It also revealed my father’s paralysis on the matter of slavery, a paralysis brought about by his true intimacy with it. For there was one “wolf” Papa could neither safely hold nor safely let go.
The last time I saw Beverly Hemings was at Christmas the next year, just before he took his violin outside into the snow to play holiday songs for the slaves on Mulberry Row. Shortly thereafter, he left Monticello and didn’t return.
I was there when my father grimly took up his pen and listed Beverly as a runaway in his record book. “I’ll send his sister to him on a stagecoach with enough money to establish herself.” Papa said, eyeing me, as if anticipating some objection to the money he meant to give his illegitimate children.
I put my hand atop his withered one. “You’re a kind and generous father.”
He looked away, and my heart broke for him. Because I could imagine the pain I’d feel to send my children away, knowing I’d never see them again. But I believed it was a generosity to part with Beverly and Harriet this way. Beverly might never be known as a gentleman, but Harriet had a good chance of becoming a gentleman’s wife. She’d come of age in a genteel household and could both read and write. She’d been trained in the womanly arts of spinning and sewing and keeping house. She was more beautiful than her mother had been, which meant that so long as Harriet disavowed all connection to the Hemingses of Monticello, she might do better than my own daughters in securing her future.
And in the end, I was right about Sally. Her fierce determination that her children should be free overcame all other instincts. I saw her on the terrace, her arms round her only surviving daughter’s neck. When they finally parted, Sally stood there, staring after her daughter’s carriage, knowing it was likely to be the last time she ever laid eyes on her. Then Sally quietly walked to her room by the dairy and shut herself inside.
For weeks, Sally didn’t take meals nor did she answer the door when her youngest two sons knocked, nor even when my father sent for her. She pled illness, and my father pretended to believe her. For with the departure of Beverly and Harriet, our gentler way of life was more fiction than it had ever been before.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Monticello, 26 January 1822
From Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Keech
It’s not in my power to give you a definite idea of when our University may be expected to open. We shall be truly gratified should it become an instrument of nourishing those brotherly affections with our neighboring states which it is so much our interest and wish to strengthen.
WHAT A PAIR of schoolmasters we’ve become,” my father said when my youngest boys dragged their school desks from my sitting room into a circle round his stuffed leather chair for a Latin lesson. Having recently taken a fall that put his arm in a sling, and with the winter weather harder on his bones than it used to be, Papa was housebound.
The weather kept visitors away, so during our quiet winter respite, we made a little university out of Monticello. And because Sally was less and less at my father’s side since her eldest children left Monticello, Papa looked increasingly to me for his happiness.
I enjoyed every moment of our harmonious idyll, but when spring thawed our mountain, Papa was restless and called to Burwell. “I want my horse.”
We’d always relied upon Sally to quietly and sweetly dissuade Papa from folly, but the competent and devoted Burwell was too pliant, leaving only me to protest my elderly father’s insistence upon riding. “At least take a servant with you!”
“I’ve been roaming this country since I was a boy. No one knows these lands better than me.” Soon after, he was up and into the saddle, riding off with the air of power he still carried with him even at his age.
That busy day saw me chasing after my recalcitrant boys, who insisted on pelting one another with chinaberries from their grandfather’s ornamental trees. Ranging in age from five to seventeen, my four rowdies were as noisy and dirty as the half-alligator, half-horse men that infested our western country. They kept me so busy that the great clock chimed the dinner hour before I realized my father wasn’t home.
In the parlor, Cornelia looked up from the architectural rendering of my father’s university and dusted her fingers. “I’ll ride out and look for him.”
“Let your brothers go.” But before I could call them, we heard a commotion near the terrace where my father, frail, soaking wet, and muddy, was being helped up the stairs by Sally’s sons. Papa’s good arm was draped over an adolescent Eston, who in the light of that early spring evening looked much like my father in his youth. Supporting my father on the other side was eighteen-year-old Madison.