Sally Heming Read Online Free PDF

patriae of the other. For if a slave can
have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in
which he is born to live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the
faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual
endeavours to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable
condition on the endless generations proceeding from him.
    thomas jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1790
     
     
    Sally Hemings closed her eyes
and sank down at the foot of the neat rectangle marked off by smooth stones and
planted with primroses. Fresh grass was growing within its boundaries. A wooden
cross that had been lovingly carved by Eston Hemings had replaced the original
tombstone. It didn't seem possible that twenty-three years had passed since one
of the two pillars of her life had crumbled. Elizabeth Hemings had died on
August 22, 1807, at the age of
seventy-two. She had outlived her daughter's father, John Wayles, by over fifty
years. It had not been an easy death. It had taken the whole, humid fever-infested
month of August to kill her. Two months before she had died, she had stopped
eating and had taken to her bed. But even starvation had been slow to weaken
the fabulous constitution that had survived almost three-quarters of a century
of slavery and the birth of fourteen children. Resistant to all the infections
that killed childbearing women in their forties; immune to all the malarial
fevers, the typhoid and yellow fevers that struck eighteenth-century Virginians
in their swampy, unhealthy climate; untouched by the periodic outbreaks of
cholera; without physical blemish or congenital weakness, she had survived
everything, including her own biography.
    Against her closed eyelids Sally Hemings could still see
the oppressive, insect-filled interior of that slave cabin where she and Martha
Randolph had watched her mother strain toward death with the same prodigious
will that had sustained her in life. In the sweltering heat of that room she
and Martha had sat in a strange and southern circle of complicity: the
concubine, daughter, the mistress and the slave; the aunt and the niece. All
three women were reflecting, each in her separate way, on the intricacies of
their blood ties and relationships. There had been love, servitude, hate,
womanhood. It was all flowing together that day when Elizabeth Hemings,
struggling, frantically seeking an exit from the life she had endured, had
whispered, "Put your hand on my chest and push down; my heart won't stop
beating."
     
    Monticello, August 22, 1807
     
    "I never knew of but one white man who bore the name
of Hemings. He was an Englishman and my father. My mother was a full-blooded
African and a native of that country. My father was a Captain of an English
sailing vessel. Captain Hemings, my mama told me, was a hunter of beasts like
her father, except that he hunted in the sea and his prey was the whale.
    "He sailed between England and Williamsburg, then a
great port. When the Captain heard of my birth, he determined to buy me and my
mother, who belonged to John Wayles. He approached Master Wayles with an
extraordinary high offer for us, but amalgamation was just beginning and Master
Wayles wanted to see how I would turn out. He refused my father's offer.
Captain Hemings begged, pleaded, threatened, and finally they had words. All to
no avail; my master refused to sell. My father, thwarted in the purchase but
determined to own his own flesh and blood, then resolved to take us by stealth.
His ship was sailing; everything was in readiness. But we were betrayed by
fellow slaves, and John Wayles took us up to the Big House and locked us in.
Captain Hemings' ship sailed without us.
    "We were kept at the Big House, but my mother never
recovered. She kept running away. I must have run away six times before I could
walk! Her master warned her that the next time she did it she would be punished
not by the regular beating she got