But those hours, unrecorded, will never exist in history, nor will the starlight and the pumpkin moon, nor those bottles of wine, nor Thomas Jefferson’s laughter, nor Maria Cosway’s, nor their kisses across the dinner table, nor those deeper kisses just before he tells her, “Watch this!” and begins to run toward the cistern.
~ ~ ~
It is June 26, 1787. Sally Hemings is fourteen and has arrived in a country where the air smells of rancid meat and of flowers too long in the vase, and all the people speak in grunts, coughs and fluting whinnies. In one hand she holds the canvas bag that contains her every possession in the world. Her other hand is on the shoulder of Polly Jefferson, whom she clutches against her side. Beside them on the stone quay is a waist-high sea chest stuffed with Polly’s belongings. Her little sister, Lucy, is dead of the whooping cough, and Polly has come from Virginia to live with her father and her big sister, Patsy, in France. But this mud- and gravel-colored city is not France. Sally Hemings does not know what this city is. She thinks it might be London.
“What’s happened to Captain Ramsey?” says Polly, who is nearly nine years old but so small and frail she looks six. Her hair is exactly the rich earth-brown of Sally Hemings’s, and the two girls have done their hair in an identical fashion, with hanks drawn back loosely from the temples and framed by the ruffle of their cotton bonnets. Sally’s bonnet, however, is topped by a straw hat, partially eaten by mice during their passage (at the crown and the back), and pinned, through the bonnet, to her hair.
“He’ll be right back,” she says.
“But where did he go?”
“Didn’t you listen?” Sally Hemings is irritated, but she knows she shouldn’t be, so she gives Polly’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze and speaks softly. “He’s just looking for the porter. He’ll be right back.”
“But why didn’t he send Mr. George?” says Polly. “Or one of the mateys?”
“They’re busy, I reckon.” Sally Hemings gives Polly’s shoulder another squeeze, but more for her own encouragement this time.
She doesn’t like Captain Ramsey. Throughout their five weeks at sea, he was always coming up behind her, slapping her on the bottom and shouting, “Get along there, girl!” One night when she was on her way back from emptying Polly’s chamber pot over the gunwale, he stopped her at the top of the companionway and put his hand on her bodice, just over her left breast. When she pushed his hand away, he said, “What’s the matter! I just want to see how healthy you are.” That is the worst he ever did, and he has never been anything but grandfatherly to Polly — who loves him as if he actually were her grandfather — but Sally Hemings suspects he’s one of those white men her mammy has told her about, the ones you have to keep your eye on.
She looks down the long marble quay toward the building with the huge windows into which Captain Ramsey disappeared. He ought to have been back ages ago; it can’t take that much time to find a porter.
When their ship docked, brilliant silver and white clouds with gray undersides were scattered across a powder blue sky, but since then the clouds have grown steadily denser and darker, and she can see a heron-blue smear of rain falling diagonally beyond the big building.
A sudden chilly gust blows down the quay, and she has to hold on to her hat. This is a cold country, she thinks. It is nearly July, and yet she and Polly have to wear their shawls tight across their shoulders if they want to keep from shivering. France will be nicer, she hopes.
Polly makes a small noise and flings her arms around Sally Hemings’s shoulders.
A bearded man in a black coat is standing just behind Polly, holding the grips of a wooden wheelbarrow and shouting, in a low, angry voice, words that sound like English chopped into pieces and rearranged in a nonsensical order. The front edge of his wheelbarrow is actually touching Polly’s skirts, and the girl seems to want to climb into Sally Hemings’s arms.
“Did Captain Ramsey send you?” asks Sally Hemings, thinking the man may be the porter. But her question only makes the chopped-up English tumble ever more rapidly and loudly out of his three-toothed mouth.
He keeps jerking his wheelbarrow back and forth on the cobbles. It is stacked high with oil casks and has no room at all for Polly’s chest.
“He just wants us out the way,” Sally Hemings says, and pulls Polly back until they are both standing with their heels half over the quay’s edge. The bearded man grunts and pushes his wheelbarrow through the gap between their toes and Polly’s sea chest.
“Where’s my papa!” cries Polly. “I hate this country! I wish we stayed with Aunt and Uncle Eppes.”
“There, there.” Sally Hemings pulls the weeping girl into her arms, feeling that it will be only a matter of seconds before she, herself, will be crying.
Polly was furious at being left behind when her father and Patsy went to France, and she only became more so when little Lucy died of whooping cough, a disease she might never have gotten had she and Polly gone to Paris, too. And when her father finally wrote to Aunt Eppes saying that he wanted Polly to join him, she said that she wouldn’t go. “Don’t you want to see Patsy?” her Aunt Eppes asked her. “Don’t you want to live in a real castle and see real princesses walking the streets?” No! Polly was determined. If her father didn’t love her enough to come and take her to Paris himself, then she wouldn’t go, and no one could force her.
Finally Aunt and Uncle Eppes told her that they would go to France with her. They packed valises for themselves and carried them onto the ship at Jamestown. When she was settled in her cabin, they gave her a medicine they said would keep her from getting seasick, but that actually just put her to sleep. And when she woke up, she and Sally Hemings were all by themselves on a boat full of men, miles and miles at sea. Sally Hemings had never felt so lonely and afraid as she did during the hours she sat beside the sleeping Polly, and she feels a little of that loneliness and fear now.
She squeezes Polly against her chest and kisses the top of her head. “Your papa loves you,” she says. “That’s how come he sent for you. He’ll be here soon, and you’ll see how much he loves you. Everything’ll be just fine.” She kisses Polly’s head a second time, and the little girl returns her squeeze. “Who knows?” says Sally Hemings. “Maybe Captain Ramsey found your papa already and they’re just talking down there in that big house.”
Polly is no longer weeping, but she keeps her head tight against Sally Hemings’s breast.
It’s been more than half an hour since Captain Ramsey left them. All of the other passengers on their boat are gone, and Sally Hemings feels more alone every instant. Maybe this isn’t London. Maybe all these gruff men in their leather aprons and grease-stained clothing aren’t speaking English at all but some other language she’s never heard of. Maybe Captain Ramsey has just abandoned them here.
She gently extracts herself from Polly’s grip and says, “You wait here, Polly-Pie. Let me go see what’s taking that Captain so long.”