A day has passed, and a night during which Sally Hemings did not sleep. Now it is morning, but so early that there is only a blue vagueness in the garden outside the kitchen door. An armful of wood has already burned down to a mound of glowing, irregularly popping and snapping coals, and a ten-gallon iron stewpot is already filling the air with onion-scented steam. Jimmy, who got back from Le Havre last night, is standing at the chopping block transforming peeled carrots into a heap of thumbnail-long cylinders. He doesn’t know that Sally Hemings is standing in the doorway behind him, watching.
Her first thought is that her brother seems so gentle as he gives himself to his work, and so unhurried, even though the extraction of each new set of three or four carrots from the heap, their alignment against his knife and then the rocking chops that transform them into orange cylinders are accomplished in scant seconds. It’s his grace that makes him seem unhurried, or even in a sort of trance. He hardly looks at what he’s doing, his eyes turned toward the empty space above a shelf of soot-blackened copper pots, and yet his knife blade strikes with the regularity and precision of a ticking clock.
But in the next instant, all Sally Hemings sees is her brother’s humiliation. His movements are not so much graceful as supremely controlled. His back is rigid, his expression blank and his head held high in the manner of a man struggling to endure the unbearable. There is a great deal of rage inside Jimmy, but it is humiliated rage — rage lacking not intensity but the power to be expressed in action.
At these last thoughts, Sally Hemings becomes so weak with sorrow that a groan escapes her throat.
Jimmy’s head jerks around. “Oh, Sally!” He smiles. “Don’t do that! I thought you were a ghost.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t you know better than to creep up on a man with a knife in his hand!?”
Sally Hemings can’t bring herself to laugh. Jimmy’s smile is replaced by the slightly parted lips and crumpled brow of concern.
“What’s the matter, Cider Jug?”
“Nothing.” She looks away, then back.
Jimmy is still looking at her but doesn’t say anything.
“I just heard someone in here,” she says, “so I thought I’d look in.”
“Hunh.”
“What are you making?”
“Boeuf bourguignon.”
“Oh.” Sally Hemings wasn’t quite listening to his response. So after an instant she asks, “What’s that?”
“Beef and wine and vegetables — potatoes mostly.” He looks back at the chopping block, lines up some carrots and places his knife across them. “Mr. Jefferson’s having a whole bunch of people over tonight.” Chop.
Sally Hemings doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she says, “I better be going.”
Jimmy rests the hand holding the knife on the table. When she doesn’t budge from the doorway, he says, “Come over here.”
“No. I’ve got to go.”
“Come over here.” He points his knife blade at the floor beside him.
She wipes her hands on her apron, then crosses the room to stand beside her brother, though not as close as he indicated.
When she still doesn’t say anything, Jimmy says slowly, with a knowing smile, “You look like the dog sneaking out of the hen yard.”
“What are you talking about?”
He smiles again. “I don’t know. I’m waiting for you to tell me. All I’m saying is that you look like you’ve been up to no good.”
“I haven’t done anything,” she says angrily. She wants to leave, but she can’t.
“Well, something happened.”
“No.” She picks up her apron absently and wraps both hands in it. “I have to go.” She takes a step away, then turns around. “Something happened, but I didn’t do anything.”
His smile is gone. “Oh, Sal.”
Her eyes grow hot with tears. She squeezes her lips together and shakes her head.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he tells her.
She wipes her fingers across her eyes, then says, “I can’t talk here.”
She walks toward the door and out into the yard, where the powdery light is going pinkish. She hurries between beds of the rotted leaves and stems of last year’s peas and squash, pressed flat by a winter of snow, and she doesn’t turn around until she is behind the toolshed. Once Jimmy joins her, she leans forward and speaks in a voiced whisper beside his ear.
“Mr. Jefferson came to my room the other night.”
Jimmy pulls his head away from hers and covers his mouth with both hands. “Oh, no!” After a moment he lowers his hands and says, “You mean that he… that… that he…” He cannot complete his sentence.
“He came to my door,” says Sally Hemings. “He was drunk, and he wouldn’t go away.”
“Did he force himself in?”
“No. Not really. He just kept saying all these things…. I didn’t know what to do, but… And when I realized he was already in the room, I didn’t know how I was going to get him out.”
“Did he—” Jimmy cuts off his own question. He gives Sally a firm, interrogatory glance but then cannot bear to look at her.
When he looks back, she is staring him straight in the eye. Then she nods slowly.
He makes a small gasp but says nothing.
She realizes that he has probably misunderstood what actually happened, but she can’t bear to speak any of the words she would have to use to make that clear — and maybe it doesn’t matter. It was bad, that’s all. Just bad.
After a long moment of silence, Jimmy moves his open hands back and forth horizontally, as if sweeping something off a table. “You can’t talk about this to anyone,” he says. “Anybody finds out about Mr. Jefferson or if Mr. Jefferson finds out you been talking—” He doesn’t complete his sentence.
“But what am I going to do?”
“I don’t know.” He makes the sweeping gesture again. “You best hope Mr. Jefferson doesn’t come around again. The best thing you could have done was never open up your door in the first place.”
“Jimmy!” She puts both hands on top of her head, as if she has just been struck.
“I’m sorry.” He comes back to her, throws his arms around her and crushes her against his chest. Then he lets her go. “I’ve got to think about this. The main thing is, we’ve got to see what’s going to happen. Maybe nothing’s going to happen… and then everything will be all right… and we can just forget about it.”
“I’ll never forget about it.”
“Well…” Jimmy backs away. “Just wait, and we’ll see.”
~ ~ ~
For almost a week, Sally Hemings keeps to her room as much as she can stand to and as much as she can manage without neglecting her duties to such a degree that everyone in the house will guess what has happened.
She cannot bear the idea of anyone’s knowing, partly because if no one finds out, then it is almost as if nothing actually did happen, but mainly because she knows the conclusions that everyone will draw: Some will blame her for having led on the good Mr. Jefferson, or for having lacked the fortitude to make clear to him the inviolability of her virtue, and the rest (the majority, she believes) will simply be indifferent to what she has suffered. She is a slave, after all, and a young woman; it is her duty to serve her master in any way he requires. All of these conclusions fill her with such fury and dread that she sometimes feels insane.
So by day she is careful to respond to every greeting, question and command exactly as she would have responded had nothing happened and to devote exactly her ordinary level of attention to her every task and action — even to actions as simple as walking down the hall (in fact, she devotes much more attention than normal to how she places each foot as she walks, and how she holds her hands, and where she allows her eyes to stray).