Sally Hemings Read online

  She took one of his hands in hers, and with the other she pressed his face into the folds of her dress. It was the first and last time Nathan Langdon would experience such a feeling of pure happiness. Sally Hemings’ blunder, as offhand and unconscious as it was, awoke in Langdon an unbearable jealousy of a dead man.

  “I begin to be jealous.”

  “Of a dead man?”

  “Jefferson lives. Didn’t you know that? That is the chorus of a new patriotic song.”

  “He lives for me.”

  “How do you think Langdon got so well into the good graces of Mama, knowing how particular she is?”

  “I don’t know how he did it, Mad, but he’s here and it don’t look like he’s going to budge any time soon.”

  Eston hoped Madison was not going to make a scene. His mother was happy.

  “What I don’t understand, Eston, is why the hell he comes up here all the time. What does he stand to gain? We ain’t got nothing worth stealing! Or do we?”

  “Our mama!” Eston laughed.

  “Eston!” Madison was shocked.

  “Oh Mad, I didn’t mean he would try anything! And I don’t think he’s out to get anything. I just mean she’s fond of him. I think she’s kind of taken him under her wing, like … like a son. . . .”

  Eston wished that last word had not come out of his mouth.

  “A son!” exploded Madison. “She’s GOT two white sons who haven’t even seen fit to let us know if they’re living or dead! That’s not two white sons too many?”

  “I think Mama knows where they are, and how they are. She just doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, Nathan Langdon is hardly some poor ex-darky, passing for white, that Mama has to protect, you know. He’s Tidewater, and even if his family ain’t rich anymore, they still got their place in society. . . . What’s he doing up here? He’s got a fiancée; he’s passed his law examinations; and he has started out on his own. And you saying he needs our mama for a friend? That he can’t do without Sally Hemings? He’s picked up some strange ideas up North!”

  “I know it’s strange, Mad, but I really think he can’t do without her.”

  “Eston, sometimes you haven’t got the common sense of a jackrabbit. He’s using Mama. Nathan Langdon is eaten up with curiosity about Thomas Jefferson, that’s all. It’s fascination with our father, not with Sally Hemings!”

  “He also has political ambitions, Mad. He wouldn’t risk any kind of compromise over Mama.”

  “Wouldn’t he now? You know his visits up here don’t go unremarked.”

  “Nobody’s crying scandal.”

  “Not yet. Because nobody knows, Eston, how damn often he comes up here!”

  Madison held the pale eyes of his brother.

  “You know it ain’t right, Eston.”

  Madison was right, thought Eston. Besides, there was something of the master that he resented in Langdon, despite his genuine affection for him. They had had many long conversations together, but he despised Langdon’s proprietary air with his mother. His presumed intimacy.

  “All I know, Mad, is that she is happier seeing him than not. There’s probably no harm in it.”

  “That still don’t make it right. Don’t make it correct. If Mama was white, Eston, there’d be a lot of tongues wagging about a widow and a young engaged gentleman!”

  “But she ain’t white, Madison. And neither are we. We can’t stop him.”

  Eston stared at Madison. Twenty-one years later, at the age of forty-four, Eston would indeed be what he was not. He, and his family consisting of a wife and three children, would cross the color line from black to white and take the name of his natural father, becoming Eston H. Jefferson.

  The two men eyed each other. They would give anything never to see Nathan Langdon again, but they didn’t dare say such a thing in front of their mother. Whatever she chose to do was correct in their eyes. Neither would acknowledge that there was a double standard for black women and white men. Madison turned to look out the window and saw the small resolute figure of his mother approaching the house through the peach orchard. A flash of tenderness and pity made Madison shift his gaze back to his brother.

  “Nathan Langdon, you are not as cynical and complicated as you like to appear.”

  “Do I like to appear complicated? Am I complicated?”

  “No, but this … situation is complicated, and unhealthy. You should be spending your time with young people, not—”

  “A historical monument?”

  “Whose?”

  “His!”

  “What?”

  “No, yours. Your monument to yourself. We must erect it with your life as you have lived it … and write about it. He has enough monuments. It’s yours I’m concerned with.”

  “I need no monument.”

  “Let me decide that.”

  It was the seriousness in his voice, not the arrogance, that turned Sally Hemings’ eyes on him. His tone had been sharp, as if she had caused him pain.

  “I would allow you to decide everything, Nathan, if it were possible. If I could,” she said softly.

  “I could, if I knew you. If I didn’t come knocking at your door each time and find a stranger. A new stranger, not even the old one. You change like a chameleon.”

  “It’s not I who change, but you. You come each time expecting an answer. And there isn’t one.”

  “I expect to find the answer to Sally Hemings.”

  “My answer to that is that you have the answer to me. You know me better than anyone ever has, Nathan. It’s just that you expect too much. You expect explanations I can’t give. The only thing I can give is that knowledge of myself you already possess. It is my gift to you for all the happiness you’ve brought me.”

  “Happiness?…”

  “I have as much affection for you as for my own sons.”

  “Yet you’ve never told your sons your—their—history?”

  “I’ve never told them for a reason—that reason is that they are safer without it, Nathan.”

  “And I’m in danger?”

  “You are white, Nathan. That puts you mostly out of danger. But you would be, if you try to use the knowledge I’ve given you. You are in danger if it has changed you.”

  “Of course it has changed me. You have changed me.”

  “I know. That’s what makes me sad.”

  “The change is for the better.”

  “Change is hardly ever for the better, I’ve learned. I want you to be happy.”

  “Not at your expense.”

  “Love is always at another’s expense.”

  “Love is doing something for that person. Changing things.”

  “But there is nothing you can do for me. You can’t change the past.”

  “I can change myself.”

  “But don’t you see; that’s the danger. You change yourself, and first thing you want is to change me, then those around you—your family, your life, the South, everything. There is danger when you contradict your roots, what is considered ‘right,’ what is accepted.”

  “I said you were a dangerous lady, and you laughed,” Langdon said.

  “I just don’t want to see you hurt. Not by others and not by me. All these months, there have been remarks about us.”

  “I know that.”

  “And there are Eston and Madison to consider.”

  Langdon suddenly sensed Sally Hemings slipping out of his grasp. Several times in the past he had had this sensation of panic.

  “Damn Eston and Madison!” he said. “What about you? What do you want?”

  “I’ve never had what I wanted, Nathan. Never.”

  “Why?” he asked, like a stubborn child.

  “Because…”

  Sally Hemings did not continue, and she smiled at this childish exchange. There was something naive and touching about Nathan. Some basic innocence white men seemed to take in, she would have said, “With their mother’s milk,” had it not been for the
fact that that “milk” had been black. There were times she believed that white skin was just a protective covering—nothing ever really seemed to penetrate it.

  “This time you will,” Nathan said.

  The violent temper Sally Hemings had striven all her life to conceal flashed to the surface; she suddenly wanted to slap his face hard, to bury herself in his chest, and scream curses at him.

  “No, I won’t,” she answered vehemently. She wanted to hurt him. “It will end, Nathan … and I shall miss you.”

  “There is no reason on earth why it should end.”

  There was every reason on earth, she thought.

  “Let’s not talk about it,” she said.

  They both looked away at this. To put the possibility of an ending in words was tempting fate with their fragile happiness. The same fate that had brought the lonely woman and the lonely young man together in the first place. Langdon knew he must break the tension.

  “Besides,” he said lightly, “if I stopped coming to see you, where would you get your weekly gossip and slander? Madison has no imagination, and Eston has no malice.”

  They both smiled at this. Eston’s good nature and Madison’s bad temper had become a private joke between them. Nathan Langdon felt a rush of affection: everything was all right again.

  He smiled and rose.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I must. I only stopped for a minute.” He looked at his watch. “I am going to miss the post.”

  “Oh, Nathan, I’ve kept you again.”

  “No,” he said sharply. “I wanted to come. I hadn’t seen you in more than a week. But I haven’t had any time since this new lawsuit started.”

  “How is it progressing?”

  “Badly. I’m up against one of the slickest, most outrageous liars I’ve ever had the misfortune to represent. He changes his story every day. At least I can say that the adversary is consistent—consistently lying. . . .”

  “Nathan, how are you supposed to defend someone who lies?”

  “It can be done. Liars can be defended brilliantly and honest men can be destroyed. You should know that—you’ve seen many an honest man lose … especially in politics.”

  “Promise me.” Sally Hemings suddenly reached out and touched Nathan’s sleeve. A flicker of memory, like a grain of sand, made her blink.

  “Yes?” he said, his voice low.

  “Promise me you’ll bring the latest ending to the Randolph saga of the ‘look-alike chickens coming home to roost’!”

  The young man burst into laughter. Then he said softly, “I promise.”

  “No excuses. …”

  “Please, Ma’am, am I the kind of gentleman who would bring excuses when I could bring mayhem and scandal? By the way, the latest Andrew Jackson joke is that when he puts on his reading spectacles, he turns out all the lights!”

  With that he was already out the door. She watched him descend the steep pathway to where his horse waited, waited until she could see him no more.

  CHAPTER 7

  ALBEMARLE COUNTY, AUGUST 1831

  The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.—But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one’s mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution.

  THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1790

  THE SUMMER was passing and Sally Hemings’ thoughts were enclosed in a soft, weary happiness. Slowly, out of an almost invisible but very deep wound, in an unceasing stream, thoughts and feelings welled up and spilled out. She felt herself floating, felt an odd excitement in answering Nathan Langdon’s questions, and even while speaking was divided between pleasure and torment. She had lived a life; she was startled to perceive that life. As if it had been kept in a long underground passage which ascended now and again into the midst of tremendous events called History. History, which had left her alone in a vast, unfamiliar, unwanted wasteland.

  Furtively, she looked across at Nathan Langdon. He really was quite an ordinary man, yet it was only with him that she felt this new sense of her existence. Had he given her that, or had she taken it herself? It was so hard to know.

  “What are you thinking?” he said from the shadows.

  “My own thoughts,” she answered.

  Nathan sensed a resistance, even an irritation. He knew the mood. Since summer he had treaded softly with Sally Hemings. He remained silent and let the moment pass. There would be other moments, a long series of moments in which to unravel the mystery of Sally Hemings. He would bide his time.

  Nathan Langdon sighed in the stillness. It was an afternoon like many he had spent with this ex-slave. He felt himself sliding deeper and deeper into compromise with his race and his class and less and less inclined to shake himself out of a numbing lethargy, an insidious guilt that kept him peering into the faces of his slaves, his servants, his mother, his brothers, his fiancée. For what? He didn’t know. He really didn’t know anymore why he had returned to Charlottesville. He had certainly begun to question his earthly destiny. When Esmeralda and his mother had begged him to come, it had been with relief that he had returned South to take up the responsibilities of his family. He had made little headway in Boston. The possibility of success in the North for a Southerner, without means or influential friends, was dubious. He also knew that he was wanting in the bitter, energetic ambitions of most of his Northern schoolmates, but he had blamed this on his “Southernness.” Yet his luck had been no better here in Charlottesville, where he could hardly call himself a stranger. He found it difficult to slip back into “Virginian” ways. He had acquired sharper edges in the North. At least he liked to think so. The coying slickness of Southern manners now stuck in his gullet. The only thing he had accomplished in the past year had been his job as census taker. That had ended now, he thought, and he hadn’t succeeded in extending his connections or his business. He had tried to form a partnership which had not worked out well. His clerkship with Judge Miner was over and he had not been invited to stay on. He had always had a desire for public life; to shape national conduct seemed to him the highest form of achievement, he mused, but he had no money and what influence there was had to be shared with his two brothers, who also had political ambitions. There was little that was public in his solitary room, or his solitary office, or his solitary visits to Sally Hemings. He didn’t think consciously of his unhappiness, or of what Sally Hemings might have to do with it. If he had, he might have prevented what happened that peaceful August afternoon.

  It was several days after the much-awaited eclipse of the sun.

  It was the same August 31,1831, that the slave Nat Turner, property of Putnam Moore and born the property of Benjamin Turner, and his aide-de-camp, the slave Will Francis, born the property of Nathaniel Francis, were, with a small army of sixty or seventy men and one woman, all born slaves, sweeping through the County of Southampton, Virginia, and in two days and one night, murdering every white man, woman, and child that had crossed their path, systematically burning everything as they killed. Fifty-five men, women, and children would perish this day because of the one favor of God they held highest and in common: being white. Turner’s goal was the arsenal in Richmond where, he, hoping to have gathered around him an army of hundreds of runaway slaves, had planned to organize an uprising of all the slaves of Virginia, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. He would fail.

  “If your brother doesn’t want it, why don’t you take on the case, Nathan?”

  Langdon shifted nervously in his chair. He hadn’t come to see Sally Hemings today to be challenged. Confronted with a difficult decision. One that basically went against his grain. The Hemingses were one thing. Mulattoes were another.

  “He didn’t say he didn’t want it. He said it couldn’t be won in a Virginia court of
law.”

  “I know the atmosphere, with all these new laws, is tense, Nathan, but perhaps you …”

  Who did she think he was, thought Langdon, Thomas Jefferson?

  “The case, as I said, is un-winnable. It will be one of those trials that is decided even before it begins.”

  “As are all trials concerning mulattoes in Virginia,” said Sally Hemings. She had almost forgotten. If Virginia courts condoned murder, they wouldn’t blink an eye at fraud.

  “Yes, most.”

  “And you can’t help him?”

  “I would, if I could.”

  “Jefferson once tried to defend a mulatto when he was young. . . .”

  “And he lost.” Nathan Langdon said this not without pleasure.

  “He lost, to be sure, but he tried.” Sally Hemings was trembling. She rarely asked for anything. She hadn’t realized how difficult it was. “It took courage at the time,” she said, and looked intently at Langdon. It had been the wrong thing to say.

  “Courage or foolhardiness? You must know that with the situation as it is now, any mulatto who sets foot in a court is going to lose just for having the temerity to do so.”

  Sally Hemings was still looking at Nathan Langdon. There was something in her gaze that profoundly irritated Langdon. Something childish and stubborn. Or was it only his anger and terror at being compared with the great Jefferson, the constant references to him as if he were a touchstone, a holy relic? …

  “But this case is different, Nathan. This man was never a slave. He was freeborn to begin with. You see, Master … Jefferson’s case was one of a slave who sued for freedom on the grounds that his mother was white, and a child by Virginia law inherits the condition of his mother. But this man was born free because his mother was freed before he was born and left the state. His father recognized him in court in Philadelphia, and he should have the same rights as any citizen of the United States, being born outside Virginia, to inherit property. In this instance, his property is his own slave kin! Brothers and sisters and uncles!”