Sally Heming (5 page)

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."

Monticello, August 22, 1807

"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.