JAMES DISCOVERED the concubinage of his sister that morning when he turned back the counterpane of his master’s bed. He had waited, first outside the door of the bedroom and then in the gray shadows of the arc made by the curved marble stairway of the Hôtel de Langeac in the early dawn. He had seen Thomas Jefferson descend the grand staircase and carefully unlatch the front door and step out into the courtyard of the mansion. For one moment, the rosy light loomed against the blackness of the arch. Then the door had slammed shut. James had waited for a length of time he could not measure when Sally Hemings came down the same stairs. She had turned, almost facing him and wearing his heavy black cloak and had gone out the front door.
Sally Hemings’ brother now stood in his master’s empty room under the painted ceiling of “Night.” He was twenty-three years old. Of those twenty-three years, fourteen had been spent serving, loving, and tending Thomas Jefferson. Like some demigod who descended from the heavens to mingle with mortals, he would ascend, leaving that which had to be cleaned up to his servants. His master had left Paris.
He was in throes of some powerful emotion, yet he couldn’t sort out which emotion it was. James Hemings was a virgin. His master and his sister had gone beyond the pale of his existence. He gathered the stained sheets in his arms. The complexity of his new feelings paralyzed him. Violence, like an ague, shook him. What should he do? How should he conduct himself as a free man? Kill?
“Help me,” whispered James. “God, help me.”
He didn’t—would never—have the courage to kill Thomas Jefferson.
From that day on, James dreamed of those spots of blood. The whole bed would turn red as he touched it, staining his own hands as if he had plunged them into the entrails of a living creature. He would struggle to take the sheets off the bed, but they would heave and swirl, and sickening sounds would come from them. Terrified, he would back away, but the sheets would pursue him, leaping at his throat like a wild animal, enveloping him in a slimy embrace. In the ensuing struggle, he would be hurled into the fire burning in the room’s hearth. His hands and feet, still swaddled in the sticky sheets, would begin to burn. Then his arms and legs. Then his private parts. Finally, only his torso would remain with a blackened and charred head, the mouth opened in a horrible but soundless scream. The head would begin to spin itself in agony until it literally spun itself off the burning body and lay in the ashes which filled its mouth and eyes and nostrils, strangling and suffocating him.
That same dream would come back time and again, and would remain with him until the day he died. The first time he had awakened to find himself being shaken by a pale Petit, terrified by his screams.
“Jim-mi. There is nothing to be afraid of. Réveille-toi, mon garçon. It’s only a nightmare. Wake up, son.”
“No, not like that! Glide. GLIDE! You’re not supposed to lift your feet from the floor!”
“I’m not lifting my feet from the floor!”
“You are too. You walk like a duck! Look at Sally. She does it perfectly; better than either of us.”
“That’s because I’ve watched the frotteur do it every day for a year now! Just think of waxing floors with your feet like he does and you’ll have it.”
“Waxing floors! Will you just imagine the queen of France waxing floors!”
“I’d never thought of it! Marie-Antoinette, ‘La Frotteuse.’”
The three girls dressed in their undergarments and perspiring, collapsed into loud laughter, falling onto the deep featherbed in Sally Hemings’ room at Madame Dupré’s boardinghouse.
Martha and Maria had doffed their crimson convent uniforms, which lay in a heap on the polished floors. Sally Hemings had been in her chemise, being fitted for a new dress, when the girls arrived. Martha and Maria had begun to visit their maid regularly in her comfortable and cozy rooms. There was absolutely no privacy for the girls in the convent, the fifty pensioners slept in two immense rooms without curtains, the other rooms being reserved for drawing rooms and classrooms. Sally Hemings was overjoyed and welcomed the company of her two playmates. Released from the oppressive Hotel de Langeac, from the smoldering power of Jefferson’s sensuality, and the bitterness of her brother James, she had found relief, joy, and affection in the adolescent company of Marie and Martha. Her initiation into womanhood forgotten, she basked in her temporary return to childhood.
Often she would leave her rooming house and walk the several blocks to the Abbaye de Panthémont, entering through the chapel on the rue de Grenelle and stepping into the courtyard filled with crimson-uniformed ladies of the gentry. As this was not only a school for girls, but a retreat for spinsters, abandoned wives, and ladies of the court in temporary seclusion, the ways and gossip of Versailles and the court found their way here with rapidity, and girls were playing a game now popular at the school: attempting to imitate the famous walk of the queen, Marie-Antoinette, the “most beautiful walk in France.”
With the voluminous hoop skirts in fashion called robes à paniers, which completely hid the bottom half of a lady’s body, the desired effect of moving oneself from one place to the other was that of floating disembodied along the galleries and antechambers of palaces like ships on water, rather than humans on legs and feet. The effect was obtained by never lifting the feet from the floor, but by gliding them forward and slightly outward along the surface of the floor in a skating movement, and keeping the tightly corseted upper part of the body erect and rigidly immobile. The walk was practiced by both the ladies and gentlemen at the court of Versailles, but no one in the kingdom achieved the desired effect with greater success than the stately, full-bosomed queen herself.
“One of the ladies at Panthémont said that she had never seen such a sight as the queen sailing along the gallery of mirrors. One could see nothing in the throng of courtiers but a forest of waving plumes a foot and a half taller than her ladies’ heads,” Martha said. She turned to Sally Hemings.
“Can you imagine such a thing, Sally? Oh, how I would love to see it just once, the court of Versailles. Papa has promised to take me to the public galleries when he returns. Anyone may enter, you know, and the gardens as well are public, and you may come across the queen herself walking with her ladies. Of course, we shall have an entrée in the person of the Comtesse de Tessé, who is a lady in waiting to the queen. I will find her gliding like a swan among the pools and fountains of Versailles, and I will drop my best curtsy, and Papa will kiss her hand and … Can you imagine!”
Martha Jefferson shook the bare shoulders of her maid gently and affectionately, tossing the mane of bright hair behind her. Sally Hemings nodded to Martha and let her petticoats drop. At any rate, she could walk like a queen, if nothing else.
She fell back into the arms of Martha, pretending to slip, and as she did she let out a whoop: “Her majesty has just glided onto her royal derrière. . . .” They all collapsed into new gales of laughter. This brought Madame Dupré to the door of her boarder.
“Girls, ladies, you would think I had a regiment of hussars in my house!”
Madame Dupré was the proprietor of a small rooming house on the rue de Seine. She had been instructed to board the maid of the American minister’s daughters while he was away on a trip to Amsterdam and the Rhineland. She had agreed to do this for the sum of twenty-one francs a week plus laundry and dressmaking. The gentle, lovely girl, who had arrived at her door two weeks ago accompanied by the minister himself, had pleased her. As she had not been instructed otherwise, Madame Dupré treated Sally Hemings as she would have treated any maid of an aristocrat: that is, a young girl of a poor family with no dowry who enters the service of a great family as a lady’s maid and companion to the daughters of such a family in return for room, board, and protection. Obviously the minister thought enough of her not to leave her alone in the company of his servants when he went abroad. . . .
Madame Dupré had no way of knowing that Sally Hemings was a slave. She had no way of knowing either that a “maid” in Virginia was a polite way of indicating someone who was black. Sally Hemings’ complexion told Madame Dupré nothing, except that she was dark. She would even have said swarthy, but a little strange; the particular tint of the young girl’s skin was not the same as she had noted in the Italian or Spanish complexion. It was rather an extraordinary shade of buff, without the profusion of down that usually accompanied the ladies of that hue. She was a bit surprised at the meanness of her wardrobe. Certainly if one was poor, one had to know how to sew in order to dress oneself, but then she was to remedy these shortcomings by instructing her in dressmaking and making sure that she had the minimum uniforms of a lady’s maid. Certainly her manners and gentleness and soft, charmingly accented French bespoke a certain breeding, and with a little grooming, thought Madame Dupré, she would surely attract a gentleman of property and improve her station in life in the timehonored manner of becoming the mistress or (why not?) the wife of a modest member of the gentry. She, of course, had had no instructions along these lines, but as she liked the child, Madame Dupré decided she would do all she could to improve her while she was in her charge. Besides, through her mistresses, Sally Hemings had access to the Abbaye de Panthémont, where only the finest ladies and young girls retired or were educated. She had only to imitate her betters, she concluded.
When Madame Dupré saw what the girls had been doing, she joined the laughter. The queen’s extraordinary walk was renowned throughout the kingdom, and when little Sallie showed her version of it, she had to admit it was both seductive and accurate.
“My, that is quite good. Now do me a curtsy, all of you—comme il faut. I have come to serve you tea, but you had better put your clothes back on before the servant sees you in the state of nature.”
The three girls stood up and Madame Dupré looked at the virginal young bodies pressed close to her. The eldest Mademoiselle Jefferson was so tall she towered over everyone. Some American ladies were immense, and this one certainly took after her father. She had a fine complexion: milk and roses at the same time, except that it was marred by the same freckles that dotted the countenance of the minister. She remarked on Martha’s lovely hair. It was hanging down in a mass of thick auburn waves to her waist. Her eyes were without color or lashes and too close together, and her chin, she felt, was impossible: long and jutting, with the promise of unyielding stubbornness so disagreeable to men. Yet the luxurious curls managed to soften the lines of her face and long nose, and her mouth was delicate, firm, and good humored, bespeaking justice if not generosity, and the body was slim, well made, and bursting with good health.
As for the young Mademoiselle Jefferson, she and her maid resembled each other uncannily. Madame Dupré continued her inventory. They were both remarkably beautiful, both dark with hazel eyes, the maid’s being a peculiar but fascinating shade of yellow. They both had deep dimples, prized by French ladies, and soft wide mouths with that touch of sullenness found in ardent characters. The maid reflected the promise in body of the mistress, who was still a child; perfect mat skin, long thick dark hair, and fragile yet compact body with a deep bosom and full hips.
Yes, thought Madame Dupré, with a little luck, Sallie will make her fortune in Paris … if she has the luck to attract a gentleman.
The first time James Hemings came to visit his sister at Madame Dupré’s, she fell into his arms with a cry of relief. She had not seen him since she had left the hôtel that March day almost three weeks ago. James Hemings was still reeling from the shock of his sister’s seduction, but he determined to show nothing but tenderness and solicitude. He had three or four weeks at the most to convince her that her master had compromised all claims to her love and loyalty by his forcing of her, and that now was the time to claim her rights as a free woman on French soil. Once the demigod was back, his powerful compelling presence would again dominate their lives, and their only chance would be lost, perhaps forever.
He had brought her a letter that had arrived for her from her master.
She had taken the letter from him with trembling hands but had not read it, hiding it in her petticoat pocket. They had then gone out for a walk, as they had so many times before in Paris. Free of uniforms and even the semblance of servanthood, they had roamed the streets and the grand boulevards crammed with new buildings. American Revolutionary ideas were everywhere, and they met them in a form hitherto never encountered by either of them: the newspaper and the broadside.
There were regular newspapers printed every day which, even under the king’s Censure Bureau, were wildly critical and full of republican ideas. Anyone with the money to buy or rent or who owned a printing press was free to print and distribute what he liked. These were called broadsides. Anyone doing this was liable, of course, afterward to be arrested by the king’s censors for lèse-majesté, but no one prevented the broadside from being printed and distributed, even if the author was in the Bastille. It was around the Palais Royal that most of the newspaper vendors congregated and it was usually here, in the magnificent gardens of the palace with its famous meridian cannon fired by the rays of the sun at noon, that brother and sister spent part of their promenade.
The public gardens of the Palais Royal teemed with every manner of man, woman, and beast—from veiled noblewomen on their way to assignations to street prostitutes painted in the gaudy red rouge and white powder in fashion. There were priests and hawkers, lemonade and food vendors, cavaliers and officers of the king’s regiment, beggars and pickpockets, raving orators, and all manner of dubious-looking characters. In the center of the gardens was the Due d’Orleans’s new glass-domed circus, the latest wonder of Paris. It was here, amid the pamphlets, engravings, newspapers, broadsides, rumors, and posters, that brother and sister discovered the shadow of things to come.
Each week a letter had come, hand-delivered by James, and each week Sally Hemings had silently hidden it in her petticoats and gone walking in Paris with James. Each week James sought to steal the mind and body of his sister from her master, while she half-listened to his pleas and warnings about her life, too stunned to think of anything except the letter that had arrived.
They were the first letters that anyone had ever addressed to her in all her fifteen years. They had taken on a magic, these letters addressed to “Mademoiselle Sally Hemings.” She was unable to explain to James her fascination with the power of these words. Her name had stood independent of herself or her will on the thick white paper. Again and again, she had touched the black letters on the white paper imagining this person “Sally Hemings” to whom they were addressed.
Even not being able to answer these summons, because he was not long enough in each city, seemed right: the magic hold was never broken by the effort it would have taken to answer and thus claim the title by which she was addressed. Instead she had only to wait, to receive, to acquiesce.
The letters themselves, when tremblingly she opened them after James’s departure and read the dozen or so lines, were as ordinary as those her master wrote to his daughters, which she also read when they came to visit her. If she expected billets-doux, she got none. Instead, there was a steady stream of fatherly advice, kindly, distant, a little cold, which took on the air of a monologue, since no response was possible. Yet the young girl read and reread her letters. She kept them in a silk envelope she had sewn especially for them. Without knowing why, she showed them to no one, nor did she speak of their existence.
Sally Hemings smiled at her latest geography lessons interspaced with “be a good girl.” “Study … depend on yourself … visit with Patsy and Polly … love me. ...” These fatherly letters disappointed her. How strange these terse letters that arrived from mysterious German cities so remote from her imagination, she thought.
Then, one day, a new letter arrived. It was dutifully brought to her by James to her rooms and dutifully hidden in her petticoats until she returned from their walk to read it alone, and dutifully opened and held toward the light in order to decipher the minuscule, almost illegible writing. When she finished reading it, she sat down weakly, her legs no longer able to support her, and steadied the letter trembling in her hands on her lap. Again she strained over the tiny cramped writing, as if her life had depended on it, and finally she clutched it to her bosom with a cry.
The message was clear. And because it was written, it had for Sally Hemings the binding power of a holy writ.