But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1790
“MAMA, what did you talk about all that time?”
“I don’t know, Eston, different things, gossip mostly.”
“You mean a white gentleman traveled all the way from Charlottesville to come up here and gossip with you? What did he want? What kind of information? And how do you know he weren’t one of those journalists?”
This was Madison Hemings speaking. His voice had a perpetual edge of violence and irritation.
The question sent a flush of surprise up the back of Sally Hemings’ neck. As a matter of fact, she had no idea at all if he was a journalist or not. He didn’t seem or speak like one, or at least her idea of one, since she had never met a journalist in her entire life. Therefore, she wasn’t sure. Besides it was evident from his knowledge of local families and his accent that he was from these parts.
“I told you, Madison, I was afraid it might have been the sheriff and when I saw that it wasn’t, well, I was just so relieved I guess I just believed anything. He had to be one or the other, and if he was white and wasn’t the sheriff, then he had to be the census taker. He said he was the census taker, and didn’t you tell me the census man would be coming round these days? I just assumed he was telling the truth.”
“Mama, you believe everything a nice white gentleman tells you! You had no business letting a strange man, white or black, into my house!”
“Our house, Madison,” Eston said. “And leave Mama alone. You just scared it might have been the sheriff. I told you Martha Jefferson Randolph is not to be trusted. She hates all of us, and always has.”
“Leave Martha out of it, Eston,” Madison said. “She had her reasons for helping us—if you can call this run-down, no-dirt farm ‘help.’ She’s no better off herself, living down there in Pottsville, in that dinky house with all her children, and Thomas Mann Randolph, dead as crazy and drunk as a loon. I’m not shedding any tears for Martha Randolph! She didn’t have to marry that bastard!”
Of all her children, she thought, Madison was the most difficult, and because he was the one who reminded her of her brother James, she favored him in a way. He, of all her children, was in the most danger. Eston, with his placid nature and good looks, would always get by as a black man or as a white one.
“Mama, admit you were wrong to let him in! He could be a journalist pretending to be the census taker just nosing around for dirt to print,” Madison went on.
“You can surely find out if he is the real census taker,” his mother answered. “Just ask in town. He said his name was Nathan Langdon and he was born at Broadhurst. He has six brothers and sisters, and his father is old Samuel Langdon and his Uncle John was a friend of Thomas Jefferson. He is fair with a dark beard and about six feet tall, light for a young man, about twenty-seven or eight. He is going to marry a Wilks girl from Norfolk by the name of Esmeralda, and he just came back from Boston and Harvard, cause his pa is sick and his fiancee upset about his taking so long to come back. Then too, his brother … killed in a duel …”
“Mama, you found all that out!”
“I was the last count to be made for the day and he was hot and tired. I guess he just stayed on longer than he intended.”
“Was he waiting for us to come home?”
“Not really. He asked about you both; and wanted to know how he could reach you for some work his father needs done at the plantation. I told him he could find you after curfew if he needed to.”
“You mean you invited him back?”
“Well, that was the least I could do, he’s—”
“White, Mama! I don’t want him in the house. Any business he has with me, he can find me at the university. Any business with anybody can be conducted at the front door. And you were alone. . . . What if—”
“Madison, for heaven sakes. Not all white men are rapists!”
“No? Just remember Stokes’s wife, stuck out there past the Channing place. . . . Didn’t happen less than two months ago. A free colored man’s wife, free colored man’s property doesn’t mean anything in this county. They don’t want free coloreds in Virginia. They’ve made that pretty clear. One false step—even one—and you are in a chain gang heading for Georgia or South Carolina, papers or no papers. Just sudden like that. Nobody ever found out what happened to Willy Dubois. Where’d he go? In the dead of night? After curfew. Just disappeared, leaving hearth and home, wife, mother, and five children. Now just where did he go? I don’t want any strange men in this house, Mama, black or white. You hear me, Eston?”
“I hear you,” Eston said, moving over protectively to his mother.
Eston Hemings was a beautiful man. He was huge, over six feet four, with bright red hair and a continent of pale freckles on a clear milky skin that showed no trace of a beard. He had enormous hands that could carve the most delicate designs—flowers, scrolls, fruit—in any wood that grew, and could wrench the most beautiful notes out of his instruments—the pianoforte and the Italian violin. His features were regular and delicate, like his mother’s, with a high wide rather long nose and a generous sensual mouth. Already there were laugh marks around his pale-blue eyes. He was broad of shoulder with a surprisingly long and girl-like neck.
Eston knew that when Madison was like this, something bad had happened to him in town. Maybe he would tell them, and maybe he wouldn’t. Madison had a damned irritating way of doing everything. He was the darkest in the family, and his cool slender grace, his animal vitality and cockiness, seemed an affront to both races. He was always getting into trouble: rows with shopkeepers over bills, with foremen over plans, with masons over blueprints, with other carpenters over techniques, with the landlord, with the bank, with the tax collector. With everybody, nigh on. Madison should leave for the Territories, thought Eston. Now. Before he really got into some scrape he wouldn’t be able to get out of. Eston knew why Mama would never leave here. He could take care of Mama alone. He wasn’t in love. He wasn’t trying to prove to some freeborn girl how great a man he was.
Madison Hemings felt the gentle but firm pressure of his brother’s rough hand steering him toward the back door of the cabin and the cool fragrant night air. The gentle, insistent pressure calmed and soothed him. He clamped shut his jaw in an effort to stop tears of rage.
Why was he so upset? Why had he yelled at his mother? The real reason, he knew, was fear. . . . He was scared to death that something was going to happen to ruin their fragile existence, before they even got a chance to live it. He didn’t want to tell anyone about what had happened to him today in town. Not even Eston. Eston could feel his brother’s neck muscles tense, but he said nothing.
Outside, they faced the dying red sun sinking below the delicate line of the peach trees they had planted more than a year ago. Beyond that lay the boundaries of Monticello. Normally a thick whitewashed birch fence cut across the dark green of the pine woods, marking the end of the plantation on the southwest side. But the fences were now mostly down, and those standing were a dirty disinherited gray. The crossbeams lay on the nettle-packed ground where they had fallen.
Madison stared at this unkempt frontier. It seemed to be the line between his former life and this one. He would never understand why his mother refused to leave this place; why she deliberately chose a rented house so close to Monticello. Was it that she wanted to be reminded, every minute of every day, of her former servitude, of her concubinage?
His mother had never told him anything of his origins. He knew that slave women never told their offspring anything. So slave children learned what they could when they could, in bits and pieces from older slaves, mammies, white people’s conversations, and the bitterness of what they learned was all the more wounding. It intensified the shame without alleviating the burden. He remembered the shock of learning from some old crone that he was the son of the master. Even his grandmother hadn’t told him! He was their son; yet neither father nor mother seemed to love him for it! He had tried to understand. He had stood for hours looking at his pale-yellow face in the polished silver mirrors of the Big House. He would run down to this very frontier, far from the Big House, and butt his head against the white-birch fencing until the blood came, because he couldn’t understand why his father didn’t love him. Madison stared at the fence posts now, as if he expected to see the stains of his childish blood still on them.
Madison looked up. He and Eston watched their mother slip under the high gray railings of the frontier of Monticello. Gathering her skirts as she went, she was walking up the mountains toward the cemeteries.
When she was upset or angry she could usually be found either by the grave of Thomas Jefferson or that of her mother, Elizabeth Hemings. They divided her loyalties in death as they had in life. When her sons saw her turn eastward, they knew she was heading toward the slave cemetery and their grandmother.