Jefferson's Sons Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  Spring 1805

  Chapter One - The Violin

  Chapter Two - Papa

  Chapter Three - Run

  Autumn 1805

  Chapter Four - James Hubbard’s Back

  Winter 1805

  Chapter Five - Great-grandma and the Sea Captain

  Christmas 1805

  Chapter Six - Home for Christmas

  Summer 1806

  Chapter Seven - Joe Fossett

  Christmas 1806

  Chapter Eight - Hidden in Plain Sight

  1807

  Chapter Nine - The Lines on the Hearth

  Summer 1808

  Chapter Ten - A Carpenter’s Apprentice

  Summer 1809

  Chapter Eleven - Home to Stay

  Chapter Twelve - The End of Tranquility

  Chapter Thirteen - Nothing

  Three Years Later, Summer 1812

  Chapter Fourteen - Maddy Learns

  Chapter Fifteen - Miss Sally’s Son

  Chapter Sixteen - Miss Ellen

  Chapter Seventeen - The Mockingbird

  Chapter Eighteen - They All Play the Violin

  Chapter Nineteen - James Hubbard Flogged Again

  January 1813

  Chapter Twenty - Maddy on His Own

  1813 into 1814

  Chapter Twenty-one - A Landau, Septimia, and a Funny Sort of Sweet Potato

  Spring 1814

  Chapter Twenty-two - Money Musk

  Autumn 1814

  Chapter Twenty-three - Field-Hand Socks

  1815

  Chapter Twenty-four - Peter Fossett

  Summer 1815

  Chapter Twenty-five - The Declaration

  1816

  Chapter Twenty-six - Master Jefferson Sells James

  Spring and Summer 1816

  Chapter Twenty-seven - Moving On

  Autumn 1816

  Chapter Twenty-eight - Poplar Forest

  December 1818

  Chapter Twenty-nine - Three Months of Grief

  Spring 1819

  Chapter Thirty - Beverly’s Twenty-first Birthday

  Summer 1819

  Chapter Thirty-one - Hailstorm

  Chapter Thirty-two - Beverly’s Story

  Three Years Later 1822

  Chapter Thirty-three - The Luckiest Boy

  Summer 1822

  Chapter Thirty-four - Harriet Turns Twenty-one

  Autumn 1822

  Chapter Thirty-five - As Long as Master Jefferson Lives

  Nearly Two Years Later, 1824

  Chapter Thirty-six - Freedom Fighters

  1825

  Chapter Thirty-seven - Extra

  1826

  Chapter Thirty-eight - Waiting for the Fourth of July

  Early January 1827

  Chapter Thirty-nine - Washington, D.C.

  January 14 1827

  Chapter Forty - The Graveyard

  January 15, 1827

  Chapter Forty-one - The End

  Afterword

  Most Useful Sources for Further Study

  Descendents of Thomas Jefferson

  To Bart, Matthew,

  and Katie

  DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group · Published by The Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. · Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) · Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England · Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) · Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) · Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India · Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) · Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa · Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2011 by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley · All rights reserved · The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Type set in Minion ·

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bradley, Kimberly Brubaker.

  Jefferson’s sons : a founding father’s secret children / by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A fictionalized look at the last twenty years of Thomas Jefferson’s life at Monticello through the eyes of three of his slaves, two of whom were his sons by his slave Sally Hemings.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-52945-4

  1. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Juvenile fiction. 2. Hemings, Sally—Juvenile fiction. [1. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Fiction. 2. Hemings, Sally—Fiction. 3. Slavery—Fiction. 4. African Americans—Fiction. 5. Monticello (Va.)—Fiction. 6. Monticello (Va.)—Fiction. 7. Virginia—History—1775–1865—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B7247Je 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010049650

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Spring 1805

  Chapter One

  The Violin

  It was April and all Monticello was stirring, but in their cabin Mama had just put baby Maddy down to sleep and she told Beverly and Harriet to be still.

  Beverly did not want to be still.

  Harriet reached under the bed for the box where she kept things and pulled out the sampler Mama was teaching her to sew. Beverly knew what would happen next. Harriet and Mama would talk sewing, and ignore him. He aimed a kick at his little sister. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Let’s do something fun.”

  Harriet sat down on the stool beside the hearth. She beamed at Mama with what Beverly called her good-girl smile, like she was trying to show off how sweet she was. Harriet was almost four years old. She was not a sitting-still little girl, but sometimes she took a mood to act like one. Beverly reached out with his foot again. His toe grazed the end of one of Harriet’s braids. Harriet screeched.

  “Beverly,” Mama said, not even looking up, “don’t wake your brother.”

  “I didn’t yell,” Beverly said. “Harriet did.”

  “You’re the one looking for trouble,” Mama replied. “Do you need something to do?”

  Beverly knew better than to say yes. Mama would make him do chores. “No, ma’am,” he said. “I guess I’ll go visit Uncle Peter.”

  “Don’t you bother him, neither,” Mama said, but she let him go.

  Beverly went out the cabin and down Mulberry Row. The spring wind whipped the still-bare branches of the mulberry trees. The packed dirt road felt cool and firm beneath his bare feet. Beverly spread his arms into the wild wind. He felt wild too.

  The kitchen was halfway down the row, in the basement of a little brick guesthouse. Uncle Peter, one of Mama’s brothers, was the cook. Uncle Peter didn’t hand out treats very often, but you never knew. It was midmorning. If the folks in the great house hadn’t been hungry at breakfast, there might be muffins left over.

  Beverly slid through the open door. On the hearth, Dutch ovens steamed in a row over piles of coals. Uncle Peter and the two girls that helped him stood behind the long table, chopping vegetables. Uncle Peter gave Beverly an eye. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Beverly said. He edged closer to the table. There were muffins left, and slices of ham too.

  Uncle Peter whapped Beverly’s hand with the end of a towel. The girls
laughed. “Get out of here, Beverly!” Uncle Peter said. “Two hours since breakfast, you can’t be hungry yet!”

  “Can too,” said Beverly, but he went.

  Outside, the wind still howled. Beverly stopped and thought about what he wanted to do. He was too little to have a real job. Most days he helped Mama while she sewed in the cabin, or visited his aunts and uncles, or ran around the gardens or the orchards. Sometimes he walked with Mama to the great house, where she checked to see that everything in Master Jefferson’s room was all right. Master Jefferson spent most of the year in Washington. When he was gone the great house stood empty. Besides taking care of Beverly and Harriet and Maddy, Mama didn’t have much to do.

  Now Master Jefferson was home for a month and everything had changed. He’d brought his grown-up daughter and all her children with him, and invited friends to visit, so the house was full to bursting. Mama worked and worked. What’s more, she stayed up at the great house every night.

  Beverly didn’t mind the bustle. But whenever he thought about Master Jefferson, his stomach gave a little twist, almost like he was hungry. It twisted now. He wished Uncle Peter had given him a muffin.

  He looked to his left, toward the woodshop. His uncle John worked there, learning fancy carpentry from a white Irishman named Mr. Dismore. Beverly loved Uncle John, and he loved watching him make things out of wood, but he wasn’t sure how he felt about Mr. Dismore. Unlike the overseers, Mr. Dismore was cheerful and funny, but he also sometimes said things like, “I don’t want you pickaninnies hanging around my shop.”

  Beverly hated the word pickaninny. It sounded like something you’d stomp on if you saw it running across the floor. He was not, he thought, a pickaninny.

  Straight across the road was the smokehouse, locked so the hams couldn’t grow legs and wander away. To the right was the blacksmith’s shop. Beverly often went there to watch the nail boys work. He knew he’d be a nail boy himself when he was older. The nail boys made nails all day long, tap, tap, tap! They cut nail rod into short pieces, then hammered one end of each piece long and pointy and the other square and firm. The nail boys’ muscles stood out on their arms. Master Jefferson was proud of them.

  The only problem with visiting the blacksmith shop was Mr. Stewart. He was head blacksmith, a white man, and mean when he was drunk. Lately he stayed drunk all the time. Only yesterday, Master Jefferson’s daughter, Miss Martha, said it was about time she took matters into her own hands and showed Mr. Stewart the door, before he grew careless in his inebriation and burned the blacksmith shop down. She said it was a good thing they had Joe Fossett, or that place would be a ruin.

  Beverly’d heard her. He was good at hearing things. “If you’re smart,” Mama often told him, “you’ll keep your mouth shut and your ears open. You’re a smart boy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he’d say, proud that it was true.

  Beverly loved the word inebriation, even though Mama said it was just a fancy name for drunk. Beverly savored beautiful words. They were like music in his head. He didn’t care what words meant nearly as much as how they sounded. He loved it when Mama and Miss Martha spoke French together, even though they only did it so no one else could understand them.

  “Teach me,” he begged Mama. “Teach me how to talk like that.”

  Mama taught him a song in French, and how to say “I love you, Mama,” but she said she didn’t have time to teach him more, and besides it would upset Miss Martha. No good ever came from upsetting Miss Martha.

  Miss Martha’s full name was Mrs. Martha Randolph. She was the only one of her mama’s children still alive. She loved to come to Monticello and act like the boss of everything. But she wasn’t the real boss—Master Jefferson was—and she wasn’t there very often. Beverly didn’t care if he upset her or not. When he said so, Mama shook her head. “Trust me,” she said. “It’s better to stay on her good side.”

  “Does she have a good side?” asked Beverly.

  For a moment Mama looked like she might laugh, but then she set her lips together and told Beverly not to act like he was too big for his britches. She said everyone had a good side, even if with some folks you had to look mighty hard to find it. She told him again that smart boys kept their mouths shut, was Beverly listening?

  Beverly was. He wondered where Miss Martha kept her good side. On the sole of her left foot, maybe, safe inside her shoe.

  Miss Martha was two years older than Mama. Once upon a time, after Master Jefferson’s wife died, but when Miss Martha was still just a girl, Master Jefferson and Miss Martha went to live in France. After a few years they sent for Master Jefferson’s other daughter, Miss Maria, who was still alive back then, but little and scared. Beverly’s mama was just fourteen years old, but she got the job of taking Miss Maria on a ship across the wide ocean to France. They all lived in Paris for three more years. That was where Mama learned French.

  Miss Maria grew up, married a nice man, had a son, and died. Mama told Beverly that. Miss Martha grew up, married a loud, angry man, and had too many children. She walked around looking like she’d just tasted sour milk. Mama didn’t have to tell Beverly that; he could see it for himself.

  Beverly had two dead sisters and one dead brother. He couldn’t remember any of them, but Mama told him and Harriet about them because she said it was important to keep their stories alive. Family counted, living or dead.

  Baby Madison seemed healthy, Mama said, but you never knew for sure. One of the dead sisters had lived for over a year, walked and talked and everything.

  Beverly looked out over the blacksmith shop, past the gardens and down the mountainside. He sighed. There was only one place he wanted to go. He knew it, and he might as well go there. He lifted his chin and tried to look like a boy with an important errand to do, not one sneaking off where he didn’t belong.

  He went to the great house.

  It was in pieces. It had been a fine big house, but not fine or big enough to suit Master Jefferson. He’d hired workmen to rip the walls open and add rooms off the long sides, and remove the roof to add a third floor. Right now the work was about half-finished; to live there you had to not mind dust and dirt and no roof and holes in the walls. Master Jefferson didn’t mind. Miss Martha did, but she was there anyway, because she preferred a house with no roof away from her husband to one with a roof and her husband inside.

  Beverly’s grown cousin Burwell was the butler whenever Master Jefferson was at home. Burwell hated mess even more than Miss Martha did, but he didn’t have any say. He just had to cope the best he could. Master Jefferson expected a fancy dinner on a clean tablecloth with china and silver and lots of good wine, every afternoon at exactly three o’clock, whether there was a roof over the house or not. Burwell always managed to make everything right.

  I’ll go see Burwell, Beverly told himself. He’ll let me polish spoons. But he knew Burwell wasn’t the person he wanted to see.

  He slipped between the poplar trunks supporting the unfinished porch roof and through the back door into the great house. Upstairs a baby wailed. Beverly heard footsteps hurrying across the hall. Burwell’s dining room was to the left, but Beverly turned right.

  There in front of him stood a wide-open door.

  Beverly stared. His breath came quick with happiness and surprise. It was open—the door to Master Jefferson’s room was open! Beverly’d been inside many times with Mama, but never, ever when Master Jefferson was home. When Master Jefferson was home, he kept the door locked. He did not want his papers or books or self disturbed. Only Burwell and Beverly’s mama had keys to the door. Even Miss Martha had to stay out.

  Beverly peeked inside. Nobody. The fire had burned down, but a new pile of wood waited by the swept hearth, so Beverly knew Burwell had come and gone. The curtains at the open windows fluttered in the breeze.

  Beverly took a cautious step. The room sure looked different with Master Jefferson home. When he was gone Mama kept the desk swept bare and all the books shut up
safe in cabinets behind glass. Now piles of books covered the floor and tables. Some had scraps of paper or ribbon sticking out of their sides, and one lay upside down on the polished wooden desk, with half its pages cut, and the paper knife lying beside it.

  Then Beverly saw, beside the half-cut book, the violin.

  He sucked in his breath, fast. His heart hammered. Oh, that violin! How he loved the sound of that violin! Master Jefferson had brought it with him from Washington, and sometimes in the evenings Beverly could hear its music all the way down Mulberry Row, sharp quick notes, long dancing bits, ta-dum-dum-ta-dee. He had never heard anything like it. Better than inebriation or the sound of words in French was the glorious music from Master Jefferson’s violin.

  Beverly crept forward. He’d never seen a violin up close before. Now he stood over it, admiring the shiny honey-colored wood. Next to it was the stick thing you drew across the strings. Beverly reached out and touched the stick, just once. His fingers kept moving and brushed the smooth wood of the violin itself. He thought he could feel the music inside.