“That’s her,” one woman tells another as she passes.
“Who?” says her friend.
A man lurches in front of her — drunk, or pretending to be drunk — then gives her upper arm a stinging, three-fingered slap as she dodges past. She hears several people speak the words “nigger wife.”
At last she is in Mickel’s Millinery, the door shut behind her and its little bell still jingling. She leans her back against the door for half a second, then steps away, trying to regain her self-possession.
Yesterday Edy Fossett told her that an article about her and Thomas Jefferson had appeared in a Federalist newspaper — but Edy had only heard tell of the article, not read it herself. When Sally Hemings asked what it had actually said, Edy replied, “Just silliness and balderdash! I don’t know why people trouble themselves with those rags!”
Mrs. Mickel glances at her as she stands by the door but doesn’t meet her eye. There are two other people in the store — a white woman and her grown daughter — and Mrs. Mickel is explaining to them that she is all out of baleen and won’t have any more until the week after next, but if Miss Clark — the daughter — is in a hurry, the wooden stays are almost as good. There follows a long conversation comparing the virtues of various types of stays, during which Sally Hemings keeps a few steps to the rear, waiting her turn, grateful for the opportunity to calm her hammering heart. She doesn’t know what she will do when she finally has to leave — except that she won’t go back to the stage office along Main Street, but maybe along Market and Little Commerce, although that would take her considerably out of her way.
Sally Hemings has been coming to this store for close to thirteen years, ever since she got back from Paris. Mrs. Mickel used to love it whenever she brought in Martha’s or Maria’s French gowns for copying or repair, and she could talk for hours about the quality of their materials and the fineness of the design and the stitching. Even those beautiful dresses became old-fashioned, however, and Mrs. Mickel was close to tears the day Maria asked to have one of Martha’s passed-down Parisian gowns altered so that it might look more stylish. Ever since Maria’s marriage, however, Sally Hemings has mostly come into the shop on her own business. She and Mrs. Mickel have that placid affection that arises between shopkeeper and customer over years of counter-side chitchat, and of learning bits and pieces of each other’s life, and of watching each other age. It is clear Mrs. Mickel thinks Sally Hemings a kindred spirit.
Miss Clark and her mother simply cannot decide whether to settle for the wood stays or hold out for the baleen and hope the latter come in on time. Sally Hemings keeps waiting for Mrs. Mickel to cast her a surreptitious eye-rolling glance, but no such glance is forthcoming.
At last the women reach a decision: They will have the dress made now and perhaps substitute baleen stays for the wood at a later date. Mrs. Mickel tells them she has just exactly the material they will want for the bodice and skirt, and then she calls for Nora, her Irish servant, to bring out the new shipment of silk.
Nora does as instructed, and while Miss Clark and her mother consider the skeins of evergreen, midnight blue and burgundy silk, Mrs. Mickel retreats to the back room with Nora for a couple of minutes. When she returns, she continues to ignore Sally Hemings, even though her two other customers have little need of her attention.
After a couple of minutes, Nora also emerges from the back room and indicates to Sally Hemings with a lateral glance and a hook motion of her hand that she should go out the front door and meet her in the alley.
Nora is only twelve, and as she speaks, she keeps her eyes on the ground. “Mrs. Mickel told me to tell you,” she says, “that she is sorry, but she will no longer be able to serve you in her store.” After a moment of silence, the girl looks up with her almost-Oriental, coffee-brown eyes. “I’m sure she doesn’t mean it,” she says. A nervous smile flashes across her face, and then a wince of sorrow and shame.
Sally Hemings’s only response to the message is to ask whether Nora thinks it would be possible to make her way to Market Street via mewses and alleys.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know, miss,” says the girl, and Sally Hemings decides to give it a try.
~ ~ ~
There is nothing in her head. Nothing in her heart. She walks because she has nothing to do. Sometimes she turns in a circle, like a leaf in a breeze, watching a sky full of clouds swirl around her head. Sometimes the yellow fields, buzzing with cicadas, seem to rise and fall as she breathes. We pity her. She thinks her fancies are her real, true life. She thinks she is free. We know that nothing good is ever given, only taken. We know that a master’s promises are equal to a snake’s hiss. We know that forgiveness is surrender and that the road to freedom runs through hate.
~ ~ ~
It is normal for Thomas Jefferson to have up to twenty visitors a day when he is at Monticello, but ever since the publication of Callender’s articles, his visitors have numbered fifty or more, with many of them not actually wanting formal audiences but only to spot “the African Venus” and “Tom,” her supposed child. Every time Sally Hemings steps out of her cabin or the great house, she sees at least one person looking at her, sometimes two or three and, once, a small crowd. So far no one has actually approached or called out to her, but often people point or whisper into one another’s ear, and she worries that it is only a matter of time before she is accosted once more, as she was in Charlottesville, or that something worse will happen to her or her children.
When there is no letup in the number of visitors after a week, Thomas Jefferson decides to send Sally Hemings to Poplar Forest, the most distant of his plantations, eighty-three miles southwest of Monticello. He tells her that she will be “more comfortable” there while the scandal is still raging. Not only do very few people know that he owns the property, it is practically on the frontier. Nobody there has much interest in Federalist newspapers, or in any other form of printed matter, so she is far less likely to be troubled by curiosity seekers.
She leaves the following morning, as soon as there is enough light for Tom Shackelford to see the road. In her arms she holds sixteen-month-old Harriet. And seated at her side is nine-year-old Evelina, Harriet’s “nurse.” Beverly has stayed behind with his grandmother. The journey takes three days. They spend the first night lying on a tarpaulin underneath the carriage and the second in the servants’ quarters behind Flood’s tavern in Appomattox. They arrive at Poplar Forest just before sundown, and Tom Shackelford heads back to Monticello before the sun has risen the following morning.
There is no great house at Poplar Forest, only the former steward’s cottage, built half a century earlier by Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law when the plantation was an acre of stumps in an interminable forest at the edge of the known world. The present steward, Mr. Chambliss, built himself a brick house on a small rise, from which he can survey most of the plantation, and so the original house, unoccupied eleven or more months out of the year, is neglected and moldering. Its roof leaks, and many of its clapboards, especially on the southern side, are paintless and weathered gray. Thomas Jefferson recently had the inside painted teal, sage green and liver pink, but the furnishings are all boxy and rough-hewn — built by farmers rather than a joiner. The whole house smells of termites and mice, and the sheets on the beds feel moist against the skin and have the acrid tang of mildew.