Jefferson's Sons

Three important things happened in the second half of that year.

The first was that William Stewart, the white blacksmith, finally got so soaked with drink he could barely stagger out of bed. He couldn’t be trusted to swing a hammer, much less work near hot coals, and the day he set Joe Fossett’s pants on fire, even the white overseer had enough.

The overseer had brought one of the work horses up the mountain to be shod. When Beverly walked into the shop, Joe Fossett had just put the iron bars for the new shoes into the coals to heat.

“Don’t just stand there,” Joe told him. “Blow the fire up.”

Beverly worked the big bellows, and blew the fire up. The smoldering coals glowed. Joe went to the horse, picked up its foot, and started to trim it for the shoe.

Mr. Stewart, slumped in his usual chair, gave a thundering snore. Then, without warning, he jumped to his feet. “Lemme do that!” he sputtered at Joe. He seized the tongs and snatched an iron bar from the fire. It was already red-hot like the coals. Mr. Stewart swung it in a wide arc over the anvil. “Stupid n—”

He missed the anvil and tripped. Stumbling forward, he stabbed the hot bar into the back of Joe Fossett’s pants. The pants burst into flames. Joe yelled and shoved his seat into the dowsing bucket. The horse spooked. Beverly screamed.

Everyone went still. The overseer grabbed the horse and steadied it. Mr. Stewart stood swaying, his mouth open, a thread of drool dangling from his lip. The iron bar fell from the tongs. It lay in the dirt, a thin trail of smoke curling up from it.

Beverly barely breathed. He wanted to ask Joe if he was okay, but the silence was so thick he didn’t dare make a sound. He took his hand off the bellows, then winced as they creaked open. Joe stood. Water dripped down his legs. His brown skin showed through the charred hole in his pants.

The white overseer kicked at the dirt beside the still-smoking shoe. “That,” he said, “is positively the last gol-durn straw. If you kill Joe here, Stewart, who will do your work?”

“’Ma fine blacksmith—” Mr. Stewart began.

“You used to be a fine blacksmith,” the overseer corrected. “Now you’re a common drunk. Get back to your house and start packing.”

Mr. Stewart stared at the overseer. The overseer stared back. Finally Mr. Stewart turned and spat over his left shoulder. The gob of spit narrowly missed Beverly. “Crummy job here anyway,” Stewart said. “Been six months since I’ve been paid.”

He walked off. Joe Fossett picked the iron bar off the ground with the tongs and put it back into the fire. “Blow the fire up,” he said to Beverly, and Beverly did.

Mr. Stewart left the mountain. The overseer wrote to Master Jefferson. Master Jefferson sent back a letter full of good news. He named Joe Fossett head blacksmith, in charge of the whole shop by himself. If Joe took on extra work for people outside Monticello, he would get a cut of the proceeds—sixteen cents out of every dollar they paid. Best of all, Miss Edith had had another baby, a girl. Joe and Miss Edith named her Maria.

Joe shone with joy. He advertised his services all over Charlottesville. He fired the forge early and worked late into the night. He was earning for his family now.

That was the first important thing. The second one Beverly learned right after Master Jefferson came home for Christmas. Mama gathered him and Harriet and even Maddy close around her in their cabin. She had something to tell them, she said, but she’d waited so she could tell Master Jefferson first. Mama put her hand on her belly and smiled. “I’m going to have a baby,” she said. “Sometime late spring. A brother or sister for the three of you.”

Harriet laid her head against Mama’s belly. Maddy scowled. “I’m the baby!” he said.

“No, you’re not,” Beverly told him. “If there’s going to be a new baby, that means you’re a big boy.”

Maddy’s scowl vanished. “I’m a big boy!” he said.

“Yes,” Mama said, kissing him. “You’re a big, beautiful boy.”

Master Jefferson was happy about the baby, or so Mama said, but Miss Martha wasn’t. When Beverly carried firewood through the hallway of the great house on Christmas Eve, he caught the horrified look Miss Martha gave Mama’s swelling belly. “Surely, Sally,” Miss Martha said, “surely you’re not increasing again?”

Mama replied softly, in French. Then she added, her voice soothing and calm, “And so are you?”

Miss Martha pressed her lips together. Tears sprang to her eyes. She looked away angrily. “Again,” she said. She didn’t seem happy at all. Beverly guessed it was because Miss Martha’s husband was so mean. Or maybe having seven living children was enough. He felt a pang of sympathy for Miss Martha.

Miss Martha turned and saw him. “You, boy,” she snapped. “Don’t stand there. The third floor needs wood.” She made a shooing motion with her hands. “Git!”

Beverly got. So much for sympathy, he thought. Miss Martha was a shrew.

The third thing was the most important. It was something he finally figured out. One of Miss Martha’s daughters, Miss Virginia, was just about Harriet’s age, and two others, Miss Cornelia and Miss Mary, were not far off on either side. After Mama told Harriet she was going to grow up to be a lady, Harriet started to pay attention to Miss Cornelia and Miss Virginia and the rest. At Christmastime Beverly caught her eavesdropping when Miss Martha spoke to her girls. He could see how Harriet copied them, sitting with her back not touching the back of her chair, folding her legs at the ankles, and brushing her skirts down smooth. It was only a game to her, but Harriet was prettier than Miss Martha’s girls, and more graceful, and Beverly watched her with a kind of pride. Harriet would make a good lady someday.

Then it hit him, square in the pit of his stomach.

To be a lady, Harriet would have to be white.

He went to Mama.

She was bent over, stoking the fire in the hearth of their cabin. She had a new shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and for a moment Beverly wanted to bury his face in it, and have her rock him the way she did when he was a little boy, but he knew he was too old. Instead he sat on the edge of the bed and pushed his cold feet closer to the fire.

“Beverly.” Mama sat beside him and pulled him toward her. “What’s the matter?”

He turned so his face was just a little bit against her shawl, and told Mama what he’d figured out.

“The things you think about,” Mama said. “I swear you were born with an old soul. You’re not even ten years old, Beverly. You don’t have to worry about this yet.”

“But you want her to be white, don’t you?” he said. “That’s what you mean by being a lady.”

“She is white,” Mama said.

“She’s not. ’Course she’s not.”

“What does she look like?” Mama said. “If you saw her down in Charlottesville, dressed like one of Miss Martha’s girls, wouldn’t you think she was white?”

It was like the time Mama had taken off Maddy’s clothes, and asked them if he looked like a slave. Harriet’s skin was not quite as light as Miss Martha’s, but it was much lighter than everyone else’s on Mulberry Row, except Beverly’s. Harriet’s hair was like Mama’s, soft and straight, not tightly curled like most slaves’ hair.

“You’ve got to be black to be a slave,” Beverly said at last.

“Well,” Mama said. She looked at him for a moment. “The law says, if your mama is a slave, then you are too. The law also says white people can’t be slaves, so you’re right, if you’re a slave, then you are legally black. That’s the law. But let me show you something.” She reached forward and grabbed the poker. “Here’s Harriet.” She drew a line with the poker in the cool ashes on the edge of the hearth. “Here’s me, Harriet’s mama, and here’s Master Jefferson, her father.” Mama drew two more lines, sprouting off the first one. “Above me, we put my mama and daddy, that’s Grandma Elizabeth and Master John Wayles, a white man. Okay?”

Beverly nodded. His grandma was dead now, but he remembered her.

“Above your papa we put lines for his mama and daddy, both white. Now, above Grandma Betty we put two lines for her mama and daddy, that’s Parthenia and the sea captain, Captain Hemings. One black, one white. You with me?”

Beverly didn’t completely follow her, but he nodded again anyway. “Lines for Master Wayles’s mama and daddy,” said Mama, “and for your papa’s four grandparents. Got that? Eight lines, for you and Harriet and Maddy’s eight great-grandparents.”

“Okay.” Beverly said. He did understand that much.

“How many of those eight were black, and how many were white?”

“Well, Grandma Betty—”

“No, no,” Mama said patiently. “Just look at that last line of eight. How many white, how many black?”

Beverly counted. “Seven white,” he said. “One black.”

Mama nodded. “The law says that any slave’s children are always slaves, but it also says that any person who has seven out of eight white great-grandparents is legally white. So you and Harriet and Maddy are white people. You’re slaves, but you’re white.”

“Nobody acts like I’m white,” Beverly said.

“No. They won’t, because you’re a slave. But think on it, Beverly. Someday you won’t be a slave. You’ll be a free white man.”

Beverly thought of the white people he knew. They got to be the bosses, mostly, and they lived in nicer houses than the black people he knew. Still. “I don’t want to be white,” he said. “White people are mean.”

“Not all of them,” Mama said. “And the ones that are mean to black people aren’t always mean to other white people.” She looked at him steadily. “It’s easier to be white,” she said. “It’s safer.”

Beverly guessed that was true. Harriet did look like a white person. Maybe he did too. “So when I change into a free man, I just change into a white man?” he asked Mama. “I just tell everybody, look at these seven-eighths? I want to be called a white man now?”

Mama laughed and cuddled him closer. “It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “If you go down to Charlottesville, where people know you and know your family, and you tell them you used to be black but now you’re white, what do you think they’ll say?”

Beverly thought. “They’ll tell me to get out of town,” he said. “They won’t listen. They won’t change how they think about me.”

“That’s right,” Mama said. “I’m sorry for it, but you know it’s true.”

“So, Mama, what’s the use?”

Mama laughed again. “You won’t stay in Charlottesville,” she said. “You’ll go where nobody knows you. And they’ll see you, and say to themselves, ‘That looks like a white man.’ And you won’t tell them any different—why should you? You are white, by law. You’ll just go about your business, and Harriet will too. What you don’t tell people, they’ll never know.”

“But I’m black by law too,” Beverly said. “Because you said slaves have to be black. I can’t be black by law and white by law, both.”

“You can,” Mama said. “The law says both things.” She paused, and put her hands around his face. “You’re kind of caught in the middle of the law. It doesn’t matter, though. You’ll be free and you’ll look white, so you’ll be a free white man.”

“I’m going to have free papers?”

“Of course not,” Mama said. “Papers are for black people. You’ll be white.” Mama took Beverly’s hands. “Listen. Neither part of you is better, not the black part nor the white part. They’re both what you are. But right now the white people make the laws in this country. They make the rules. It’s easier to live like a white person here.”

“I’m never leaving Monticello,” Beverly said, “so I don’t care.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Mama said. “It’s a long time from now.”

“Harriet can go,” Beverly said. “I’ll stay. I want to be with you.”

Mama didn’t say anything. She took the hearth broom and brushed away the lines. Seven white great-grandparents, one black.

“I don’t like secrets, Mama,” Beverly said.

“Might as well make friends with them,” Mama said. “They’re here to stay.”