-three miles southwest of Monticello. He tells her that she will be “more comfortable” there while the scandal is still raging. Not only do very few people know that he owns the property, it is practically on the frontier. Nobody there has much interest in Federalist newspapers, or in any other form of printed matter, so she is far less likely to be troubled by curiosity seekers.
She leaves the following morning, as soon as there is enough light for Tom Shackelford to see the road. In her arms she holds sixteen-month-old Harriet. And seated at her side is nine-year-old Evelina, Harriet’s “nurse.” Beverly has stayed behind with his grandmother. The journey takes three days. They spend the first night lying on a tarpaulin underneath the carriage and the second in the servants’ quarters behind Flood’s tavern in Appomattox. They arrive at Poplar Forest just before sundown, and Tom Shackelford heads back to Monticello before the sun has risen the following morning.
There is no great house at Poplar Forest, only the former steward’s cottage, built half a century earlier by Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law when the plantation was an acre of stumps in an interminable forest at the edge of the known world. The present steward, Mr. Chambliss, built himself a brick house on a small rise, from which he can survey most of the plantation, and so the original house, unoccupied eleven or more months out of the year, is neglected and moldering. Its roof leaks, and many of its clapboards, especially on the southern side, are paintless and weathered gray. Thomas Jefferson recently had the inside painted teal, sage green and liver pink, but the furnishings are all boxy and rough-hewn—built by farmers rather than a joiner. The whole house smells of termites and mice, and the sheets on the beds feel moist against the skin and have the acrid tang of mildew.
There are no servants living in the house, but Mr. Chambliss sends his cook, Mag, in the mornings to make dinner, portions of which Sally Hemings saves for that night’s supper and the following morning’s breakfast. Every couple of days, Jemma comes to dust and otherwise make sure the house is, as she puts it, “in fine shape for Mr. Jefferson”—which phrase is only one of the many ways by which she expresses her resentment at having to serve Sally Hemings and her daughter (though not Evelina) as if they were white. Mag feels the same way, as do all of the other Negroes with whom Sally Hemings comes into contact at Poplar Forest. The worst are the field laborers, who never speak to her when she encounters them on her walks but only cast her sullen gazes and seem to be awaiting with a preternatural patience for the first opportunity to take revenge upon her for her privilege. She is lonely most of the day and frightened all of the night. Every creak and thump in the darkness sends her bolt upright in bed, her whole body trilling with the cold electricity of fear.
She has met Mr. Chambliss several times at Monticello, where he struck her merely as bland and unintelligent, and embarrassingly deferential to Thomas Jefferson. Here, however, he is not the
least bit deferential, but self-possessed to the point of being imperious. His every motion seems calculated, and his expressions emerge only gradually on his face, as if they are rising from primordial depths. He smiles a lot, but with his eyes averted, and he seems always to be in the process of executing some secret plan that he believes is going exceptionally well. He is unfailingly polite in a superficial sense—he even addresses her as “Mrs.” Hemings—but every now and then she catches him looking at her, and she can see in his eyes not only that he has mentally removed every stitch of clothing from her body but that he wants her to know he is relishing everything he sees.
The servants and laborers never meet his eye when he gives orders but listen with their heads bent and don’t even glance at his back when he walks away. They do exchange weighty glances with one another, however, and they sometimes lift their eyes to Sally Hemings. Then they just do what they were told.
On their second day at Poplar Forest, when she and the children take a shortcut behind the barns on their way to a duck pond, she spots a post with a rope lashed around it just about as high as a man might reach, with the two lengths of the rope dangling down about a yard on one side of the post. They are twisted and kinked in a way that indicates they have been knotted many times. The lower half of the post is stained a brownish black with what can only be blood. As soon as she understands what, in fact, this post is, she picks up toddling Harriet and grabs Evelina by the hand. “Where are we going?” the older girl says in surprise. “I forgot something,” says Sally Hemings. “We have to go back. I have to get something.” Once they are all in the house, she slams and locks the door and tells Evelina that she is too tired to go to the pond. Maybe they will go another day.
She walks. We watch her from the fields, our hands salty, yellowed and stinging from tobacco leaves. We watch her as we swing picks along the road. She walks because she has nothing to do. She holds down her straw hat against the wind, so that she might preserve her precious whiteness. Her step is light. She sings. She is a bauble. She believes that she lives outside the world created by the cowskin, but nothing she believes is true.
In this world—our world—everything is simple. The cowskin is our Devil. The cowskin uses our fear to teach us helplessness. The cowskin uses our rage to teach us silence. It eats our souls as it eats our flesh. It blends our sweat with our tears and causes our blood to run in rivers. And yet it gives us a justice unknown to the white man. It teaches us that in a world of evil, the evil in our hearts is innocence. It tells us that we are angels because we live in hell. We are beatified by pain. We are beatified by hate. Hate is our hope. Even as our lives drip into the dust, we have entered the Promised Land.
It astounds Sally Hemings that Thomas Jefferson could ever imagine that she might be “more comfortable” under the sway of Mr. Chambliss. Sometimes she thinks this just another instance of how incompletely he comprehends the facts of his own existence. He cannot find his spectacles even when they are resting on top of his own head. He can pick up a cup of coffee that has sat on his desk for an hour or more and be genuinely perplexed that it is cold. It has often seemed to her that Thomas Jefferson’s brain is so labyrinthine that ordinary human understanding simply gets lost in it.
Yet with every day she spends at Poplar Forest, she asks herself more frequently if the comfort he was talking about was not hers at all but only his own.
As soon as she returned from her awful trip to Charlottesville, she asked Thomas Jefferson to show her the newspaper articles about him and her. “They’re just a lot of nonsense,” he told her. “There’s no need to trouble yourself over them.”
“Don’t I have a right to see what’s been said about me?”
His lips crumpled dubiously. “Really. There’s no need.”
“You’ve read them,” she said. “So why shouldn’t I?”
For a moment he seemed about to argue. Then he just shrugged and pulled a thick handful of newspapers from a drawer in his desk. “You can burn these when you’re done with them,” he said. “Better yet, tear them up and put them in the privies.”
From the newspapers she learned all the nasty and absurd things that had been said about her (among which was a cruel poem by John Quincy Adams, who, like his father had been so kind to her when she was in London), but she also learned that people were saying much more cruel things about Thomas Jefferson. He was being called a disgrace to the nation, an offense to public decency and a traitor to his race; people said that he should be impeached, tarred and feathered, driven out of Washington or locked in the madhouse at Williamsburg.
“I’m sorry to have caused you so much trouble,” she said, flinging the last of the newspapers onto the table. When he only met her words with the buckled brows of incomprehension, she added in a more neutral voice, “How are you going to deal with all this?”
He puffed his lips disdainfully. “It’s nothing. It will pass.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. It was impossible for her to believe that such threats—and the outrage that inspired them—would not cause him considerable political damage, to the point where he might have to retire from the presidency. The outrage in some of the editorials and letters was so ferocious that she could imagine one of his enraged critics challenging him to a duel, or even just shooting him in the street. He had already received death threats, after all, and even had to travel around Washington with an armed guard for a whole week the previous April. Why should Callender’s articles not inspire more of such murderous intentions?
“I’m not going to worry until I have reason.” He smiled wryly and flicked his hand as if chasing away a fly. But then he became thoughtful. “We shall see what transpires.”
The next day he told her about his plan to make her “more comfortable.” He also told her that he, too, needed “a little peace and relaxation” before returning to Washington and so would be joining her after five days.
The prospect of soon having Thomas Jefferson at her side has been her one consolation during all her loneliness and anxiety at Poplar Forest. She waits for him in happy agitation the whole of the fifth day. But by nightfall he still hasn’t arrived, nor does he arrive the next day or the one after, and he sends her no word of explanation. As time passes, she finds herself increasingly defenseless against her worst fantasies: that Thomas Jefferson sent her to this foul and frightening place not just to hide her away but to get rid of her once and for all; or that Mr. Chambliss has already received instructions to set her to work in the field, where she, too, might become stooped and glowering and possessed of only one hope: revenge; or that Thomas Jefferson simply told Mr. Chambliss to sell her to whoever would be willing to pay for her; or that he should feel free to use her however he pleases.
Such grim possibilities come to her at all hours of the day, but she is generally able to quell them by devoting herself to little Harriet or by reading (she brought half a dozen books with her from Monticello, including Locke’s Conduct of the Mind and a translation of Fénelon’s Adventures of Telemachus). But in the night her fantasies arrive as implacable certainty, and she waits, sweat-glossed and with a pounding heart, for the door to fly open and for Mr. Chambliss to drag her screaming down the stairs and shackle her into the back of a wagon that will take her away from everything she loves and all that she has ever known.
Of all the damsels on the green,
On mountain, or in valley,
A lass so luscious ne’er was seen,
As Monticellian Sally.
Yankee Doodle, who’s the noodle?
What wife were half so handy?
To breed a flock of slaves for stock,
A blackamoor’s the dandy.
—John Quincy Adams
She dances on a dust cloud, believing herself outside the evil. We pity her. She whirls, hand atop her head, believing she escapes black by being white and white by being black. But there is no escape, and nothing ou
tside the evil. Not one thing. The white people know this—the real white people—but they know it only in secret. They know it in their nightmares and in their never-ending fear. They know it in their belief that all men are born evil and that only the cowskin makes them good. And the gun. And the jail cell. They know it in the cowskin’s bitter whistle and in the snap of splitting flesh. And they know it most of all in their churches, where love-your-enemy incinerates in hellfire.
It is the fourth day after the one on which Thomas Jefferson promised to arrive, and Sally Hemings is alone among trees. Sunbeams angle between slender branches and long trunks, and the air is cool and still where she walks—though from time to time there is a seething in the treetops. This is good, she tells herself. This is helping. Being immersed in the beautiful and the familiar is giving her a measure of hope. And strength.
She has been walking for half an hour and will walk an hour more. She left the house in a frenzy of anger and shame, afraid of how close she had come to doing something horrific.
Harriet had awakened, crying plaintively, every ten minutes all night. She would suckle herself back to sleep but would continue to twitch and grimace and groan, until finally her crying would start all over again. Her clout had to be changed three times during the night. The first time Sally Hemings got Evelina to do it, but after midnight it was more trouble to wake the girl than to change the clouts herself. It was only just before dawn that Harriet finally sank into a sound sleep, but by that time Sally Hemings was hot-eyed, with humming nerves and an endless stream of ghastly and sordid realizations flooding her mind.
Harriet slept later than usual but was awake by eight, and thereafter the day was the same as the night: She would suckle without being satisfied and refused to swallow even a mouthful of solid food. Over and over she would fill her clout with watery muck, which, more often than not, would leak onto the floor or the bed or wherever she happened to be sitting or lying, including, one time, Sally Hemings’s lap. Angry red pimples came up on the delicate folds between her legs—but she only shrieked when her mother tried to salve them with melted butter.
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Page 46
