I am more and more convinced that Man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or few is ever grasping, and like the grave cries give, give.
ABIGAIL ADAMS
I never hoped for mercy … for more than fifty years I have lived in an enemy country.
JOHN ADAMS
I BELIEVED myself to be happy. As a child I was happy. I was brought up around the Big House at Monticello, and I loved those around me: my mother and uncles, Martha, Maria, Master Jefferson. Like all slaves, I was told nothing of my origins, which little by little I pieced together. Once, when I was eight or nine, my brother James and Martha went off to play and left me behind. I don’t remember the reason, only that I felt abandoned and was crying.
Master Jefferson came upon me and tried to comfort me. He said being sad was a waste of time and the best thing to do when you were sad was to write down everything you saw about yourself, even the tiniest detail, and then to think about them one by one. By the time you had got halfway through the list, he said, you wouldn’t remember the origin of your misery anymore. He left then and returned with a smooth pine board and some charcoal. He sat beside me and we made a list of all the plants, flowers, trees, and vegetables we could see in the kitchen garden and beyond; all the fish we could imagine in the little river by the northwest boundary; all the animals we could imagine living in the pines of the southwest boundary. It was my earliest recollection of him, and, that moment knowing neither past nor future, I felt only an immense calm and safety in his presence that rested on my shoulders like a warm cloak.
When Martha and James came back and found us together, Martha flew into a rage of jealousy, took off her boot, and started to hit me with it. The heel of Martha’s boot came down above my temple and raked the skin and broke it. More blood than was warranted by the wound streamed down my cheek. It mingled with my tears of confusion and grief.
Out of desolation, I ground my teeth to keep from crying and brought my petticoat up to my ear to stem the flow of blood. But he was there before me. He held my head and pressed his handkerchief to the wound. Then he picked up Martha in his arms to keep her from hitting me again.
I remember her bright head meeting level with his great height in a blaze of red. He had flung her over his shoulder, but his eyes met mine in an attempt to console me, too. I despised Martha for being jealous of those few minutes I had had, when she had him as a father forever. . . . That day made me a list-maker. And a diary-keeper. I would continue all my life.
The Greenhelm, June 17,1787
It was June seventeenth. I remember that day we were five weeks out of Norfolk, and we were, as Captain Ramsay would have said, “becalmed.” There was not a sniff of wind; all the great square sails were furled and bound. The sun was hot on my head, and even now, if I close my eyes, I can still see the reflection of the sun on that smooth sea, like the field of white clover that runs down the back toward the river boundary of Monticello. I had found a wonderful hiding place, and intended to keep it for myself. It was high up on the forward mast, well, not so high up, but it was quite a dangerous climb. There was a little niche where I could watch what was going on below without anyone seeing me. I used to go up there and take off my bonnet. I can still hear little Polly screaming not to take her bonnet off, for if she got freckles in the sun, her father had written, he wouldn’t love her anymore. Well, I would take my bonnet off and let my hair down and feel it curl round my waist. At home I was made to wear it tied up. My charge, Maria Jefferson, known as Polly, had done nothing but cry and cuff me for the past ten days. We, that is, her cousin Jack Eppes, Mistress Eppes, and myself, had lured her on the ship by deceiving her, and she still wasn’t over it. She hadn’t wanted to leave her Aunt Eppes to go to her father. Now she found herself on a strange ship with me, on her way to a foreign country to see a father she didn’t remember, who said he wouldn’t love her if she got freckles! From the time she had awakened, hours out of the port, she never stopped screaming about being shanghaied. I was just fourteen and Polly was nine. On the ship she had been left with me, who was as scared as she, and who felt just as abandoned. We were on our way to Paris, France, and her father, Thomas Jefferson, the minister to that kingdom. But by then, the worst was over. She had liked the captain, Mr. Ramsay, who had taken charge of her. She clung to him.
We were the only females on the ship and were made much of by the five other male passengers and the captain. For me, it was the beginning of my real history. From the moment I stepped onto that ship as nurse for Polly, everything that had happened to me before seemed to recede and grow smaller, until nothing remained except the sweep of the sea and the vastness of the sky and those unexpected days of peace and freedom.
I was still quite childish at fourteen, although I looked older than my age. My childhood days at Monticello—the little school, run for the white children and the house servants, taught by Mrs. Carr; old Cook’s underground kitchens with all their intrigues and noise and heat—faded away in the bright sea-sun. I missed my mother. I thought for a while she was going to take Polly to Paris herself, but finally my mother had decided on me. It had been a queer choice.
It was Mammy Isabel who was supposed to have gone with Polly. When Mistress Eppes arrived to fetch her to Norfolk, it became known that Mammy Isabel was well gone with her eighth child and wasn’t fit to travel. Mistress Eppes, who was altogether distracted anyway about losing Polly and sending her so far away against her will, was beside herself. First, because Polly really didn’t want to go; and second, because there was no one to take her.
My mother had suddenly turned and looked at me and said, “Sally will go. She’ll have James to look out for her.” And before Mrs. Eppes could get her breath to ask if I had had my smallpox, or how old I was, Mama swept me out of the parlor, down the hall, and out through the kitchens, leaving Cook with her mouth wide open, ready, but unable to get her two cents in. I was breathless and scared. I had never been a nurse or a lady’s maid or anything. Most I had been before then was a child! But Mama, she kept right on going, I can remember her skirts whistling, up the back stairs, into the linen room in the back, out with a straw trunk and three cases, then back to her own chests of linen to find chemises and petticoats and stockings and bolts of cloth for dresses. Nothing Isabel had for the voyage fit me, even the underwear, so, in less than a week, everything had to be made new.
I was going and we couldn’t miss the ship that was waiting in Norfolk. Master Jefferson was not going to tolerate any more delays. I suppose my mother could have found someone to fit into Isabel’s things. After all, there were some three hundred and sixty-four slaves she could pick from, at least half were female and grown. But something pressed her to send me. To this day I don’t know why. If it was fate, then she had a hand in it.
“It will be Sally, then. I can’t think anymore,” Mistress Eppes had said, finally and belatedly, for her voice was lost in the preparations of my departure.
I was leaving Monticello, the only home I knew, for a strange country.
Monticello, the most beautiful place in the world. The grass was greener, the scent of flowers keener, the blossoms bigger, the air clearer, the animals more healthy, the rigs more elegant, the cooking better, the slaves happier, the master—whom I had not seen since I was ten—better than any other place. Of course, I had never been outside the boundaries of Monticello. I was born at Bermuda Hundred, the plantation of my father, but he died three months after I was born, and the next year I came with my mother to live at Monticello, perched on its mountain, looking onto the Blue Ridge Mountains. My mother loved it more than I. It was always cool, with a breeze even in the hottest summer, and had a great hall that carried the freshness through the house. With horse and carriage, it took almost one hour to reach the main gate from the road.
Master Jefferson spent much of his time away from the plantation, in Philadelphia or New York, but every time he came home he would tear something down or build something new or rebuild something. He always arrived with his plans, and he would summon my brothers James and Robert and the white workmen, and they would start to work.
The slave cabins dotted the hillside in back of the Big House; they climbed up the hill like white morning glories gone wild with the smoke drifting out of the chimney fires. Along the back of the main house was a long covered walk, looking onto the kitchens, the meat house, smokehouse, icehouse, laundries, storehouses, and servants’ quarters. This was my mother’s domain. She oversaw twenty-five or more house servants.
We never had the number of servants a big plantation had. Master Jefferson didn’t want it, and as Mistress Jefferson was frequently ill, she couldn’t have managed to run them. My mother could have, of course, but there didn’t seem to be much point in having a footman behind every chair and no mistress.
And, of course, there were always everybody’s children, black and white, running everywhere. Once Master Eppes came rushing in to find Master Jefferson, tripped over a baby in the hallway, and slid seven feet on the parquet that had just been waxed for the fourth time that day. Fractured his rib, I remember. My mother usually kept everybody in the back and made do with Martin and Big George when the master was home.
My mother was beautiful. She was not very tall, but well formed and light mahogany in color. Her skin changed colors on different days; sometimes there was a rose tint and sometimes a yellow tint. She had her “dark” days and her “light” days. She used to say that my father would always remark on her color every morning. Once I surprised her in the fields just standing perfectly still like a statue among the tall wheat; her skin had taken on the same color, her eyes were blazing, and there were two tears running down her cheeks, but there had been no sounds of weeping.
A great calm had settled on our ship. Another day and still there was no wind, so we lingered, sitting on the tranquil sea, like a turtle in its shell. Sailors and passengers alike were lulled by the silence, the absence of movement. Games were organized and promenades. We made friends with the sailors who would make us gifts of little soft animals, creatures made out of rope and hemp. Polly and I used to “fish” over the side of the ship, which amused the sailors, who would ask us if we had caught any “catfish.” One fat, red little sailor with a blond beard and green eyes made me the figure of a little dog in the image of a certain race they had in France. He made it out of hemp, and around the neck, tail, and legs was a mass of curls shaped like shrubbery. I later learned this race of dog was called “caniche” and was in fashion with the Paris gentry. I tied a ribbon on mine and called him George Washington. I would climb up to my hiding place, my “Monticello,” with Washington, and there I would sit, making lists in my loneliness, to pass the time.
Blue. Sky. Water without wind. No clouds. Sixteen sails. Three flags. Birds. Seven Masts. Sun. A long railing of polished brass. God. Silver on blue. 85 spokes in the railing. 48 sailors on the ship. 3 cooks. 1 surgeon. 2 mates. 1 adjunct. 4 officers. 1 Captain. Captain Ramsay. The cargo; sugar. tobacco. rice. barley. molasses. peanuts.
Partial inventory of Polly’s trunks: 1 stiffened coat of silk; 2 silk dresses, 1 cloak, 8 petticoats; 8 pairs of kid mittens; 4 pairs of gloves; 4 pairs of calamanco shoes; 8 pairs leather pumps; 6 pairs fine thread stockings; 4 pairs fine worsted stockings; 2 fans; 2 masks; 4 pairs of ruffles; 7 girdles consisting of 2 white, 2 dark blue, 1 rose, 1 yellow, 1 black; 6 linen drawers; 6 silk drawers; 13 chemises; 1 silver mirror; 16 dolls; 1 flute. . . .
Inventory of my trunk: 2 cotton petticoats; 1 quilted petticoat; 6 dresses, 1. pair worsted stockings; 4 linen aprons; 2 girdles; 12 chemises; 1 pair of shoes; 2 nightshirts; 1 wooden crucifix carved by John; 1 woolen shawl; 1 flute.
We got under way again. It had been still the whole day, when suddenly a breeze whipped the ribbons of our bonnets as Polly and I strolled on deck. There were sailors everywhere, running and leaping in a noisy slippery dance. The sails swelled before our eyes and the ship shuddered, rolling under us like one of my master’s galloping bay horses. In about an hour we had begun to take on speed, and what a beautiful sight were the waves we made, frothing in the setting sun, the last streaks of light quarreling with the dark that finally came, dropping like a black cloth. From then on we made good time. I started looking forward to the future instead of being homesick for the past. That night we celebrated the trade winds.
Everyone dressed for dinner, and Captain Ramsay put on his dress uniform and fairly took our breath away. It was of a bright- but deep-blue hue, a velvet jacket with golden tassels on the shoulders hung with golden cords. The lapels were red satin, with a matching waistcoat. His cravat and shirt were a snowy white, with lace at the cuffs, and his small cloths were also white with blue stockings. His hair was powdered and tied with a blue ribbon, and his shoes were black patent-leather, with silver buckles. His buttons were of silver and he had a silver watch and a great sword in a silver harness and a blue sapphire on his hand. I will never forget the splendor of Captain Ramsay. Little Polly had found her first love. Oh, he was a splendid man, Captain Ramsay, and Polly did adore him! I think it was because she missed her father.
I remembered her father well, but Polly had been only four when he had left, and she had no recollection of him at all. All that she had known, as love and family, she had left in Norfolk with her aunt’s family. I felt sorry for Polly. I loved her in a way I never loved her sister Martha. Martha was one year older than I, yet I was her aunt, just as I was Polly’s. We had grown up together at Monticello, fought, played, rode, and laughed together. I was with her when Mistress Jefferson, my half sister, died. A long, pale, hot afternoon, stinking and mosquito-filled. We had tried to keep the bugs off her, taking turns fanning her. The doctor came at the end, but Master Jefferson wouldn’t let him bleed her. My mother had dropped all her household duties to nurse her mistress. Master Jefferson had moved his study next to her bedroom and had not left her for the whole time it took her to die. Monticello, which had always been a house full of people, babies, guests, kin, and animals, seemed to empty out, and there was just my mother, Master Jefferson, Martha, Polly, and me, and the rest of the servants. At the end, my master had fainted dead away. He remained unconscious for so long his family thought he had died with her. The last thing she had made him promise was not to marry again.
It was my mother who had bathed her and laid her out and wept over her. The mistress had been like a daughter to my mother, even though they had been, like Martha and me, almost contemporaries. Whatever accommodations they had had to make in their lives because of my mother’s concubinage, they seemed to have made long ago, because they genuinely loved each other. Mama combed her long hair out onto the pillow. Mama wept and wept and cleaned her and put on her jewels, draped the room and filled it with fresh flowers, and wept. She wouldn’t let anyone else touch the body. She had tended Master Jefferson as well, who seemed to have lost his senses and his will to live. She cooked his meals and practically fed them to him, nursed him until he was able to go out riding again. Then he had ridden like the wind for days and days until he was exhausted. Martha rode with him sometimes, but mostly he was alone. And mostly Martha was alone. She couldn’t reach her father in his terrible grief, so she turned to me. Or rather we turned to each other. We didn’t cry over Martha Jefferson’s death, but then Master Jefferson and Elizabeth Hemings wept enough for all of us. Martha and I seemed to enter into some kind of covenant; tearlessness. We were shocked by the conduct of the grown-ups. Somehow it didn’t seem dignified. One day Martha, who was called Patsy to differentiate her from her mother, held up a mirror to my face and said: “You look more like her than I do. I look like my father.”
In seven more days we were to reach England. I was happier with every passing day. Everything in my former life grew smaller as we put more and more ocean between our ship and Virginia. Monticello became farther and farther away.
I felt myself breaking a barrier, leaving childhood for adulthood. I already knew that I looked much older than my age, and something happened on board which brought home to me the fact that I was no longer a child.
It was June nineteenth, and Polly was busy playing cards and learning curse words from Captain Ramsay. The sea was navy blue, with lacy frills of soft waves made by a gentle easterly wind. The sky was bright blue without a cloud. We had had nothing but good weather. When I told the captain that I too would have loved just one storm at sea, he had laughed and said beautiful girls shouldn’t make wishes that beautiful girls might regret, as beautiful girls usually got what they wanted in life. Considering my place in life, I thought he was making fun of me, and my eyes filled with tears. I started to speak, but he had already turned away, occupied with his affairs.
Later that day, one of the five gentlemen passengers, Monsieur LaFaurie, a Frenchman, spoke to me for the first time. I was delighted, for on my own I could not have addressed him. I was anxious to ask him about Paris, the French people. We had often had French visitors at Monticello. My mother always took special care with the food on those occasions, since she said the French put great store in what they ate. And always Mistress Jefferson took special care with what she wore because, as with their food, she said, the French cared a great deal about what they put on their backs. This, I found out, was a contagious disease, for never was I so consumed with envy for clothes and despondent not to have them as in Paris.
It seemed to me too that the French were very careful about the way they spoke, for Monsieur LaFaurie hemmed and hawed for over an hour before he finally asked me: Why did people refer to me as being a Negro slave? Since obviously I was neither a Negro nor a slave. “Why, you are whiter than I,” I remember him saying in astonishment.
I could have told him that I was a slave not because of my color, but because my mother was a slave and her mother before her. But I was, I found myself lying, a Spanish orphan from New Orleans (that sounded distant and foreign enough), engaged as a lady’s maid for Miss Jefferson. I was on the seven seas, far from Monticello, and I let my imagination take me through a most convincing childhood. I had had much practice with Martha at home, making up imaginary childhoods.
But, of course, he asked Captain Ramsay later, who told him the truth, plus my age. He also gave me a scolding I would never forget. After the gentlemen had had their brandy and cigars, Captain Ramsay sent for me.
“Sally, I want to know why you deliberately lied and misled Monsieur LaFaurie this morning.”
“Because he wouldn’t have believed me if I had told the truth.”
“I can’t believe that a slave at Monticello has been brought up to lie. Your master would be shocked, and what an example to set for young Miss Jefferson!” He sighed and waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, he continued. “You know it is very difficult to have two female passengers on this ship. Of course, Miss Jefferson is a child, but you are not, and you should be careful how you conduct yourself. I know that at home you have all kinds of freedom and license and that you are … are … are even encouraged … but you must remember in the close quarters of a ship, you cannot … I will not permit that you give … provocation to my gentleman passengers. You may look sixteen, but I know you are but fourteen, and you invite … something you are not prepared for, to be sure. . . . You are a child, and I might add a not very well-brought up slave and servant, and if you have not been taught as yet your place in life, then I will confine you to your cabin until we reach shore.”
All my pretensions of womanhood dropped like so many petals. I had wanted to impress Monsieur LaFaurie because he hadn’t treated me any differently for being “black.” I supposed French people didn’t know any better.
“I have not said anything to Miss Jefferson, nor do I intend to. Nor do I intend to punish you myself. That is, if you behave yourself. Am I understood?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Now, another thing, Miss Hemings. You have the habit of sitting on the first platform of the forward mast. Sitting there, you may not be aware, but you are in full view of the sailors working beneath the upper deck. You cannot see them, but they can see you. You sit there for hours, and undo your hair and let it stream down your back, and this is dire provocation for the sailors who call you the ‘siren.’ I know you don’t know what that means, but let me say, for a sailor, a siren … is someone who makes … who provokes.”
“What’s that?”
“Provocation … flirting … frolicking,” he said.
I almost fainted with shame. Captain Ramsay, who had been getting redder and redder, paused, and I began to sob. I was suddenly lonely and miserable.
For the first time in my life I realized that I was truly alone. I had never had a father, and might never see my mother again. I had no rights before society, whatever Monsieur LaFaurie said. I had no rights even over my own body, which was changing and unnatural to me. I could be coveted or punished at the whim of any white man, not just my master. No kin of mine could protect me, for they had no rights either. This horrified, tobacco-smelling white man before me could beat me or confine me or take me to his bed and I had no redress: no man would step forward to protect me, and I had no right to protect myself if I could.
I was a slave. A female slave. I felt sick.
Poor Captain Ramsay was utterly undone. He sat me down. Then he stood me up again. He poured me a glass of some kind of spirits and made me drink it. But it did nothing against that great dark desolation that crouched in my soul that day.
We would get to Paris; Polly would find her father, but I would not find mine. I was a slave. Captain Ramsay sat with me in the dark cabin a long, long time. He said how sorry he was for having been so stern. He hadn’t realized how innocent I was, how young. He tried to take me in his arms, but I let out a scream of terror. So we sat there like two stones, me with tears rolling down my cheeks. Finally, he let out a big tobaccoish sigh and got up. He paced around for a while, lit a cigar, and stared out of the porthole, so that I saw only the broad blue of his back.
After a time he left, saying he was going to fetch Miss Jefferson. Polly finally came much later, bringing Washington with her, and she took me in her arms.
The next two days, Polly and I spent the afternoons listening to stories about Paris from Monsieur LaFaurie. It didn’t seem possible that such a city could exist on the same planet with Charlottesville, Virginia. We never tired of hearing the descriptions of the ladies and their dresses, the coiffures, the gardens of the Tuileries and Versailles, the palaces of the king, the Royal Palace, Marly, Fontainebleau. I dreaded that I would be sent back to Virginia once Polly was safely delivered to London. Polly said she wouldn’t allow it, but I had already learned not to put too much faith in the promises of mistresses.
Captain Ramsay announced that we would reach our destination the next day, the twenty-sixth of June, and little Polly understood that she would be separated from Captain Ramsay, to whom she had become so attached. She too made everybody laugh by announcing that she would not leave the ship until she had her storm at sea. That she felt cheated, after being practically kidnapped onto this ship, not to have had a real storm and waves that high. Captain Ramsay laughed and said he would ask the cook if he would “stir” up a storm for Polly that night.
The last night I dressed Polly in white muslin and put her hair up. I dressed myself in red with a dark blue girdle and I let my hair out and tied it with a red ribbon. The gentlemen seemed quite pleased. Captain Ramsay seemed relieved that I was myself again, and all the officers and gentlemen rose when we left the table.
The next morning we saw birds and smelled land. After a long voyage even the inexperienced can smell land. Everybody was up early so as not to miss the first glimpse of the shore and the famous Cliffs of Dover. We were to go up the Thames to London. We had spent six weeks on the sea. I had stored up those six weeks of freedom, of being at no one’s beck and call, making lists in my diary and entries in my heart. I had read and I had written and I had dreamed. And I had grown up.
When land was sighted, a great cheer went up from everybody on deck, and Captain Ramsay appeared resplendent in still another new dress uniform. He was a vain and beautiful man! The sailors too had on their best tunics. The ship’s orchestra started playing a very gay tune as the banks of the river closed in on us. We slipped along the narrow channel toward the port of London Town.
I had never seen such a place filled with more white people than I had ever imagined in one place. Not one black face anywhere. It was for me a strange and new sensation. There were no slaves. This was another world.
We had dressed in white that day. Polly was trembling in agitation, and clinging to Captain Ramsay as he led us down the gangplank toward a bright-yellow carriage with magnificent horses, in front of which stood a couple dressed in black. The couple was Abigail and John Adams. They had come to fetch us. They seemed a pretty couple as we approached them. They looked stern and straight in front of their pretty carriage, with a splendid liveried footman atop in scarlet. Abigail Adams was short but still slightly taller than her husband, slim and in black silk. Her husband, holding her arm, was short, round, and portly, with a large square head that seemed especially bald because of the abundance of his side-whiskers. His face was ruddy, his mouth stern, his eyes direct, and his expression happy.
I followed slightly behind Polly and Captain Ramsay, and stood apart while the greetings were exchanged. The Adams couple seemed to know Captain Ramsay and greeted him warmly. I could tell from the set of Polly’s body that she was about to burst into tears. She was clinging to Captain Ramsay with both hands, as he and the handsome couple tried to coax her into the waiting vehicle. She called my name in terror and Abigail Adams, in one swift movement, turned her gaze toward me.
I got a good look at her, too. She had an oval face with a long regular nose, a pointed, almost fleshless chin, and a thin mouth. It was her eyes that made her face; they were tear-bright and sparkling, closely spaced and quick, like the eyes of a small animal. From beneath her bonnet sprang bright-red curls. Her eyebrows were arched high, giving her whole face a mischievous look. It was a face that had no age, although at the time she was middle-aged. Her color was high, as in people with that color hair, and, as she turned, there were two bright spots of exasperation on her cheeks.
“And who are you, Miss?”
“I am Mistress Polly’s slave, Ma’am.”
Several expressions passed quickly across her face, but the one that settled there was one I already knew well: that of a rich white lady eyeing a poor darky slave. She looked first at her astonished husband, then at Captain Ramsay, who still had hold of one of Polly’s hands while I had taken the other in mine.
“What!” she said.
It was the first time, I am sure, Abigail Adams had ever seen or addressed a slave of her own country.