My Monticello(38)
To try to escape all that and more, I’d pull a book from the shelf and read by candle or window light. I read from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, running my fingers over his inventory of land mammals, his clever calculations of the heights of the state’s mountains, the depths of its rivers: a great and good man. I noted Jefferson’s reflections on the mildness of Virginia’s climate and thought of its ferocity now, the ways we’d desecrated our commonwealth. I read some of Jefferson’s thoughts on human bondage. Slavery was “a moral depravity,” he wrote, brutal to Black people and a means to make tyrants of white people. But then he also wrote that Blacks were inferior to whites, in body and mind, that we stank, that we were like children, unable to look after ourselves. And so, if slavery was to be ended, former slaves would have to be sent somewhere far away. Freed Blacks would have to leave, he concluded, because of the “deep rooted prejudices” of white people and the memory of Black people of the wounds they’d sustained at America’s hand. These forces, Jefferson wrote, would “produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”
I laid that book down and opened another, skimming the timeline of Jefferson’s life—his inheritance from his father of the land I now stood on, his marriage to Martha and the births of his official children—those first, white children who would not be expected to prove and re-prove their lineage. I imagined Momma’s teacher looking down at eight-year-old Momma, not just disbelieving but repulsed. My own Momma had waited until late in life to have me, maybe because MaViolet had her too early, and with a man who did not love her after all. Momma was already in grade school by the time MaViolet married Papa Alred, who’d loved her like she was his own. Momma made no secret of my father’s name, though I never knew him. He’d been, she assured me, good-natured and good-looking but only a friend to her, only a means to an end of having me, before it was too late.
I grew weary reading of Jefferson’s life, so I searched out stories about Sally Hemings instead. Hemings, who was brought to Monticello as a child, along with her mother and siblings—a wedding gift of slaves from the father of the bride, like a set of silver platters. The accounts I found of Hemings were all secondhand, other people’s words, so that it felt like the more I read, the more hidden she became. I discovered that Jefferson’s father-in-law—the man who’d made a gift of her—was also Sally Hemings’s father. This meant Sally Hemings was Thomas Jefferson’s wife’s half sister. How had it felt, I wondered, to be family and property all at once? And what did it mean to look on your owner and see sister? Or to look on sister and see slave? I read that most historians believe Jefferson first slept with Sally after Martha’s death, while she accompanied the family to France to serve them. Jefferson was forty-one, Sally was fourteen. She came back from Paris pregnant at sixteen, with a promise from Jefferson that all of her children by him would one day be freed Black people. Jefferson and Hemings had six children together, four of whom survived into adulthood, living as slaves at Monticello until each one was eventually granted release.
In the end, none of Sally’s released children felt safe enough to stay. Not Beverly, or Harriet, or Madison. Not Easton, who later published a memoir naming Thomas Jefferson as the patriarch of his family. Two Hemings children were allowed to walk off the mountain, slipping into obscurity and presumably living the rest of their lives divided from family and cloaked as white people. The other two eventually moved far out of state, in spite of Jefferson’s written appeal to the general assembly that an exception be made for them. Years earlier there’d been an amendment borne of white people’s fears about reprisal from freed slaves, after all the torment that had been heaped upon them. And be it further enacted, that if any slave hereafter emancipated shall remain within this commonwealth more than twelve months … he or she shall forfeit all such right and be apprehended and sold. Sally’s children, once freed, remained dispossessed. Stay and we will find you and re-enslave you: Virginia is not your home.
VII.
It was the fifth morning when Devin finally came to the top of the hill, giving up his long stint at the welcome pavilion. When I saw him from the greenhouse window, I must’ve made some kind of sound. Knox looked up from whatever he was reading, the book I’d lent him or else his gridded notes. You okay? Knox said. In the yard, I could hear Mr. Byrd greeting Devin—Young man!—then the two of them speaking back and forth. I kept watching until I realized Knox was still waiting. I am, I answered.
As Devin followed Mr. Byrd along the path, I realized that his reluctance to come up to the house had not been entirely about me. There was a deep caution in the way he crested the terrace steps, his voice low as churchgoing. When he made his way inside to speak to MaViolet, he looked around as if in wary wonder at it all.
By contrast, Elijah bounded in a few minutes later, full tilt, bellowing out from the entrance hall. Ezra! Where you at? When Ezra galloped down, Elijah tackled his twin, a reunion of entwined limbs and bracing holds. A reunion of noogies like they were twelve or something. Someone whelped, someone pooted, and in the ensuing funk, the twins embraced in earnest, thumping backs, and then standing back to regard each other as if no legitimate tussle had happened. Like they’d been born to forgive each other. The twins settled in the third-floor room Ezra had chosen for them, with two beds against one wall. Devin chose an outcast space in the south pavilion, a brick room at the far bent end of the long plank-like terrace our greenroom opened up to. He would sleep as far away as possible from the main house and closer still to Mulberry Row.