The bells had tolled for my father’s death, and the townspeople closed the city. Donning black armbands, they formed a processional up the mountain that was delayed by the rain. While we waited for people to arrive on the dismal and dreary day, Sally and I stood on either side of the open grave, Papa’s coffin between us, held up on planks.
Huddling with her enslaved family against the rain, Sally wore a plain black dress with the locket my father had given her long ago, her eyes trained not on the coffin but on me. She must’ve known her fate now rested in my hands, but there was nothing servile in her expression. Only an expectation of justice.
She seemed to believe herself a free woman and didn’t lower her eyes in deference. Not even for Tom when he appeared to taunt us. “Here are his two widows . . . and neither of them shedding a tear.”
In that moment, I wished Tom straight to hell and believe Sally did the same.
“Let’s start,” Jeff finally said, fearing my husband wanted witnesses to cause a scene. He wasn’t wrong. Tom quarreled with him that we ought to delay on account of the rain, then held himself over Papa’s coffin, wailing in affected grief while I looked on like a statue in the driving rain.
“You’ve got a heart of stone,” Tom shouted at me.
But his words didn’t pierce me. He was right. Until that moment, I believed my heart was flesh and blood like any other. But my heart had turned to stone.
The sky itself might cry, but I wouldn’t. My tears, when they came—if they came—wouldn’t be for Tom. All my life I’d held back my tears. For my father’s sanity, for his reputation, and now for his legacy. However much I wished for release, for a moment to feel the loss, no one would ever see me fall to pieces. No one would ever see that.
Certainly not Tom Randolph.
So I endured his taunts.
I endured the shoveling of dirt over my father’s grave.
And I endured the silence that followed.
Our silence. Our special silence.
Others would suffer, truly suffer, for what my father hadn’t said in his lifetime. But I’d always divined his wishes in that silence, and could hear his words echoing in it even now. And those words were:
Take care of me when I’m dead.
Chapter Forty-two
Monticello, Unknown Date
From Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph
Farewell my dear, my loved daughter, Adieu!
The last pang of life is in parting from you!
Two Seraphs await me, long shrouded in death:
I will bear them your love on my last parting breath.
THIS IS HIS LAST LETTER.
I read it often, wondering sometimes if he left one like it for Sally. If there are letters, tokens, evidence . . . well, she has good reason to keep them quiet.
Along with the linens, the artwork, the furniture, and the rest of the slaves at Monticello, she’s been priced for auction. Her value has been set at fifty dollars. But she won’t be sold with everything else.
On the night we buried my father, we faced one another in Papa’s chambers and she gave me the keys she’d claimed as her own for decades. She surrendered to me her dominion over my father’s private sanctuary . . . and her place in his life.
She hadn’t bargained for her freedom in France, only for the freedom of her children.
But she will have her freedom. I’ll see to that. I’ll let her walk off this mountain like Harriet and Beverly did. She’ll be given her time.
And her silence is the price.
I make Jeff swear upon God and country and his honor as a Virginia gentleman and upon his grandfather’s honor, too, that Sally will not be sold. He doesn’t ask me why; my son knows better than to ask. I wouldn’t tell him the truth, anyway. If it comes to it, I will lie about Sally to my deathbed.
But in exchange for Jeff’s vow, he demands that I make one of my own. I must agree not to witness the rest of the slaves being auctioned off at Monticello.
I feel as if I should be there. As if I must witness the final destruction of everything. As if I need to see every tear as my father’s people are ripped away from their mountain, from the only home they’ve ever known. I ought to hear their sobbing as the auctioneer calls out their worth. . . .
But Jeff says, “It’s making you sick.”
“I am sick now, but shall be well again.” Because I have to be. My work—my father’s work—remains undone. And as with Ann’s death, I must hold myself together until I’ve finished doing for my father the very last thing that I can do for him in this world.
Jeff puts a hand on my shoulder. “Spare yourself the bitter anguish of seeing his abode rendered desolate, the walls dismantled, and his bedroom violated by the auctioneer. And take the children before my father snatches them from you.”