Jefferson's Sons

The first thing Maddy saw as he came down Mulberry Row was that someone had shut the door to their room. He scowled. In summertime that room could heat up something dreadful. He yanked open the door.

Eston jumped forward and threw himself on Beverly. Beverly hugged him, hard. Then he turned to Maddy, who stood frozen from shock. “Aren’t you glad to see me, Maddy?” Beverly asked.

Beverly sighed. He sat down again, Eston clinging to his arm. “I’ve been back three days. Haven’t done much. Straightened the woodshop a little, worked on a cabinet—”

Maddy thought of all those roads, all the places between Monticello and Poplar he wanted to explore. Beverly didn’t like freedom? Maddy didn’t know what to think. Finally he asked, “What’d Mama say?”

Beverly shook his head. “She’s about wore me out. She was so mad, for the first day she couldn’t quit screaming at me. Since then she hasn’t talked to me at all.” Beverly sank his face into his hands. “She cried.”

Maddy walked forward and hugged Beverly tight. Oh, he’d missed Beverly. He’d missed him so much, and he never wanted to see him again. His heart hammered. He didn’t know what to think or say or do.

“She thinks I don’t appreciate her,” Beverly said. “She thinks I don’t want what she’s given me. It’s not that. She won’t listen. We’re not doing it the best way, but Mama doesn’t want to hear it. Neither does Harriet.” Beverly sighed. “The women in this family wear me out.”

Beverly was right. Neither Mama nor Harriet would speak to Beverly, or listen to a thing he had to say. For a few days Eston and Maddy just kept their heads down and hoped the storm would pass. Beverly went back to work in the shop. He stayed indoors and mostly out of sight. Maddy waited to hear what folks along Mulberry Row would say, but it was like Beverly was some kind of ghost. Nobody had said anything when he left, nobody said anything when he returned. Joe Fossett and Miss Edith and Burwell all looked like they could say plenty, but they held their tongues. The white overseers just passed their eyes over Beverly as though they couldn’t see him.

After a few days, when the hum of Mama’s anger had begun to subside, Beverly told his story. It was evening. They’d propped the door to their room open with a chair, and Harriet sat on it, brushing out her hair. Mama sat on the other chair, near the empty hearth, and Beverly and Eston and Maddy sat on the floor.

Mama snorted. Harriet said, “That is such twaddle. You’re as good as any white man—you are a white man—Beverly, I—” Harriet was getting wound up again.

“Harriet, listen!” Maddy said. He was suddenly furious. Why wouldn’t they listen to Beverly? He’d been out there, he knew more than they did. “Nobody said you aren’t going to get what you want. Nobody took anything away from you. You’re not leaving here for another three years. Shut up and pay attention.”

“Thank you,” Beverly said. “I repeat: White people are different. Not because they look different, not because they are born different. They’re raised different.” Beverly paused. “It’s not the skin. The skin could be any color. We could all be purple, there’d still be a difference. Black people are either free or enslaved. They’ve got papers or they don’t. If they’re slaves, as long as they’re doing what they’re supposed to, nobody asks them questions.

“No white person wants to know who a slave is inside, what they enjoy, who their family was. A white person doesn’t care if a slave is good at singing or had a brother they loved. A white person wants to know who they belong to and if they’re where they’re supposed to be.

“Now, if you’re a black person and you’re free, white folks don’t care about your story either. As long as you’ve got papers, and you’re doing something you’re supposed to be doing, white folks don’t care who you are. Where you’re from. What your story is, who your folks are. None of that.

Beverly looked pained. “I’m coming to that,” he said. “I’m getting to that. You’ve been all over me for a week, and now you’re going to listen. Hush up, Harriet.”

“Hush,” Beverly repeated. “That’s the problem. You all told me as much as you could about being white, but you raised me black. You couldn’t help it. I know. Black folks, we know how sad our stories can be. We know better than to ask another slave who his daddy is—maybe nobody ever told him, maybe he was sold as a baby, maybe it’s a white man and everyone’s supposed to pretend they don’t know. You can’t ask another slave his story. Maybe it’s so sad he’s buried it deep, and he’ll never tell it again. Black folks, they don’t ask too many questions. They tell the stories they want to tell, and they forget the rest.

Beverly passed his hand over his face. “I headed east,” he said. “I thought I’d probably end up in Washington City, it’s growing fast and they must need carpenters there. But one night on the way I stopped at a tavern. I ordered some dinner, and the man asked me what I did and where I was headed.

“I told him I was a carpenter going to Washington. Nothing more than that. I didn’t know what all I was supposed to say, but I sure didn’t want to say too much.

“He said he had a friend who was just desperate for a carpenter to help him finish building a house. The carpenter that had been working for him took sick. The man at the inn said this friend of his would pay me good to work for him a for few weeks, and anyhow I didn’t want to go to Washington in the summer with all the malaria and the flies.

“It sounded like maybe a good idea. So the next day I started working for this man. I worked hard for two weeks. Kept my head down. Got my pay on Fridays. But along about the middle of the third week the man started asking me questions. He said, ‘Tell me your name again.’”

“I said, ‘I’m Beverly Smith.’ And he said, ‘Whereabouts you from?’ I was afraid to say Charlottesville, so I told him it was just a little town. He wanted to know what town. I told him Bedford.”

Beverly shrugged, spreading his hands wide. “How could I know? I think he was just making it up. I think he was trying to rattle me. He kept after me all that day, more and more questions, ’til I didn’t know where to look or what to think. Then when I was packing up he looked at me and said, ‘I think you’re hiding something from me. I better not find out it’s something bad.’

Mama looked hot with indignation. “That man got what he wanted,” she said. “He didn’t have to pay you for your third week. Beverly, don’t get spooked like that. You didn’t have to tell him anything. Your life wasn’t any of his business.”

“I kept traveling down the road,” Beverly said. “And everywhere it was the same. What was my name, who were my people? What was I supposed to say? That my father is the president, and my mother is his slave?”

Beverly looked up, and his eyes blazed fire. “You did. Believe me, Mama, if I told anyone I’d been born a slave I’d have been run out of town. If not worse. The only way to be white is to not ever have been black.

“But I didn’t have a story. I felt so out of place. I wasn’t ever good at lying. And I thought, my name is Beverly Hemings and my people live at Monticello. I’ll just go on home.

“Besides, Mama, it isn’t going to work to have Harriet show up three years from now, out of the blue. I could maybe keep quiet about myself and get along, but I can’t have a sister without having folks we came from. Nobody would think she was a nice girl.

“And I was lonely,” Beverly said. “I didn’t know I could be that lonely. But that wasn’t important, not really. I could have coped with being lonely. I came back to get a story.”

As dusk fell the room had grown completely dark. Maddy could no longer see Beverly’s face, or Harriet’s, or Mama’s. It was past time for Mama to leave for the great house, but she hadn’t moved. From the open doorway Harriet spoke, low and firm. “Our mama and papa died of typhoid,” she said. “We were so little we can scarce remember them. Our aunt Sally and uncle John raised us, only they weren’t our aunt and uncle exactly, more like cousins, the only kin we had. Uncle John taught you carpentry. He died a few years ago, but you stayed on the farm, trying to be a help to Aunt Sally. Now she’s gone, and with the price of land so low and crops poor and all, you had to let the farm go for taxes. Not that you minded—you like carpentry better anyhow, and I’ve always hoped to live in a city.

“So now you’re seeking a job, and a nice set of rooms to rent. You’ve got a sister—me—staying back with friends for a few months—and as soon as you get settled you’ll send for her. That’s how it is, Beverly. That’ll be our story.”

“We’ve got three years,” Beverly said. “I’ll leave again a few months before you can, before you’re twenty-one. You keep telling me our story, Harriet. You tell me until then.”

“I’m not as strong as Mama,” Harriet said. “I want children, and they will have to be white children, because I will never be strong enough to send them away.”