“Is it true?” she demanded of her mother, when she’d raced in a flurry out to the sunny room across the yard from the kitchen, where the Cary slaves and those of their guests gathered to do the mending and ironing and stitching of clothing for the household. The Cary slaves had regarded her in mingled pity and surprise, that at age nine she still seemed to think it would cross any white person’s mind to even ask if she wanted to leave her family or not.

“It’s true,” her mother had answered. And then, when Sally turned to run from the room, “Where you goin’, girl?” She’d caught Sally by the arm, led her outside into the yard behind the big Cary house at Ampthill, the air cold after the frowsty sewing-room’s warmth. “You thinkin’ of runnin’ in to Mr. Jefferson, to ask him not to send you to Eppington? Are you?”

When Sally didn’t reply, Betty Hemings shook her, not roughly but urgently, pulling her eyes back to her own. “Don’t you even think about it, girl. Don’t you even think that because he teaches you your letters, and talks kindly to you, and answers all your fool questions, that he really cares even that much—” She measured the width of a lemon-pip between forefinger and thumb, “—where you want to go, or what you’d rather do than what he tells you to. Not him, not any white, man, woman, or child. They got a word for niggers that think they can ask not to do things they don’t want to do and that word is spoiled. And once they start thinkin’ you’re a spoiled nigger, then they start lookin’ around for ways to un-spoil you. To teach you real hard not to talk to ’em as if you wasn’t black. You understand?”

Sally, trembling with defiance, looked up at her mother’s face and saw there fear as well as anger: a terrible, piercing fear. She thought, What does she think he’ll do? Sell me?

And the thought succeeded it as instantly as the following heartbeat, He could.

It was indeed what her mother feared.

“It’s like that Decoration of Independence Martin was tellin’ us about,” her mother went on, her voice low and tense. “Mr. Jefferson wrote, All men is created equal, but what he meant was, All white Americans is created equal to all white Englishmen. Can you give me the name of any one of his slaves that he’s turned loose since he wrote that?”

Sally whispered, “No, ma’am.”

“You’re damn lucky you’re just goin’ with Polly, and not bein’ sold to Mrs. Eppes.” Betty’s voice was low, and she glanced at the back door of the Cary house, where young Peter Carr, just shooting up from boy to young man, could be seen flirting with one of the light-complected housemaids. “If Mr. Jefferson was to die tomorrow, every one of us would be sold off to pay his debts. You better get used to it, girl, and thank God it’s no worse yet.”

Sally had returned quietly with her mother to the sewing-room, and had taken up work on a shirt for Sam Carr, as a way to quiet her mind and her hands. But later that evening, when the men had finished their port and were going in to join Mrs. Cary and the older girls in the parlor, seeing Mr. Jefferson walking behind the others Sally slipped from the shadows and tugged his sleeve, whispered, “Mr. Jefferson, sir—must I go to Eppington?”

He paused in his steps and looked down at her. His tall loose-jointed form seemed to loom against the candle-glow and gloom of the early-falling winter darkness. She was at the age when the slave-children began to be given real jobs, and had graduated from short calico shifts to a real dress of printed muslin, her hair—which was like a white woman’s, silky and long—braided tidily up under a linen cap. In the half-dark she was aware that, being taller than the other girls her age (except for Patsy, who at ten was as tall as little Mr. Madison), she seemed already one of the adult servants, and not a child who can ask for things because she doesn’t know any better.

Mr. Jefferson’s voice was gentle and kind. “Now, Sally, Polly asked specially that you go with her to her aunt Eppes. She knows you, and loves you. I’m sending you with her so that she won’t be lonely there.”

He didn’t sound in the least as if he even comprehended that she, too, might be lonely there. Shock, anger, disappointment pierced her heart like a thorn, but looking up into his eyes she saw there was no arguing. She’d seen that side of him as he’d dealt with other people, but never before had he turned that kindly implacability on her.

He simply didn’t want to hear there was a problem. His hands rested briefly, warmly, on her shoulders. “You’re a good girl, Sally, and I’m trusting you to take care of my daughter. And it won’t be for very long.”

It was to be four years.

And for those four years, Sally had hated Thomas Jefferson.



The carriage emerged from the woods. Sunlight dyed the dust egg-yolk gold. They passed through a village: white stucco houses, brown tile roofs patched with green moss, a thick smell of pissy gutters, smoke, and pigs. A few of the people wore town-folks’ clothes, like the people Sally had seen in Williamsburg and in the fascinating bedlam of London, but they looked patched and threadbare. Most wore smocks and breeches, ragged and baggy and without stockings, like the field-hands.