He has a boiled egg and two glasses of cider at the posthouse while his horses are being changed. The hostler stamps the snow off his boots, scattering white chunks across the gray floorboards. “Everything’s ready, Your Excellency.”
“No,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry,” says the hostler, his nose claret red, his cheeks the unsteady red of a not-quite-ripe peach. After half a breath’s hesitation, he adds, “President Jefferson,” and lowers his head.
Thomas Jefferson is not the president either. Not anymore. He will never return to Washington. One last swallow. The tankard comes down on the hacked tabletop with a satisfying bang. He thanks the hostler and the innkeeper.
The hostler follows Thomas Jefferson outside and watches from the porch as he is taken apart by the hurtling snow. The harness clinks, the muffled thumps of eight hooves grow ever quieter. Thomas Jefferson diminishes. Grays. His body fragments. And between the fragments is a fierce gray-white. The fragments whirl away. Vanish. First one. Then another. Then another and another. Then dozens at once. Finally there is nothing left but that gray snow, which is only white snow in the shadows of the numberless flakes hurtling sideways between the earth and that clean, clear emptiness above the clouds.
Account Book
1. After having refused to pursue Tadeusz Kościuszko’s bequest of $20,000 to buy his slaves freedom, Thomas Jefferson, desperate to pay off some of his debt, sold a large number of them to Francis Eppes, his daughter Maria’s only surviving child, for $3,500—an arrangement that kept the slaves within his own family and the slave families relatively intact.
2. On February 20, 1826, the Virginia state legislature agreed to allow Thomas Jefferson to pay his debts by disposing of most of his land and buildings — the Monticello great house excluded — through a lottery, which he expected would bring him $112,500. The plan was put aside when a committee of New Yorkers convinced his grandson, Jefferson Randolph, that more money could be raised through contributions from wealthy patriots throughout the country. Unfortunately, this effort returned only $16,500, though Thomas Jefferson never learned of this fact, and went to his grave believing that his grandson’s efforts to save the plantation had been successful.
3. After Thomas Jefferson’s death, Jeff Randolph attempted to hold the lottery after all, but people were far less interested in helping the Jefferson family than in helping Thomas Jefferson himself, and so the effort failed, leaving the family only one alternative.
4. On November 3, 1826, Jeff Randolph placed the following advertisement in local newspapers:
EXECUTOR’S SALE
Will be sold on the premises, on the first day of January, 1827, that well known and valuable estate called Poplar Forest, lying in the counties of Bedford and Campbell, the property of Thomas Jefferson, dec. within eight miles of Lynchburg and three of New London; also about 70 likely and valuable negroes, with stock, crops, &c. The terms of the sale will be accommodating and made known previous to the day.
On the fifteenth of January, at Monticello, in the county of Albemarle; the whole of the residue of the personal property of Thomas Jefferson, dec., consisting of 130 valuable negroes, stock, crop, &c. household and kitchen furniture. The attention of the public is earnestly invited to this property. The negroes are believed to be the most valuable for their number ever offered at one time in the State of Virginia….
~ ~ ~
… Joey touched my shoulder and said, “Aunt Sally,” his voice an urgent whisper. I turned around and saw a man walking toward the stable with two sets of shackles, one in his hand, the other draped over his shoulder. Two other men walked behind him. One of them had an antique musket slung through the crook of his arm; the other carried a coiled cowskin in his hand and had a pistol in his belt.
The sun had barely risen, and we were standing in front of the solitary open stable door. The opposite door had been nailed shut and was fortified by having a wagon backed against it. The wagon was also to serve as the auction platform, and Mr. Broomfield, the auctioneer, was standing on it issuing instructions concerning the arrangement of crates into a sort of staircase to make ascent and descent more expeditious. A rough fence, with a gate only wide enough to allow the passage of one person at a time, had been built inside the open stable door. And behind that fence stood all the good people whom I had known since they or I were born. A couple of babies were crying, but most everyone else was silent or murmuring in the lowest of voices. Even the children were silent, clutching at their mothers’ skirts or standing alone, eyes wide in infantile astonishment, hugging themselves against the cold.
An acrid tang, such as I had never smelled outside of a slaughterhouse, hung densely in the dim air inside the stable. Even before I fully apprehended the nature of that odor, I became wild with the desire to flee — not out of any fear for my person but simply because I knew that the world was about to be revealed to me as a miasma of agony and shame. Yet I could not, for I had promised Joey that I would stand by him — dear Joey, whom I had thought of as my own child during the years after his mother, my sister Mary, was sold to her husband, Colonel Thomas Bell. Joey and I were among the handful whom Mr. Jefferson had chosen to free — as were my own two boys, who were in Charlottesville with Joey’s mother, looking for a house in which they and I might live. Of my immediate family, only Critta and Peter were to be sold, but Miss Maria’s son had solemnly promised that he would buy and free Critta, and Danny Farley (who was Joey’s brother and who had already bought his own freedom) agreed to do the same for Peter. Joey had returned from Charlottesville only an hour earlier, having received similar promises regarding his wife and nine children, and he had come to the stable door to give his family the news, as well as a parcel of oatcakes made by Mary.
And so I stood my ground, though it might be better to say I swayed upon it, for my mind was aswirl with such a diversity of passions and worries that I had to clutch at Joey’s hard shoulder to keep from falling.
Mr. Jeff was walking toward the man with the shackles. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. Not two minutes previously, he had been standing beside Joey and me, telling the crowd inside the stable that although he had gotten bids from Georgia farmers, he would not allow “my people” to go to anyone but “good Virginians.” And now here he was, walking toward these grim and unwashed men—“good Virginians” presumably, whose virtue was exemplified by the shackles, guns and whip they carried.
“Welcome!” he said. “Welcome!” And in a voice that couldn’t have been more amiable were he speaking to dearest friends, he told them that the “viewing” wouldn’t begin for another hour but that they should feel free to look around the house, the entire contents of which would be put up for sale in the coming days.
It is happening, I thought as I watched this scene. Nothing can stop it now. And yet, despite these asseverations, I simply could not believe that Mr. Jeff, who had always seemed the quintessence of decency and good cheer, should be a party to this impending monstrosity. As Mr. Jefferson reached the extreme of his old age, he had become far less active in the affairs of his plantation, with the result that his overseers had been exercising more and more control, and many of them had been unable to suppress their intrinsic cruelty. On being installed as steward by his grandfather, Mr. Jeff had dismissed the most abusive overseers and encouraged the remainder to exercise a policy of fairness and restraint. Cruelty was not banished from the plantation. In fact, Mr. Jeff himself had presided over a thrashing, but life definitely became easier for all the slaves. And so when word got around about how deeply Mr. Jefferson was in debt, most people believed that Mr. Jeff would find a way to discharge that debt with minimal pain. I had myself. There was even talk that he had come up with a scheme whereby enough money might be raised through a lottery to enable Mr. Jefferson to free all of his slaves upon his death. But absolutely no one had ever imagined that Monticello would simply cease to exist. So here we all were, staggering in disbelief and terror, and here was our supposed savior in congenial conversation with two men sure to bring misery to any number of us.