Sally’s pretty dark lashes swept low. “You haven’t seen the gazettes?”
Most of the Hemingses could read and write, though how they’d learned, I’d never asked. Still, it surprised me a little that they’d been following matters in the papers. “Let me see them.”
“We haven’t any papers here,” Sally said. “They’re all down at Mr. Bell’s store. But it’s dreadful. In the press, Master Jefferson is being attacked for everything from intrigue to dishonor.”
Fury washed through me. I was already road weary and worried for my husband’s state. And now to learn Papa had been attacked! Despite my exhaustion, I got back in the carriage and summoned Sally to follow, telling the driver, “To Charlottesville, straightaway.”
MR. BELL’S STORE stood on the corner of Main Street. Boxes and barrels crowded together in the middle of the wood plank floor while tins and glass bottles and blue-painted plates lined the shelves. The scent of lavender wafted down from baskets hanging on the eaves overhead so that, tall as I was, I had to stoop to get to the counter where Mary Hemings busied herself boxing up a pipe for a customer, who replied, “Thank you, Mrs. Bell.”
Mary wasn’t Mr. Bell’s wife, but given the way Thomas Bell smiled at her from where he stacked goods on a high shelf, he was plainly smitten. Everyone in Charlottesville seemed willing to accept the arrangement, and I was happy to do the same.
Sally sorted through stacks of pamphlets and pulled free some copies of the Gazette of the United States. Handing them to me, she warned, “It’ll sicken you.”
Nevertheless, I began flipping through the pages of papers published this past summer and fall. My eyes landed on one passage right away.
Cautious and shy, wrapped up in impenetrable silence and mystery, seated on his pivot chair, Mr. Jefferson is involved in political deception. . . .
I’d seldom heard a word of censure against my father. He’d been, here in America and in France, idolized by nearly everyone. I suppose that’s why my cheeks stung to read such pointed criticism. Rifling through pages so violently I might’ve torn them, I found another attack.
Had an inquisitive mind sought evidence of Mr. Jefferson’s abilities as a statesman, he’d have found the confusions in France. As a warrior, to his exploits at Monticello. As a mathematician, to his whirligig chair.
I frowned anew that anyone might blame the “confusions” in France upon Papa and not the royalists who bankrupted their country and left the peasants to starve. It embittered me, too, that we were to still suffer censure for our late-night flight from Monticello—where I suppose they believed we ought to have brandished pistols and pitchforks against the trained British dragoons, women and children, and all.
And what was their obsession with my father’s chair?
As a philosopher, his discovery of the inferiority of blacks to whites, because they’re unsavory and secrete more by the kidneys.
There I stopped, remembering that Sally had brought this to my attention. Perhaps if I’d not come of age in France, I wouldn’t have felt such an acute shame, but I couldn’t look at either Sally or Mary. I could only whisper, “Who wrote this? Do we know these men?”
Mr. Bell stepped down off his ladder. “Some say it’s the secretary of the treasury using different names.” Given all my father had said of Mr. Hamilton, I believed it. “But plenty of others agree with him. Not just northerners either. John Marshall is leading the Federalists here in Virginia, and now Patrick Henry is going over to that side, too.”
Patrick Henry. The very man who cried give me liberty or give me death, had spread the story of my father’s supposed cowardice in the face of British soldiers. Though I had only childhood memories of the famous orator, I’d long disliked Patrick Henry as my father’s political enemy. Now my anger was fueled anew.
“They’re calling on your father to resign,” Sally said, pulling me from my bitter thoughts. “They’re digging for an excuse, and the gossip about your kin—”
“Nancy Randolph hasn’t been under my father’s roof in nearly two years!” Quickly, I brought my fingers to my lips, as if to recall what I’d said, for it was a tacit admission that I believed my sister-in-law guilty.
Fortunately, if the Hemingses knew anything, it was discretion. Clutching one of the screeds against my father, Sally replied, “It doesn’t seem as if Federalist writers care much for facts or fairness.”
No, they didn’t. And if these men could work themselves up into such a furor over my father’s chair, what would they make of kin who lived in incestuous and adulterous union, and murdered a baby? Still, I tried to persuade myself that the scandal wouldn’t touch my family. “Surely, no one could think my father would tolerate the debauching. . . .”
There I trailed off. I couldn’t pretend in front of the Hemingses—no matter how discreet they might be—that nothing improper ever took place under my father’s roof.
For Sally Hemings was proof that, in fact, it did.