CHAPTER 32

NOVEMBER 1802

If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.

Harriet martineau, Society in America, 1837

THE RECORDER Richmond September 1st, 1802 It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is sally. The name of her eldest son is Tom. His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the President himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age. His mother went to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters. The delicacy of this arrangement must strike every portion of common sensibility. What a sublime pattern for an American ambassador to place before the eyes of two young ladies!

If the reader does not feel himself disposed to pause we beg leave to proceed. Some years ago, the story had once or twice been hinted at in Rind's Federalist. At that time, we believed the surmise to be an absolute calumny. One reason for thinking so was this: A vast body of people wished to debar Mr. Jefferson from the presidency....

By this wench Sally, our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighbourhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story; and not a few who know it....

'Tis supposed that, at the time when Mr. Jefferson wrote so smartly concerning negroes, when he endeavoured so much to belittle the African race, he had no expectation that the chief magistrate of the United States was to be the ringleader in shewing that his opinion was erroneous; or, that he should choose an African stock whereupon he was to engraft his own descendants....

Mute! Mute! Mute! Yes very Mute! will all those republican printers of political biographical information be upon this point. Whether they stir or not, they must feel themselves like a horse in a quick-sand. They will plunge deeper and deeper, until no assistance can save them.

If the friends of Mr. Jefferson are convinced of his innocence they will make an appeal of the same sort. If they rest in silence, or if they content themselves with resting upon a general denial, they cannot hope for credit. The allegation is of a nature too black to be suffered to remain in suspense. We should be glad to hear of its refutation. We give it to the world under the firmest belief that such a refutation never can be made. The African venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello. When Mr. Jefferson has read this article, he will find leisure to estimate how much has been lost or gained by so many unprovoked attacks upon.

J. t. callender.

"James T. Callender." I repeated that familiar name once again. "James T. Callender."

My mother burst into tears.

"Sweet Jesus! You mean that's printed in the newspaper for everyone to see?"

"Not only The Recorder, Mama, everywhere in Virginia, by the Examiner, in the Virginia Gazette in Lynchburg, in Fredericksburg, in Philadelphia, in Washington City, in New York." I had left out the parts she couldn't understand.

"But what does it mean, daughter?" For once, my mother didn't know what to say.

"It means, Mama, that they are attacking the master through me, to hurt him. They accuse him of many more dreadful things than miscegenation. They accuse him of being a coward, of trying to seduce another man's wife, of being an infidel...."

My voice had broken. In truth, I knew so little, entombed here at Monticello. Maria and Martha certainly knew more, but refused to speak. Even Maria. So we remained in our cocoons of silence, not able to comfort one another. For once, the slave intelligence had been silent. Yet the plantations all knew. My shame was the common knowledge of every field hand in Virginia. The intelligence passed from those who could read to the multitudes who could not.

"And Thomas Jefferson, up in Washington City? What does he say?" my mother wanted to know.

"He doesn't say anything, Mama. He doesn't even know that I know about the newspaper articles."

"He ain't said nothing to you?"

"No."

"And to his friends? ..."

"He has kept his silence. He has said nothing to no one."

"But it can't go on like this! He will sell you and the children ... out of Virginia. O God, have mercy on us!"

"God," I said, "has nothing to do with this." My mother looked up. "And Martha?"

"She knows as much as I, or perhaps more, but she is as silent as her father."

"And Maria?"

"Maria, too, is silent."

"All are silent?" my mother asked. Her voice was small in the empty, white-draped room where we sat facing each other, mother and daughter, two generations of white men's concubines.

"Oh, no. His friends are rallying around him, denying everything. Denying that I exist. Calling Callender the most foul and blasphemous slanderer ever to be born. Meriwether Jones, the editor of the Richmond Enquirer, has wished Callender in Hell by means of the James River. He's the one who wrote: 'Is it strange, therefore, that a servant of Mr. Jefferson's at a house where so many strangers resort, who is daily engaged in the ordinary vocations of the family life, like thousands of others, should have a mulatto child? Certainly not....' "

My mouth twitched. Certainly not. I thought of my sister Critta, my half sister Mary, my mother's daughters, Nance and Betty. I thought of my mother, Elizabeth, and of her mother, the African. I thought of all black bondswomen everywhere in the South at God's and Fate's mercy. Thousands.

"But he, the masta, says nothing?"

"Nothing, Mama. Even this summer, when we were all ignorant of the danger, there were hints in the newspapers, but it is this one, Callender's story, that has caused all the furor."

There had been others, more serious because they had been closer to home, I thought. Callender was a foreigner, a Northerner, an enemy. These other men were friends and neighbors. The editor of the Frederick-Town Herald, for example, had been seen in Charlottesville, by Burwell and Davey Bowles, asking questions of servants and neighbors and townspeople and of the small outlying farmers who got their wood from Monticello. All those who had known my master from birth knew who I was. They knew who my mother was. There was one calumnious article after another, the most recent from the Virginia Gazette, whose article had asked the same questions and got the same answers. "Why have you not married some worthy of your own complexion?" one had written in an editorial.

My eyes filled with tears. I heard my master's voice: "Tell me who die... who marry, who hang themselves because they cannot marry...."

I stared at the white back of one of the draped pale damask armchairs from the hotel in Paris, and fondled the richly carved wood.

"I believe he will never say anything to anyone about me."

"Daughter, you don't understand white men. They loves you. Sometimes all they lives. But when you go up against they real life, they white life, white friends, white children, white power, you got to lose. You got to be cut down. You got to be put away. Thomas Jefferson's real mistress is his politics. It was that way with Martha and it's that way with you. Nothing will stand in the way of that. No woman will ever keep him from that. Even a white wife would not have been as bad as this.... He will send you away. He has got to do it. His white folks will destroy him if he don't. At least he has got to say what is true is not true...."

"He will not lie, and he cannot avow, so there is nothing left except silence," I said.

"Silence," Elizabeth Hemings spat out into the white room, "or sale."

For one moment my heart seemed to stop as she uttered the dreaded words. Sale! Had I lived too long in Monticello, hidden, petted, spoiled, and loved? Had I forgotten it was love that ceded, and not the white world? Then I said:

"He will not sell me, Mama. And he will not abandon me or send me or the children away. Not for me, not for his daughters, not for his friends, not for his enemies, not even for the presidency."

"And why, pray, daughter?"

"Because he cannot live without me."

It was true. I had made it so. This had been what I had wanted. There was no triumph, no smugness, no pride; there was not even joy in my voice. Only the reality of how it was between us.

"He cannot live without me." The words fell like pebbles in the room. They seemed to take a long time to reach my mother, as if they had been thrown down a deep well. But the words struck the sides of my being like flint against flint, and, like flint, struck fire in me. We had won.

"I'll have the keys to the mansion now, Mama."

After a moment, my mother unfastened the great iron ring with its score of keys. The dull glint of forged iron struck the light. Their metallic music was the only sound in the room except for the tick of the clock. I knew she would never understand. Why now? Why at a time when we had been betrayed by servants and neighbors, why, when everything was lost, when I should be fleeing for my life and those of my children, when I should be paralyzed with fear, why had I decided to stand, when I had never stood before? She would never understand. Yet I knew I was right. This was the line. This was the battle. This was the test that Thomas Jefferson would have to pass. If he passed this trial, it meant victory for us. A feeling almost of elation filled me. We had the power of love on our side. We were stronger and better than the monstrous iniquity we had sprung from. I held out my hands. My mother placed the mass of iron into them. I took the keys and weighed them, and then, without a word, attached them to the black ribbon at the waist of my black-and-white calico dress. The keys hung low and nestled into the folds of my skirt. Elizabeth Hemings recognized the orderly transition of power just as my master did; that day, Monticello had passed from one ruler to the next. Her reign was over.

"We wait, Mama," I said a moment later, "in silence. We wait and we let them rant and rave. But, if they really want to hear about Southern gentlemen and Negro mistresses, we have some stories to tell, no, Mama? We can start with John Marshall, the chief justice of the United States. Virginians talk in their sleep, you once said, Mama. And who hears them? Their servants."

Elizabeth Hemings looked at me with dawning respect. I hadn't spent three years in France for nothing.

"Now you know why Martha and Maria have left for Washington, when they have always refused until now," I said.

"To dampen the scandal by their presence."

"Yes. And to keep Dolley Madison from the head of the presidential table."

"I never could figure why they both left."

"Now you can. And now, I want the word spread among the slave population. My name is never again to be mentioned. Nor those of my children. To anyone black or white. I do not exist anymore, nor do my children. My name on our people's lips is forbidden. Forbidden! Spread it among our people, black and white, on pain of being fired or sold. And tell Jim I want to see him." I dismissed my mother.

It was only when Fanny and Edy returned from Washington that I learned the amplitude and the viciousness of the campaign which had raged about us. It was from Fanny that I heard the part of a poem by the famous Irish poet Thomas Moore that referred to me, and that was making the rounds of the kitchens and salons in Washington and Virginia, in New York and Baltimore, in Boston and Philadelphia.

Fanny, who could write, had copied it out on the back of a sheet of butcher's paper in her large childish scrawl:

The patriot, fresh from Freedom's council come,

Now pleased retires to lash his slaves at home;

Or woo, perhaps some black Aspasia's charms,

And dream of freedom in his bondsmaid's arms.

I stared at the large printed letters. Freedom. What had I won? I had bound him to me as surely as I was bound to him. Nothing could change that. Not poems or ballads, not slander or insults, not the crudeness of mankind. My tears fell on the oiled paper and rolled off, making no mark, just as I made no mark on the surface of the world; except for these lewd cries of indignation, crude obscene scrawls, smirking winks of slander and perfidy.

Fanny's excited voice dented my thoughts.

"You is the most famous black lady in the whole United States! I tells you, you is famous! I saw a letter about you in a Philadelphia newspaper, but it was too long and hard for me to copy it. And in Washington—you is the talk of the town! But we servants don't say nothing about what we knows, or don't know. And poor Masta Jefferson—as if every Virginia gentleman that holds the title ain't messed with a black mistress. Why they family gives them one at sixteen or seventeen. How can they expect that they don't cherish them later? I do declare, white people are one strange breed of humanity. They do everything they want and then cry distress when they do gets around to people who don't do it, because they ain't got it to do it with! I do declare, I'm glad I got me a black husband. A good black man. And don't have to be sniffing after no white masta who is hell on earth!"

My mother looked at the bisquit-colored Fanny.

"Yo Mammy," she muttered.

"Yourn," replied Fanny, evenly, without blinking.

She was a match for my mother, and she knew it. Not only did she have the estimable advantage of being cook at the president's house, she could read and write as well. Fanny held Elizabeth Hemings' eye, but, before the onslaught came, I stepped between them.

"Enough, Fanny," I said. "I know you and Davey so tried Master Jefferson's patience with your squabbling that he sent for Mister Bacon to sell you both in Alexandria." I looked at her. "I trust you begged your way back into his good graces, since you are standing here and not on an auction block."

"I hear it's mostly died down," Fanny said contritely. "I expect it's finished, Sally. But Lord knows, it sure made a stir! You can't imagine.... Them white folks is outraged."

"Then let it be finished. Lord God. 'Cause we is sick of it at Monticello," Elizabeth Hemings said as she took Fanny by the shoulders, and with a slight push, propelled her toward the door of her kitchens.

He still would sell a slave in pique or to assure his domestic tranquillity. He was still white. He was still the master. And he was not the same in his white world. My master amongst white Americans was not the man I knew. I wished he would come home. I wished he would come home where he was safe and loved. People, I thought wearily, like horses, tire; and the uses of silence born and bred into every slave, would serve me well.