And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavours to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1790
SALLY HEMINGS closed her eyes and sank down at the foot of the neat rectangle marked off by smooth stones and planted with primroses. Fresh grass was growing within its boundaries. A wooden cross that had been lovingly carved by Eston Hemings had replaced the original tombstone. It didn’t seem possible that twenty-three years had passed since one of the two pillars of her life had crumbled. Elizabeth Hemings had died on August 22, 1807, at the age of seventy-two. She had outlived her daughter’s father, John Wayles, by over fifty years. It had not been an easy death. It had taken the whole, humid fever-infested month of August to kill her. Two months before she had died, she had stopped eating and had taken to her bed. But even starvation had been slow to weaken the fabulous constitution that had survived almost three-quarters of a century of slavery and the birth of fourteen children. Resistant to all the infections that killed childbearing women in their forties; immune to all the malarial fevers, the typhoid and yellow fevers that struck eighteenth-century Virginians in their swampy, unhealthy climate; untouched by the periodic outbreaks of cholera; without physical blemish or congenital weakness, she had survived everything, including her own biography.
Against her closed eyelids Sally Hemings could still see the oppressive, insect-filled interior of that slave cabin where she and Martha Randolph had watched her mother strain toward death with the same prodigious will that had sustained her in life. In the sweltering heat of that room she and Martha had sat in a strange and southern circle of complicity: the concubine, daughter, the mistress and the slave; the aunt and the niece. All three women were reflecting, each in her separate way, on the intricacies of their blood ties and relationships. There had been love, servitude, hate, womanhood. It was all flowing together that day when Elizabeth Hemings, struggling, frantically seeking an exit from the life she had endured, had whispered, “Put your hand on my chest and push down; my heart won’t stop beating.”
“I never knew of but one white man who bore the name of Hemings. He was an Englishman and my father. My mother was a full-blooded African and a native of that country. My father was a Captain of an English sailing vessel. Captain Hemings, my mama told me, was a hunter of beasts like her father, except that he hunted in the sea and his prey was the whale.
“He sailed between England and Williamsburg, then a great port. When the Captain heard of my birth, he determined to buy me and my mother, who belonged to John Wayles. He approached Master Wayles with an extraordinary high offer for us, but amalgamation was just beginning and Master Wayles wanted to see how I would turn out. He refused my father’s offer. Captain Hemings begged, pleaded, threatened, and finally they had words. All to no avail; my master refused to sell. My father, thwarted in the purchase but determined to own his own flesh and blood, then resolved to take us by stealth. His ship was sailing; everything was in readiness. But we were betrayed by fellow slaves, and John Wayles took us up to the Big House and locked us in. Captain Hemings’ ship sailed without us.
“We were kept at the Big House, but my mother never recovered. She kept running away. I must have run away six times before I could walk! Her master warned her that the next time she did it she would be punished not by the regular beating she got every time they sent her back, but by the legal punishment for runaways: branding of an ‘R,’ for runaway, on the cheek.
“She ran away again, and John Wayles ordered the punishment. It was the overseer that was to do it. My mama screamed and hollered and fought. She was a strong woman, my mother, and it took four men to hold her. But when the brand approached her skin, John Wayles’s hand shot out against that iron. He had meant to knock it from the hand of the overseer, but the blow only spoiled his aim, and the brand came down on mama’s right breast instead of her face. The slaves witnessing the punishment thought Master Wayles was going to kill that overseer.
“My mother never ran away again. There is something about a brand in the flesh that will stay with you until death. You never forget. Beatings you can forget. But not the scar. Especially a woman. My mother went to the fields, and I was kept at the Big House.
“Then one day when I was about fourteen going on fifteen, my mistress took me by the hair. I mean she just took a whole handful of my hair and half dragged me down to the tobacco fields. And there she left me, just left me. I never saw her face again, for when I returned to the Big House, she was long dead. I stayed in the fields. I was given to a slave named Abe for Abraham, and bore him six children.
“Twelve years later, John Wayles took me as his slave mistress, despite the fact I had already bore six children for Abe, who went and died on me. John Wayles had seen three wives die. The first, Martha Eppes Wayles, died within three weeks of her daughter Martha’s birth. The second wife, a Miss Cocke, bore four daughters, three of whom—Elizabeth, Tabitha, and Anne—grew to maturity. After she died, he married Elizabeth Lomax, who survived only eleven months. When that last one died, he took me into the Big House as concubine. I had grown up in the Big House, and now I came back as housekeeper. I was twenty-six-years old, the year was 1762, and Martha Wayles was thirteen. In 1772, John Wayles was still dealing in slaves, buying, selling, and breeding them. By that time I had borne him four children: Robert, James, Peter, and Critta. In 1767, when Martha was eighteen, she married her cousin and left Bermuda Hundred, only to return less than two years later a widow. She stayed at home until she married Thomas Jefferson three years later on a snowy January first. I served the passions of John Wayles and ran his household for eleven years, from the time I was twenty-six until he died in 1773, three months after the birth of his last child, Sally. My life was connected with his white children, especially Martha, as well as my own children by him. I loved them all.
“I cared for them all. Like they were mine. The younger girls didn’t remember, but Martha always remembered. Of all the white children, I loved her most. I followed her to Monticello; I nursed her in her illnesses and saw her die a little after every birth, trying for a son for Thomas Jefferson. For her darling. And he let her try and let her kill herself trying, then mourned her—monstrous—as did I.
“Somehow, I could never forgive him when he knew he was killing her; when he knew after the first child she had no business trying again. Her body going give out. But he was hit even harder than me. We struggled, we did, both of us to gain our equilibrium. I cried and he burned. Burned all her things. All her letters. Her portraits. Her diary. Her clothes. Everything. Weren’t right to destroy what was hers like that. That was rage. Rage against God, and rage against God is blasphemous. He could get angrier than any man I knew. For a while, I thought he was going to get so mad he was going to kill himself.
“But I couldn’t think about self-murder’ cause I had all those children. I had ten of my twelve children with me when I went to Martha. John Wayles died not freeing me, nor any of my children. I told all my daughters, beautiful things all of you, don’t love no masta if he don’t promise in writing to free your children. Don’t do it. Get killed first, get beaten first. The best is not to love them in the first place. Love your own color. That brings pain enough. Love your own color if you can, and if you’re chosen, get that freedom for your children. I didn’t get mine, nor for my children. I can’t say he promised it to me, so I can’t say he didn’t keep his promise. He never promised and I never asked. I just expected. A terrible thing for a slave to do. Expect.
“Found myself at Monticello, property of Thomas Jefferson. I just said to myself I weren’t going to die of it. I’d just get on with caring for Martha and my children and hers. I couldn’t let go, you see, I just had too many heads to hold. My last two children were born at Monticello. One by a slave husband Smith. The other, I don’t like to speak about. Got raped is what happened. And not just once. Nothing to do about it. He was a white carpenter named John Nelson. Nothing to do but to have the child and to love it. It wasn’t his fault how he got here. He was my last. My baby. When I was almost fifty.
“Despite all the misery, and the bondage and the hard work, I loved life. The idea, you see, was to survive. Not go under with grief: the game was to last out the day and the night and garner enough strength for the next. And, Lord, I needed that strength. First, I had Bermuda Hundred to run, that huge sprawling house and all them slaves. Then I had Monticello. The house was smaller, but Thomas Jefferson was always tearing it up, rebuilding, so I could never get that plantation running like I wanted. Every time things would quiet down and I would get the house and the servants all orderly, why he would come back from Philadelphia or New York and we would be in the brick and plaster again. Reduce me to tears, it did. Poor Martha never did see her house finished. She was poorly a lot of the time and she hated when he was away. She hated that politics anyway. But she loved the man. She loved him. I kept telling her to hold on. To try and garner her strength. Not to try to keep up with him, because Thomas Jefferson would live to be a hundred. Strongest man I ever did see. Twenty, thirty miles on horseback every day. He was like me in temperament, except he sometimes got his moods or his ‘depressions,’ as Martha would call them. He liked his privacy, too. Didn’t want Martha sticking her head out too much either. He was a jealous and possessive man. And he had a temper—oh, he was sweetness and light—but I saw it. He had a monumental temper when he was riled. Even when it didn’t come out. He thought it weren’t dignified … but he had it. I could sometimes smell that brimstone inside him. Sometimes he would just look at me smelling it, and laugh. He stayed out of my way. He stayed out of my household affairs, so we got on. I liked him, I did. And I guess he did love my Martha in his way. But he never did understand women, really.
“When his mother died in 1776, why he did the same thing he did later with his wife’s belongings when she died; he burned everything—letters, portraits, mementos—everything. He didn’t want anyone to know him, yet I never saw a man who so much needed to be known and loved. Well, Martha Wayles loved him, and so do you Sally. I can pass down to you what I knowed about Thomas Jefferson, which ain’t much. But nobody can teach you how not to be hurt when you love a white man.
“I say ‘love’ if that’s what can pass between a slave and a free white man, or a slave and free white woman. I loved Martha like a mother, and I loved Wayles like a wife. Trouble was I didn’t ask for nothing, and nothing’s what I got in the end. When I realized who I was or what I was, I made up my mind I might be called a slave, but I wasn’t going to live no slavish life. I wasn’t going to go out of my way to be no slave. I tried to pass that on to all my children. One thing I always insisted was that we had a family name—Hemings. Hemings. And I wanted all my children to be addressed by it. Made them remember they had a surname! I tried to get them interested in life. In seeing what was going to happen next. Even slaves have things happen to them. Even in a slave’s world, something got to be happening all the time. I believe in life-preserving and love.
“I believe in having a secret life with secret plans and secret dreams. Just like having a little vegetable garden to yourself out back of your cabin like mine. You got to work it at night or real early in the morning, but it’s yours. Same with dreams. Maybe you got to work them late at night or real early in the morning, but nobody can take them out of your head lest they kill you and if you work ain’t nobody going to kill you, cause you too valuable. Lord, God, I would fight the suicides.”
All through the sweltering summer afternoons, Elizabeth Hemings ran out her life with words. They flowed on until dusk and until she was too exhausted to speak. Many of the stories, Sally Hemings and Martha Randolph had heard a dozen times, yet they clung to Elizabeth Hemings as to a floating log in a rapid. And Elizabeth Hemings carried them faster and faster down her particular river of memory. Rivulets of incidents, old family jokes, intrigues, feuds, births, and deaths, trickled through the ramblings of each afternoon.
She reached back further and further, her hands hovering over the quilts as if she were choosing the bits and pieces of a mosaic in colored glass, each cut glass reflecting other past events which brought on still other images of her life. Sally Hemings thought that she would never be able to remember her own life so well, and Martha Randolph too was amazed at the richness of this slave’s recollections. For the two women tending her, there had never been a time when there was not an Elizabeth Hemings.
“After John Wayles’s death, all of us slaves were divided up amongst the inheritance of the four living daughters, Martha and her three half sisters. Martha took me and ten of my children. The other two went with Tibby. I didn’t come here to Monticello until after your birth, Patsy. Came with Sally, who was two years old, and the baby Thenia.
“Thomas Jefferson was a rich man in those days. Yea, rich. He inherited one hundred thirty-five slaves from John Wayles, including us Hemingses, and eleven thousand acres. He had four plantations: Monticello, which wasn’t much to begin with, but with all his building, became the most beautiful; Poplar Forest, where we all went after them British came ‘round for us; Elk Island; and Elkhill. Life was sweet for Martha up until all the trouble about the independency came along. First thing, Thomas Jefferson out defending a mulatto who claimed freedom because his great-grandmother was a white woman who had him by a black slave father. Masta Jefferson saying the sins of the father shouldn’t be visited on the third generation, or generations without end, and that that boy was free because he was the great-grandson of a free white woman, and it is the mother who determines slavery in Virginia. He lost. Didn’t no Virginian wants to hear nothing about no white lady having no black children. Used to sell any white woman and her child into slavery for it: five or ten years for the mother, and thirty for the child. They used to believe, back in those days, a white lady have one black baby, all her babies coming black. Now, if that were so, why didn’t it apply just as well to us? Then came this Stamp Act. I heard all about that. This ruckus up in Boston with white men disguised as black folks and Indians throwing tea into the water, and first thing, Thomas Jefferson finds this thrilling and writes a ‘revolutionary document,’ as Martha called it. Telling the English where they could go and what they could do, which made him a traitor to the Crown and liable to get himself hung and quartered. Poor Martha was fit to be tied. She told me all the terrible dangerous things her husband was doing, running risks of losing his fortune, his name, and his head.
“But Masta Jefferson was right happy. He racing around feeling good, smiling, writing, speechifying. Then he got one of them headaches like he got after his mama died. Headaches and dysentery were his two ailments. All coming from his nerves and that hot temper. Then he left home with my son Robert for Philadelphia. He went to the Continental Congress with all them famous men of those revolutionary times. His little girl died at eighteen months, and Masta came racing home, but it was too late then. Martha grieved something terrible and Masta Jefferson begged her to come back with him to Philadelphia, but she wouldn’t go. Masta Jefferson went on back to Philadelphia and wrote his Declaration of Independency which made him the most famous man in Virginia, maybe in all the colonies. Martha didn’t care. She didn’t want no revolution, but she didn’t say nothing to her husband but once.
“Only that Christmas in ’75 she pleaded with him to give up politics. There was the death of little Jane still grieving her, and she pleaded with him to give up politics, to give up making war on England. Of course by this time it was too late; I could have told her that. Masta Jefferson was not going to give up his politicking for no mortal. She mostly couldn’t stand the separations. She said she wasn’t like Abigail Adams, who loved politics and who pushed her husband. Yet she wouldn’t go to Philadelphia with him even when she was well. She fought and pleaded, but he struggled. It was a hard thing to ask an ambitious man like him to give up his life’s work. Well, England was getting riled up and sending troops and commanders and generals, and landed them mostly where they liked. It got around amongst the slaves that the English was taking slaves into their army and offering them their freedom and giving them uniforms. It seems they had three hundred in the army in Maryland with ‘Liberty to Slaves’ on their breasts. I sure would have liked to have seen that. Black men in uniform with rifles, and before you known it, we was at war.
“The second year of the war, Martha finally bore a son for her husband. He lived only until June fourteenth, and we buried him without a name. Only Patsy lived now, and I thought Martha was going to lose her mind. She had lost three children, counting her son by her first marriage. I had seen women lose five, seven, ten children before they was two years old. There’s nothing in this life harder than burying your own children. I thank God it never happened to me. Oh, I’ve buried two now, but they were full-grown men.
“Martha got with child again as soon as she could, and the next year she had Polly, who was blessed to live. At least she lived long enough to marry. But Martha was slow coming back this time. She was scared of dying, scared of losing Polly, scared of losing another child, and scared of having another.
“Masta Jefferson started in rebuilding again Monticello. Things weren’t going too well for him. It seems we were losing this war he started. He was governor of Virginia now, with his seat of government in Williamsburg, but he weren’t made to be no war general. The generals and officers that did come to Monticello during those times was mostly German and English, prisoners of war, at least that’s what they was called. But, they was treated like guests. Many a musical evening and dinner took place for foreign gentlemen fighting against us. One German lady, wife of a general, followed her husband clean to our shores and was lodged at Monticello along with him. Twenty-two slaves run away from Monticello to join the English army, eleven of them women. Lord, then come the day British dragoons come looking for Governor Jefferson, saying they wanted to put a pair of silver handcuffs on him. Searched the house they did from top to bottom and took off poor Isaac to the army, with his mother there screaming and crying. I guess this decided Martha to move to Williamsburg with the masta and then to Richmond, where she again got pregnant. This left the plantation for me and my son Martin to run alone. Never knowing when the soldiers would show up or nothing. Coping with slaves running to join the English right and left, and taking everything they could eat and anything that weren’t nailed down. In November eighty, Martha come home and Lucy Elizabeth, the first, was born.”
“Lord, here come the British again. They showed up again in June eighty-one. Jack Jouett rode all night to reach Monticello with the news that the British general, Tarlton as I recall, was coming to capture Thomas Jefferson. Jouett was all cut up from the thickets. He carried them scars on him to his grave. He was in a state that morning. I cleaned him up and got something to eat in him and then off he rode. Masta Jefferson sent off Martha and Patsy and Polly and all the white people to Poplar Forest. You remember that, Patsy? Sally, you stayed with me. You was scared and trembling something terrible. Thomas Jefferson sat and had his breakfast at his leisure and then when he saw through his telescope that the English was coming up the mountain, he got his horse saddled and rode off toward Carter’s mountain. I was the one who met the English at the door. But I made Martin open it for me. But before that we was running around getting the silver together for Caesar, who was hiding it under the floorboards. The English was banging on the door and Martin, he let the plank drop on poor Caesar, leaving him under the house, trapped underneath the floorboards. He told me later that he could hear them boards groaning and creaking under them dragoons’ feet. One of the soldiers put a gun to Martin’s chest and said he’d fire if Martin didn’t tell him in what direction Masta Jefferson had rode out. Martin said ‘Fire away then!’ And poor little Sally thought she was about to see her half brother shot dead, and she started screaming, but they didn’t shoot anybody. They rode out the next day just as nice as you please, not taking anything and leaving me and Martin in charge. If I had thought, we could have hid Thomas Jefferson in Caesar’s place! I’ve often laughed with the masta about that.
“Masta Jefferson, he didn’t have no more heart for governing after that. Them militia weren’t fighting properly, breaking and running and deserting, and half of them couldn’t shoot straight no-how. Wouldn’t let the slaves fight, those Virginians, although slaves was fighting on both sides in Maryland and Pennsylvania and Carolina. But those militia boys, they was just farmers and yeomen and backwoodsmen. They didn’t know anything about fighting a real army with real uniforms and all. It was just a mess. Then to top it all off, Masta Jefferson fell off Caractacus and was laid up for six weeks. He’s had six horses in his life. He loves them bay horses, especially that tall horse with white hind feet. Well, anyway, he was a changed man after the British raided the capital. Martha, she was in heaven and hell—that is she was with child again, even after all the troubles we had after Lucy Elizabeth. This here was her seventh pregnancy. I didn’t leave her for the whole nine, and Masta Jefferson neither.
“He put his office up in the little room next to hers at Monticello to wait it out. Started writing a new book on Virginia. Heard it said he didn’t care much for black folks mixing with white folks. Anyway, about that time Masta Jefferson sent Martin out after that slave boy Custer, who had run off to Williamsburg—never did catch him. In May of eighty-two, Martha gave birth to another girl child and named it after the one she had lost, Lucy Elizabeth. I didn’t say nothing, but I didn’t want that name for that child. It seemed to be a bad omen, and I was right. Lucy survived until the age of four, but Martha didn’t live to see her face but for another seventeen months. Martha knew she was dying, and I knew it, and Masta Jefferson, he knew it, but nobody said nothing until the end. Lord, when he see her die … And she not yet thirty-four.”
Elizabeth Hemings gazed from under the half-closed eyelids at the two women watching her die. Martha was stubborn about coming to sit with her. It was her duty as mistress of the house to attend to dying slaves.
Those two sat there like they were made of wood, Elizabeth Hemings thought. They had always had a talent for stillness. She had never been able to sit still. She was doing her best to die, before they murdered her, but she was dying hard. She always knew she would have a hard time dying. There they sat, and she lay, the three of them, waiting for death. They had all lived their lives according to the rules: the rules of master and slave, man and woman, husband and wife, lover and mistress. The one who had called the rules and who had made the game was gone riding, loath to associate himself with all this women business of dying and watching other people die. She knew these two would mourn him when his time came, more than they would ever mourn her, and could she blame them? They had been birth’d and trained for that. She herself had trained her own daughter, her favorite child, to the triple bondage of slave, woman, and concubine, as one trains a blooded horse to its rider, never questioning the rights of the rider. If she hadn’t done that, her daughter would never have come home from Paris.
Lordy, yes. She had procured for her master. She had made him a present of what she had loved most in the world. How could she have known that her vision of the perfect slave would coincide with his vision of the perfect woman. And Sally Hemings loved Thomas Jefferson. That was the tragedy. Love, not slavery. And God knew how much slavery there was in love …
Oh, the small degree of love she had felt for John Wayles had given her some measure of privilege, of barter, of freedom, of pride, of comfort. . . . No, her daughter’s was a love of which she had had only an inkling. Sally had no worldly pride, no independence, no idea of justice. She was still childish, rancorless, detached, except for that which concerned what she loved. Sally was not even conscious of injuries inflicted upon her, and of the self-possession it took to forgive, she had not one grain of that.
The old woman continued to examine the placid and unlined face of her favorite daughter. She wanted to scream at her to run away. But it was too late. Much too late. Nothing could change now. If only she had understood in the beginning that her daughter had been constituted for love the way some women are constituted for breeding. Her life had left no trace on her body or her spirit. She could absorb everything. Not like poor tormented Martha Randolph with her twelve children by her insane and drunken husband, and her passion for a father she could never quite please. Martha with her awkward body, and her plain looks, and her quick temper hidden under migraine headaches, like her father.
Elizabeth Hemings felt a sudden mixture of love and contempt for them both. She turned her head away from them and fell silent.
The pause seemed longer than necessary, and Sally Hemings automatically continued: “I was forty-seven and Sally was thirteen, Martha she was twelve,” and waited for the discourse to continue. But Elizabeth Hemings did not pick up the thread of her tale.
“Mama?”
“She’s dead, Sally.” Martha’s voice was like a rock under her.
Martha tried to rise, fell back, and then, with a moan, threw herself over Elizabeth Hemings’ still body.
Sally Hemings remained seated, staring at Martha as if she had gone mad. Her mother couldn’t be dead. Her mother had something eminently important to tell her. She had waited all these weeks to hear it. Like the keys to the mansion, it was information that had to be passed on from black woman to black woman, just as she would pass it on to her own children. Her mother couldn’t be dead because she didn’t know the secret. Her mother had taken it along with her slavehood to the grave.
She felt a chill. Her mother’s face was calm, smiling. She had murdered herself before they had done it for her.
“Mama!”
Sally Hemings tore Martha’s encompassing arms from around Elizabeth Hemings and began to shake the frail body of her mother.
Even Martha, who was strong, could not unlock the two women. It was Thomas Jefferson, who, with all his force, finally wrenched his mistress away from her mother and carried her in his arms from the cabin, as the other slave women began the ritual wail which echoes from cabin to cabin, following them along Mulberry Row, as he strode grimly back with her to the Big House.
Elizabeth Hemings had a fine funeral. All her children, grandchildren, and their children were summoned to Monticello from the neighboring plantations. One hundred and four descendants, all answering to the surname of Hemings, came to pay their last respects. Black. Brown. Yellow. White. All slaves.
HERE LIES THE BELOVED
ELIZABETH (BET) HEMINGS
OF
MONTICELLO
BORN 1735 DIED 1807
“Mama—” She paused as if she expected an answer. “I’m so lonely.”
The last sound came from her throat like the rasp of a night cricket. Sally Hemings stretched across the rectangle of earth and pressed her face into the cool young April grass.