Such grim possibilities come to her at all hours of the day, but she is generally able to quell them by devoting herself to little Harriet or by reading (she brought half a dozen books with her from Monticello, including Locke’s Conduct of the Mind and a translation of Fénelon’s Adventures of Telemachus). But in the night her fantasies arrive as implacable certainty, and she waits, sweat-glossed and with a pounding heart, for the door to fly open and for Mr. Chambliss to drag her screaming down the stairs and shackle her into the back of a wagon that will take her away from everything she loves and all that she has ever known.
Of all the damsels on the green,
On mountain, or in valley,
A lass so luscious ne’er was seen,
As Monticellian Sally.
Yankee Doodle, who’s the noodle?
What wife were half so handy?
To breed a flock of slaves for stock,
A blackamoor’s the dandy.
— John Quincy Adams
~ ~ ~
She dances on a dust cloud, believing herself outside the evil. We pity her. She whirls, hand atop her head, believing she escapes black by being white and white by being black. But there is no escape, and nothing outside the evil. Not one thing. The white people know this — the real white people — but they know it only in secret. They know it in their nightmares and in their never-ending fear. They know it in their belief that all men are born evil and that only the cowskin makes them good. And the gun. And the jail cell. They know it in the cowskin’s bitter whistle and in the snap of splitting flesh. And they know it most of all in their churches, where love-your-enemy incinerates in hellfire.
~ ~ ~
It is the fourth day after the one on which Thomas Jefferson promised to arrive, and Sally Hemings is alone among trees. Sunbeams angle between slender branches and long trunks, and the air is cool and still where she walks — though from time to time there is a seething in the treetops. This is good, she tells herself. This is helping. Being immersed in the beautiful and the familiar is giving her a measure of hope. And strength.
She has been walking for half an hour and will walk an hour more. She left the house in a frenzy of anger and shame, afraid of how close she had come to doing something horrific.
Harriet had awakened, crying plaintively, every ten minutes all night. She would suckle herself back to sleep but would continue to twitch and grimace and groan, until finally her crying would start all over again. Her clout had to be changed three times during the night. The first time Sally Hemings got Evelina to do it, but after midnight it was more trouble to wake the girl than to change the clouts herself. It was only just before dawn that Harriet finally sank into a sound sleep, but by that time Sally Hemings was hot-eyed, with humming nerves and an endless stream of ghastly and sordid realizations flooding her mind.
Harriet slept later than usual but was awake by eight, and thereafter the day was the same as the night: She would suckle without being satisfied and refused to swallow even a mouthful of solid food. Over and over she would fill her clout with watery muck, which, more often than not, would leak onto the floor or the bed or wherever she happened to be sitting or lying, including, one time, Sally Hemings’s lap. Angry red pimples came up on the delicate folds between her legs — but she only shrieked when her mother tried to salve them with melted butter.
While Evelina was outside washing the soiled clouts, Sally Hemings paced between the parlor and the dining room, rocking her little girl in her arms, singing to her, kissing her, stopping every now and then to see if she would eat from bowl or breast — but nothing helped. And then there came a moment when yet another image of her daughter being ripped from her arms flashed into Sally Hemings’s mind, but this time, instead of paralytic despair, the image filled her with such terrific rage at the relentless cruelty and injustice of this life that it seemed to her there was no purpose in living, that all the care and work she lavished on her daughter was a sham and that, in fact, the greatest service she could do the little girl would be to smash her skull against the stone fireplace — and as this notion came to seem not a mere supposition but an active impulse taking control of her arms and hands and heart, Sally Hemings burst sobbing out the door, her baby in her arms. She ran around the side of the house to where Evelina was hanging the newly washed clouts on a clothesline. “I am an awful mother!” she said, thrusting Harriet into the girl’s arms, saying, “I have to go. I’ll be back. But I have to go — now!”
She strode away from the house along the wooded bank of the stream where Evelina had been doing her washing. She passed between several fields, in one of which she could just make out the bent backs and the rough, sad songs of the laborers. When, at last, the stream turned southward along the edge of a wooded bluff, she clambered to the top and entered an old-growth forest where, beneath stout and lofty maples, beeches and oaks, the passage was relatively easy.
This is where she has been walking for half an hour. This is where she has heard the wind seething in the treetops and the cries of birds and where she has begun to feel that the worst of her fears about Thomas Jefferson are exactly as unsupported by fact as the most tender of her hopes. She knows nothing, neither good nor bad. Nothing at all. And so, for the time being at least, her inescapable ignorance seems to be her only problem, the one that she must struggle with and learn how to manage.
Eventually she comes to a trail leading more or less in the direction she has already been going: west, she thinks, toward the unmapped wilderness beyond everything she has ever heard of. The trail is narrow but well trodden. She can feel how it has been worn into the forest floor by centuries of foot traffic, even in those places where it is beginning to be overgrown. This must be an Indian trail, she thinks, here since creation. If she follows it long enough, perhaps she will come to an Indian village, or to a whole country of Indians, where there are no white people at all and no colored. Maybe that would be a better place for her and her children. Maybe that would be a place where they might belong.
She is just beginning to worry about having spent so much time away from Harriet — an hour at least — when there is a furious hissing in the uppermost leaves, the tall boughs around her begin to creak and groan and a current of dank air cools her cheeks and presses her gown against her body. It is still sunny straight overhead, but in the direction she is walking, a part of the sky has gone storm dark.
She wheels around and hurries back down the path, hoping that the sky will be slow in turning, that maybe only clouds will come or that, at the very least, the rain will hold off until she has reached the house. But the sunbeams have already withdrawn from the trees. The winds grow ever more fierce. The light dims, grows dusk gray, then a strangely luminous green. All at once there is a fierce rattling at the tops of the trees, and then huge drops begin to strike her shoulders, cheeks and hands.
The problem is that Sally Hemings did not take note of the place where she turned onto the trail and thus doesn’t know where she ought to leave it so that she might make her way to the crest of the bluff and then home along the stream. When, at last, she strikes out on impulse into the trackless forest, she realizes after less than a minute that nothing around her is familiar, that she has no idea where she is going.