Sally Heming Read Online Free PDF Page B

every time they sent her back, but by the
legal punishment for runaways: branding of an 'R,' for runaway, on the cheek.
    "She ran away again, and John Wayles ordered the
punishment. It was the overseer that was to do it. My mama screamed and
hollered and fought. She was a strong woman, my mother, and it took four men to
hold her. But when the brand approached her skin, John Wayles's hand shot out
against that iron. He had meant to knock it from the hand of the overseer, but
the blow only spoiled his aim, and the brand came down on mama's right breast
instead of her face. The slaves witnessing the punishment thought Master Wayles
was going to kill that overseer.
    "My mother never ran away again. There is something
about a brand in the flesh that will stay with you until death. You never
forget. Beatings you can forget. But not the scar. Especially a woman. My
mother went to the fields, and I was kept at the Big House.
    "Then one day when I was about fourteen going on
fifteen, my mistress took me by the hair. I mean she just took a whole handful
of my hair and half dragged me down to the tobacco fields. And there she left
me, just left me. I never saw her face again, for when I returned to the Big
House, she was long dead. I stayed in the fields. I was given to a slave named
Abe for Abraham, and bore him six children.
    "Twelve years later, John Wayles took me as his slave
mistress, despite the fact I had already bore six children for Abe, who went
and died on me. John Wayles had seen three wives die. The first, Martha Eppes
Wayles, died within three weeks of her daughter Martha's birth. The second
wife, a Miss Cocke, bore four daughters, three of whom— Elizabeth, Tabitha, and
Anne—grew to maturity. After she died, he married Elizabeth Lomax, who survived
only eleven months. When that last one died, he took me into the Big House as
concubine. I had grown up in the Big House, and now I came back as housekeeper.
I was twenty-six-years old, the year was 1762, and Martha Wayles was thirteen. In 1772, John Wayles was still dealing in slaves, buying, selling,
and breeding them. By that time I had borne him four children: Robert, James,
Peter, and Critta. In 1767, when Martha was eighteen, she married her cousin and left Bermuda
Hundred, only to return less than two years later a widow. She stayed at home
until she married Thomas Jefferson three years later on a snowy January first.
I served the passions of John Wayles and ran his household for eleven years,
from the time I was twenty-six until he died in 1773, three months after the birth of his last child, Sally. My
life was connected with his white children, especially Martha, as well as my
own children by him. I loved them all.
    "I cared for them all. Like they were mine. The
younger girls didn't remember, but Martha always remembered. Of all the white
children, I loved her most. I followed her to Monticello; I nursed her in her
illnesses and saw her die a little after every birth, trying for a son for
Thomas Jefferson. For her darling. And he let her try and let her kill herself
trying, then mourned her—monstrous—as did I.
    "Somehow, I could never forgive him when he knew he
was killing her; when he knew after the first child she had no business trying
again. Her body going give out. But he was hit even harder than me. We
struggled, we did, both of us to gain our equilibrium. I cried and he burned.
Burned all her things. All her letters. Her portraits. Her diary. Her clothes.
Everything. Weren't right to destroy what was hers like that. That was rage.
Rage against God, and rage against God is blasphemous. He could get angrier
than any man I knew. For a while, I thought he was going to get so mad he was
going to kill himself.
    "But I couldn't think about self-murder 'cause I had
all those children. I had ten of my twelve children with me when I went to
Martha. John Wayles died not freeing me, nor any of my children. I told all my
daughters, beautiful things all of you, don't