By night she jams a wooden peg into the slot above the latch of her bedroom door so that it can’t be opened.
By night she looks up into the swirling plasma of darkness between her bed and the ceiling and hears the tick of every contracting or expanding floorboard and the whisper of every breeze, and she thinks only of the danger gathering force in every corner too dark to see.
By night she does battle with her memory and her imagination and with her rigid, sweating, sleepless body, which wants to do nothing but run from her room and out into the streets and never see the Hôtel de Langeac again, or Paris.
~ ~ ~
“Come with me, child,” says Madame Gautier, the laundress, a potato-shaped woman of about sixty, with very small eyes and an imperious pout. She visits the Hôtel twice weekly, to drop off cleaned linens, towels, undergarments and shirts and to pick up dirty ones. She is speaking in French. When Sally Hemings greets her command with only an uncomprehending stare, Madame Gautier asks, “Are you not Mademoiselle Sally?” Sally Hemings answers in the affirmative, and Madame Gautier takes her by the hand, saying, “Good. You must come with me. Monsieur Jefferson desires that you should live in my house.”
Sally Hemings yanks her hand free. “One moment! I know nothing about this.”
“I am afraid that is none of my affair.”
“Did he tell you this himself?”
“Yes. Just now, when Madame Dubois was paying me. Monsieur Jefferson came into the kitchen and asked if he might rent a room for you.”
Many thoughts are shooting through Sally Hemings’s mind, most of them concerning the significance of Thomas Jefferson’s decision. Is she being banished from the Hôtel de Langeac? Will this impatient and stupid woman be her new mistress? Will she never be able to see her brother again? Or Patsy and Polly?
“I’m sorry,” she tells Madame Gautier. “I must speak to my brother.”
The old woman seems on the verge of scolding her, but then her scowl softens. “Very well,” she says. “But hurry. I have many things to do.”
She knows, Sally Hemings thinks as she hurries to find Jimmy. Everybody knows.
She has to pass through the dining room on her way to the kitchen, and this is where she spots her brother, who rushes right up to her.
“Jimmy!”
“Oh, Sally!” He holds out a small envelope. “He gave me this.”
She takes it, removes the single page inside, on which she recognizes her own name and Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting. She stares at it a long moment, her trembling hand making a blur of the page’s edges.
“Do you want me to?” asks Jimmy.
She hands him the letter, and he reads:
“‘Miss Hemings, I am writing to inform you that I have procured a room for you with Madame Gautier, which shall be your refuge whenever your services are not needed here by Patsy and Polly. During the days that my daughters are in residence at the Hôtel, I think it best that you reside in your present chamber, though if that should not be agreeable to you, alternate arrangements can certainly be made. Whether you wish to continue your duties at the Hôtel in the absence of my daughters is also a matter I leave to your better judgment. I hope you will understand that I have made this arrangement only in the interest of your greater comfort. If I have erred in my judgment, or if you have any questions or requirements, please do not hesitate to express them to me through the good offices of your brother. Respectfully yours, Th. Jefferson.’”
~ ~ ~
Sally Hemings’s new room is just off the yard where Madame Gautier does her washing. The walls are fieldstone, the floor is dirt, the bed is a straw-stuffed tick on a wooden frame.
Sally Hemings thinks the room might be pretty if she can whitewash the walls, put dried flowers on the sill in front of the folio-size window and find a small dresser or trunk for her clothes. “You can do whatever you want,” says Madame Gautier, “but Monsieur Jefferson must pay for it.”
Sally Hemings does not want to ask any favors of Thomas Jefferson.
Madame Gautier’s twenty-year-old daughter, Thérèse, is as big as a man. Her fingers are as thick as her thumb, her mouth is chapped purple all around from constant licking. “Who are you?” she asks Sally Hemings five times in a row, and seems satisfied with nothing Sally Hemings and her mother tell her.
Sally Hemings goes to sleep every night to the sound of the mice stirring inside her tick and wakes every morning to steam clouds scented with lye soap.
Her eyes water and her nostrils burn.
She is determined to only return to the Hôtel de Langeac when she escorts Patsy and Polly home from school and to stay away when they are not there, but she has nothing to do during her days except wander the streets.
“Monsieur Jefferson is paying for your room but not your food. If you want to eat, you must buy your own food or you must ask Monsieur Jefferson to buy it for you.”
Sally Hemings cannot read, but she is able to add and subtract in her head, and so she figures that her wages are enough to allow her to buy bread and a piece of cheese every day.
Jimmy gives her meat and soup during her days at the Hôtel.
She cannot store her food. The mice eat it when she keeps it in her room, and Thérèse eats it when she keeps it in the kitchen larder.
She is walking through Les Halles on her way to Penthemont and spots a young man lying in the street, the top quarter of his head missing. A young woman standing in a doorway tells her that he was brained by a rock thrown by a “sans-culotte.” Sally Hemings does not know what a sans-culotte is.
“You really must take better care of yourself,” says Patsy. “How can we bring you anywhere if your linens are so gray and you smell like fish?”
When Monsieur Gautier gets drunk, Madame Gautier makes him sleep in the yard. On those nights Sally Hemings gets no sleep, because her door does not lock and she is afraid that he will come in and because his snores are as loud and enduring as a two-man saw cutting through an endless piece of wood.
Polly says, “Clotilde told us you no longer live here because Papa is angry at you. That’s absurd! If you would like, Patsy and I will tell Papa he is being ridiculous this very minute.” Sally Hemings glances at Patsy, who looks away. “Don’t,” Sally Hemings tells Polly. “Thank you, but don’t.”
Every morning Thérèse comes out into the yard and gathers her skirts into a bundle between her knees. She holds her bare buttocks over an enamel chamber pot until she has entirely voided both her urine and feces. Then she flings the contents of the pot over the rear wall into a vacant lot — or she tries to. About a third of the time, she misses and the mess remains on the wall until her mother can sluice it away with a bucket of used wash water.
Sally Hemings feels the heat on her cheek first, then looks down a street to see a house towering with flame. A pawnshop, she discovers when she has joined the curious crowd. Black timbers enveloped in roaring orange. Bricks bursting with a sound like gunshot. Once again: the sans-culottes.
“I insist!” says Polly. “I think Papa is just being stubborn. I am going to talk to him this instant.” “Really,” says Sally Hemings. “There is no need. I’m perfectly happy as I am.” Patsy takes no part in the conversation, but when she looks at Sally Hemings, she seems to have an extremely painful stomachache.
Only once it has sunk its teeth into the flesh just to the left of her chin does Sally Hemings realize that the animal she woke to find sitting on her chest is a rat.