Sally Hemings Read online

  “He is still legally a mulatto, therefore he cannot testify against his white cousins in the case. It is no longer a question of slavery but that of a black man testifying against a white man.”

  Sally Hemings was silent. Nathan Langdon felt the gall rise in his throat. Women. She still wanted a hero. The heroic age was over. Didn’t she know that? Ended with James Madison. This was the age of mediocrity, small-mindedness, caution, calculation, money-grubbing. The age of the common man. An age that deserved what it got: Jackson, not Jefferson. Then he heard her say:

  “Think if it were Madison or Eston.”

  “It could never be Madison or Eston.”

  “Why not?”

  “Madison and Eston,” Langdon said very deliberately, “are white. I made them white. Legally. They can testify against anybody on earth.”

  “White?”

  “In the census. I listed them and you as white.”

  There was a stunned silence. Outside, only the sounds summer makes. “It takes more than a census taker to turn black into white.” Her voice had an ominous quality to it: a sudden chill that should have warned him.

  “After all, by Thomas Jefferson’s definition, you are white.”

  “By Thomas Jefferson’s life, I’m a slave.”

  “Think how much easier it is for you now, staying in Virginia with all that’s going on … not to have that sword of expulsion hanging over your head! I … decided.”

  “You decided.” He couldn’t tell whether she was going to laugh or scream. “You decided! For fifty-four years I’ve been Thomas Jefferson’s creature, and now … now you decide it’s time for me to be yours. Yours!” She began to laugh. “It’s Judgment Day! Instead of being black and a slave, I’m now free and white.”

  Her eyes showed something of that lurid yellow that had frightened him on his first visit.

  If he had been a good lawyer, or even a competent one, Langdon would at this point before it was too late have laughed and tried to turn the whole thing into a joke. Or he would have lied by saying she had completely misunderstood. But Nathan Langdon was not a good lawyer. He blundered on, insisting, explaining. Perspiration was forming on his high forehead. There were undertones, nuances, secrets he hadn’t calculated and that he had no way of gauging.

  Her laughter had shattered what composure he had left. Instead of reading her face, in which was reflected shock, disbelief, horror, as well as a plea for rectification, he went on pleading his already lost cause, repeating himself with a kind of childish despair. Surely she knew he had meant well. That he had done it for her!

  The shrillness of her laughter had given it a loud, raucous, almost drunken quality. Then suddenly it stopped.

  “Why did you have to tell me? Why couldn’t you have kept quiet? What did you think you were doing—playing God?”

  “I did it for you and your sons.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Nathan. You didn’t do it for me. You didn’t even know me. You did it for him. To make him not guilty. To shield him … so that he wouldn’t have a slave wife!”

  Her eyes had turned darker. A strand of black hair had escaped from its knot. He wanted to go down on his knees and hide himself in the folds of that skirt again. Surely, it was going to be all right. Surely, he wasn’t going to lose her over this.

  “Forgive me, I didn’t realize …”

  “Forgive you because you didn’t realize … That’s what black folks are here for. To forgive white folks because they didn’t realize. Forgive me. Forgive me. My father said it. My lover said it. My white sons will say it. Yes, I forgive you. All of you, and your insufferable arrogance. But I never want to see you again.”

  “Please…”

  “You are not welcome here anymore.”

  “I beg you…”

  “If you come back, Nathan, I’ll have Madison throw you out.” She went on before he could cut in again. “I’m tired, Nathan. I’m tired of white men playing God with my flesh and my spirit and my children and my life, which is running out. I thought you understood that. You’ve left me nothing of my own. Not even my color! I’ve been asked to give, and give, and give, and now I can’t give any more. I can’t forgive another man, Nathan. I’m sorry.”

  He had made one of those blunders of enormous consequence that only a fool or the very young makes. One that afterward plays again and again in the mind like a set piece in a game of chess long after the match has been lost. It would seem to him incredible, later, that such a small miscalculation, flung so nonchalantly on the board, would have cost the game.

  “Oh, God.” He groaned. “Tell me what to do. I’ll do anything. Pay any price.”

  “That’s what all white men say.” There was dullness and pity and contempt in her voice. “You are just like all the rest. You haven’t understood anything of what I’ve told you all these months. You still think I exist by your leave. You always will.”

  The bitterness shocked him. She meant what she said. He had not understood.

  “Please, I love you.”

  “That’s what all men say. That’s what he said. That’s what he said!”

  Suddenly, there was no Sally Hemings. No Nathan Langdon. There was only unfathomable, uncontrolled black rage. A rage that went far beyond the terrified young man who skimmed and rocked on its surface like a storm-tossed skiff.

  Sally Hemings rose like some outraged goddess in her sanctuary, now defiled. Like pure crystal light, her rage, he felt, could maim or kill at will. There was something diabolical and possessed in the scream that echoed after Nathan Langdon as he fled from her.

  That sound would remain for him one of the bitterest and cruelest memories of his life.

  For a long time, Sally Hemings stared at the receding figure of Nathan Langdon. Then her head snapped back. There was a pressure in her head that seemed to push her neck forward and made her want to lower it.

  When she looked down, there were spots of blood on her apron. Blood. Her nose was bleeding. She lifted the white apron and buried her face in it. Blindly she whirled and entered the darkness. She let her apron drop.

  She owned nothing, except the past. And now, even that had been taken from her. She had been raped of the only thing a slave possessed: her mind, her thoughts, her feelings, her history. Among all the decisions of her life, she realized, not one was ever meant for herself.

  Sally Hemings was trembling. She went to her dark-green chest. This moment she knew had been coming ever since that April day the census taker had arrived at her door, interrupting her solitude, disturbing her memories, changing her color. She took out a small linen portfolio, opened it, and stared at the yellowing, unframed sheet within. It was a pencil drawing, a portrait of her as a girl in Paris. She had never shown this drawing to anyone—not to her sons, not to Nathan Langdon, not to Thomas Jefferson. She had never reasoned why. Except that somehow, on this small scrap of paper, John Trumbull seemed to have captured something that made her see herself for the first time. This one was the sole image of herself that belonged only to her.

  For a long time she studied the delicate lines on the aging paper. Had she ever been this young? Could she ever believe, invisible as she was, betrayed, and drowning in this sea of loneliness, the generations passed from her, that she had loved? … Had loved the enemy. . . .

  She turned and strode to the fire. Sacrifice. For one instant of pain, she hesitated, and then she threw her image into the fire. Blood. A blood sacrifice.

  For one moment her eyes went to the small bundle of cloth and clay on the mantle. What more did the gods want? She strode again to the chest and stared down at the yellowing diaries.

  “In order to burn them I would have to forget you.”

  There was a slight smile on her lips as she began to burn paper. She burned through the afternoon. The last to go were her diaries. As she knelt, tearing the pages one by one, her eyes shone like a cat’s in the light of the fire, her face was streaked with tears. George … George. Like George. A human sa
crifice. She destroyed all but the last diary. There was still one more thing she had to do. She tried to rise. Her long black hair had loosened and fell like a nun’s chaplet over her shoulders to her knees. She no longer had the strength to pull herself up, so she continued kneeling in an attitude of prayer, her diary open to the last page on her bloody apron. There, before her, in small neat script, was the account of hours: every visit with its date and length of stay Thomas Jefferson had made to Monticello from the time she had returned to Virginia with him. Re-enslaving herself. Thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years of minutes, hours, months. A certainty that her fate was something more than a personal one overtook her.

  Like an abbess at her devotions, she repeated each date. The last inscription was not the date of his death, but the date of his last return to Monticello, twenty-six years before.

  She would make this act her very own, she thought: neither black nor white, neither slave nor free, neither loved nor loving.

  She burned it. She felt a deep calm. She no longer feared anything; not death itself. She had crossed that line. Even if they hanged her.

  As for Nathan Langdon, he had helped her leave her life. She never intended to see him again.

  CHAPTER 8

  JERUSALEM, 1831

  The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation. …

  THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1790

  THERE WAS not one black person to be seen as Sally Hemings stood in the white mob disguised by her color, shoulder to shoulder with other tense women and men who had come to Jerusalem. It had taken her and Eston one week to get to this place; yet she had felt compelled to be here in the chill of this November day, a long, once elegant cloak covering her from head to foot.

  The remnants of Nat Turner’s army, twenty-eight in all, had been destroyed or apprehended, and thirteen of them, including the woman, had been executed—all without confessing. There remained only Nat Turner; only Nat Turner had confessed, and this was his trial. As reports and rumors of Turner’s revolt had spread through Virginia, Sally Hemings had been so affected by it that she, who for almost thirty years, had never ventured outside the boundaries of Monticello, now stood in this place, in awful danger, against the will of her sons.

  It was as if Nat Turner’s giant hand (for she thought of him as being immense) had pushed her into this heaving crowd that seemed to rest in the hollow of some enormous bloody bosom, now calmed and stroked by the awe of true massacre.

  She felt as if this man had taken her hand and lifted her out of the loneliness after Nathan Langdon, after the destruction of her diaries. Now, alone, she faced the truth of her life: she had loved the enemy. She had denied and denied and denied the mesmerizing violence of Turner and his avengers that had been around her and in front of her and a part of her, always. Nat Turner, the nullifier of her life.

  The silence was deep and sensual; she felt the fear and hatred and dread of her blackness like twin asps at her bosom. She had begged and pleaded and finally forced Eston to bring her here without being able to give a reason, but now she knew there was one: to force back invisibility forever, to confront her life. The danger was immense. Blacks, slave or free, all over Virginia, were hidden, crouched behind locked doors or plantation masters. Reprisals had been heavy, sweeping through counties as far away as Alberdale, as far south as North Carolina. Already more than a hundred blacks had been killed in the orgy of revenge that followed the two-day insurrection. Fifty-five whites had been killed. The number glowed before her. Blacks had perished because of the color of their skin, but for whites to perish for the same reason was revolution!

  They were not invincible!

  It was like the day she had stood in the yellow salon in Paris and listened to her brother James describe what was going on in the streets of the city. Blue blood had proved as red as peasant. White blood would flow as easily as black. Virginia had begun to bleed. This day’s wound was staunched for the moment, but, like some royal disease, it would result in a never-ending hemorrhaging. Invincibility, Sally Hemings knew better than most, was in the mind. Her head whirled. She saw now the contradiction of her life. The weight of every moment of it. The weight of power was being exchanged. Just as, for two delirious days, the power of life and death had passed from white hands to black, so the power over her life and death passed at last from her master’s hand to her own.

  The thought rocked her back on her heels. She swayed slightly, and as she did the crowd stirred with her as the courthouse door opened. Sally Hemings clutched her son’s arm with both hands as Turner stepped, stumbled, and was half-dragged into the dappled sunlight.

  Eston’s arm trembled under her clutching hands. They were without doubt the only black witnesses to this awful moment.

  The pale woman standing beside her bastard son had thought she knew all about real power. Sally Hemings had spent forty years of her life in daily contact with one of the most powerful men in America. She had seen his friends and his enemies sweep in and out of their mansion in quest of power or in homage of it. She had never understood until now, however, why men lusted after it with such ferocity; why they fought, killed, slandered, flattered, begged, worshipped, begot sons in its name. All the Burrs, the Hamiltons, and the Washingtons that she had seen come and go had never been able to convey the meaning of it as well as this black man about to have terrible things done to him. He was now being dragged, spit upon, and kicked. He seemed half-crazy; wounded, a hunted animal, caught. Yes, this man’s dignity had become real power to her. There was something almost obscene about seeing it here, so naked. This man had killed her enemies. For her! He had taken them on and fought them to his last breath. For her! He had stood while she had done nothing for herself all these years except submit. She wanted to cover the convicted man with her cloak. To blot out a vision of herself more terrible than she had ever imagined. She felt herself sinking into this white world as into a watery grave.

  She raised a hand above her head as one does in drowning, but it was really to signal Nat Turner that he was not alone. Her hand was dragged down by her distraught son, in whose blue eyes she saw tears of fear and loathing.

  Nathan Langdon made his way through the restless ugly crowd. He had ridden two days from Washington City to get here. He was haggard and uncoordinated in his movements; his face showed the same savage and perpetual bewilderment that had clouded his features since his precipitous departure from the Hemingses’ cabin three months ago.

  He shoved and pushed at random, but it was like trying to move some great mountain of flesh. People felt neither pressure nor pain. Shoulders and elbows knocked and prodded into tissue without the least response from the victim. Langdon even found he was shoving women in his frenzy to reach the courthouse before it adjourned and spewed out the criminals.

  It was a nasty day, with sudden bursts of occasional sunlight. It seemed the right climate for the drama of the trial.

  He too had been compelled to this place for reasons he only dimly perceived. He knew they had something to do with Sally Hemings. He was here to find out something about her, but also about himself; about Virginia, about slaves and insurrection and murder. People from all over the Tidewater region were calling Turner’s rebellion an aberration, yet all Langdon’s instincts told him this was not so. This event was logical and inevitable. There was no mayhem here. Here was systemized homicide as the perfect and indelible equation to slavery. There had been talk of slave armies, thousands of men marching on Jerusalem, killing and raping and burning by the hundreds. The governor of Virginia had even begun to muster an army to meet the insurgents, and there had been talk of the federal army marching from Fort Lauredale in Maryland. Panic had seized the capital, yet Turner had been captured less than fourteen miles from where he had started his crusade.

  The race from Washington City to arrive in time for Nat Turner’
s condemnation—one couldn’t call it a trial, since he had confessed beforehand—had also been a sudden decision. Sally Hemings’ words had echoed in his head like the rhythm of his horse galloping toward Jerusalem: “You haven’t understood anything! You haven’t understood anything!” He smelled the restless, straining crowd, the odor of death like singed hair, the overexcited bodies swaying in some kind of primitive dance of retribution. . . .

  Turner was mad! Of course he was. Being an atheist, Langdon had only contempt for religious fanatics. It was Will Francis, Turner’s aide-de-camp, who fascinated him, for here was pure, unadulterated logic, unclouded by biblical hysterics. My God! What was he thinking? How could he be rationalizing insurrection? What had become of him? His eyes narrowed against the brief glare of the sun, but soon the ray disappeared behind the clouds.

  But Francis, ah, Francis … Francis had killed more than twenty-five of the fifty-five people murdered.

  Langdon was sweating under his greatcoat as he burrowed his way toward the red brick courthouse. He now had no hope of reaching the courtroom or getting inside, although he had used what little influence he had to get a seat.

  He had to see Nat Turner and Will Francis with his own eyes. His very life depended on it. If Nat Turner existed, then all he had been taught to believe was false.

  Nat Turner, the nullifier of his life! Nathan’s personal bewilderment seemed to flow into the larger drama.

  Nathan Langdon had thought of Nat Turner as gigantic and black. But the man who was dragged into sight was of medium size, not more than five feet eight, slender, and a light-brown color. This visionary had made a full confession of his crimes. Crimes committed in the name of justice. God knows how many innocents in Virginia would pay, thought Nathan. He had to urge the Hemingses to leave Virginia with their mother. She was no longer safe here.

  Nathan passed so close to Sally Hemings that day he could have touched her cloak. Not in his wildest speculations would he have imagined, however, that the delicate recluse would be in this heaving, bloodthirsty mob. He had been promised that this could never happen, and that was what he had intended to tell his sons. Now he wouldn’t be able. He stared intently at the dark figure being dragged through the crowd. Women and men were spitting, screaming, and cursing—especially the women. The man seemed but a sack of flesh; all spirit had fled him.