Albemarle County, Virginia

Sunday, April 6, 1800

Mrs. Madison?”

At the sound of the voice, Dolley looked around, and to her great surprise recognized Sally Hemings standing beside the garden gate.

“Please forgive my being so bold, ma’am, but might I have a few words with you?” The young woman—Dolley guessed her age at not quite thirty—stood just on the other side of the white wooden palings that separated Patsy Jefferson Randolph’s beloved beds of tulips and azalea from the still-greater beauty of the spring woods. With her turquoise-green eyes, and the morning’s mistiness still clinging to the gray-barked trees around her, she looked rather like a spirit in a tale who cannot cross cold iron, ready to evaporate when the day grew bright.

“Of course, dear.” Dolley cast a quick glance back toward the frame house where Thomas Randolph’s butler was just emerging from the back door, a wicker tray of breakfast leftovers in hand. With Patsy going into her fourth day of a devastating migraine, Dolley hoped somebody would remember to round up eight-year-old Payne and seven-year-old Jeff Randolph for lessons before they disappeared into the woods. Patsy ruled her household with a kid-gloved hand of iron and when she had a headache, everything tended to slither fairly speedily into rack and ruin.

On the other hand, Dolley had never expected to see Sally Hemings set foot on Patsy’s property. Whatever had brought the young slave here, it had to be important.

Dolley folded her shawl more closely around her shoulders and stepped out through the garden gate. For all her years in Philadelphia, she had slipped quickly back into the Virginia habit of thinking: It was almost without awareness that she made sure she and Sally couldn’t be seen from the house.

“Is all well at Monticello?” Even as she said the words she thought, If anything happened to Jefferson, word would come here, or to Jemmy, first….

“Yes, ma’am, quite well.” Sally had a pleasing soft alto whose gentle refinement had impressed Dolley, on the few occasions she’d heard her speak. Since she’d first visited Monticello with Jemmy in 1795, she’d seen the beautiful maidservant any number of times, and had easily believed her own maid, Sukey’s, matter-of-fact gossip: She Mr. Jefferson’s woman, you know. Had believed it even before she’d observed that Patsy Randolph never spoke of or to Sally and looked through her as if she were a pane of glass. This didn’t happen often, because Sally was unobtrusively never in the same room with Patsy if she could help it.

And Jefferson, like every other Virginia planter Dolley had ever met, appeared to notice none of these interactions.

Dolley may have been a Quaker, but her Coles cousins down in Hanover County hadn’t been, and she’d learned everything there was to know about concubinage by the time she was ten.

Like most of the concubines Dolley had seen over the past five years—and Sukey could point out every one for six counties around—Sally was very light-skinned, and well dressed even for a maid at Monticello, where the house-servants were clothed as well as many Philadelphia artisans. In Spanish cities like New Orleans or Mobile, according to Aaron Burr, such a woman would have been a free courtesan, kept by her protector with an establishment of her own. It was only in the United States that there existed no place for such a woman.

“I’m not sure whether this is any of my business, ma’am,” Sally went on softly, “or to whom I should speak of it. But it touches Mr. Jefferson; I believe he may need to know.”

Dolley said, “Go on.”

The young woman was silent for a moment, as if arranging her thoughts. Though her green muslin dress was reasonably new and had clearly been made for her, not handed down from someone else, she wore no jewelry beyond a thin gold chain around her neck. Considering the way other women in her position were sometimes decked, this spoke well for either Jefferson’s taste or her own. It impressed Dolley, too, that she was matter-of-fact, as if she knew Dolley knew perfectly well who she was, but was neither bold nor coy about it.

It was a fact, that was all.

“Have you heard Mr. Jefferson speak of a gentleman named Mr. Callendar, ma’am? Mr. James Callendar?”

Dolley felt her lips compress at the name. Only the system that required every person of color to speak of any white man as a “gentleman”—usually on pain of a beating—could have given Callendar that title, as far as Dolley was concerned.

“I’m acquainted with him,” she replied evenly. “He’s the editor of the Richmond Enquirer.” She didn’t add that upon the few occasions she had met James Callendar, she always wanted to go wash afterwards.

Sally’s eyes flickered to her face, then away. She kept her voice neutral, as any slave learned to, when speaking about any white. “Yes, ma’am. And I know he’s a friend of Mr. Jefferson, and that his newspaper supports him. But my niece Betsie, who lives near Richmond—at Eppington, you know—”

Dolley nodded. Tom Jefferson’s younger daughter had married her handsome cousin Jack Eppes three years ago—Dolley had come to Monticello for the wedding. She recalled Jemmy telling her that Jefferson had given the newlyweds a number of slaves, as part of the dowry. Betsie Hemings must have been one of them.

“Betsie’s told me that Mr. Callendar has been asking questions around town, about Mr. Jefferson. Questions about scandal and rumor.” Her troubled glance touched Dolley’s again. “There was a woman, the wife of one of Mr. Jefferson’s friends, that Mr. Jefferson fell in love with when he was young…that kind of thing. Scandal that’s really nobody’s business. Things everybody knows about everybody, that get passed around among the colored and the poor whites, and talked of in the taverns.”

“In that case I believe Mr. Callendar must hear a great deal of it,” said Dolley drily. Across the younger woman’s face, quick wry appreciation of the comment flitted, instantly sponged away.

“As you say, ma’am. Betsie—my niece—says she hears from the potboys there that Mr. Callendar is always asking where and when, when the talk touches Mr. Jefferson. Then he buys men extra drinks to get them talking more. I don’t know what Mr. Callendar is up to, but I’ve seen the kind of thing he writes. I think Mr. Jefferson ought to know what’s going on.”

Dolley never swore herself, but at times like this she understood why someone would want to. A number of Jemmy’s favorite expressions passed through her mind.

“I know it isn’t my place to speak against a white man, ma’am, nor to pass along gossip,” concluded Sally. “But I know Mr. Madison is working to make Mr. Jefferson the President, writing to the newspapers and meeting with men in the legislature. The kind of rumor Mr. Callendar is asking about isn’t anything that will be helpful, if it goes beyond Virginia.”

Again their eyes met, and this time they held. Dolley knew exactly the first rumor James Callendar would have heard upon his arrival in Richmond eighteen months ago: the same one Sukey had first whispered into her ear. She Mr. Jefferson’s woman….

Sukey had spoken without innuendo or judgment, merely as a piece of information that her mistress would need in adapting to the household. She’d used the same tone to remark that Aunt Carr had a room up on the attic floor, and that there’d been another sister, Miss Elizabeth, who’d been not right in her head and had died in a snowstorm many years ago. In Virginia—in the whole of the South—concubinage and its more casual variations were simply part of the landscape, like mosquitoes in summer, although among slave-owners it was considered extremely bad form to talk about it.

For a man looking to discredit a political opponent, particularly in the North, it was a smutty treasure-house of innuendo.

And the logical defense against it would be to send the woman away.

Dolley said quietly, “Thank you, Sally. It will most likely come to nothing, for Mr. Callendar is after all one of Mr. Jefferson’s most loyal supporters. But thou’rt quite right to be concerned for his reputation, and thou art quite right in letting him know what thou hast heard. I’ll write to him this evening, since I don’t believe he’ll be back until the end of May.” She’d heard from Sukey that Sally Hemings could write, but whether it would be safe for a slave to write to her master—particularly in the vicious political climate of the approaching election—was another matter. She added, “I will keep to myself that thou wert the one who told me.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I do appreciate that. I hope Mrs. Randolph is better? Shep said that she was bad enough that you’d been sent for, to help with the household.” Shep was one of the slaves who worked in Jefferson’s nail-factory on Monticello. “I hope she’s feeling more herself?”

“She was a little better this morning,” said Dolley. “I thank thee for asking. Migraines usually pass off quite suddenly, don’t they? ’Tis hoped she’ll feel better today.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sally curtseyed. “I am sorry to have disturbed you, ma’am, and if I may I’ll leave you to get back to your family.”

“Of course. My thanks again.”

For a time Dolley stood watching as the other woman retreated along one of the narrow foot-traces that threaded through the woods behind the Edgehill home-place, her green muslin dress flickering in and out of the thin-leafed pale trees.



In the carriage on the way back to Montpelier later that day, Dolley turned them over in her mind: Sally, and Tom Jefferson; James Callendar, and the election that would take place at the end of the year.