Free Sally Heming by Barbara Chase-Riboud Page A

if it were Madison or Eston."
    "It could never be Madison or Eston."
    "Why not?"
    "Madison and Eston," Langdon said very
deliberately, "are white. I made them white. Legally. They can testify
against anybody on earth."
    "White?"
    "In the census. I listed them and you as white."
    There was a stunned silence. Outside, only the sounds
summer makes. "It takes more than a census taker to turn black into
white." Her voice had an ominous quality to it: a sudden chill that should
have warned him.
    "After all, by Thomas Jefferson's definition, you are
white."
    "By Thomas Jefferson's life, I'm a slave."
    "Think how much easier it is for you now, staying in
Virginia with all that's going on ... not to have that sword of expulsion
hanging over your head! I... decided."
    "You decided." He
couldn't tell whether she was going to laugh or scream. "You decided! For fifty-four years I've
been Thomas Jefferson's creature, and now... now you decide it's time for me to be yours. Yours! " She began
to laugh. "It's Judgment Day! Instead of being black and a slave, I'm now
free and white."
    Her eyes showed something of that lurid yellow that had
frightened him on his first visit.
    If he had been a good lawyer, or even a competent one,
Langdon would at this point before it was too late have laughed and tried to
turn the whole thing into a joke. Or he would have lied by saying she had
completely misunderstood. But Nathan Langdon was not a good lawyer. He
blundered on, insisting, explaining. Perspiration was forming on his high
forehead. There were undertones, nuances, secrets he hadn't calculated and that
he had no way of gauging.
    Her laughter had shattered what composure he had left.
Instead of reading her face, in which was reflected shock, disbelief, horror,
as well as a plea for rectification, he went on pleading his already lost
cause, repeating himself with a kind of childish despair. Surely she knew he
had meant well. That he had done it for her!
    The shrillness of her laughter had given it a loud,
raucous, almost drunken quality. Then suddenly it stopped.
    "Why did you have to tell me? Why couldn't you have
kept quiet? What did you think you were doing—playing God?"
    "I did it for you and your sons."
    "Don't be a fool, Nathan. You didn't do it for me. You
didn't even know me. You did it for him. To make him not guilty. To shield him
... so that he wouldn't have a slave wife!"
    Her eyes had turned darker. A strand of black hair had
escaped from its knot. He wanted to go down on his knees and hide himself in
the folds of that skirt again. Surely, it was going to be all right. Surely, he
wasn't going to lose her over this.
    "Forgive me, I didn't realize..."
    "Forgive you because you didn't realize ... That's
what black folks are here for. To forgive white folks because they didn't
realize. Forgive me. Forgive me. My father said it. My lover said it. My white
sons will say it. Yes, I forgive you. All of you, and your insufferable
arrogance. But I never want to see you again."
    "Please..."
    "You are not welcome here anymore."
    "I beg you..."
    "If you come back, Nathan, I'll have Madison throw you
out." She went on before he could cut in again. "I'm tired, Nathan.
I'm tired of white men playing God with my flesh and my spirit and my children
and my life, which is running out. I thought you understood that.
    You've left me nothing of my own. Not even my color! I've
been asked to give, and give, and give, and now I can't give any more. I can't
forgive another man, Nathan. I'm sorry."
    He had made one of those blunders of enormous consequence
that only a fool or the very young makes. One that afterward plays again and
again in the mind like a set piece in a game of chess long after the match has
been lost. It would seem to him incredible, later, that such a small
miscalculation, flung so nonchalantly on the board, would have cost the game.
    "Oh, God." He groaned. "Tell me what to do.
I'll do anything. Pay any price."
    "That's what all white men say."