Free Sally Heming by Barbara Chase-Riboud Page B

There was
dullness and pity and contempt in her voice. "You are just like all the
rest. You haven't understood anything of what I've told you all these months.
You still think I exist by your leave. You always will."
    The bitterness shocked him. She meant what she said. He had
not understood.
    "Please, I love you."
    "That's what all men say. That's what he said. That's
what he said!"
    Suddenly, there was no Sally Hemings. No Nathan Langdon.
There was only unfathomable, uncontrolled black rage. A rage that went far
beyond the terrified young man who skimmed and rocked on its surface like a
storm-tossed skiff.
    Sally Hemings rose like some outraged goddess in her
sanctuary, now defiled. Like pure crystal light, her rage, he felt, could maim
or kill at will. There was something diabolical and possessed in the scream
that echoed after Nathan Langdon as he fled from her.
    That sound would remain for him one of the bitterest and
cruelest memories of his life.
     
     
    For a long time, Sally Hemings stared at the receding
figure of Nathan Langdon. Then her head snapped back. There was a pressure in
her head that seemed to push her neck forward and made her want to lower it.
    When she looked down, there were spots of blood on her
apron. Blood. Her nose was bleeding. She lifted the white apron and buried her
face in it. Blindly she whirled and entered the darkness. She let her apron
drop.
    She owned nothing, except the past. And now, even that had
been taken from her. She had been raped of the only thing a slave possessed:
her mind, her thoughts, her feelings, her history. Among all the decisions of
her life, she realized, not one was ever meant for herself.
    Sally Hemings was trembling. She went to her dark-green
chest. This moment she knew had been coming ever since that April day the
census taker had arrived at her door, interrupting her solitude, disturbing her
memories, changing her color. She took out a small linen portfolio, opened it,
and stared at the yellowing, unframed sheet within. It was a pencil drawing, a
portrait of her as a girl in Paris. She had never shown this drawing to
anyone—not to her sons, not to Nathan Langdon, not to Thomas Jefferson. She had
never reasoned why. Except that somehow, on this small scrap of paper, John
Trumbull seemed to have captured something that made her see herself for the
first time. This one was the sole image of herself that belonged only to her.
    For a long time she studied the delicate lines on the aging
paper. Had she ever been this young? Could she ever believe, invisible as she
was, betrayed, and drowning in this sea of loneliness, the generations passed
from her, that she had loved? ... Had loved the
enemy....
    She turned and strode to the fire. Sacrifice. For one
instant of pain, she hesitated, and then she threw her image into the fire.
Blood. A blood sacrifice.
    For one moment her eyes went to the small bundle of cloth
and clay on the mantle. What more did the gods want? She strode again to the
chest and stared down at the yellowing diaries.
    "In order to burn them I would have to forget
you."
    There was a slight smile on her lips as she began to burn
paper. She burned through the afternoon. The last to go were her diaries. As
she knelt, tearing the pages one by one, her eyes shone like a cat's in the
light of the fire, her face was streaked with tears. George ... George. Like
George. A human sacrifice. She destroyed all but the last diary. There was
still one more thing she had to do. She tried to rise. Her long black hair had
loosened and fell like a nun's chaplet over her shoulders to her knees. She no
longer had the strength to pull herself up, so she continued kneeling in an
attitude of prayer, her diary open to the last page on her bloody apron. There,
before her, in small neat script, was the account of hours: every visit with
its date and length of stay Thomas Jefferson had made to Monticello from the
time she had returned to Virginia with him. Re-enslaving herself.