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darkest in
the family, and his cool slender grace, his animal vitality and cockiness,
seemed an affront to both races. He was always getting into trouble: rows with
shopkeepers over bills, with foremen over plans, with masons over blueprints,
with other carpenters over techniques, with the landlord, with the bank, with
the tax collector. With everybody, nigh on. Madison should leave for the
Territories, thought Eston. Now. Before he really got into some scrape he
wouldn't be able to get out of. Eston knew why Mama would never leave here. He
could take care of Mama alone. He wasn't in love. He wasn't trying to prove to
some freeborn girl how great a man he was.
    Madison Hemings felt the gentle but firm pressure of his
brother's rough hand steering him toward the back door of the cabin and the
cool fragrant night air. The gentle, insistent pressure calmed and soothed him.
He clamped shut his jaw in an effort to stop tears of rage.
    Why was he so upset? Why had he yelled at his mother? The
real reason, he knew, was fear.... He was scared to death that something was
going to happen to ruin their fragile existence, before they even got a chance
to live it. He didn't want to tell anyone about what had happened to him today
in town. Not even Eston. Eston could feel his brother's neck muscles tense, but
he said nothing.
    Outside, they faced the dying red sun sinking below the
delicate line of the peach trees they had planted more than a year ago. Beyond
that lay the boundaries of Monticello. Normally a thick whitewashed birch fence
cut across the dark green of the pine woods, marking the end of the plantation
on the southwest side. But the fences were now mostly down, and those standing
were a dirty disinherited gray. The crossbeams lay on the nettle-packed ground
where they had fallen.
    Madison stared at this unkempt frontier. It seemed to be
the line between his former life and this one. He would never understand why
his mother refused to leave this place; why she deliberately chose a rented
house so close to Monticello. Was it that she wanted to be reminded, every
minute of every day, of her former servitude, of her concubinage?
    His mother had never told him anything of his origins. He
knew that slave women never told their offspring anything. So slave children
learned what they could when they could, in bits and pieces from older slaves,
mammies, white people's conversations, and the bitterness of what they learned
was all the more wounding. It intensified the shame without alleviating the
burden. He remembered the shock of learning from some old crone that he was the
son of the master. Even his grandmother hadn't told him! He was their son; yet
neither father nor mother seemed to love him for it! He had tried to
understand. He had stood for hours looking at his pale-yellow face in the
polished silver mirrors of the Big House. He would run down to this very
frontier, far from the Big House, and butt his head against the white-birch
fencing until the blood came, because he couldn't understand why his father
didn't love him. Madison stared at the fence posts now, as if he expected to
see the stains of his childish blood still on them.
    Madison looked up. He and Eston watched their mother slip
under the high gray railings of the frontier of Monticello. Gathering her
skirts as she went, she was walking up the mountains toward the cemeteries.
    When she was upset or angry she could usually be found
either by the grave of Thomas Jefferson or that of her mother, Elizabeth
Hemings. They divided her loyalties in death as they had in life. When her sons
saw her turn eastward, they knew she was heading toward the slave cemetery and
their grandmother.

CHAPTER 4
     
    ALBEMARLE COUNTY, 1830
     
     
    And with what execration should the statesman be loaded,
who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the
other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the
morals of the one part, and the amor