JAMES CAME HOME. He had arrived from France more than a year ago, and we dreamed to hold him at Monticello until the summer. He had seen his ex-master in Philadelphia.
“Thomas Jefferson says my journeys will end up on the moon! If only it could be so, for I am tired of this earth and its inhabitants!”
“When did you see him? How is he?”
My brother looked at me in disgust.
“He is fine. Embroiled in politics, as usual, and complaining about it, as usual. Burwell sends his love. Your master has no stomach to govern men. He says, ‘I leave to others the sublime delight of riding the storm, better pleased with sound sleep and a warm berth below, with the society of neighbors, friends, and fellow laborers of the earth, than of spies and sycophants. . . .’ So, I guess he misses you, sister. He can’t decide whether he wants to be vice-president or not. Certainly, according to the newspapers and the backstairs, they are giving him a hard time. He looked so worried and despondent, I proposed that he join me on my next voyage to Spain to forget his troubles.”
“Spain!”
Both Elizabeth Hemings and I exclaimed at the same time. We were sitting in one of the cellars next to the kitchens where it was cool. We had stuffed James with everything good we could find to eat in the pantries. He was wearing the latest French fashions and looked splendid. Men no longer wore breeches, but long pants, slender, and tight, and tucked in tall boots. The colors had changed as well—no more rose satin or pale-blue silk. Frock coats were shorter, fuller, in dark colors with high collars and white linen swathed the chest and neck up to the ears. James no longer wore his hair long; it was cropped short in a mass of curls.
“But why Spain?” we asked.
“And why not Spain? As I told your master, it is the only country not fighting, or getting ready to fight, with France! Don’t think that France is any party since the Revolution; we had only the beginnings of it that October of eighty-nine, and the stories we’ve heard here are nothing compared to the reality. When I arrived in France, I had hoped to find work with one of the great houses I had known when we were there. Only I learned that most of the great houses were closed, or gutted and burned, their owners and occupants either in exile or gone to the guillotine, like the poor king and his queen. And the ‘citizens,’ as they call everyone now, were looking askance at the servant class as well. Many cooks’ and valets’ heads came off along with their masters’. Petit knew what he was doing to leave when he did.
“Once Robespierre was dead, it was thought that the bloodletting would be finished, but it goes on even now. There is civil and foreign war. Everyone is attacking France or getting ready to attack her. Because of the upheaval, there had no been no planting and therefore no harvest. There is no bread and no money. People pray only for a deliverer. The Estates General is paralyzed. Everything—everything is chaos, yet your Jefferson still hopes for victory for the Revolution. Nothing but a miracle will save France now. Never did I think the fine house of the old Comtesse de Noailles on the He Saint-Louis would be gutted and burned to the ground; as well as the Hermitage, and the Tuileries Palace. There was no trace of the Bastille, but think on this: they destroyed Marly as well. Nothing is left.”
Marly. So it too was gone.
“And all of Master Jefferson’s friends?” I asked.
“How changed their fortunes are now! Lafayette is in a prison at Magdeburg. Madame de Corny is a widow and has retired to Rouen with a pittance she salvaged from her jewels. Mrs. Cosway has gone into a convent at Genoa. Monsieur de Condorcet escaped from a hanging indictment, and is a fugitive. The Due de la Rochefoucauld was torn to pieces by a mob before the eyes of his mother and wife. Those who have not been separated from their heads are either in exile or in prison. The Directory could well use the Bastille we tore down!” James licked his lips.
The recital of murder and trials went on long into the night. We listened at first with horror and interest; then numbness set in as the litany went on and on. James took delight in the demise of one great aristocrat after another. His hard eyes glinted when he told the tales of the Terror and Jacobins and finally Robespierre’s death. Now there was the chaos and civil war of the Directory.
“We Americans didn’t have a revolution worth talking about,” James continued. “We’re just as much slaves now as in 1776! We’re just as much slaves under a vice-president and a president as we were under a British governor. They still import as many slaves into this so-called Republic. If the French could make an insurrection with stones and pitchforks, why can’t we?”
“James, hush your mouth!” Elizabeth Hemings cried.
But there was no master here to overhear what we said. I was the mistress of Monticello.
“I’m trying to say, Mama, that there are thirty thousand slaves in the state of Virginia alone. In South Carolina, we outnumber the whites. . . . Thirty thousand Virginia slaves … that’s an army. You realize that? An army!”
My mother rose as if to block the very words out of James’s mouth. But who was listening?
We moved outside and I watched the mountains turn gold, red and silver as the sun dipped. James’s eyes glowed, feverish as ever. The low-hanging smoke from the slave fires dimmed the pink of the sky, and the buzz of night creatures mingled with the droning of James’s familiar voice.
What did I really feel? Horror, vengeance, delight, sorrow, indifference … yes, indifference was the closest to this tight stony feeling that pushed itself up into my heart.
“Lord, you know that sounds like some slave revolt!”
“That’s what I mean, Mama, if you could see what the Revolution—theirs, not ours—brought down as we saw it, then you would know that anything is possible!”
“But them aristocrats,” my mother said slowly, “was weak.”
“And our masters are strong? Those white people were just like us; militia and passes, and lynchings … Just like us, Mama! Can you understand a little of what I’m trying to say to you?”
“I understand more than you think, James Hemings. I understand when you talk about revolution and how many slaves there is in Virginia and how our masters with all they privileges ain’t no stronger than that King Louis. I understand you just like anybody got two cents’ worth of brains understands you. But I know what we ain’t got, and what we ain’t got is a leader to lead us. A Moses. We ain’t got him. He ain’t come and unless he do, we ain’t going nowhere. You talking about people who followed because they was led. I’m ready to follow, but who’s going to lead? All the white folks get together even if the poor trash can’t stand the rich white folks. They get together from all the plantations to put it down. Make an example of the leaders, put the fear of the Lord into everybody. France got some troubles on its hands, and I don’t think what they be needing is a pastry cook. What they need is somebody, one body to pull their coals out of the fire, not their petit fours. …”
“I don’t intend to go anywhere near an aristocrat or a citizen, for that matter,” James said, “but where there’s war, there’s money. That I learned from our politicians and bankers up in Philadelphia. And I intend to make a fortune. I came back for just one reason—to get my sister. You coming, Sally Hemings?” James’s voice cracked onto the still air like thunder in my ears and I sat up struck by it.
“Come with you?” I whispered.
“Nothing stopping you,” he said.
“Nothing … except two children.”
“Leave them with Mama and come back and get them, or take them with you. I don’t care which.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, James. I couldn’t—”
Without warning, James’s face contorted with rage. “Mama, listen to her. You hear her! Mama!” It was a scream. “Eight years and she hasn’t learned anything! After all the promises in Paris, it took him seven years to free me, and I got thirty dollars and a horse. I traded freedom for promises, because I thought he loved me: a few cooking lessons in Virginia, and I ended up giving him seven years of my life for thirty dollars and a horse, and I even said ‘Merci, Monsieur.’ He promised her her children would be free at twenty-one, pokes out her stomach with his bastards, says he loves her, and she says, ‘Merci, Monsieur.’ Fool!”
“Coward!” I screamed. “Afraid to steal yourself! Why didn’t you run? Why? What stopped you? And now, look at you! More than five years of freedom and what do you have to show for it? Nothing!”
“And you do? I suppose. You could have made more in a bordello!”
“What do men make of the world for women except a bordello!”
“And you revel in it!”
“Men revel in it! Lovers and husbands, brothers and uncles—you all revel in it! My whoredom is yours and you know it!”
“I know it,” he cried, “and it never leaves me, even in sleep. I want only to forget it! To leave you to it, if you want it!”
“Then leave me to it. Leave me, leave me!” I screamed.
“I’ll never leave you to it as long as I have breath in my body, as long as I dream at night.”
“We all have dreams,” I said deliberately. “You think yours are special, but they are not. I’ve had enough of chasing eleven-year-old dreams of Paris.”
“You sound just like him. ‘Enough of chasing rainbows …’ Stay where you are. Lay up money. Be a good ex-slave. Make something of yourself. And I look at him. I look at those cold blue eyes and I say, ‘You’ve already made something of me …’ and the bastard doesn’t even understand what I’m talking about.”
“James, you got to stop hating yourself.” This was Elizabeth Hemings speaking. Her voice trembled in a way I had never heard before. My brother’s violence had undone her. I realized she was afraid of her son. She who was afraid of nothing.
“Mama, you ain’t got no idea what hate is,” James said.
“I guess I ain’t,” replied my mother.
“Women! Somebody cover you with dung and you wipe it off, wrap it up and start crooning a lullaby over it.”
“You better go on back over there across the water, son.”
“I’m going, Mama. I just want to know, for the last time, if she’s coming with me.” He turned to me and his eyes were dark burning holes and the look in them was the same he had turned on my master that Christmas Day five years ago.
“You coming, Sally Hemings?”
“No,” I said.
“I’m never coming back here for you again. Save yourself, sister.”
“No, James.”
This time I could not keep the pride out of my voice. Was I not the legatee of my half sister? I had love. Did I not have a room of my own? I had privacy. Did I have a white mistress? No, I did run this place. Had I not saved ten black men from certain death? I had power. How could my brother speak of saving myself. I had no need to.
James looked out. The sense of desolation he had carried all these years enveloped him with the familiarity of an old friend. Loneliness. Dislocation. Thomas Jefferson’s pompous proclamation had no more freed him than his own impotent declarations in Paris so long ago, he thought to himself. No piece of paper ever would, he had finally realized. Happiness had dissolved before him. The future no longer stretched before him full of hope, but swerved back onto itself and his past. He was not free. Only if he took Sally away … freed her, would he feel truly emancipated. Why, James wondered to himself, did he need the freedom of Sally Hemings? He looked at his sister. Suppose she never left Thomas Jefferson? Never left Monticello? What would become of him, James, who needed her freedom more than he needed his own?
James left Virginia for Spain on an English ship out of Norfolk sailing for Gibraltar. At the end of December, his letters began to arrive. Sometimes his “You coming, Sally Hemings?” would echo like a heartbeat on the page after page of fine script full of adventures and descriptions, plans, hopes, and dreams … always dreams, and the culmination of those dreams, always just one more letter away.
Many times that winter I thought of Richmond and Gabriel Prosser. The state capital was guarded these days by armed and uniformed sentinels and a permanent cordon of bayonets. This was the lasting memorial to Gabriel’s defeat. The insurrection hung over the valley and all that was in it which was his.
I thought about what my master had said:
“An insurrection is easily quelled in its first effects, but far from being local, it will become general and whenever it does, it will rise more formidable after every defeat until one will be forced after dreadful scenes and sufferings to release them in their own way. . . .”
“And how?” I had asked.
“I don’t know, but if something is not done, and done soon, we shall be the murderers of our own children. . . .”
Had he known what he was saying? I felt a numbness come over me.
“You must be chilled, my dear,” he had said with a concerned voice. “Shall I ask Jupiter to come and light a fire for you?”
He could speak of murder and his children, and then his slave Jupiter …
The summer of 1800 that had just passed so quietly at home was also the summer that was, ballot by ballot, crowning my lover president of the United States. The scent of power had seeped into the mansion. The house had been abuzz with messengers, letters, newspapers, and visitors.
It seemed to me an omen that the duel for power between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr came to an end while Jupiter lay dying. The faithful Jupiter was fifty-seven years old and he shared his birth year with his master, whom he had served since the age of fourteen. The handsome black face, gray now with illness and impending death, flooded with joy as I bent over his still bulky and powerful form to whisper the news of his master’s presidency.
“I knowed from de beginnin’ at Willam’ an’ Mary dat Masta Jefferson was gon’ be first in de Ian’. . . .”
The words in their soft slur escaped me at first, and I bent closer to the pain-racked body in order to hear.
“Uncle Jupiter, I have greetings for you from Master Jefferson. He says you get well and he bring you up to Washington City to the president’s house. . . .” I slipped into the slave dialect: “He say you younger than him by four months and you ain’t got no business gettin’ all sick without his permission. And you shore ain’t got no permission to lay out and die on him. . . . He says ol’ Davey Bowles, he can’t drive his bays like you. Say he tearin’ up dem bays, dat young pip …” My eyes filled with tears as I soothed the old man, the soft Virginia drawl falling as easily from my lips as the French I sometimes spoke with Polly. “Full-blooded bays, Masta Eppes bought fo’ Masta Jefferson’s carriage in Washington. You’ll be seated behin’ dem, Uncle Jupiter. . . . They’s de mos’ spirited, de mos’ showy, de mos’ beautiful. . . . They cost de masta sixteen hundred dollars. Best horses in Washington … first in de Ian’…”
We had called the black doctor from Milton and the white doctor from Charlottesville. My mother had strained her knowledge of herb remedies to the limit, but nothing had helped.
“Uncle Jupiter,” I said softly, “you wan’ som’ milk bread? Try a little, Mama made it jus’ fo’ you. . . .” But he could not hear my words; my mother closed his eyes, and, on either side of him, Martha and I knelt. I was going to have to write my master that his beloved Jupiter was dead.
The news of Jupiter’s death spread throughout the household, and then out toward the slave quarters and outlying plantations. The slaves began to gather for the wake, a low moan lapping up the mountain from the underside of Monticello.
It was at the funeral of Jupiter that most of the slave population learned that they were now the property of the president of the United States.