There are no servants living in the house, but Mr. Chambliss sends his cook, Mag, in the mornings to make dinner, portions of which Sally Hemings saves for that night’s supper and the following morning’s breakfast. Every couple of days, Jemma comes to dust and otherwise make sure the house is, as she puts it, “in fine shape for Mr. Jefferson”—which phrase is only one of the many ways by which she expresses her resentment at having to serve Sally Hemings and her daughter (though not Evelina) as if they were white. Mag feels the same way, as do all of the other Negroes with whom Sally Hemings comes into contact at Poplar Forest. The worst are the field laborers, who never speak to her when she encounters them on her walks but only cast her sullen gazes and seem to be awaiting with a preternatural patience for the first opportunity to take revenge upon her for her privilege. She is lonely most of the day and frightened all of the night. Every creak and thump in the darkness sends her bolt upright in bed, her whole body trilling with the cold electricity of fear.
She has met Mr. Chambliss several times at Monticello, where he struck her merely as bland and unintelligent, and embarrassingly deferential to Thomas Jefferson. Here, however, he is not the least bit deferential, but self-possessed to the point of being imperious. His every motion seems calculated, and his expressions emerge only gradually on his face, as if they are rising from primordial depths. He smiles a lot, but with his eyes averted, and he seems always to be in the process of executing some secret plan that he believes is going exceptionally well. He is unfailingly polite in a superficial sense — he even addresses her as “Mrs.” Hemings — but every now and then she catches him looking at her, and she can see in his eyes not only that he has mentally removed every stitch of clothing from her body but that he wants her to know he is relishing everything he sees.
The servants and laborers never meet his eye when he gives orders but listen with their heads bent and don’t even glance at his back when he walks away. They do exchange weighty glances with one another, however, and they sometimes lift their eyes to Sally Hemings. Then they just do what they were told.
On their second day at Poplar Forest, when she and the children take a shortcut behind the barns on their way to a duck pond, she spots a post with a rope lashed around it just about as high as a man might reach, with the two lengths of the rope dangling down about a yard on one side of the post. They are twisted and kinked in a way that indicates they have been knotted many times. The lower half of the post is stained a brownish black with what can only be blood. As soon as she understands what, in fact, this post is, she picks up toddling Harriet and grabs Evelina by the hand. “Where are we going?” the older girl says in surprise. “I forgot something,” says Sally Hemings. “We have to go back. I have to get something.” Once they are all in the house, she slams and locks the door and tells Evelina that she is too tired to go to the pond. Maybe they will go another day.
~ ~ ~
She walks. We watch her from the fields, our hands salty, yellowed and stinging from tobacco leaves. We watch her as we swing picks along the road. She walks because she has nothing to do. She holds down her straw hat against the wind, so that she might preserve her precious whiteness. Her step is light. She sings. She is a bauble. She believes that she lives outside the world created by the cowskin, but nothing she believes is true.
In this world — our world — everything is simple. The cowskin is our Devil. The cowskin uses our fear to teach us helplessness. The cowskin uses our rage to teach us silence. It eats our souls as it eats our flesh. It blends our sweat with our tears and causes our blood to run in rivers. And yet it gives us a justice unknown to the white man. It teaches us that in a world of evil, the evil in our hearts is innocence. It tells us that we are angels because we live in hell. We are beatified by pain. We are beatified by hate. Hate is our hope. Even as our lives drip into the dust, we have entered the Promised Land.
~ ~ ~
It astounds Sally Hemings that Thomas Jefferson could ever imagine that she might be “more comfortable” under the sway of Mr. Chambliss. Sometimes she thinks this just another instance of how incompletely he comprehends the facts of his own existence. He cannot find his spectacles even when they are resting on top of his own head. He can pick up a cup of coffee that has sat on his desk for an hour or more and be genuinely perplexed that it is cold. It has often seemed to her that Thomas Jefferson’s brain is so labyrinthine that ordinary human understanding simply gets lost in it.
Yet with every day she spends at Poplar Forest, she asks herself more frequently if the comfort he was talking about was not hers at all but only his own.
As soon as she returned from her awful trip to Charlottesville, she asked Thomas Jefferson to show her the newspaper articles about him and her. “They’re just a lot of nonsense,” he told her. “There’s no need to trouble yourself over them.”
“Don’t I have a right to see what’s been said about me?”
His lips crumpled dubiously. “Really. There’s no need.”
“You’ve read them,” she said. “So why shouldn’t I?”
For a moment he seemed about to argue. Then he just shrugged and pulled a thick handful of newspapers from a drawer in his desk. “You can burn these when you’re done with them,” he said. “Better yet, tear them up and put them in the privies.”
From the newspapers she learned all the nasty and absurd things that had been said about her (among which was a cruel poem by John Quincy Adams, who, like his father had been so kind to her when she was in London), but she also learned that people were saying much more cruel things about Thomas Jefferson. He was being called a disgrace to the nation, an offense to public decency and a traitor to his race; people said that he should be impeached, tarred and feathered, driven out of Washington or locked in the madhouse at Williamsburg.
“I’m sorry to have caused you so much trouble,” she said, flinging the last of the newspapers onto the table. When he only met her words with the buckled brows of incomprehension, she added in a more neutral voice, “How are you going to deal with all this?”
He puffed his lips disdainfully. “It’s nothing. It will pass.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. It was impossible for her to believe that such threats — and the outrage that inspired them — would not cause him considerable political damage, to the point where he might have to retire from the presidency. The outrage in some of the editorials and letters was so ferocious that she could imagine one of his enraged critics challenging him to a duel, or even just shooting him in the street. He had already received death threats, after all, and even had to travel around Washington with an armed guard for a whole week the previous April. Why should Callender’s articles not inspire more of such murderous intentions?
“I’m not going to worry until I have reason.” He smiled wryly and flicked his hand as if chasing away a fly. But then he became thoughtful. “We shall see what transpires.”
The next day he told her about his plan to make her “more comfortable.” He also told her that he, too, needed “a little peace and relaxation” before returning to Washington and so would be joining her after five days.
The prospect of soon having Thomas Jefferson at her side has been her one consolation during all her loneliness and anxiety at Poplar Forest. She waits for him in happy agitation the whole of the fifth day. But by nightfall he still hasn’t arrived, nor does he arrive the next day or the one after, and he sends her no word of explanation. As time passes, she finds herself increasingly defenseless against her worst fantasies: that Thomas Jefferson sent her to this foul and frightening place not just to hide her away but to get rid of her once and for all; or that Mr. Chambliss has already received instructions to set her to work in the field, where she, too, might become stooped and glowering and possessed of only one hope: revenge; or that Thomas Jefferson simply told Mr. Chambliss to sell her to whoever would be willing to pay for her; or that he should feel free to use her however he pleases.